by Jim Richards
Even worse, I had overlooked the need to bring a foot valve, the critical piece of equipment that provides the water intake for the pump.
My heart sank. Was this going to be the item that forced a return trip to Georgetown that I could not even afford?
‘How could you forget da foot valve for da dredge, Jim?’ asked Charlie helpfully.
‘Because, Charlie, I wanted to test your fucking initiative.’
There was an abandoned dredge camp upriver, so we raided its old rubbish dump intent on finding a solution. We found some useful connectors, a rubber conveyor belt, bolts and also, vitally, enough bits and pieces to fabricate a foot valve. We also found a metal nozzle for the end of the orange suction hose, which would constrict it slightly and help prevent the larger cobbles from getting in and causing blockages. As a bonus, we got a near-ripe stem of about fifty bananas from the camp’s abandoned bush garden.
Heading back to our own camp, we felt triumphant with our modest yet essential booty. I hung up the bananas to ripen on the central stay above my hammock and we got to work. We fabricated a rough foot valve using some old pipe, two reasonable connectors and leather screwed onto an old conveyor belt for the valve, which hopefully would hold the water charge long enough to prime the pump. The rest of the dredge plumbing was cobbled together with imperfect but workable hose connectors.
The moment of truth had come. We primed the pump with a bucket of water, I pulled the starter cord on the engine and Charlie simultaneously let go of the air-intake valve. The engine roared into life, I gave it some throttle and water cascaded over the sluice box.
Wow! It actually works!
Next we connected up the hookah diving system. From the air compressor, we ran a 3/8-inch air hose to the reserve air bottle. This bottle acted as a store of air, and from it ran another hose that supplied the diver.
I had never done any diving before, only snorkelling, and certainly never using equipment purchased in circumstances that now felt like a complete lottery. I put on the poorly fitting wetsuit and weight belt. The latter took some nerve, as I was a bit concerned it would pull me to the bottom and there I would stay. I fitted the mouthpiece and took a deep breath. It seemed fine. I gunned the engine to get strong suction for dredging, and then ducked under the black water.
The water was only around 4 metres deep. Light filtered down, so I could adequately see the gravels and riverbed. I grabbed the suction hose, guided it between my legs to help control the unwieldy tube and pointed it at some nearby gravels. Up the hose they went. In fact the vacuum on the suction nozzle was so strong, I had to be careful my hand didn’t get too close or I would find my whole arm sucked in.
Suddenly this was fun. The loose gravels ran up the tube as fast as I could feed them, making a dull thump as they rose. The whole thing was working. After a few minutes I got two tugs on my air hose from Charlie, the signal to surface.
As my face came out of the water, I was greeted by the strange sight of Charlie frantically holding up one side of the dredge. I instantly saw the problem: gravel had built up in the sluice box (instead of discharging off the end) and the weight was pushing the dredge onto a precarious angle. The only thing preventing the dredge from capsizing was Charlie’s skinny body holding up the end of the sluice box.
‘Jim, I can’t hold it any longer …’ he gasped.
I killed the engine and the immediate loss of water to the sluice box allowed the machine to partly stabilise.
‘Why didn’t I think of dat?’ said Charlie.
‘Probably because you would have cut my fucking air off, so please don’t get any other bright ideas, Charlie,’ I said, feeling alarmed by his lack of awareness.
We adjusted the sluice box to a steeper angle and set the engine higher to increase the water flow. These two factors created a smooth flow of gravels across and over the end of the sluice, and I continued dredging, sweeping up whatever gravels I could find.
By the end of the day, I was exhausted. The water was cold and the wetsuit was hopeless. Every time I moved, a cascade of chilly water was sucked down my back. In the excitement I had forgotten to put my diving hood on, and my head had become very cold.
Nevertheless, the pair of us were pleased to have some material to treat (clean up). We removed the riffles from the sluice box and dug out the gravels and sand into a couple of large buckets. Finally we removed the old carpet at the bottom of the sluice, which was there to catch the fine gold. The material on the carpet was brushed off with soapy water into the buckets.
