Gold Rush

by Jim Richards

  ‘I missed you too,’ she said.

  We spent a blissful few days together travelling around Florida, to the Cays and the beaches. My Spanish came in handy in Miami, where hardly a soul seemed to speak English. Her company was wonderful and reminded me of what I was giving up.

  I flew back to Georgetown in a contemplative mood, determined in some way to build upon the wonderful opportunity Golden Star had given me.

  Back at Omai, I fell into the old routine. Bob Shaw the Canadian geologist was generous with his time and was teaching me useful lessons in tropical weathering geology (rocks which had been altered by the physical and chemical environment of the tropics) as I learnt to log (record) the core samples. We were both working in the core shed one afternoon when I noticed something amiss.

  ‘What’s that on your neck, mate?’ I asked Bob, as I saw a nasty boil there.

  ‘Dunno, I have a few of them and they bloody hurt.’

  ‘You’d better see Stamford, buddy, I don’t like the look of that.’

  Bob had septicaemia and went down like a sack of spuds. Within hours he was so ill that he was barely conscious. Too sick to travel, all Stamford could do was repeatedly inject him with antibiotics. It was a close call, but after three days Bob pulled through.

  His blood poisoning was a stark reminder of how swiftly you could go under in these remote spots. You had to be right on top of your personal hygiene. In the jungle any small cut could flare up into a nasty infection, which is what had happened to Bob.

  After several years in the infantry I was good at looking after myself in the field, but I wasn’t quite so smart on the machinery. One afternoon I was rushing back to camp on Carlos’s pride and joy, a brand new 4×4 quad bike. I misjudged a corner and rolled the bike, flying off in the process. I was slowed to a halt by the friction of the laterite road against my skin. The bike smashed into a tree.

  My hands, elbows and knees were oozing blood, which was mixing with the red dirt I was covered in. In fact I still have some Guyanese dirt buried in my elbow from this incident. I tried to get up but my right ankle was a mess and I was in considerable pain.

  Oh shit, Carlos is really going to fire me this time.

  I tightened the laces of my right boot as far as I could, which hurt badly but did at least allow me to stand up. I then limped over to the bike and pushed it back onto four wheels. The front was smashed and looked really bad.

  I put the bike into neutral and pressed the starter. It fired up; that was impressive. Then I manoeuvred it back onto the track and limped it back to camp, the handlebars facing in one direction and the bike travelling in another.

  At the workshop, the head mechanic took in a loud, deep breath while shaking his head.

  ‘Mr Carlos no like this, Mr Jim,’ he informed me. I was really wishing these guys would stop saying that.

  ‘Yes, I had worked that out, thank you, but can you fix it?’

  ‘Well, yeeees, I can get the bike going again,’ he said. ‘It’ll just look like shit, Mr Jim.’

  The mechanic gave me a lift to my accommodation. I showered and then cleaned and disinfected my weeping wounds. Leaving them open, I covered up the mess with a long shirt and trousers, bandaged my ankle and forced it into my boot with a whimper. I was limping heavily but made it to the office. Inside was Carlos.

  ‘Hello Jim. Have you sorted out that issue on the rig yet?’ he asked.

  ‘Er, yes, Carlos, totally fixed. I did have a slight technical problem with the new bike though.’

  His face darkened.

  ‘Nothing we can’t put right,’ I added.

  ‘I hope so Jim, I love that bike,’ he said. ‘Now let’s do that camp inspection we were talking about.’

  ‘Yes, let’s,’ I said weakly.

  For the next thirty minutes, I followed Carlos around the camp doing my damnedest to neither limp nor show any pain. I had learnt my lesson: don’t speed on a quad bike – they are bloody dangerous.

  One evening, unusually, I just couldn’t eat and I felt lethargic. That night I started getting fevers, my head was pounding and I ached all over. By the next morning I was so weak I couldn’t even get out of bed. Stamford took a needle and pricked my thumb. He placed the blood onto a slide and checked it out under his microscope. I had malaria.

  There are two main types of malaria: falciparum, which can go on to the brain and be life-threatening; and vivax, which is less serious. I had falciparum, which I could have done without, although with the Golden Star system I would at least get treated with the correct drugs.

