by Jim Richards
The dredges were large 8-inch suction machines with diesel truck engines. They floated on two wooden pontoons. Every part of the dredges had been flown in by light aircraft except the pontoons, which were built from trees on-site.
I was on the front of the boat and Colin manoeuvred me up to the side of the first dredge where the engine was situated. At that moment the dredge operator gunned the engine and an overflow of hot water flew out all over me.
Thinking it was scalding hot (which it wasn’t), I fell over into the river to ensure I didn’t get burned. The dredge crew were delighted their joke had turned out so well, and given that I took it in good spirit they gave me a warm welcome. The only downside to this was that my camera, which had been on my waist, was destroyed.
I took great interest as Colin showed me around the operation. After this we went downstream to the falls. As we motored along I could see various claim boards nailed onto trees beside the river:
A Williams 18 July 1971
CHF Wall Street
To the uninitiated: CHF stands for ‘creek, hill, flat’. ‘Wall Street’ was the name of the claim.
People had been here before. I would have to be smart in my mining.
I had already heard accounts of the earliest diving for diamonds in Guyana, which commenced at the start of the twentieth century. These divers had simply ducked under the water holding their breath and shoved gravel into hessian bags. The Guyanese called it water-dogging, and there were still occasional water-dogging rushes in some remote and shallow rivers.
In the 1950s, old-fashioned brass diving helmets were imported from Brazil and divers descended with a lead weight slung over their shoulders. Hand-pumped air was fed down to the helmet through a line from the surface.
Once on the riverbed, the diver would scrabble around, filling the sacks with gravel. When they were full, he would tug on the air hose and his buddies in the boat would haul him up on a rope. The diver had to keep his head upright at all times, as the helmet was open at the bottom and would fill with water if he fell.
It was a dangerous occupation and deaths were made more common by an ignorance of the bends, which was still common even when I was in Guyana. The introduction of the aqualung to Guyana in the 1960s made diving far easier, and the first diver-operated dredges had appeared at that time. With each introduction of new technology, more challenging areas could be worked and fresh fortunes were made.
My own plan was to set up a more modest operation than Cyrilda’s. It was all I could afford, anyway. I planned to use a small dredge (about 3 by 2 metres) that I could manoeuvre around the falls, and mine the gravels that the larger dredges could not reach. My machine would still have the ability to suck gravels from the bottom of the river, supply air to a diver and have a sluice box to catch the gold and diamonds. But it would be a much lighter machine and need fewer people to operate.
This plan had the added advantage that the falls were likely to host higher-grade material, especially within the mythical potholes that every alluvial diamond miner dreamed of finding. I hoped that by taking a hand-operated cable winch with me, I would be able to access areas under large boulders that the original miners may have missed.
This plan also meant that Cyrilda’s larger operation and mine were not competitors for the same gravels, which was a better starting point for the relationship.
Colin and I worked our way through the upper falls in his boat. I ducked under the water in various places using a borrowed snorkel and mask, looking for unworked gravels, which I did indeed find at a fairly shallow depth. This seemed a reasonable place to start.
Colin and I got on well. As he was the boss of Cyrilda’s operations, I think he liked having someone other than his own men around. Colin was intelligent, a first-class bushman and an experienced miner; he was a great help.
There was also a spare leaky old boat that Colin would lend me, an essential item in order to operate on the river. Now I had some infrastructure to lean on and things started to seem a bit less daunting.
In this pre-internet era, I had no hard information on operating a small dredge, so setting one up from scratch was going to be a challenge. Back in Georgetown I had received plenty of mining advice, both good and bad, and had been confused as to how to proceed. Yet out here in the bush, with an expert like Colin on hand, things became much clearer. I questioned him constantly.
That night in the bush camp, I started to make out a list of items that I needed to buy in Georgetown. My shopping list was extensive. For the dredge I needed an engine, floats, frame, water pump, a couple-jet, 4-inch diameter suction hose, 3-inch diameter pressure hose and a sluice box.