As Ekereku had both gold and diamonds, we combined the sieves and a batea for the clean-up: the former for the diamonds, the latter for the gold.
We stacked the three sarukas one on top of the other in a shallow pool, the coarsest sieve on top. Beneath the bottom sieve we placed the batea to catch the fines that fell through the sieves.
Charlie poured some of the material from one of the buckets into the top sieve, which I held. I then threw (spun and jigged) the sieve as Uncle Benjy had taught me.
Nothing.
Medium sieve: nothing.
Fine sieve: nothing.
The batea at the bottom caught all of the fines and I worked it for several minutes. Eventually I got down to the final tail, but all we could see was some black sand and a small amount of mercury.
The mercury was not a good sign, as it indicated someone had been here before us and had already worked these same gravels, probably using mercury in their sluice box to aid gold recovery. It looked like we had been dredging tailings.
We were disappointed that we hadn’t found a cracker, and I felt most unsettled. Perhaps the entire falls area had already been worked out? That night, as Charlie cooked, I reflected on what I had seen earlier in the day. I would have to use my brain on this, as people had clearly worked here before. If I didn’t try something different from them, I would not succeed.
For the next couple of days, Charlie and I persevered in the open pools, but with the same result. We then decided to move into the rapids. This was much faster water, with more difficult and dangerous diving as you were buffeted by the current. By now I was getting more confident in my diving abilities so decided to give it a go.
Using ropes, we moored the dredge in the faster water and I ventured out in my diving gear, hanging on for dear life to the suction hose that served as my anchor. There was not much gravel in the open river, as it had been swept away by the rapid water. I sucked up what little I could find.
A few metres downriver, still in the main channel, the rapids slowed and a number of large, round boulders had accumulated. Being careful not to snag my air hose, I explored around these boulders and was happy to discover some promising gravels.
With the help of a crowbar, I prised out some of the gravel, using the suction hose to loosen the fine matrix holding it together. Any cobble that was too large to fit up the 4-inch hose was discarded.
It was tiring work, especially as the air compressor never quite gave me enough air and I spent a lot of energy fighting the current. More worryingly, the boulders were partly held in place by the gravels, so as I worked, some of them started to move. I got Charlie to fetch me a hacksaw blade, which I subsequently kept in my boot; I’d rather cut off a finger than drown.
After the day’s work, I was reasonably satisfied we had at least tested these new gravels. Although not large in terms of volume, they were highly variable in cobble size and indurated (welded together). It was quite different from the soft material we had previously been working.
Charlie and I moved the dredge to the shore and started the clean-up.
First sieve: nothing.
Second sieve: nothing.
Third sieve: four diamonds. Awesome!
They jumped straight out at my eye before I had even got halfway through the jigging – the first diamonds I had ever found myself, and I felt justifiably proud. Finding gold was hard; finding diamonds was a lot, lot harder. Now this was getting interesting.
> I weighed the stones on my small manual diamond scale, which had miniature tin leaves as counterweights. The diamonds were 0.10, 0.20 and 0.25 of a carat; not big, but of excellent clarity and colour – not brown, just clear. They were good stones and there was some gold too. More importantly, I had got into a seam of paydirt that I could now follow. My heart was thumping, my imagination running riot; what were we going to find tomorrow? I had come a long way from when I was looking at that school noticeboard in Brecon.
Diamonds are made of carbon that is bonded in a special way to give the unique properties of a diamond: lustre, hardness and a high refractive index. They are classified according to the four Cs: cut, carat, clarity and colour.
We were finding rough diamonds, so of course cut was not relevant.
Carat refers to the weight of the stone, one carat being 0.2 grams, although in the Guyanese diamond fields stones were more often referred to in terms of points. A hundred points made up a carat, so we had found a 25 pointer as our largest stone.