  I was totally out of it for about four days with fevers and aching joints, and I lost several kilograms in weight. When I finally got up, I was weak and shaky. It is amazing how rapidly malaria can bring a young and fit person to their knees. I should have made more of an effort not to get bitten by mosquitoes. Further bouts like that one and I wouldn’t be setting anything up.

  Mosquitoes were not the only hazard. The cook, McCabe, knocked off a bottle of rum from the camp store one evening. The next morning I heard a fracas emanating from the accommodation block and I saw McCabe staggering out, his face and white cook’s uniform covered in blood.

  ‘What happened, McCabe?’ I asked in horror.

  ‘Vampire bat got me,’ he spluttered.

  ‘Why didn’t you zip up your cot?’

  ‘I did, but I zipped the fucker inside with me.’

  As he’d awoken from his alcoholic haze that morning, the bat had been sitting on his chest eyeing him up for breakfast. McCabe was now covered not just in his own blood, but in bloody bat urine.

  As I recuperated from my malaria, the drilling and fieldwork began to wind down at Omai, to be replaced by office-based feasibility studies. This involved modelling and costing all that would go into building the gold mine, in order to predict how the mine would perform commercially. (Omai was subsequently built and mined; it made a fortune, but not for me.) This change in focus gave me the opportunity to work at another company location.

  My final journey out of Omai was via Mahdia. After I had delivered the last of the banka drill samples, I waited for one of the regular flights from Mahdia to Georgetown – not scheduled, not organised, just regular. I was at the Golden Star camp and spotted the plane landing on the Mahdia strip, and Keith drove me to the rum shop that served as the airport.

  The aircraft was a single-engine Cessna Skyhawk, common in Guyana. It was owned and flown by a well-known local pilot, Gary. The payload for this four-seater aircraft was 900 pounds (about 400 kilograms). A lot of people seemed to be waiting for the plane, and I was concerned I might miss out.

  Gary wandered out of the shop with a beer in one hand and a girl on the other. He was dressed in shorts, a t-shirt and a pair of flip-flops, with a pistol strapped to his waist. He started negotiating with a couple of pork-knockers, who paid him in diamonds; another couple then paid in gold. Dammit, I’ve missed out. He beckoned me forward and asked for a reasonable sum for the flight. Great, I’ve made it.

  Then Gary loaded us all up, hefting our bags in his hand to guess their weight. I sat in the front passenger seat, and behind me were four men in two seats, two sitting on the laps of the other two. Stuffed behind them in the tiny cargo area were two girls and the baggage.

  You must be joking. Eight people in a four-man Cessna, plus baggage. Gary looked confident as he checked the plane. I gulped. It was a beer in Georgetown or Mahdia tonight. I chose Georgetown.

  Gary opened his door and jumped into his own seat. He then leaned back out the door and adroitly picked up his waiting girlfriend, plonking her on his lap. She giggled.

  No fucking way, nine people in a four-man Cessna.

  Too late: he fired up the engine and we started to roll. I hastily put on the headphones and looked at Gary. I’m not scared of flying, but I am scared of dying. He must have seen the fear.

  ‘No problem, man, don’t tek worries,’ he said. ‘Do it all the time, you just have to hit the right spot on t
he strip.’

  This was not especially reassuring, as in my experience the Guyanese phrase ‘don’t tek worries’ normally preceded some major disaster.

  Mahdia was a long dirt airstrip; the main hazards were a kink in the middle and holes where pork-knockers had illegally mined parts of the runway that contained gold. Gary taxied for quite a while, then found his preferred spot. He gunned the engine hard and we gathered speed.

  As Gary reached maximum speed, the plane hit his special bump on the airstrip and bounced. At that exact moment, he slammed down the wing flaps and we were up flying, just. We incrementally gained height in the slowest take-off imaginable and, just as the airstrip ran out, we cleared the trees by a whisker.

  After a few minutes, I had calmed down a bit. If you manage the take-off, you’re fine, as burning the fuel gives you extra leeway on being overweight.

  ‘Where the hell did you learn that trick?’ I asked Gary over the intercom.