For diving I needed an oil-free air compressor, reserve air tank, air-regulator, hose, mask, wetsuit and weight belt.
For general mining gear I needed a Tirfor cable winch, saruka sieves, a gold pan, mercury and tools.
I also required an outboard boat engine, gasoline, diesel, oil, grease, camping gear and bedding, rope, a machete, an axe, a saw, nails, a hammer, assorted hardware, connectors, joiners, tape, glue, food for two men for a month, et cetera.
The list seemed endless, and I could not afford to miss something that would prevent me from operating: there was no hardware store at Ekereku. It was a lot of gear, and I was becoming concerned that I would not have enough start-up money.
Despite this, I returned to Georgetown feeling more confident because I now had a plan. A friend had let me use her house as a base and storeroom, which was a godsend. She was more than a friend, in fact, so things were getting complicated.
Many of the Forty-Niners had walked down this same road. It is a very old story indeed. In my lonely pursuit of fortune, I had fallen into the arms of another woman. Did I feel guilty? A little bit.
First step was to find a small dredge, without which the other equipment would not be of much use.
Within Guyana there was, and presumably still is, a permanent cadre of expatriate desperadoes who were constantly trying to set up alluvial mining operations, by and large unsuccessfully. This group met most afternoons at the bar of the Tower Hotel in the centre of the capital.
There was a whole sub-industry of Guyanese rip-off artists who fed off the foreign miners. These conmen would buzz around the bar at the Tower looking for their next mark. The only honest transactions to be found in this milieu were from the disturbingly beautiful and ubiquitous prostitutes, where presumably you actually got what you paid for.
I walked into this nest of intrigue, trying to work out how I was going to find a small dredge. Whichever Guyanese I spoke to, I always got the same unlikely answer: ‘No problem, come with me and I know exactly where you can find what you want.’
These guys were extremely helpful; they just didn’t help. These encounters invariably led to their mate’s empty machine shop where tall promises were made, providing I paid up front, of course.
After a couple of these time-wasting meetings, I tried the expats. There were Americans, Canadians, a Pole and a German. I was the only Brit. They were a disillusioned bunch and their main topic of conversation was how much money they had lost and how much gear of theirs had been stolen. This crowd of men in their forties and fifties did appear to be finding considerable solace in the girls though.
I struck up a conversation with a cadaverous American sitting alone in the corner of the bar, propping up a bourbon. His name was Bill Sampson and he looked to be on his deathbed. In mining terms, he was the real deal. Bill was a miner and former airplane pilot who had been there and done that in both Guyana and the USA for the last fifty years.
We got on well, but Bill had recently had a heart attack and was in bad shape. Guyana is not a good place to have a heart attack.
‘If you’re interested in a job,’ he drawled, ‘I’ve got a ten-inch dredge on the Potaro River. It’s been hijacked by the manager I fired. He’s taken over the crew and is now working out the fuel and supplies for his own profit.’ He appraised me with his sunken eyes
. ‘You look like the kind of guy I could use. Why don’t you get some men together, and go up and retake the dredge off this thieving bastard? Afterwards you could manage the outfit for fiteen per cent of production.’
It was an interesting offer. In the Guyanese bush, law and order often depended on who was better mates with the local police, or who was armed. But there didn’t seem a lot in it for me. I had left the UK to set up my own operation and I didn’t want to be sidetracked now.
‘Thanks, Bill, some other time perhaps. But I’m really looking for light equipment to set up my own portable mining outfit,’ I said.
‘Well I’m your man then, I’ve got some small-dredge gear. It’ll be just what you need.’
I went back with Bill to his house to take a look. He appeared to be a distressed seller. Bill opened up his garage and I feasted my eyes on the remains of an old Keene 5-inch dredge that consisted of two small 8-horsepower diesel engines with water pumps attached. He also had floats and a sluice box. I tried the engines and they fired up first time.
