This world of ours

Front matter

Book 5^1G_

CpipghtiN".

CjDPXRIGHT DEPOSm

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I The World My Oyster ii

II How I Opened the Shell ..... 19

Chapter I The World My Oyster

I HAVE only one life : then I am liable to be a long time dead. But before I die there is this beautiful World to see.

If Francis Bacon could take all knowledge for his province, why mightn't I, a boy, try to take this Round World of Ours for mine? . . . And I did. I dedicated myself to travel. I travelled so far, so wide, that perhaps no one has caught me up. But the quality of my wanderings — ^which only I can judge of — that is a different thing. It is so easy to travel to-day — mostwheres ; and I have travelled too easily. As I lay in bed once, computing my achievements, a voice cried in the dark — "You miserable Cook's tourist ! What do you imagine you've done? Remember the French jeweller, Tavernier, setting out those centuries ago! And Marco Polo, reaching China in the Middle Ages! Think, too, with your wagons-Uts and your thermos flasks of Thomas Cory at, walking from Jerusalem to Ajmere at a cost of fifty shilHngsl Go to sleep."

I did. Yet, however humbled my pride, I havf seen the Face of the Earth. I am getting far, far more than my share out of life; what can I give the World, for all the World is giving me?

II

Once in Australia, a bed-ridden man lay reading a book. It was my Shadow-Show; and he said to me, "I wish he would write another."

That at least I can do; here it is. A small enough thing; yet if it give pleasure to some weary ones, let that be placed against my great debt.

Travel was in my bones. I belonged, through my mother, to the Pinsons, English descendants, to all seeming, of the Pinzons of Spain. Living at the Port of Palos, beside Huelva, Alonzo, Vicente and Francisco, three brothers of this family, not only financed Columbus as to one-eighth but sailed with him to the discovery of America; and to Vicente Pinzon, some years later, fell the actual discovery of Brazil. Of the "Old Admiral" himself, who made so many things possible for me, I shall have enough to say.

Conqiiistadores in the blood; an early instinct which told me I should sit at no desk — these counted for something; yet my destiny was shaped for me otherwise. I was fourteen, with overstrung nerves and a weak digestion ; and after thoughts of a public school had been put aside — ^what was there for it ? Accompanied by a guardian, I set sail around the Cape for Australia.

We saw no land. Our canvas was furled seventy-seven days later, off Wollongong, where a tug boat took us in tow, and that night we passed through Sydney Heads. Awaiting a berth in the dock, we dropped anchor in a cove on the north shore of the harbour.

In these days, Sydney must needs find room for 750,000 people, but in those days that cove lay utterly secluded, wooded to the water's edge. All was green and sparkling, lobelia and maidenhair fern grew in each crevice; landing on that first Sunday morning I roamed the woods enchanted.

THE WORLD MY OYSTER 13

In the evening I escorted three of our ladies over the water to church. In the gloaming we landed before a city where all the houses and superscriptions seemed Chinese, presently passing into crowded streets, and the British town, where there was a cathedral, and splendid singing; but my thoughts lay in those woods over on the "North Shore."

Retracing our steps to the boat, we passed the stall of a huckstress, where I would have refreshed myself ; but it was conveyed to me that one of the ladies belonged to some stringent sect, and could not bear to see apples bought on the Sabbath. I had fingered the fruit, and already held it in a bag; nevertheless, my first deliberately ethical act in Australia was to replace those apples on the stall and the sum of threepence in my trousers pocket.

The following day we berthed ; upon which my guardian conducted me to an hostelry in the heart of Sydney, hastened to celebrate, and by evening lay speechless drunk upon his bed. He had been selected from eighty applicants. Waking next morning as fresh as ever, he surprised me by hurrying us aboard a small harbour steamer, crowded with merrymakers. Producing two tickets for the day's outing, he became the life and soul of the party, putting a furious zest into ''kiss-in-the-ring" with the more buxom among the women. That evening, in the hotel, he lay drunk again, and passed insensibly, wide eyed and stertorous, to a state bordering on delirium. A few days later this person was delivered to his relatives, and from then onward I travelled alone.

Physically, as one may say, I was laimched, and in prudence, in certain Scottish traits of character, already a grown man. But you are not to suppose that Australia, or any other land, is going to reveal the inner mysteries to a boy of fourteen. I was still stolid and unimaginative; there must have been days, even in the

"bush/' when a black coat and a desk hung over me as by a hair. But the sense of ''atmosphere/' which stands for the subtler side of things, was forming slowly, and a breath coming out of the East, nearly a year later, made my ultimate calling and election sure.

