Gold Rush

by Jim Richards

  With self-control born of terror, I kept completely still. Upside down and underwater. Stuck in the pothole for what seemed like an eternity. Gravity pushed excess blood into my head, which made my ears pound painfully. The only sounds I could hear were my shallow breathing and my heavily thumping heart.

  Think.

  I finally came up with a plan. With the air now fully built up in the reserve tank, I took three deep breaths, thus fully oxygenating my body. Then I evacuated my lungs by breathing out as far as I could. This took some guts, as I was not confident in my air supply.

  But emptying my lungs gave me a tiny bit of extra space in the pothole, enough to jiggle the suction tube bit by bit to one side and get partially free. Breathing shallowly, I slowly backed myself out of the hole.

  I surfaced, gasping, and collapsed onto the bank, shaking heavily. Sarah and Charlie looked at me strangely, totally unaware anything was wrong.

  I recounted my near-death nightmare to them, had a hot drink and finally stopped shivering.

  Despite being considerably rattled, I had to get back on the horse, and I ducked back down to suck out the rest of the pothole. This time I went into the hole myself without the hose to remove the larger cobbles, then I dropped the hose in on its own to suck out the smaller gravel.

  After another hour, I had sucked out the first pothole, clean as a whistle. I surfaced and we looked at the box. There was visible gold throughout. It was still only morning, but we decided to do a clean-up, lest we blow out the sluice. We had gold, but what about the real prize? The diamonds.

  First sieve: nothing.

  Second sieve: ‘Holy shit!’ Sarah squealed.

  Diamonds everywhere. You could see them as soon as soon as you half threw the sieve. Diamonds that are caught by the second sieve are plus one carat. We were on the money.

  We picked out seven plus-one-carat stones, all of excellent quality.

  The third sieve was carpeted in diamonds.

  ‘Look at that one!’ cried Sarah.

  ‘And dat one, my god! I never seen nuthin’ like dat,’ said Charlie.

  We scrabbled to pick out the diamonds from the sieve, like kids around a lolly jar. Carefully we stowed them in the old medicine bottle I used as my diamond container. This bottle had a childproof lid and was the securest receptacle I had.

  The gold was all over the batea. Many ounces, and we tried to concentrate it as best we could and transfer it into the jar, but there was too much black sand and we had to use a bucket.

  It was still only early afternoon, and nothing was going to stop us dredging out the second pothole. With fevered excitement we got the gear ready. Sarah took her turn to dive and, after warnings of my near miss, she dredged out the second pothole like a pro.

  This pothole was a bit smaller than the first, but we cleaned up again with another great result. Five plus-one-carat stones, a host of smaller ones, and plenty of gold.

  By late afternoon we were ready to weigh the diamonds. I got out my scale and poured the stones onto the cup on one side: a mini-mountain of beauty with the sunlight refracting fire out of the stones.

  Now for the moment of truth. I started piling on the counter-weights.

  Ten carats.

  Twenty carats.

  Thirty carats.

  Still no tipping of the scale.

  Forty carats.

  Fifty carats.

  I saw some movement on the scale and went down to adding one-carat weights.

  Fifty-two carats in total. High quality too, including twelve stones over a carat. There were two bottle-greens, a fancy yellow and a bluish stone that could be extremely valuable. The biggest stone was 2 carats: a perfect octahedron of a flawless, clear beauty that left me breathless when I found it. (Quite some time later, I gave this stone to a special lady friend. She lost it.)

  Additionally, we had 8 ounces of gold.

  I was selling my stones at a decent mark-up, so this lot was probably worth around $40,000 in today’s money. I had set the whole operation up for less than $25,000 (in today’s money), so now I was well ahead.

  At dusk that evening, as Charlie cooked the meal, Sarah and I sat on the riverbank, arms around one another in the magnificent wilderness.

  ‘What a crazy day. Staring death in the face one minute and making more money than I have ever had in my life a couple of hours later,’ I said.

