Some
of these were stolid Boers, drawn to the fields as a novel and curious
spectacle, but disdaining the drudgery of shovelling and washing from
morning till night for the chance of a tiny bright stone. They stared
for a while at the laboring diamond seekers, and then turned their
backs on the field contemptuously, and rode home sneering at the mania
which was dragging its victims for hundreds of miles, over sun-cracked
and dusty karroos, to hunt for white pebbles in a river bed. Still
there were many poor farmers who caught the infectious diamond fever at
sight of the open field and a few sparkling stones, and they camped at
Klip-drift or went on farther up or down the river, to join, as well as
they knew how, in the search for diamonds.
Following
this influx from the Free State came swarming in men of every class and
condition from the southern English Colony, and from the ships lying in
the coast ports. The larger number were of English descent, but many
were Dutch, and hardly a nation in Europe was unrepresented. Black
grandsons of Guinea coast slaves and natives of every dusky shade
streaked the show of white faces. Butchers, bakers, sailors, tailors,
lawyers, blacksmiths, masons, doctors, carpenters, clerks, gamblers,
sextons, laborers, loafers, — men of every pursuit and profession,
jumbled together in queerer association than the comrades in the march
to Finchley, — fell into line in a straggling procession to the Diamond
Fields. Army officers begged furloughs to join the motley troop,
schoolboys ran away from school, and women even of good families could
not be held back from joining their husbands and brothers in the long
and wearisome journey to the banks of the Vaal.1
There
was the oddest medley of dress and equipment: shirts of .woollen,—blue,
brown, gray, and red,—and of linen and cotton, — white, colored,
checked, and striped ; trim jackets, cord riding-breeches and laced
leggings, and "hand me downs" from the cheapest ready-made clothing
shops ; the yellow oilskins and rubber boots of the sailor; the coarse,
brown corduroy and 1 "Among the Diamonds," 1870-1871.