Clarity depends upon inclusions, usually black carbon. The fewer there are, the better, and even the untrained eye can pick the best-quality diamonds by their clarity.
Colour means hue, however subtle. The more perfectly transparent and colourless the diamond, the better. These colourless or subtly coloured stones in Guyana were locally called white (although this term is not strictly correct). Ekereku was well known for delivering good clear stones.
Shape is also a consideration. Stones with standard diamond crystal shapes (octahedral, dodecahedral) cut more easily with less waste. An elongate or oblate stone would yield a lower percentage of its weight to create a standard brilliant-cut diamond.
That night I was utterly exhausted from fighting the river, but satisfied. I felt something really significant could be close. I opened my hammock, and climbed into my unzipped sleeping bag for a well-earned sleep.
Something large and hairy scurried over my foot. I leaped out of the hammock with a yell and fell onto the ground.
‘Charlie, get a torch, there’s something in my sleeping bag!’
Charlie held the torch while I slowly and carefully opened the sleeping bag. As I got to the bottom, there he was: a massive, hairy black tarantula about the size of a dinner plate. He was eyeing us off too, bristling with anger and venom.
I stared at this magnificent monster, thankful I had not been bitten by something so damn big and nasty. My wonder was interrupted by the sight of a saucepan hitting the tarantula’s body, instantly converting it into a gelatinous pile of hairy goo that splattered all over my bedding.
‘Got him!’ shouted Charlie.
‘Thanks, mate,’ I said caustically.
After a considerable period cleaning up the mess, to prevent a repeat performance I climbed above my hammock and sealed up the offending stem of bananas – the tarantula’s former home – with a black plastic bag.
I then turned my sleeping bag inside out and drifted off into a fitful sleep. This jungle gave up nothing for free: not gold, not diamonds, not even bloody bananas.
Next morning I zipped up and safely stowed my sleeping bag to avoid any more nocturnal surprises. We started the day with vastly raised hopes as we continued to work under the boulder piles. Over the next couple of weeks we had some modest success and I steadily built up a stock of small diamonds.
Time was moving on, and although Charlie and I were finding some stones, we were hardly covering costs and needed to up our discovery rate. We spent two days excavating out the small cracks near the riverbanks that could be easily worked with a suction dredge. There was not much gravel in these crevices, but they were good trap sites. We found four 25 pointers, again not enough. We continued to scratch around, testing different areas and techniques, with only a couple of small stones each day, or ‘one-one eye’ as the Guyanese would say.
The fuel was holding out well and the faithful Lombardini engine worked like a dream. This was partly because I carefully pre-filtered all the diesel through a chamois fuel filter – it took out all the particulate contaminants and, when soaked in gasoline, also prevented any water from passing through its hollow fibres.
This precaution was well founded, as Guyanese diesel was dirty, and water in diesel engines is particularly bad news because it is not compressible. The result can be total destruction of the engine.
Ominously, though, our food was starting to run low earlier than I had planned.
Our diet was not greatly different from that used by the Californian Forty-Niners, and for the same reason: it was easily stored. In California, the staples were flour, dried corn and salt beef. Delete the corn and insert rice and red beans, and that was our diet. Like the Argonauts, there was a worrying lack of fresh fruit and vegetables.
We stored our staples in white buckets with sealable lids. The rice kept well, but by this point the flour was getting damp and had weevils. Our luxuries of instant coffee and tins of Carnation milk had long gone. The main meat we had was salted pork in a bucket of brine. This had initially been delicious, but as the weeks had rolled on, maggots and worms had hatched. Now you had to have a strong stomach and poor eyesight to eat it.
The work was draining and we needed the food, so we didn’t have a lot of choice; we had to eat. We made sure we cooked the pork well and just sucked it up. We had made the rookie mistake of eating our tinned food first. The next time we would save the tins for last.