  ‘Yep, that was a rush. I didn’t get all this until I saw it. Well done, honey, I am impressed,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Having you here with me has been the best bit,’ I said, tongue in cheek.

  ‘Even better than the diamonds?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course, darling. Of course.’ We both laughed.

  The pothole glory may have been more by luck than judgement, but as the saying goes: the harder I work, the luckier I get.

  My overwhelming emotion was of relief. I had put myself under a lot of pressure and bitten off a decent chunk of leather to get to this point. This strike would now relieve the financial strain.

  I also indulged myself in feeling some exoneration. I had taken a lot of flak over my plan to leave the UK and go mining in South America. Now I felt a bit of a burden had been lifted. It actually did work, and you could make money out of it. Sod the lot of them.

  We were on it now and I finally knew what I was doing. How many more of these treasure troves awaited us?

  For the next couple of days we scoured the remaining gravels around the potholes. We also went over the tailings, doing a good clean-up of the minerals we had missed in the fevered rush. Sarah had to fly out at this point; we would catch up in Georgetown in two weeks. I gave her a couple of stunning diamonds by way of thanks for her help.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE RECKONING

  Soon after our pothole day, we were cleaning up the sluice one afternoon when a family of Amerindians came paddling by in a low dugout canoe. We beckoned them and they expertly brought their craft to shore.

  He was a man of about thirty and his wife was a bit younger. Their two children were healthy and shy, a boy aged about eight and a little girl of four. They were dressed in ragged old t-shirts and shorts and were barefoot.

  Although the man kept his bow and arrow handy, they were friendly and we invited them into our camp for some food. They spoke their own language to each other, and the man had some English. The little girl carried a small white puppy, which she was clearly very fond of. Over some lemongrass tea and damper, he explained their journey to us.

  Every year, during the dry season, they travelled from their home village of Kamarang around their ancient lands, which included Ekereku.

  From Kamarang, they would climb up the tepuis, recover a canoe hidden in the forest from the year before and then continue their journey on the river. At the other end of the tepui, they would again conceal their canoe, descend from the mountain and then paddle home up the Mazaruni River in a different canoe. The following year they would do the same circuit in reverse, so their canoes were always where they were needed.

  The man told us these annual travels had spiritual importance, kept them connected to their lands and strengthened their family bonds as they passed on their knowledge to the next generation. There was also a practical component: these journeys took place during periods of low water, when fishing was easier and nuts and berries were in season.

  They had bows and arrows with them and lived by fishing and hunting. This would have taken considerable skill and bushcraft. We always seemed to be starving, despite having brought in a full set of rations. I did notice though that they had a batea in the bottom of their canoe. They no doubt knew some good spots for gold.

  We swapped some of our rice for some of their wild honey and they paddled on. It was quite poignant to see this young family confidently moving through the river on what to me appeared to be a most daunting journey.

  It had not occurred to me that Ekereku actually belonged to anyone in particular. But talking with these people, it sounded
like they had a more credible right to the land than anyone else, including Venezuela, which has laid claim to the western half of Guyana for over a century. None of us miners in the bush really belonged there, whether Guyanese pork-knocker, Brazilian garimpeiro or British adventurer; we were all itinerant opportunists staking a temporary claim. These Amerindians did belong, they were a part of the forest and the landscape – the true traditional owners – and they did not seem to be getting any say as to who did what.

  Charlie and I continued dredging with vigour and enthusiasm. We had cracked the code. We knew how to find the best spots for diamonds now. It wasn’t all that hard, you just had to know where to look.

  For the next few days we found nothing. The potholes that ran into deeper water were all scoured out, and the potholes in the shallower water were full of sand. Our two potholes in the Goldilocks zone were just that: the only two.

