The Book of Diamonds

Index

1

History and Lore of the Diamond

The evil eye shall have no power to harm

Him that shall wear the Diamond as a charm

No monarch shall attempt to thwart his will

And e’en the gods his wishes shall fulfill.

Anonymous Roman poet, second century A.D.

It is recorded that the first men to know diamonds, the Dravidians of India, found them seven or eight centuries before Christ and two or three before Buddha. From them we get our unit of weight. Because apparently they thought diamonds grew in the ground like so many turnips, they balanced them on their scales against the seeds of the carob tree, the cattie or carat.

Little, however, is known about these men or their methods. Indian architecture, like Indian sculpture, belonged to these prehistoric natives whose language we have not yet translated. They worked first in wood and then in stone, carving shrines out of solid rock, hollowing out cave-temples and pagodas, and decorating the openings with animal friezes and walls with the Tree of Life or dancers. Both their style and their skill was as remarkable and precise as that in the Western civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, with whom they traded.

But what of their diamonds? Even as late as the fourth century before Christ when the diamond appears frequently as a well-known and precious stone in the Buddhist stories, we find nothing factual about where the diamond was found, how it was mined or collected and how abundant it was. Buddha, it was said, had a throne carved from a single diamond! Can it be true? Authorities today are inclined to think it was rock crystal but the mere idea of such a piece suggests the scope of their work and their tools.

Another legend—a favorite of mine—gives other clues. This is the story of how Alexander the Great ventured into a diamond pit, a tale told by a man who claimed to be Aristotle’s nephew and a companion of Alexander on his great campaign through India about 350 B.C. Reportedly the diamond pit was guarded by snakes and the snakes had a gaze of such fatal power that when they looked upon a man he died.

But this did not deter Alexander long. He outwitted them with mirrors, held in front of his men like so many shields. And when the snakes gazed into the mirrors their fatal gaze was turned upon themselves and they died. Now Alexander himself peered into the pit and, seeing the diamonds there, ordered his men to throw down the carcasses of freshly slain sheep. The diamonds adhered to the fat of the flesh and the flesh lured vultures. Soon the sky was filled with the great birds who swooping down seized the flesh and the diamonds and soared skyward.

Behind them Alexander’s men ran, picking up the diamonds that fell and following the vultures to their mountain roosts to garner the rest.

Fantastic and romantic as it sounds, it is not an impossible method of collecting diamonds. The diamond does adhere to grease; vultures do seek meat; birds have been known to carry many objects many places and to be tracked to their roosts for their loot. And Alexander did know diamonds; it is a fact of history that after one of his African campaigns, the Ethiopians presented him with a crown of diamonds. Let the scholars argue about whether Alexander actually entered a diamond pit; what interests us here is that this was possibly the earliest method of collecting diamonds.

A similar story is told of Sindbad the Sailor; when he was flung into Diamond Valley to die, he observed that merchants threw flesh into it for the vultures to gather, and, rolling himself into a diamond-studded piece, he was picked up and carried off to the mountains and safety.

Because many of the diamonds allegedly were gathered in these vultures’ nests, another legend grew up around the diamond at this period: it was said to be a charm for women in childbirth. As these legends spread by word of mouth, by song, by parchment and by stone pictures, it was said that one diamond valley in Hindustan was so hot that no man dared venture into it—a sea of glowing, many colored fire, one early reporter put it. Marco Polo recorded the diamond valley legends, believing them. Herodotus, the Greek historian, tells a similar story of how cinnamon was obtained—except that the vultures in this story used the cinnamon sticks to build their nests, and great pieces of flesh were thrown by men to break down the nests and scatter the cinnamon. Some authorities suggest it is possible that the flesh was not only a diamond catcher but also part of a sacrifice to the gods for the jewels.

As well as being magical—just to gaze upon it was considered strengthening—the diamond was highly esteemed in early India for its hardness and beauty. In one very early description, probably written at the beginning of the third century, we read that the diamond ought to have five qualities: it should be large enough to bear blows, regular in shape, able to scratch metal vessels, refractive, and brilliant. Its name in India is vajra—the same word used to denote the thunderbolt, another form of natural power. It seems fairly obvious to me that the heavy stone carving of early Indian architecture, the marble lace, and the metal swords with their fantastic cutting points which amazed the first Aryan invaders were all due to the diamond’s ability to slice through anything and to the Hindus’ ability to use the diamond as both a tool and a weapon.

The Chinese, who have never found any diamonds in their vast country, knew the diamond first as a jade-cutting knife—not as a jewel. Jade was their most honored gem, but it astonished them, as it did the early men of India, that ordinary heat could not melt the diamond, and one noted in the third century B.C.: Foreigners wear it in the belief that it can ward off evil influences. The Chinese thought it a stone related to gold, because it is so often found near gold.

