tacular
goings on in the gold markets of London and Paris—an imbroglio
popularly known as the Kaffir Circus. First there was a sudden boom,
then a sudden bust. Barnato, who was in London at the time,
singlehandedly and feverishly set out to restore order by buying, and
he succeeded—at a cost of several million pounds and, some of his
friends believed, his sanity. Three months later came the Jameson Raid.
Many Britons, including Rhodes and Solly Joel, who was Barnato's
nephew and protege, had been casting a covetous eye at the Transvaal,
and, in December 1895, a somewhat quixotic force of six hundred men,
led by Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, a close friend of Rhodes, headed for
Johannesburg with the idea of taking over the city. Jameson's raiders
were captured by a Boer force forty miles west of Johannesburg, and
four of their leaders were sentenced to death. Among these was Solly
Joel. Barnato, who was still in London, was deeply disturbed, and he
made a tremendous and ultimately successful effort to get Joel and his
colleagues pardoned. What may have convinced the Boers was Barnato's
threat to close his gold mines and thereby throw more than a hundred
thousand people out of work. Soon afterward, Barnato's mind, which had
always worked at an extraordinary pace, began to run away with him
altogether. He had lucid intervals, during which he carried on his
business in England and Africa, and it was during what Joel thought was
one of these intervals that, one day in 1897, Barnato managed to evade
his family's watchfulness aboard ship on the way to London. He jumped
overboard and was drowned. He was only forty-four years old.
During his lifetime as well as after it there were plenty of scandalous stories about Barnato's methods of making a for-
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