  We moved camp from the place we had christened Pothole Falls and tried our luck upriver, right to the headwaters of Ekereku where it was open savannah: nothing. We then went to a couple of the old abandoned dredge camps and re-treated the concentrate they had discarded: we got a little gold. Finally we went up some of the tributaries: nothing.

  I was learning that alluvial diamond mining was a capricious mistress. You make everything in a few hours, then get weeks of nothing. This made for a significant psychological challenge.

  To make matters worse, my ears were infected again, which pretty much put paid to our dredging activities. As the water was now fairly low, we spent our last couple of days digging through some active potholes at the old falls. These were open potholes that were accessible at low water and, despite the fact they had already been worked by previous miners, there was a chance a diamond had fallen in since that time.

  Charlie and I dug them out. To my surprise we found a good half-carat stone; a consolation prize. It did make me think that even without any equipment other than hand tools, if you could access an even more remote spot that had not yet been worked, what riches one might find.

  Ekereku was a lovely spot and it was high enough that it had a cool and pleasant climate. The horseflies though were an absolute curse and they bit like hell. I didn’t know why they were there; there certainly weren’t any horses. As we were packing up to go back to town, the horseflies descended on us in black swarms and we were glad to be finally getting on the plane.

  As a bonus, on the return trip we took a diversion to Kaieteur Falls to pick up a government employee for Cyrilda. As the pilot refuelled from 44-gallon drums at the airstrip, Charlie and I walked along an overgrown path to the falls, following the sound of thunder. We popped out into a clearing.

  A massive river 100 metres wide was falling over a plateau just in front of us. An incredible volume of black, frothy water was disappearing into an abyss below, so deep you could not even see the bottom in the mist. Such was the violence of the water, you had to shout to make yourself heard. I looked out from the plateau at the jungle stretching endlessly below, as far as the eye could see. Kaieteur is one of the wonders of the world. It is four times higher than Niagara Falls. During floods, no waterfall has a greater combination of height (251 metres) and water flow. I walked back to the plane in a contemplative mood: just imagine the diamonds at the bottom of that sucker.

  Sarah was also back in town. She had just finished some nightmarish and badly organised trip down a river where they had run out of food. A Guyanese soldier who was with them on the trip had mugged one of the girls for a Mars Bar and it just got uglier from there. Sarah was pretty pissed off with the youth organisation, which had clearly not appreciated what happens when your food is finished and your travelling companions have guns.

  We had a few last days together, then I saw her off at the airport as she had to return to university. I wanted her to stay, but she had her degree to finish and I had my own business to run, so our paths parted once more.

  I was getting more widely known in Georgetown and, as people knew I was mining, this attracted some interest from the criminal classes. There was no shortage of these. My habit of walking around Georgetown in the small hours of the night was risky. One evening, walking home late, and intoxicated, I felt a large arm going around my neck, crushing my throat and pulling me backwards. I saw another man going for my pockets and I blacked out. I had encountered what is known in Guyana as a choke-and-rob.

  I came to on the sidewalk, helped by a Guyanese group of Indian origin who had fortunately interrupted and ended the assault. They bundled me into their car to try and help find the perpetrators.

  We drove around the block to the other side of the drain that the robbers had run down, and sure enough there they were, two black men sloping down the street. I recognised the smaller one as my pocket rifler.

  The menacing underlying racial animosity between black and Indian now emerged. I had seen my rescuers as white knights out to help me regain my watch and money. They saw themselves as a lynch mob in search of an excuse to seriously assault any black people unfortunate enough to cross their path.

  The Indians flew out of their car with batons and the two black men ran for it. The larger man who had choked me disappeared; the smaller guy was brought to ground by a baton to the head. It was ugly, and as they smashed the living crap out of him, I was turned from victim into protector.

  I pulled the Indians off him and retrieved my watch and cash from the bleeding wreck, who then limped away for his life.

  The Indians were disappointed to see their quarry depart, but appeared satisfied to have dished out a serious kicking.