There were also legends in this period of diamonds growing under the sea—stories which until recently, when diamonds were found in the sea, were thought to result from a confusion of diamonds with pearls. Many stories tell of fish retrieving diamonds; one tells of how Buddha himself sieved for the precious stones.

But there is disagreement as to where the earliest diamonds came from; Golconda is the city where they were traded, and it is possible that there was a mine along the Godaveri River, as it is now called. Others think the fields lay along the Kistna River, the old Parteal mines where diamonds were found in the medieval period. Around 600 A.D. they were discovered in Borneo, and these fields are still being worked today in a primitive man-net: animal sacrifices are offered to the gods before the opening of a new pit; only whispering is permitted at work for fear of arousing the wrath of evil spirits; and prayers are all but continuous.

The first references in the Western world are found in the Bible. but it is believed by modern students that the Biblical authors confused magnetite and rock crystal with diamond, a confusion which extended through Pliny to Shakespeare, who seemed to think that a diamond might be magnetic—a lodestone. Pliny included diamonds in his famed thirty-four volume Natural History, naming five types and carrying over many myths from the Orient. He was a dedicated scientist for his period, a scientific martyr in fact, for he was smothered while examining the volcanic eruption at Pompeii (79 A.D.) at too close a range. But his science was woefully inexact when it came to the diamond: he said the true test of its strength was that it could not be smashed with a hammer—a small error which has cost the world many a large diamond. He also thought it would melt in goat’s blood, would neutralize poison if eaten and, if worn, would dispel insanity and drive away worry. The part about it neutralizing poison is a strictly Plinian touch: in moorish India, it was thought that the two great purposes of the diamond were the working of stone and the poisoning of enemies.

An ancient diamond mine at Panna, India. Buckets carry earth to surface; armed guards control shaft entrance at right.

Pliny called the diamond adamas from the Greek word for unconquerable, a word which gave us not only diamond but also dame and adamant. He said flatly that the diamond had the greatest value among the objects of human property and for a long time was known only to kings and even to very few of these.

Pliny had nothing to say about diamond collecting, however. The Orient was the sole source of diamonds for twelve centuries; the stones came to Europe with ginger and cinnamon on boats manned by galley slaves, probably sailing out of Madras through the Persian Gulf to be unloaded in Arabia and packed onto the backs of camels for the long trek across the desert to the Mediterranean or to Ethiopia. We get our first dependable descriptions of the Indian operations from the great French traveler, Jean Baptiste Tavernier, who pioneered in trade with India in the mid-seventeenth century, and brought back enough jewels to win a barony from the grateful Louis XIV. His two-volume tale of his adventures in India is a fascinating document. Visiting the mines of Raolconda and Kollur along the Kistna River near Golconda in the 1660’s, he found some sixty thousand men, women, and children slaving in the steaming sand, spurred on by whips. The men dug the pits to about twelve feet, and the women and children carried the gravel away in baskets to the creek and washed it, plucking out the diamonds by hand. Mining was difficult hand labor; small hoes and rake-like tools were used to gather the sand and gravel and then this debris was trundled to the wash to be picked over for diamonds.

From the mines the best gems went to the merchants at Golconda, the fabulous diamond center for centuries, and flawed ones were peddled by the small boys around the mines. The merchants demanded good gold and had fixed prices for diamonds by carat weight and quality. Tavernier’s journeys—he made six of them to the Orient—began in 1631, when he was in his twenties. A single trip might take him five years; dealing was leisurely, and frequently he might spend weeks in this great house or that as a guest seeing only the slaves or the ladies of the harem until the master of the house forewent pride and admitted his eagerness to barter with the Frenchman. Only once did he sail around Africa; usually he traveled overland through Constantinople. In Europe he traveled by horse carriage; in India his wagon was drawn by oxen and he might be accompanied by as many as sixty attendants.

The Maharajah of Gwalior sporting pearls, emeralds and his Arabian stallion, circa 1350, when the Indians valued diamonds as cutting tools and wealth but rarely displayed them.

These sketches of Indian Moguls show the owners of some of the fabulously big diamonds mined in India.

Tavernier began his palace deals by giving away his own strange European wares—pocket watches from Paris, emeralds from the Spanish colonies in South America, turquoises from Persia, bronze from Burgundy, boxes decorated in Florence, a brace of English pistols or an Italian telescope. Now and again he also brought ropes of pearls, beloved in India—but beloved in Europe too.

