Ch. 1: Gold in Ceylon

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	56 GOLD IN CEYLON. , hard at work last week sinking a deep hole or shaft, so soon as the bed or primitive rock has been come to the intention is to drift or tunnel due north and south. The place where the present Diggings are going on is the Moon Stone Plains at a distance of about half a mile from Nuwara Eliya plains, it is exceedingly strange to see such a medley of things and creatures on this hitherto deserted spot cooking, eating, drinking, smoking, laughing, and hard work is the order of the day you can here see the roaming Irishman, the cautious Scotchman and the knowing little Englishman all watching for the first big nugget so as to, if possible, get the reward if any from Government. Bradley's expectations are sanguine and indeed the same feelings have seemed to inspire all at Nuwara Eliya. Toms, cradles, pans, &c. arc all at work ding-dung, several toms and cradles are to be at work next week, so that matters are beginning to assume a business-like shape. Combined with the gold washing there is a prevailing anxiety after gems, one person has picked up a sapphire worth £20. I would wish to impress on your friends in the planting line that there is no fear of Malabar coolies working for one week at Nuwara Eliya at such work as gold digging really is. I have had 10 years' experience of what the Malabar and Sinhalese character is with regard to enterprise and I can with every degree of confidence assure you that I have never met with a Malabar-or Sinhalese who had that amount of pluck, energy and hardyhood which a man requires to work at gold digging and washing more particularly at a temperature like Nuwara Eliya; just fancy a Malabar man from morning to night up to his as coccygis in water; working as hard as it would be possible for him to do, so fatiguing was the work I noticed going on last week, there were only two men, Bradley and a little Irishman, who did not lag; so that it is not every European that can even stand it, and the man who does must have his heart in the right place; planters need not therefore apprehend any injury from scarcity of labour, should the Nuwara Eliya diggings become ever so lucrative an occupation. We will say but little as to what will be the end of this infant gold held; one thing is quite certain, that at the present moment a good washer when the weather is as fine as it is now, can from the proportion of gold found in every pan of earth earn from 7s 6d to 10s a day, and I am told that a part of Bradley's gang are to see what can be done in that way next week, so as to keep them in funds.



	(From the Observer, July 8, 1854.) The question of gold at Nuwara Eliya (the Mountain Sanatarium of Ceylon) is again being discussed in the papers. In our Supplement will be found a letter which accompanied a respectable specimen of the dust sent to our address by a dweller on the plains; while from our local contemporaries we have taken extracts on the same subject. It seems strange that neither there nor at Ratnapura did we ever hear of gold in connection with deposits of precious stones until European research has proved their simultaneous existence. Did nuggets of any size exist it is difficult to conceive how the gem diggers missed them—although, to be sure, they never affected deep digging. The present operations it is satisfactory to contemplate, are carried on in a climate exceedingly congenial to European life and health, if we except a tendency to dysentery in those who work long in the wet, from which Australia and California equally suffer. (From Colombo Observer, July 10, 1854) Nuwara Eliya Diggings. To the Editors, " Ceylon Observer? Gentlemen,—I beg to hand you enclosed a specimen of our Nuwara Eliya gold, the proceeds of one pan of surface earth; there is scarcely a pan of

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