Lieutenant Fred C. Cornell, O.B.E., had to rewrite his book, The Glamour of Prospecting, because
he didn't ready it for publication until just after World War I. He had
a lot of nasty things he had long wanted to say about the Germans, but
in his first, prewar draft he had held back; his interests would undoubtedly have suffered if he expressed himself frankly. Cornell's
work often took him into South-West Africa, and before the war that
territory, of course, was German. He was a prospector. He worked
mainly in the Cape Colony, South-West Africa, and environs, and he was
indefatigable. A good prospector should always have a streak of
romanticism running through his practical nature, but in Cornell this
streak seems to have been as wide as Park Avenue. He would hear vague rumors of a discovery hundreds of miles away, and off he would pelt.
In this he was probably not as rash as he would seem today, for in the
early part of our century there wasn't much future in caution, not in
his line. The papers were slow to hear of and report discoveries, and
there were no fast trains, no roads for cars, and certainly no
commercial airlines by which a man