On the homeward voyage from Australia, on a night, the steamer was to skirt the shores of Ceylon. There had been great heat, and I lay asleep that night on deck. And as I slept, I dreamed: dreamed of the happy Australian hunting-grounds, of kangaroos ridden down, of emus despatched, and of the white cockatoos which screech and circle in mid-air. And I dreamed we were already to the East. There were palm trees, and deserts ; and bagpipes were playing at the relief of Lucknow. Then I woke to strange cries, and in the silvery moonlight two fishermen were clinging to their catamaran, which the great steamer had brushed from her path. Ere the little tumult had died in our wake, my eyes were straining at a shadow I knew for the coast, and I gulped down the spice-laden air.

There came a grey light after a while, and all along the coast a fringe of palms. Above the palm trees I saw the forests. As the daylight waxed, I saw these spread over upland and mountain. They rose up to Adam's Peak itself, where the rainclouds were already formed, and as I watched they became marvellously fresh and green. It was the dawn in Ceylon ; the East had become mine for evermore.

Down that palm-fringed coast winds a railway. Passing out of Colombo, trailing its smoke neath a green canopy, the train runs beside the shore, where the surf comes breaking, and cocoanuts fall thudding on the sands. There are cocoanut palms for eighty miles, and the train goes winding among them, between the hills and the sea.

In these seashore woods, in their small houses, live

THE WORLD MY OYSTER 15

the Cingalese proprietors, with a beast or two, the nuts, and a covered bullock cart for their gathering — a happy people. And beside them, along these shores, live many, many fishermen from South India, who, pushing out their catamarans through the surf, spread the first net at sunrise, and are still dragging in the last when twilight falls.

There is another road out of Colombo — the road to Kandy. The old capital of the Kings lies in the hills, at near 2000 feet, and after the heat of the day a divine freshness descends on her. The beauty of Kandy — the lake, the flowering trees of the valley, the primeval verdure of the forests all around — is hardly for pen to tell. When twilight falls, and the breeze comes blowing, a myriad crickets sing in the trees, many birds give out an evening note, and the fireflies in unison emit their mysterious light. A solemn bell tolls at the dark. It sounds from the lakeside where rises the Buddhist shrine — ^the Temple of the Tooth — and presently the temple drums beat. The worshippers come stealing through the trees; it is a night of full moon, and they carry flower offerings to the gods. By the temple gate, where ancient tortoises raise their heads from out the moat, sit the blind, chanting for alms, and a leper or two, ghostly white in the moonlight. In the outer courtyard are flower sellers, and here, beside the drummers, a temple musician plays upon a pipe. A group of priests enter; yellow robed and shaven, they come from the monastery across the lake, and the boy novices walk with them. In the small inner temple there is barely moving room ; it is hot to suffocation. On a silver tray before the shrine are massed the flower offerings, blossoms of jasmine, of frangipani, of the temple flower, or panchseela — from the Tree of the Five Good Deeds — and the odour of them is strong to overpowering. The moments pass; the chief priest of Kandy drones the evening prayers; the Buddha gazes benignly upon those who worship, and the just and the unjust kneel for his benediction.

After my return from Australia they sent me to South Africa. Here I wandered alone for many months, and formed affinities with that land which have never tarnished. I went by ox-waggon to the new goldfields at Barberton, a six weeks' journey. I saw Kimberley, Rorke's Drift, and the grave of Carey the Informer at Port Elizabeth, I lived with the Colonists on their farms. Above all, I came to love the Zulus ; carrying away in my mind images of their kraals on the green uplands, and the haunting memory of their cries passing from hill to hill before the going down of the sun.

I was home again at sixteen, and settled down more or less to study. But my longing for travel was strong as ever; in two summers, spent in South Germany, I tore the very hearts from Wiirttemberg and Bavaria.

