and
rubber boots of the sailor; the coarse, brown corduroy and canvas
suits, and long-legged, stiff, leather boots of the miner; the ragged,
greasy hats, tattered trousers or loin cloths of the native tribesmen,
jaunty cloth caps, broad-brimmed felt, battered straw, garish
handkerchiefs twisted close to the roots of stiff black crowns, or
tufts of bright feathers stuck in a wiry mat of curls; such a
higgledy-piggledy as could only be massed in a rush from African coast
towns and native kraals to a field of unknown requirements, in a land
whose climate swung daily between a scorch and a chill, where men in
the same hour were smothered in a dust and drenched in a torrent.
The
main goal of the rush was not the Orange River but the Vaal, for word
of mouth had it that diamonds were far more numerous there. Hope Town,
where Erasmus Stephanus had picked up his diamond, was not altogether
neglected, however; the famous eighty-three-and-a-half-carat Star of
South Africa was found there in 1869—not on the ground but in the
possession of a Griqua witch doctor. (It
was bought from him—some say by the same Schalk van Niekerk—for five
hundred sheep, ten oxen, and a horse.) The first sizable party to reach
the Vaal was a relatively respectable one, led by a British major. He
and his companions set out from Pietermaritzburg, in Natal, in
November 1869, and made their way to a little mission settlement
called Hebron, on the north bank of the river, forty miles north of the
present site of Kimberley. There they found two Australian diggers and
a Boer trader walking along the riverbank and examining the ground like
men who had dropped some small change. The two groups teamed up and
soon headed for another mission settlement, called Pniel, twenty miles
down-