In return, he was permitted to show his pearls. Purchasers paid cash but also gave him gifts. Tavernier relates that one Indian prince bought 96,000 rupees’ worth of pearls from him paying in part in rupees, in part with a horse, and in part with a robe of honor of gold and silver brocade and complete with turban. Tavernier was proud of the outfit; when he returned to France, he had his portrait painted in it. It is odd to see his round French face below the swaddling of his Oriental headgear; odd too to see how little he prized his ornaments—if he was wearing jewels that day, none are visible.

Tavernier knew his work well; his descriptions of the diamonds he bought, his weights, his understanding of flaws, cleaving, and other techniques of diamond-handling laid the basis for all Western records of diamonds. His most famous description is the collection of Aurangzeb (a detailed description of his visit to that Mogul is in the chapter on famous and infamous diamonds, Chapter 5 ) ; his most famous sale was to Louis XIV, who altogether bought thousands of carats from Tavernier and rewarded him with gold, lands and the title of Baron.

Today the Indian beds are exhausted; the source which is said to have yielded some 12 million carats of diamonds now gives forth a yearly trickle of perhaps 100 carats. But in ancient vaults, hidden in the depths of old ruins, or handed down by Hindu princes, a vast and brilliant fortune in diamonds rests in India today.

And as yet geologists have failed to trace the source of the shiny river pebbles of the Orient. The diamond is simply carbon, pure carbon, one of the commonest elements we have, found in abundance in coal, in oil, in inks, in the human body—in fact, in every living thing. The distinction the diamond has is not its purity of carbon, it is the fact that it is crystalline carbon —gem carbon—forged deep in the earth by the most tremendous heat and pressure, trapped in molten lava and pushed upward by explosive force, perhaps to erupt from the earth’s surface in volcanic bursts, perhaps to lie embedded in escape valves. In South Africa pipes or escape valves of diamond-dotted rock thousands of feet long have been found going down into the molten layers of the earth. In India, where the diamonds were recorded as being found only in pits or river beds, no old pipes have been discovered although search after search has been made. Did the ancient diggers plumb these depths? Did the rock blow up and out completely in a volcanic eruption of such force that all its diamonds were flung far and wide? Or do the pipes lie somewhere under the now ruined city of Golconda or one of the fabulous ancient temples—or perhaps in the Himalayas themselves? All volcanoes are not productive of diamonds, but mineralogists believe the diamond can be produced naturally only by this phenomenon.

It has often been said by cynics that a major part of the allure of the diamond is the mystery of its Oriental origins, tricked up by legend and myth, but how can any man say that trappings are necessary to enhance the curious, uniquely grand qualities of this amazing jewel?

The diamond early India and early Rome and Ethiopia knew, however, was not the dazzling stone we know today. Cutting gave it its brilliance and cutting did not begin until the modern period. In early India the diamond was often cleaved, sometimes polished and quite frequently the stone sent to the West had the natural facets of the octahedron it is; good traders that the Indians were, they sent out at least a few samples of the kind of stone wanted. But it is a rare stone that glitters without expert faceting; roughs are dull, greasy pebbles which catch and reflect the light only by chance. For centuries they can lie around unnoticed; it takes a knowledgeable eye to spot a diamond in the rough.

The discovery of diamonds in Brazil provides an example of how deceptive they are. Let us imagine ourselves around a campfire in the forests of Brazil to get the full flavor. The time is 1726, the men around the campfire are gold prospectors who have been panning the streams all day and now are playing poker, using pebbles from the stream for chips. With them is a newcomer, a world traveler and something of an explorer. Recently he has returned from India where briefly he worked at the Portuguese port of Goa, discovered by the Portuguese Vasco da Gama about the same time Columbus discovered America. Since then Portugal has grown rich on diamonds; her empire includes parts of Africa, the Orient, and the vast country of Brazil. But more and more wealth is needed to control them and Bernardo da Fonseco Lobo is a soldier of fortune seeking that wealth and the power that goes with it, lured to Brazil by the report of gold. Was he also looking for diamonds? History does not say. But it is recorded fact that when he saw them he recognized them for what they were. He pocketed the shiny pebbles as fast as he won them and bought back what he lost with nuggets of gold. The next day he sent them home to Lisbon, to the attention of the Crown. The day the King pronounced them diamonds was a great one for Portugal. The whole populace was given time off to pray, to feast, to dance, and a pronouncement renamed the small town of Tejeco in Brazil Diamantina.

Diamond washing in the Raolconda mines in Hyderabad, near the ancient Indian city of Golconda.

Eastern diamond merchants completing a bargaining deal, using hand signals.

Digging for diamonds at Raolconda, India.

Slaves, with overseers, washing for diamonds at Mandango, Brazil, about 1760.

The search for diamonds in Tejucas, Brazil, in the mid-eighteenth century.

