made
a hundred miles south of the Vaal that was to lead to an entirely new
set of conceptions about diamond mining. This was on a farm called
Jagersfontein. (Fontein is Afrikaans for "fountain" or "spring"
and is encountered in South African place names as often as the word
"water" is in the place names of our own country, like Sweetwater and
Stillwater.) The farm was in the southern part of the Orange Free
State, a good forty miles from the Orange River, and its land was
altogether different from that along the banks of the Vaal; instead of
gravel, there was the plain red topsoil of the veld with here and there
an outcrop of another sort of soil—yellow and light and crumbly. For
some years—even before the influx of Voortrekkers—Jagersfontein had
belonged to a Boer family named Visser. The farm was in territory
occupied by the Griquas, and the Vissers had had to make a strange
arrangement with the famous Griqua leader Adam Kok III. Whenever Kok
and his wife took it into their heads to visit Jagersfontein, the
Visser in possession had to strip his wife of all she was wearing and
present the costume to Mrs. Kok. The Widow Visser who was running the
farm when the diamond fever struck the country had twice submitted to
this ceremony, and then Kok had drifted off to the east and bothered
her no more.
One day in 1870, the Widow Visser's foreman, Jaap de Klerk, saw some garnets in a spruit, or
dry watercourse, and, having heard that garnets are a sign of diamonds,
he began to do a little digging in his spare time. Within a month he
found a fifty-carat diamond. He took it to the nearby town of
Faure-smith, where he sold it for three or four pounds to a courier he
met in a bar. The courier took it to more sophisticated quarters,
thereby starting a rush in the direction of Jagersfontein. It was