The main evening meal was usually fried salt pork with red beans and rice; the leftovers were for breakfast. For lunch we ate damper or dried biscuits and there was the odd wild pineapple (small and bitter) and occasional fish we got from the night lines.
To wash all this down, some surviving lemongrass from the old dredge camp made a delicious tea. We cooked everything over a wood fire; there was no shortage of wood.
One late afternoon, just as we were finishing the concentrate wash-up, something caught Charlie’s eye and he glanced up the river, then whispered to me:
‘Jim, look. Up at da pool, there’s a deer crossing.’
And there was too, a small native deer or koyu. You never usually saw them, as they were shy animals, but this one was making a river crossing and so had to show its hand. We were craving fresh meat, so we took off to intersect the deer on the bank where it was going to land. It saw us, but too late. I dove into the water and grabbed it, handing it to Charlie on the bank.
He swiftly despatched the deer with his machete and we took our prize back to the camp, salivating at the prospect. We skinned it and that night feasted on the heart, kidneys and liver. It tasted all the better as we were extremely short on vitamins.
The next day we preserved as much of the deer as we could with our remaining salt. The rest we took up to Colin’s camp and traded for some cooking oil and flour. That night we smashed the deer bones up and boiled them into a delicious marrow soup, which helped us regain our energy.
In better spirits, we attacked the dredging with renewed vigour. I was, however, starting to have real problems with my hands. The dredging involved long periods of feeding gravels and sand into the hose nozzle. My leather gloves had long ago dissolved into rags, and the skin on the ends of my fingers was literally getting sandblasted away. The skin was so thin that in the evenings the pads on the ends of my fingers would ooze blood and were extremely painful.
The deerskin proved a godsend. I softened it up with cooking oil, then cut out an outline of each hand in the leather. A good sewing kit is essential in the bush, and I was well prepared with a heavy-duty needle, thread and thimble. I sewed up a pair of deerskin gloves that saved my fingers. Although I needed to do running repairs most nights, they kept the show on the road.
In the evenings Charlie would tell a few of his yarns, and then I would read for a while under the light of our temperamental kerosene lamp; torch batteries were far too precious to waste on reading. Then we would turn in. There was plenty of time for introspection during those long nights. I listened to cassette tapes
on my Sony Walkman of operas by Mozart and Rossini, which I loved. It reminded me of my student days in London, getting stand-by tickets to see the opera at Covent Garden with some beautiful girl on my arm. I thought about the life I could have had if I had just gone into banking.
The worst problem with the dredging was the blockages. Despite the input nozzle being smaller than the 4-inch hose, if you sent up an angular cobble or, even worse, two or three cobbles at the same time, they could easily lock together and cause a blockage.
Usually the blockage was in the orange suction hose that was semi-transparent. I would swim under the hose to find the blockage, visible against the sunlight above, then bash like crazy on that spot with a large rock until the cobbles unjammed and went on their way up the hose.
The nastiest blockages were in the couple jet. For these I surfaced and pushed a long stick down through the hole in the header box and into the couple jet in order to un-jam the rocks. You did not want to gun the engine too hard (which would give you added suction), as you would risk flushing out the sluice box and losing your day’s winnings.
Despite a lot of hard work, we were still not making a decent return. Given our successes had been around the large boulders, I decided to target an area which was jammed full of these outsized rocks, a partly submerged field of a dozen or so boulders wedged between some falls and the riverbank.
To get properly underneath the boulders, we used the manually operated come-along winch system I had brought in with us. This winch allowed us to move the larger boulders out of the way and get at the highly prospective gravels underneath.
We started on the first boulder, about the size of a small car engine and weighing maybe 4 tonnes. Charlie stood on the bank and worked the handle on the winch to pull in the cable. I was in the river ensuring the sling remained over the boulder, and helped ease its passage over obstacles using wooden poles as levers.
We moved the first boulder up and over the obstacles, out of the water and on towards our discard area. Of necessity, I was in a precarious position, below the rock trying to lever it up, while Charlie pulled it with the cable.