by Jim Richards
These were the legendary tepuis, upon which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had based his thriller The Lost World. The tepuis stood as isolated bodies in space and time and, as such, each one had evolved its own fauna and flora. Due to the poor-quality soils (derived from the sandstone), there were a large number of carnivorous plants on the plateaus. The tepuis were also home to several species of venomous tarantulas, including the Goliath birdeater, the largest spider in the world by weight and spanning up to one-third of a metre. I would need to watch out for them.
We came in to land at Aircheng, a lowland jungle airstrip which looked very short to me. Landing these light aircraft was not the problem, it was getting them back up again you had to worry about. This issue was helped by flights coming in that were loaded with people, food and fuel, but flying out with only people – and hopefully diamonds.
After we bounced down on the gravel strip, we were met by an American, Seth Blume, the Mazaruni project geologist. Seth had a diamond obsession which had taken him all the way to this far-flung spot.
At the nearby Martin Landing, we boarded a wooden boat that took us along the Mazaruni, a magnificent 300-metre-wide river with slow-moving, muddy water. There were quite a number of dredges here too, but this time they were looking for diamonds, not gold. This was the heart of the Guyanese diamond fields, centred around the Kurupung, Eping and Meamu rivers – all tributaries of the Mazaruni River – with numerous other surrounding diamond occurrences, including on top of the tepuis.
We headed up the Eping River and soon arrived at the Golden Star camp situated on the elevated bank of the river. This camp had just a few rough tarpaulin shelters and was claustrophobic and damp. Massive trees, even larger than at Omai, marched right up to the edge of the small clearing, which meant we only caught direct sunlight for around an hour at midday.
Seth ran a pretty tight ship and alcohol was banned, which made managing the men a lot easier. Most of the workforce here were Amerindians, indigenous people who lived in their own Mazaruni jungle villages. They all had biblical names like Moses or Aaron that some missionary had gifted them.
Seth had his wife Loretta with him in the camp. Loretta was an attractive and talkative young Guyanese-Indian woman, and it was a pleasant change to have some female company around.
Loretta and I got on well and she enjoyed the camp life; her only problem was that she was petrified of snakes. To reassure her, Seth had bought her a pair of tall rubber wellington boots which she wore everywhere to protect herself from hidden or imagined snakes. She cut an amusing figure striding around the camp wearing her precious boots.
Seth put me to work supervising the land dredge we had operating. I was pleased about this as it was just the kind of hands-on experience I wanted. The operation was testing for diamonds on a perched (elevated) terrace, which had long ago been an ancient river bed.
This was an example of inverted topography. The ancient river gravels were resistant to erosion; the older geology either side consisted of clays which were softer and eroded away quicker. Over millions of years this left the old riverbed higher than its surrounds. This phenomenon was common in Guyana and these perched terraces were good targets for diamond miners.
Our land-dredge operation was almost identical to the ones I had seen at Mahdia, except instead of the mined material going over a sluice box, it went into a mechanical jig. This worked by using a jigging motion to sort material of different densities and gave a better recovery for the diamonds. Heavier material moves downwards when agitated; that is how jigging works.
Diamonds have a density of 3.5 (meaning they are 3.5 times heavier than water), and the gravel was mainly quartz, which has a density of 2.8. So providing you set up the jig to operate at the sweet spot between these two densities, the heavier diamonds would collect in the bottom of the jig and the lighter quartz would be discarded out the top. Good diamond recoveries for such an operation would be 95 per cent; that is, 95 per cent of the total diamonds in the gravel being recovered by the jig.
At the end of my first day, I helped clean out the jig to see if we had found any diamonds. This operation was always done under close supervision from a geologist, and I was the geologist. We tipped the gravel concentrate from the jig into buckets.
Uncle Benjy, an old-time pork-knocker, then stepped into the large square wooden tub full of water we had prepared. He held out three round sieves called sarukas, each 70 centimetres in diameter, and stacked one on top of the other, coarsest on the top, finest on the bottom. I then picked up a bucket full of gravel concentrate and poured half of it onto the topmost sieve.