I went in due time to St. Andrews University, thence to Cambridge, taking a scratch course at each. My scholastic studies ended at twenty ; and when I think of what they amounted to, I emit a slight, sardonic laugh. Science is just exact knowledge, organised; yet in an age when science counts supremely, I went out into the world with none whatever. Unknowingly I was handicapped, as it were five hdindred yards in a mile, yet was expected to pit my wits against others and to rise to the top of the tree. The rubbish they taught me ! I knew no chemistry, but I was an authority on St. Paul's journeys. I knew no physics, but I had been posted on the gerund, the aorist, and the e-enclitic. I knew no geology, but had been taught on which side a house ought to fall in an earthquake. My brain seemed full of mental junk; but it had been no one's business to show me the World as a Whole,

THE WORLD MY OYSTER 17

to explain the Reign of Law throughout the Universe, and the majestic sequence of Cause and Effect. I was not dense ; but I never came across a man who both knew the right things, and the right way to teach them.

My father could not help me. He certainly taught me the greatest thing of all — to treat others as I would myself — but his mind, like the minds of so many at that day, was theological. He had no use for science. Biology, Geology and such-like knowledge riddled the Bible, dissipated its miracles; so he brushed them on one side, and taught me to do the same. I took my religion, as everyone also seemed to do, without thought. My cast of mind remained theological until I was twenty-four.

In the eyes of my own class, strangely enough, I was educated. The older folk asked of a youth that he should be ''good form," and defer to women, and be conventionally religious along Anglican or Church of Scotland lines ; and because I was these, what lay behind my forehead didn't seem to matter. Science ! It wasn't quite the thing; it made people sceptics. In this world of well-to-do gentlefolk, Darwin meant less than dinner jackets ; I often heard them speak of the greatest man of the age with contempt.

Do you know about unconscious cerebration? The Professor of Psychology at St. Andrews once sprung this on us, and proceeded to enlarge on it for the space of an hour. It is an inner, or second self, a person who thinks while you sleep, who turns over all sorts of problems you had given up, and suddenly at the end of weeks, or months, or it may be a year, places them in your brain, docketted and solved.

Many hundred times, I suppose, from that landing in Sydney harbour, onwards, I had sworn myself to a life of travel. How I was to carry this out, when to begin, and where to get the money, were thought over, simmered in the mind for years, and remained unsolved, until — Lo and behold! — "unconscious cerebration" stepped in, and the way was clear.

Gold Mining! I was to go to South Africa, my beloved country, and start there. I had seen the new goldfields there, and the Ballarat mines in Australia. Gold mining meant a return to Africa, adventure, an income, and afterwards the wide world. I had hit it! An oyster-opener lay ready to my hand; it remained but to prise apart the shell.

Chapter II

So gold mining it was : and I set out again for South Africa. Landing at Durban, I journeyed to the terminus of the Natal Railway, then at Newcastle. From Newcastle, a coach to the Transvaal left daily, drawn by eight mules ; travelling across the lower slopes of 'Majuba, and over Laing^s Nek, a few hours' run brought us to the frontier, at Volksrust.

So far as this, I knew the road. It was the old De Kaap road I had travelled in the waggon five years before ; but now, beyond Volksrust, we turned off due west, for Barberton was dead, or dying, and Johannesburg was king. On the second afternoon, as we bowled along, the endless rolling plains rose up to the Witwatersrand — the White Waters Ridge — and there, spread out mile upon mile, were the smoke stacks and galvanised roofs of the Main Reef. Arrived in the town at dusk, I alighted at the coach office, shook off a layer of dust, stretched my stiffened limbs, and merged myself in the greatest goldfield of the world.

I was soon located on a mine, and at work on the regulation eight-hour shift. If I shaped well, there was the promise of pay after several months. This mine, lying thirty miles from Johannesburg, was not on the Main Reef. It had been discovered by a working prospector, who had sold it, as such men sell their finds, for a mess of pottage. Penniless once more, he hung about the scene of his triumph, and ever and anon would be found lying besotted on the veld,

The ore here averaged no more than nine inches wide ; but richer by far than the Main Reef, and mined very clean, gave the biggest yield per ton in the whole Transvaal. This attracted notice in financial quarters, and presently the consulting engineer of the most powerful Rand group paid us a visit. I was now employed in the stamp mill, and earned £io a month. For eight hours each day, or, every third week, each night, I had the amalgam plates in trust; during the morning we scraped these, and the mill manager carried a bucket of amalgam, which was one-third gold, two-thirds mercury, to the safe. Seeing this white paste gather there, day by day, night by night, I too began, as it were, to sit up and take notice. Of the money I had brought from home, £200 remained; one day I took a holiday, interviewed a stockbroker, and placed this sum in the shares, then standing at thirty shillings. Whether it was my purchase, or the buying of the great Johannesburg house, is neither here nor there ; but the shares rose steadily to four pounds ten, and I took my first mining profit.