  ‘Oh, it’s easy,’ he said. ‘You just take on less fuel, it saves on weight.’

  My eyes swivelled to the fuel gauge. It was only half full. Shit.

  I spent the rest of the journey watching the rapidly diminishing fuel level and making mental iterations on consumption versus distance.

  When the fuel gauge hit empty, Gary started tapping it as if that would create more fuel. Ten minutes later we landed.

  ‘Easy goin’, easy goin’. Ya always get fifteen minutes’ fuel after it says empty, man,’ the pilot said.

  Presumably he had at some point found this out the hard way.

  I climbed out of the plane shaking. That beer had better be worth it.

  It was.

  That evening, I caught up with a good English friend of mine, Rebecca, an economist who worked in Guyana for the World Bank. We sat down at Palm Court, an outside bar on Main Street, which was a hangout for the local dredge owners and expats. As we waited for the drinks, Rebecca’s face suddenly changed.

  ‘Oh my God, Jim. I can’t believe it. Look, over there,’ she said.

  I looked. There was a balding white guy with two attractive young women all over him. Not an uncommon sight.

  ‘Yes, what?’ I asked her.

  ‘That guy works for the World Bank. He came in yesterday and I took him here for a drink.’

  ‘Looks like he’s fitting right in.’

  ‘Yes, isn’t he,’ she said caustically. ‘I spent the whole of last night with him while he told me how much he loved his wife and three kids and how much he was missing them. He even showed me some family photos. I can’t believe it, the bastard.’

  I saw the man putting his tongue down the throat of one of the girls, while his hand wandered over the other one.

  ‘Doesn’t look like he’s missing his family much anymore,’ I said.

  The guy came up for air and spotted Rebecca. He gave her a guilty wave and got back to work. The sultry heat of the Caribbean could have that effect on people.

  After a couple of days drinking and partying in Georgetown, I left for my next company assignment. I had been extremely interested in another Golden Star project in Guyana and, with Omai scaling back, I had managed to get myself assigned there. I was on my way to the Mazaruni Diamond Project to pursue my other long-held personal dream of finding diamonds.

  CHAPTER 9

  DIAMOND RUSH

  Diamonds are an allotrope (type) of carbon. They form under high pressures and temperatures, between 150 to 450 kilometres deep within the earth. On rare occasions, they can come to the surface entrained in an unusual silica-poor rock called kimberlite.

  Under great pressure, the kimberlite magma, rich in volatile gases, works its way upwards along major fissures and fractures towards the surface. When this magma encounters water at shallow depths, a violent phreatomagmatic (steam-driven) eruption can occur and the kimberlite is rapidly emplaced to the surface as dykes (narrow veins of rock) or as pipes (carrot-shaped intrusions).

  These kimberlite eruptions all took place in the distant geological past, long before humans evolved – a source of some regret to me.

  Kimberlite pipes vary in surface area from a few square metres to 1.2 square kilometres, in the case of the fabulously rich Orapa diamond mine in Botswana, or even larger. It is the dream of almost every exploration geologist to find a kimberlite pipe that becomes a diamond mine.

  This remarkable accomplishment has only ever been achieved by a small number of geologists. This is because kimberlite pipes that are rich enough in diamonds to be actually mined are extremely rare. About 6,400 kimberlite pipes have been found in the world so far, of which roughly 1,000 contain some diamonds. Yet only around 50 pipes have ever contained enough diamonds to be commercially mined.

  The first known kimberlite pipes were accidentally discovered in 1871 in Kimberley, South Africa. The rock was named after the town, and the town was named after the Englishman, Lord Kimberley, then secretary of state for the colonies.

  Diamond diggers who had been working in nearby river gravels went on to find good amounts of diamonds in a yellow, earthy material on a nearby kopje (hill). This newly discovered ‘yellow ground’ (as it became known) had the added advantage of breaking up easily, allowing for the recovery of the diamonds by sieve or jig. These early diggers did not know it, but this yellow ground was weathered kimberlite.

