known
as the De Beers Mine, and from the start a special precaution was
observed at the Kimberley Mine: roadways were left straight across the
digging area, north to south, forty-seven feet apart and fifteen feet
wide. This meant that each claim owner had to sacrifice seven and a
half feet on one side of his holding. The object, of course, was to
give every digger access to his claim—some of the claims would have
been left as islands otherwise—and although the diggers grumbled, they
knew the regulation made sense. They brought their earth up to the
roads by the bucketful (some using rope hauls and some carrying it up
stairs chopped out of the earth), loaded it on wagons, and carted it
off to where they had set up their washing equipment and their sorting
tables. The system worked for a while, but as the prospectors dug
deeper and deeper it turned out that the crumbly yellow ground was not
reliable material for roads. The roads began to give way under the
weight of the carts. Moreover, the diggers could not be trusted; in
spite of regulations, they kept picking out stray bits of the roads'
foundations. First one, then another, and then a lot of accidents
happened; carts, mules, and drivers slid off the roads and tumbled into
deep claims, squashing anyone who happened to be working beneath. The
diggers mended their roads with timber and rock, and here and there
they put up a shaky little bridge, but they couldn't stave off the
inevitable, and by the end of 1872 not one of the roads across the
Kimberley Mine was passable.
It
didn't take the diggers long to devise a new method of bringing the pay
dirt to the surface. In 1873 they set up a battery of hauling machines
on massive platforms, called "stagings," at the two ends of the
crater, which was taking on the shape of an oval. The basic apparatus
was a sort of windlass,
