DIAMONDS,GOLD,AND BRITISHIMPERIALISM
vidual diggers acquired small claims and worked the surface with pick and
shovel, helped, perhaps, by three or four assistants. Most of the diggers
were white; nearly all their assistants, black. By the end of 1872, four mines
were taking shape and many of the claims were subdivided into tiny plots.
On the Kimberley mine, the most productive of the four, there were no
fewer than 1,700 properties, one of which, for example, measured seven
feet by thirty and was sold for fifteen hundred pounds. As their excavations
deepened, the miners erected an elaborate haulage system with pulleys and
wires and wooden staging to remove the excavated ground. Chaos resulted.
Collapsed roadways, mounds of earth, and floodwaters made more than
half the mine unworkable.
Concentration
and mechanization gradually overcame these problems.
Steam traction replaced man and animal power, and underground
shafts
and tunnels eventually replaced open mining. As advanced technology
took over, small properties
and individual
diggers were superseded
by
larger holdings and highly capitalized organizations. The mid- 1880S were
years of mutually destructive cutthroat
competition
among those com-
panies.?
As the competition developed, a few individuals, most of them youthful