These were the essential components of a small dredge. All of the peripheral gear had been stolen, but I could find a way to replace that.
I bargained hard and ended up buying the lot for $2,000 cash (everything in Guyana was for cash), worth around $7,000 in today’s money. This was a third of my total money, but I had to have a dredge. Getting any gear into the country was difficult and expensive due to horribly high import duties, so it was not a bad deal. Anyway, I only needed one engine and could always sell the other.
Using a taxi, I moved all the equipment to my store.
I cleaned up the engines, changed the oil and filters and felt I had got a bargain. Over the next couple of weeks, I went about buying the rest of the gear. I was slowed up a bit by a mild bout of malaria, a souvenir from the Mazaruni. It was treated effectively by a local doctor, but was a reminder of my lack of backup.
I also needed an assistant, and I heard on the grapevine that a most impressive Amerindian I had worked with was in town. He would fit the bill, or might know someone who was interested, so I went to the government Amerindian Residence on Princess Street in Georgetown to find him.
The outside of the place was shocking, even for Georgetown. It was a filthy, rubbish-strewn mess, with raw sewage lying in a pool on one side of the house. My contact was sitting out the front with a few other indigenous men. All of them were rolling drunk and looked like they had been in that state for quite some time.
He gave me the drunkard’s welcoming embrace.
‘Mr Jim, Mr Jim, take a drink, here, here,’ he said, pushing some vile-smelling liquid at me.
I was shocked. I had spent months working with this guy and he’d been so switched on and capable. He had told me how he was saving all of his pay for his family back in the village. Here was one of the best men I had ever met, in an absolute mess. It was no wonder Seth ran a dry camp.
I sadly said goodbye to that hopeless scene and went to see Mrs Williams at Golden Star to see if there was anything that could be done to help this guy or, more importantly, his family. She filled me in on the problems of indigenous alcoholism and its entrenchment.
‘Don’t worry too much, Jim, we hold back a fair bit of their pay and only give it to them when they are on the plane or boat back to their village,’ she said. Good woman, that Mrs Williams.
I then tracked down a former Golden Star employee I knew called Charlie Moon. Charlie was an old pork-knocker from Mabaruma in the far north-west, and an excellent bushman. He was also a gifted storyteller who could keep you amused for hours with his tales. Charlie couldn’t dive, but he could throw a sieve, work a batea and cook. Happily, he agreed to join me. He was just what I needed.
I had first met Charlie in the Eping camp. He was a lively character, always listening to loud music on his portable tape recorder.
‘So Charlie, where do you get your music from?’ I had asked, mystified as to his large tape collection.
‘Oh, I am in da music industry, Mr Jim.’
‘Really, Charlie, how does that work?’ I just knew this was going to be good.
‘Well, when dat Jonestown thing happen, the Guyanese Army went in and took all da money lying around and then dem Americans [the USA Army] tek da bodies out. After all dat, Jonestown not far from we village, so in dere we go and tidied up da place. I found hundreds of tapes in some hidden boxes and kept hold of dem …’
‘Hang on, Charlie, are you telling me that after the Jonestown Massacre, you went in there and picked up a whole load of recorded tapes? What was on them?’
‘Oh, just messages dem people were sendin’ home, nuthin much really, boring stuff.’
I grabbed him urgently. ‘Charlie, what did you do with those tapes?’
‘Oh, I recorded over dem with da Bob Marley Exodus album, and I sell em in da market. Paid for our Christmas that year. Like I said, I am in da music business.’
I crumpled in disbelief. Those tapes had been some of the most significant historical records of life in Jonestown, and Charlie had recorded over them with reggae music.
As my pile of equipment got bigger, my pile of cash got smaller. It was a race to get into the bush before my money ran out.
I made it, just.
Finally I was at Ogle Aerodrome sitting in the aircraft I had chartered. It was loaded to the weight limit (1,500 pounds, or 680 kilograms) and Charlie and I were perched upon dredge parts, diving gear, fuel, food and countless other essential items.