  When I got home and counted out the money recovered from the robber, it turned out I had actually made a small profit on the night. This was one of the few happy endings to a Guyanese crime story.

  Indeed, crime in Georgetown was a serious problem, for both the victim and potentially the perpetrator. You did not want to be a burglar caught in the wrong house. Guyanese men boasted to me about robbers they had caught in their homes whom they had then tied up and tortured for days, inviting their friends over to join in the fun. I once saw a hue and cry outside of Bourda Market in which a mob had virtually torn a bag snatcher apart. Rough justice.

  There were some other Guyanese cultural hazards for the unwary. Not all, but many of the men measured their self-worth by the number of children they had. I do not mean the number they looked after, but the number they had.

  Condoms were expensive and difficult to get, so men would acquire them hoping this would add to their chances of finding a girl for the night: basically as a bargaining chip. However, in order to have more kids, some men would first use a pin to sabotage the condom.

  I’d worked with some impressive people at Golden Star, good family men who took their responsibilities seriously. But I have to say it: Guyana was held together by the women. They worked harder, drank less and looked after the kids.

  Around this time, the grim shadow of AIDS was thrusting itself into the public consciousness, with fear and prejudice not far behind. The Seawall, where people walked and recreated in the late afternoon, was daubed with the names of people accused of having AIDS. On that wall, ignorance, superstition and fear collided.

  Back at Ekereku it was tough going. We couldn’t repeat the earlier successes and now the wet season had started, which made everything harder, not least because of the extra volume of water in the river. I found a blue clay in a fissure in one of the pools. I thought it might be kimberlite, but when I dredged it out we didn’t get any diamonds.

  I decided to try dredging a place I had previously scouted with Charlie, which we knew as the upper falls, that lay a few kilometres upriver. We stacked everything into our leaky boat, packing it to the gunnels, and set off upstream, towing the dredge behind the boat, with Charlie bailing like a metronome.

  On the way, we stopped at Cyrilda’s dredge for a chat with Colin. They were doing a clean-up. A muscular black man from Georgetown called Brendon was doing the sieving.

&
nbsp; ‘Come on, Jim, show us how it’s done,’ shouted Brendon to me as a challenge.

  ‘What are you finding, Brendon?’ I asked, peering down at the fine sieve full of gravel.

  ‘No good, nuthin’ here, Jim, we need proper English geeologeest throwin’ sieve,’ he said sarcastically.

  I took the sieve off him and jigged it carefully. Upon close inspection there were two small diamonds, two to three pointers, in the eye.

  ‘There you go, Brendon. Guyanese man just not lookin’ hard enough,’ I said and handed the sieve back to him.

  Colin came down on Brendon like a ton of bricks, as he had been merrily throwing sieves of gravel overboard for the last hour without having picked out a single fine stone.

  ‘You want ceegrette, Jim?’ offered Colin. Almost all of the men in Guyana smoked.

  ‘No thanks. I gave up when I finished my final pack last week. Never again will I touch one of those evil things,’ I said proudly. ‘So, Colin, we’re going to have a go at the upper falls and see if we can repeat that pothole trick, what do you think?’

  Colin frowned. ‘Be careful, Jim. The river’s up and those falls will make for dangerous diving. I don’t want you to be the next one I have to dig out.’

  ‘Don’t worry, mate, I’ll be fine,’ I said. But it was food for thought.

  Charlie and I reached the upper falls around 4 p.m. and just had time to set up camp before dark. The falls were not a waterfall as such, more of a set of rapids. They looked cold, fast and bloody scary.

  The next day, the only way we could get the dredge into position was to portage it the 50 metres around the falls. So we dismantled it, carried the pieces along the open grassy bank (it was savannah here) and rebuilt it in the pool above the falls. The engine was the heaviest part and had to be slung by rope under a pole. Charlie and I shuffled along with the pole balanced on our shoulders. We tested everything out, made some adjustments and it all worked fine. By late afternoon we were done and called it a day.