Uncle Benjy held the gravel-filled sieves partly under the water, which made the load lighter and easier to receive. He then rested the bottom two sieves at his feet on the floor of the tub. He started to hand-jig the top sieve. The finer material fell through this coarsest sieve and sank in the water to safely rest on top of the finer sieves underwater.
We checked the coarsest material in the first sieve. You would have to be pretty lucky to find a diamond this size, but it was always worth a look. Nothing. We chucked the coarse gravel and discarded the sieve.
Uncle Benjy carefully lifted up the second sieve from under the water, cautious not to spill any of the gravel. He jigged it up and down and then threw (rotated) the sieve with increasing speed while also jigging. This took quite some practice, but in the hands of Uncle Benjy it was art.
The rotation threw the lighter material to the outside of the sieve, while the heavier material (including, hopefully, any diamonds) stayed near the centre
Diamonds have a high refractive index (2.4), compared with water (1.3) or quartz (1.4). It is this high refractive index that gives diamonds their so-called fire. This quality is used during the jigging process to spot the diamonds.
When you move the material in the eye (centre) of the sieve, slowly up and down between the air and water, the contrast in refractive indices makes the diamonds visually jump out at you.
And so it was that day, when a diamond winked up at us from the eye of the sieve. It was about one-and-a-half carats, a clear and perfectly formed dodecahedron crystal; utterly captivating with its diamantine lustre and constantly changing fire.
‘Hello,’ said Uncle Benjy as he picked it out with his fingers and held it in the palm of his hand.
I was so wound up I couldn’t speak. That diamond was the most beautiful object I had ever seen. In that moment I became hooked. I still am.
Next we jigged the material in the fine sieve and found several smaller diamonds, mostly good-looking gems. Every time we found one my heart skipped a beat. After jigging all of the remaining material, we weighed the stones, recorded them in the diamond ledger and then Seth locked them in the company safe. Thus concluded an extremely satisfying day.
Seth was enthused by the day’s haul; it was the culmination of one year’s work for him. Uncle Benjy, also inspired, flew into stories from his old days in the surrounding diamond fields.
‘Dat Patrick DeSouza is a quick man,’ Uncle Benjy told us, describing a notorious pork-knocker. ‘He get da green men’ (inexperienced new arrivals to the diggings) ‘comin’ straight off da boat and tek dem off to he camp, dey spend six week digging sand den he say to dem, “Aint no nuthin here, best go home now.” Once he blow dem off, he dig out da good gravel and wash da diamond. Da green guys done strip off da sand cover for he.’
Uncle Benjy told us that another trick was played out on the new prostitutes coming in from Georgetown. Diamonds were the main currency at the diggings and some of these unwary girls could be tricked with zircons as payment for their services. Good zircons could be mistaken by the untrained eye for diamonds.
A level of paranoia rightly pervaded all things relating to the discovery and handling of the diamonds. Uncle Benjy described jiggers on the dredges who were so skilled that if they saw a good diamond in the sieve they could flip it up so it jumped clean off their saruka and was caught in their mouth to be smuggled out la
ter. The overseer would be none the wiser.
The theft of diamonds was an ever-present issue for us too and had to be addressed with great thoroughness. If a large diamond was stolen from an exploration project, it could make a serious dent in the calculated economics. You stood virtually no chance of seeing a diamond during the land dredging, so security was not a problem to this point. It was from the mechanical jigs being cleaned out to the gravels being hand-jigged that close supervision was paramount.
After work in the late afternoon, we would bathe in the river – where, for whatever reason, the piranhas never bothered us. The most unnerving hazard in the river was the candiru, a small type of parasitic catfish that was endemic to these large rivers. Should you urinate in the river while bathing, the candiru, attracted by the urine, could swim up the tip of your penis and into your urethra. It would then open up its spikes and be impossible to extract without surgery. The Guyanese were genuinely terrified at the prospect of this fish; I suspected it was an urban myth, but I was not about to test it out.
