196 THE DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA
Outside
of these three main camps tents were thickly sprinkled around the
farmhouse of Bultfontein, in a field where a thousand diggers were at
work in the first week of the rush, after the ground was opened in May,
1871. Immediately south of this diamond-bearing farm was the farm
Alexandersfontein, where many prospectors were also turning and sifting
the ground. By the determination of the limits of Griqualand West these
diggings, as well as the chief camps, became part of the British
Colonial domain; for the boundary line separating the new Colony from
the Orange Free State ran just outside of this cluster of farms,
Vooruitzigt, Dorstfontein, Bultfontein, and Alexandersfontein,—
through the outlying farm of Benaauwdheids-fontein, where no diamond
mine had, as yet, been discovered.1 So all the known diamond fields of South Africa, except the Jagersfontein farm within the bounds of the
Orange Free State and the shallow Vaal River placers, were bunched on a
plateau four thousand feet above the sea level, within the angle formed
by the junction of the Vaal with the Orange River, on a patch with a
radius of 1.72 miles at the crossing of longitude 240 46' east of Greenwich with latitude 280 43' south of the equator.
The
London and South African Exploration Company, by its purchase of
Dorstfontein, Bultfontein, and Alexandersfontein, held a tight grip on
the mineral rights comprehending the diamonds on all these farms, and
leased the surface diggings under licenses of ioj\ for every claim 30 feet
square. Messrs. Dunell, Ebden & Co., of Port Elizabeth, held the
farm of Vooruitzigt, and exacted the same license fee for working
claims which were laid out in squares 30 by 2° Dutch feet, or 3 1 by 3 1 English feet.2
Outside of the Colesberg Kopje or Kimberley mine all the diggings were
at first a jumble of holes, pits, and burrows, with no attempt to
secure any system or union in mining. But the objections to this
helter-skelter opening of the ground were so apparent that a strict
reservation of roadways to give access to all parts of the surface of
the mine was insisted upon by the
1 "Diamonds and Gold in South Africa," Theodore Reunert, 1893.
2 "The Diamond Diggings of South Africa," Payton, 1872.