  Once mining had progressed to a depth of about 20 metres below the surface, the yellow ground gave way to ‘blue ground’, which the diggers greeted with dismay. Most of them initially believed this blue ground to be the bottom of a giant alluvial pothole and the end of the diamonds. In fact the blue ground was just the unweathered (fresh) kimberlite, which still contained diamonds, except this fresh blue ground was more difficult to work because it was much harder than the weathered yellow ground.

  In ignorance of this fact, many of the diggers sold out their mining claims cheaply once they hit the blue ground. It was one of those rare, special moments in mining when fortunes could be made.

  Many of the claims sold at this time were bought by a colourful mining tycoon named Barney Barnato, who (rightly) believed from work on his own claims that the blue ground would continue to yield diamonds. Other claims were bought by a young man called Cecil Rhodes, who was destined for greatness and infamy.

  Rhodes and Barnato competed for years to control the diamond pipes at Kimberley. Barnato was a Londoner of Jewish extraction, a former boxer and actor who could recite Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy while doing a handstand. Rhodes considered it to be his destiny and duty to extend the British Empire from the south of Africa to the north.

  Barnato ended up controlling the Kimberley Mine, and Rhodes the nearby De Beers Mine. Eventually, in 1888, these two men stopped competing and joined forces to consolidate their various claims and create De Beers Consolidated Mines Limited, an organisation which to this day still dominates the world diamond industry.

  It was the great wealth from these kimberlite pipes which hastened the ‘Scramble for Africa’, where European nations vied to be the first to colonise huge tracts of the continent as yet unclaimed by the west. Much of this scramble was led and financed by Rhodes, whose efforts led to a large portion of southern Africa being colonised by the British Empire. This vast area was named after Rhodes himself – Rhodesia (consisting of present-day Zimbabwe and Zambia).

  Great wealth, power and glory were the destiny of ‘Rhodes of Africa’, but it was built upon the boundless misery and humiliation of indentured black labour at the diamond (and later gold) mines of South Africa.

  Rhodes essentially invented the system of apartheid, enabling him to mercilessly exploit his black workers. The ramifications of this system (later finessed by Afrikaner Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in the 1950s and 60s) are still cascading down generations of black South Africans, manifested in part by the social dysfunction and inequality seen in South Africa today.

  When kimberlite pipes, dykes or other diamond-bearing materials weather and erod
e, the diamonds often end up washed down into the surrounding rivers. These are known as alluvial diamonds, and they are generally found in the coarser fraction (gravels) of the river sediments, as opposed to the finer fractions (sands and silts).

  In Guyana in the 1920s, a great alluvial diamond rush commenced that was centred upon the Mazaruni River. Large quantities of diamonds were easily mined from near-surface alluvial deposits and, since that time, Guyana has been well known for its gem-quality alluvial diamond production, all of it coming from small-scale artisanal miners and river dredges.

  Golden Star was assessing some of these alluvial deposits at its Mazaruni Diamond Project, and I was happy to have wangled a job there.

  The project area was remote, even by Guyanese standards, and the only practical access was by light aircraft. At first light, several of us destined for the Mazaruni Project turned up at Ogle Aerodrome, just outside Georgetown. This airstrip serviced the interior of the country and it was a place of considerable intrigue.

  Miners flying in from the bush had to negotiate the booth manned by the GGMC officers. These workers were there to shake down the miners for their gold and diamonds so that the government (and they) got their (fair) share. The miners secreted the goods around and inside their persons to try and avoid paying up, and all manner of cavity searches and bribery ensued.

  We unloaded our cool boxes of food and perishable supplies and lined up for the weigh-in. Each person and all goods were carefully weighed, as the planes had strict load limits for take-off. Unlike my previous flight with Gary, this time the weight restrictions were being followed.

  A stark reminder of the payload limit sat at the end of the runway in the form of a crashed Cessna. A month before, some miners had learnt the hard way when they overloaded the aircraft while distracting the pilot.

  We took off, heading north-west, and flew over unbroken rainforest for about an hour. It was a sea of green until mysterious flat-topped mountains appeared on the horizon, some covering only the area of a football pitch, others several kilometres across. The tops of these plateaus were covered by either jungle or savannah and the sides were sheer cliffs. The mesas rose up to 1,000 metres above the rainforest below.