There were other bathing hazards too. As you entered the shallow water, you always pushed your feet a few inches into the sand and trudged in, pushing the sediment aside as you went; this was in order to flush out any stingrays that had the habit of burying themselves close to the banks. If you trod on top of one of these, their tail would instantly arc up and a razor-sharp spike could impale itself into your leg. These wounds were notorious for getting badly infected.
After bathing we would eat a greasy meal of rice and some kind of stew in the open-tented mess. Before dark, while the men often played cricket on a small pitch, I regularly fished and would pull out piranhas weighing up to half a kilogram. You had to be wary unhooking these suckers as their teeth were razor sharp. You couldn’t eat piranha fried, as they were too bony, but they did make a delicious soup that tasted like trout.
While fishing I often saw delicate hummingbirds feeding. These creatures had bodies not much bigger than a large grape, and frequented the riverbanks, capturing nectar from the flowers that hung from the vines. At my favourite fishing spot I got to know one elegant bird that, apart from a black head, was a stunning bright crimson all over.
In the evenings I read the diamond books Seth had in the camp office, soaking up the knowledge and thrill of the diamond industry, and stories of incredible diamond rushes in days gone by.
Despite our progress finding diamonds on the Mazaruni Project, we were still a dog-and-pony outfit. We needed a serious injection of capital to get the show on the road and scale up the sampling with some larger gear. To get some of these investment dollars, David Fennell had lined up a significant Canadian mining investor to visit the project.
We all rehearsed the visit in detail to ensure it went smoothly. My job was to receive the boat at the camp and then assist our guests. On the big day I was ready, and as the boat pulled up I could see five white guys. Three of the visitors looked most uncomfortable; one even wore a suit jacket, which was ridiculous. They looked like accountants and lawyers – important, moneyed types.
The fourth was an older guy with a beard and dressed in a checked shirt: the geologist. The fifth and youngest man wore khaki, and stood at the front of the boat holding the landing rope; he looked a bit more like a bush person who was clearly in his element, probably the logistics organiser or another geologist.
I went for the suits. I helped them off the rolling boat and took them to the cookhouse for refreshments. I then ended up outside, chatting to the logistics guy, a friendly and charming North American.
‘So what do you do here, Jim?’ he asked, and I talked about my job. He was so relaxed that I opened up a bit.
‘What’s your boss like?’ he said.
I hadn’t really chatted much to anyone for a while so I was a bit indiscreet regarding company gossip. But hey, this guy was just another low-level employee like me, so what did it matter?
‘Have you met David Fennell? What makes him tick?’ he asked.
‘Oh man, let me tell you a story …’ and so it went on. We were getting along like old buddies.
I saw Seth moving in from the suits. He was looking quite worried.
‘Ahem, Jim, allow me to introduce you to Robert Friedland,’ said Seth.
Oh shit. I had just spilled the entire Golden Star dirty laundry to the world’s most perceptive and shrewd mining investor.
‘Thanks Jim,’ smiled Friedland. ‘Very interesting.’
The intriguing thing about my conversation with Friedland is that he had asked me nothing about the project, only the people.
Six years later Robert Friedland made mining history by selling the fabulously rich Voisey’s Bay nickel discovery in Canada to the mining giant INCO Ltd for $4.3 billion, the largest single mining property sale in history to that date.
So masterful had Friedland been as a negotiator, that INCO had, for a while at least, struggled to recover from the deal and, wounded, it was eventually taken over by another company. During the negotiations, if Friedland did not get what he wanted he would take off his shoe and smash it repeatedly on the table to intimidate the opposition. The INCO guys called it ‘getting the shoe’. (The Big Score by Jacquie McNish gives an entertaining account of Friedland’s negotiating tactics in that encounter, and is a must-read for any aspiring mining executive.)