I was heading out to start up my own mining operation and I felt like a king on his throne – if a poor one – because the flight had cleaned me out of the last of my money. It had been a long and eventful journey since that forlorn departure from RAF Brize Norton in the UK only ten months earlier.
The weather on the flight worsened as we approached Ekereku and we were buffeted by strong turbulence. The pilot could no longer dodge the large areas of storms and we were enveloped by clouds that sparked with lightning. We could not see a damn thing, and the plane had no GPS (it was early days for this technology). As the rain streamed over the windshield, the pilot flew on using compass, dead reckoning, experience and nerve.
I was feeling distinctly uncomfortable as we came out of the cloud and saw tepuis all around us, but the bush pilot knew his stuff and up ahead the familiar landing strip of Ekereku came into view.
After we landed, Charlie and I stumbled off the aircraft feeling sick as dogs. I was relieved to see Colin there to meet us and we transferred all of my gear into the leaky old boat I had on loan. I proudly attached onto the stern my new 10-horsepower outboard engine, making sure it was tied on to the boat with a rope in case it fell off the back; I didn’t fancy my first dive being for a lost engine instead of diamonds. Charlie and I waved goodbye to Colin and headed off downstream, with Charlie bailing water as we went.
We stopped at the spot above the set of falls that I had chosen for our camp on my recce. The rain held off and we managed to unload all of the gear and outboard engine onto the riverbank just before the boat sank. We would have to pull the boat to surface, tip out the water and bail it each time we wanted to use it.
Nightfall comes fast in the tropics. We raced to make our camp before sunset. We tied a rope between two trees and threw the tarpaulin over it, tying it down on the sides, then slung our hammocks under the tarp. We did not use mosquito nets, as Ekereku was so high there were very few around.
We ate some bread as darkness fell, and collapsed into our hammocks. I lay back with the cool breeze on my face and the sound of crickets all around. Finally I was not spending money any longer; now I was in with a chance of making it.
The top of the plateau was exposed, and during the night severe thunderstorms lashed us with heavy rain, high winds, deafening thunder and hair-raising lightning. We were at nearly 700 metres in altitude, so it also got quite cold. The camp held together, just, but I began to wonder what we had got ourselves into.
Early the next morni
ng we got a rough fire going to warm up, and my mood was lifted by Charlie’s natural good spirits. I was also eager for the challenges ahead. We ate a quick breakfast of fire-toasted leftover bread and baked beans heated in the tin on the hot coals, and then began to construct the dredge, fabricating missing bits as we went along.
We started by bolting a 30-centimetre length of old flat wood to the base of the diesel engine; we had to burn the bolt holes with a red-hot iron rod, as we didn’t have a drill. The air compressor was then bolted onto the other end of the wood, and we connected the two drive pulleys with a fan belt; we could now make compressed air for the diver.
Next we cut down some saplings and constructed a sturdy wooden frame, and lashed the four yellow floats to the bottom of this frame to give it buoyancy. The header box and sluice box followed. With difficulty we then bolted the engine onto the frame and launched the contraption into the river.
Thankfully we both held on at this point or it would have capsized, as the heavy engine on one corner far outweighed the rest of the apparatus. We fixed this through counterbalancing the engine by placing rocks around the frame.
We then fitted the couple jet (vacuum pump) under the front of the dredge with the outlet pipe feeding directly into the header box. This lowered the centre of gravity of the device and made things much more stable. We tied on an empty fuel drum for extra buoyancy and voila: one dredge.
Or, more precisely, something that looked like a dredge. When we tried to connect up all the odds and ends with the required hoses so that it would work, we encountered serious problems. Foolishly, in my rush to get into the field, I had not done a trial fit-up in Georgetown. Not all of the gear fitted together correctly. Also, some of the hose joins were quite high pressure and required good fittings, which I did not have.