from
which a steel cable ran down into the mine. The stagings had three
levels—the top one for cables going out to the middle of the pit, the
middle one for cables going to intermediate diggings, and the bottom
one for cables going almost straight down the cliff edge. Each claim
owner had his own windlass and cable, and the buckets went up and down
all day long. At first, the diggers or their employees turned the
wheels by hand, but as time went on many of them began to use larger
buckets, and some of them installed huge horizontal wheels, known as
horse whims, which were turned by horses or mules. From a distance, the
scene was fantastic—like a series of gigantic, glittering cat's
cradles—but the system was far more successful than the roadways had
been, and far less lethal.
No
sooner had the haulage problem been solved than the diggers were
confronted with another problem—that of water. Actually, water always
presented a major obstacle to the open-pit miners, one way or another.
At first they couldn't get enough of it to wash down the pay dirt, and
in the early days enterprising peddlers would drive to the diggings in
wagons loaded with drums of water. Now, as the pit went down, water
became an even worse problem—indeed, a menace. The diggers had tapped
the underground water table, and their claims were soon swamped. At
first they pumped the water out with small hand pumps, but soon these
couldn't begin to cope with the seepage. Again, though, a solution was
thought up, and in this case it was thought up by a twenty-one-year-old
man who was later to play the key role in the building of De Beers
Consolidated and in the expansion of the British Empire in Africa. In
1874 Cecil Rhodes brought a steam-powered pump to the fields and began
renting it to diggers. Within a year he had