Robert Friedland operated from his own aircraft and flew around the world, looking at projects in which to invest. He always took his close-knit team with him: a lawyer, a banker, an accountant and a geologist. They simply did due diligence and deals as they went. If Friedland liked a project and the people, he would buy his way in, there and then. If a big discovery was made, control by Friedland would not be far away. He was a consummate operator.
Friedland was also living proof that being sentenced to two years in prison for drug dealing during one’s youth need not be an impediment to a glittering corporate career.
And so it came to pass for the humble Mazaruni Project. Despite my indiscretion, Friedland said yes and a wall of money came at us. It was full steam ahead.
My new role was to do reconnaissance mapping on the areas either side of the Mazaruni River. The aim was to discover enough alluvial gravels to host a large diamond mine. The areas I scouted would subsequently be sampled for diamonds once the new gear turned up. For this task I was given two field assistants, a cook, and a small boat.
We set off from the main camp, up the Mazaruni River to the mouth of the Kurupung River, and there we set up our modest fly-camp with the usual blue tarpaulin and hammocks.
Next morning I started mapping with my two hand-picked assistants, Mackie and Moses. These men were Amerindians from the Arawak tribe and they were superb bushmen. Using the boat to get around, we landed at various points along the river, then cut lines directly into the bush. I mapped along these lines, making observations on topography, geology and old diamond workings.
We worked our way up the Kurupung River, returning to our fly-camp each night. After a couple of days we reached Kurupung village itself. This is the bush capital of the Guyanese diamond trade and the location of Guyana’s massive first diamond rush that took place in the 1920s (although diamonds had been mined there from the start of the twentieth century). The village has a splendid setting among the rainforest, with the high mesas of the Pakaraima tepuis just a couple of kilometres to the north.
Kurupung had some small shops, including diamond buyers, a couple of rough cafés-cum-rum-shops, a school, police station, a government office and a number of houses. The village was the logistics centre for the hundreds of pork-knockers who worked in the surrounding area. There was an airstrip and a muddy landing used to access the river.
Instead of sitting on a wet log to eat our lunch, we were treated to an excellent meal of salt fish and rice in a café. A steady stream of pork-knockers came and went and I chatted with them about their lives and diamond-mining adventures.
A sprightly, middle-aged black man explained to
me how it worked: ‘We prospect using a thin iron rod, push it into the ground and feel for da scrape of gravel. Den we drop [dig the] test pit. If it have good diamond, we hush up and mine it. When word get out through da buyers or dem girls, then a shout [diamond rush] start.’ He sucked on a foul-smelling cigarette, enjoying the attention. ‘We runnin’ round from place to place, dependin’ on what goin’ on. Findin’ the best place to work the diamond. Somebody always findin’ something, then we come along and clean out the fresh [unworked] ground or edges [edges of the already worked pits, where the spoil rests]. Shout: Meamu. Shout: Eping. Shout: Kurupung. Diamond, like rice!’ he finished breathlessly.
He had become so animated, I thought he might just leave the table there and then to follow one of the shouts he had just described. Here was a man who liked his work.
‘Are you married?’ I asked.
‘Well I had a girl once, but, you know …’
Yes, that lifestyle would be a disadvantage to romance. But I could see the attraction. A free-spirited existence to do as one chose and work when one pleased. On top of this, the tantalising chance to strike it rich.
He told me that Kurupung was full of intrigue and suspicion: all the different groups of pork-knockers were constantly checking on or following each other, always trying to find out who was mining where and what they were getting.
As we finished up and walked away from the café, two men shuffled past us holding a 3-metre-long pole between their shoulders. Hanging upside down from the pole were roughly thirty live scarlet macaws, recently caught. Despite being officially protected, the birds were being flown out to be sold into the North American exotic pet market.
As well as great beauty, there were also ugly things in Kurupung.