But it took a long time to get Bernardo’s find under control and his diamonds respected. There were two problems. One was the age-old one of working the diamond beds while guarding them from theft; the other, marketing.

To work the beds, the Portuguese Crown first threw out the gold prospectors and placed the fields in the hands of a few court favorites to control the slave labor gangs and the diamonds themselves. Briefly the kings of Portugal became fabulously wealthy. But the angry prospectors got even by smuggling. The government in 1740 switched to contract tenancy; a manager would lease a field for five years, say, for a share of the profits. With independence in 1822, the Republic of Brazil took over and today anyone may forage for diamonds there who can pay the steep land taxes and the labor costs.

The problem of securing a steady market took almost as long. Although Brazil quickly produced some of the finest of the world’s diamonds—clear, flawless, white, and large—jealous European traders and jewelers insisted for decades the new finds were soft and of poor color. Portugal got around this venal gossip by shipping the diamonds first to Goa and then bringing them back as Oriental stones, but it was an expensive procedure.

The peak of the Brazilian mines production occurred in the mid-nineteenth century. Slaves—black and white, male and female—worked under the foreman’s whip. For finding a stone of 8 to 10 carats, there was a prize of a new suit of clothes, a hat, and a knife; for a stone of more than 17.50 carats, freedom. Hundreds of thousands died of the heat, of malaria, of dysentery, and of starvation. Food was brought inland by racketeers from Rio de Janeiro and was incredibly expensive.

After producing an estimated 16 million carats, there trickles out today about 20,000 carats a year, most of which comes from Bahia, west of Diamantina. Here is the only place in the world where the black diamond is found, a dull spongy stone made up of tiny interlocking diamond crystals, prized for its toughness by tool makers. You or I would throw it aside like so much coal on a hot night if we found it, but finally, after almost eighteen centuries, it is the diamond Pliny dreamed of—it cannot be split by a hammer because it has no cleavage, or grain.

Brazil and India are all but played out today as sources of diamonds. South Africa is the modern source—but the most recent new discoveries have been in the U.S.S.R. In the twenties, the Western nations, led by the United States, forbade the selling of diamonds to the new communist nation; in the thirties, the Soviet Union began prospecting across a thousand mile plateau between Krasnoyarsk and Yakutsk in Siberia where geologists said the land formation resembled that of South African diamond areas. Through hot humid summers and winters of 60° below freezing they explored the land; trekking through the dense primeval forest, up the mountains, shooting the rapids—sometimes using horses, sometimes canoes, sometimes reindeer. In the fifties a young female mineralogist from Leningrad, Larisa Popugayeva, found the first blue-ground pipe near the Markha River; she called it The Dawn. Soon afterward a second pipe was found near the river Yireleekh. Both are in the State of Yakutsk, where the natives reported old legends about a stone so bright it was called Little Sun. Since then a great number of industrial diamonds have been produced despite incredible mining difficulties from the cold: the ground has to be heated before it can be dug, and boiling water has to be mixed with the concrete to prevent it from freezing before it is used. If the temperature goes up to 30° below freezing, it’s considered a warm, pleasant day.

A trickle of gems has long come out of Russia; gem diamonds were found in the Urals in 1829; and new mine shafts have been recently sunk along the Vishera River. But Russia accounts only for a small portion of modern diamond production—less than 2 per cent. Diamonds today come from Africa: industrials from the Congo and Ghana, gems from South Africa, South-West Africa, and Tanganyika.

It was in 1866 that the first diamond was found in Africa; the scene was the African plateau, five hundred miles inland from the Cape of Good Hope near the source of the Orange River in a nothing of a place with the bittersweet name of Hopetown. Once again they first were shiny pebbles and playthings: the boy Erasmus Jacobs picked up a large one that he said later had blinked at him and gave it to his sister to play a game the poor Boer children liked called Five Stones. A neighbor saw the stone on the floor of the Jacobs’ hovel and asked for it for a gift; Mrs. Jacobs gave it to him. He took it to a peddler named Jack O‘Reilly who tested it in the old manner by writing his name with it on a windowpane and then took it to a mineralogist. The mineralogist tested it by flinting a file with it and asked the local bishop to look at it. He too wrote his name on a window pane with it. All agreed it was a diamond. When O’Reilly got the stone back, he sold it to the governor of the Cape colony for about $2,500 and the governor exhibited it at the Paris exhibition of 1867. Clear, blue white and about the size of a sparrow’s egg, it weighed 21.50 carats and was called first the O’Reilly, and later the Eureka in the medieval tradition of giving diamonds names.

Early years of the South African diamond rush. At right, an expert has just declared the found stone a real diamond.

Dinner time at