When I had been at this mine a year, it became time to take stock of things. My pay was now £15 a month, and £20 was in sight; but I now realised that neither mill work, assaying, nor the newly introduced cyaniding of tailings led anywhere, and that work in the mine was the only road to knowledge and preferment. This mine, underground, was worked by Cornishmen, and I concluded that they, too, were not what I sought. The Cornish have been the Bourbons of gold mining. With considerable aptitude, they also were the inheritors of tradition, and tradition, after the discovery of the Rand, proved a curse. Even in those days their prestige had begun to suffer.

As I have said, I took stock. A change was indicated, and I returned to Johannesburg. I had finished with surface work. I was now given the underground run of several mines, and although drawing no wage, put in my time in the study of breaking ground, sampling and measurement of ore, and surveying.

Another year went by. I had acquired a certain judgment of mining conditions. I now had access to the use of some capital, and the ear of several influential men. I determined to be done with the Rand for a time, and strike further afield.

I was offered a share in a newly found mine on the Zululand border. Duly reaching the spot, I stayed for a time on the Dutchman's farm, panned the ore, took my samples, summed up the conditions, decided that the venture would not do, and started on the four days' return ride, through Zululand, to the railway. On the second day, my horse failed me, and seeing a large kraal not far from the track, I rode the jaded beast there and dismounted.

The natives of the huts, a dozen men or so, were seated on an adjacent green knoll. They sat about a fire, grilling meat on the embers, while their women, preparing the native beer, carried it to them in calabashes. The headman of the kraal, whose belly was much distended by the beer, was nevertheless provided of a sound head. The sum we eventually closed on was eighteen shillings, for which a sturdy Basuto pony was placed at my disposal, and a boy instructed to lead back my worn horse.

The new beast started finely; but the next evening, as I rode, a thunderstorm came on, and galloping in the darkness, between the lightning flashes, he fell, and went to pieces. A night's rest failed to set him up, and the following day, while yet ten miles from the railway, he was utterly spent.

I had sworn to catch that train. It meant spending

Christmas Eve down country with my friends, and I could do it by abandoning my beast and walking quickly to the railway. My eyes ranged the land for miles, but there was no kraal, no native in sight, no possible messenger. Scruple bade me stay where I was, bade me lead the pony to the agreed destination; but my will that morning would have crushed ten thousand scruples. I left the panting beast by the roadside and strode away. I caught the train. I spent Christmas at the old farm. But I learned later that a saddled pony, with a festering back, had wandered for many days, and had had to be killed; and I knew a kraal where the white-man's good faith had become tarnished.

Then I scoured the Eastern Transvaal. Fifteen years before ever the Rand was known. Pilgrims' Rest was the scene of a great alluvial gold rush, and it was to famous Barberton I had travelled when a boy. There were now goldfields at De Kaap, at Lydenburg, and throughout the Low Country, lying among mountains, thick bush, and fever-stricken valleys, covering a great belt of country. All of these I wandered over.

In a Cape cart, with four horses, I was driving down to the Klein Letaba. Johann Rissik held the reins — ■ acting surveyor-general of the Transvaal the day they had laid out ''Johannes" -burg * — and H. B. Marshall, ground landlord of half that great town, sat with me on the back seat. Driving out of Pietersburg, we slept at Solomon Marais' farm house, built where the veld takes its last dip into the low country. Rising at daylight, we found the old Boer on his stoep. He had risen, as was his wont, at three o'clock, had drunk his coffee these two

* Johannesburg, on the suggestion of Com Paul himself, was named after Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, President of the Transvaal ; Christian Johannes Joubert, Minister of Mines ; and Johann Rissik, acting Surveyor-General.

hours, and we found him in his arm-chair placidly awaiting the sunrise.

It was a sweltering day as we drove down the Letaba valley and the fever season was coming on. White men died like flies in the Low Country, and I was minded to tell them the story of a funeral at Pilgrims' Rest. At the Theta mine, a man had been mangled by the machinery; so mangled and bloody was he, that they sent for the mine carpenter, who was careless in these matters, enjoining that his coffin boards should accurately fit.

The funeral cortege passed out, and the old Dane gazed professionally on his handiwork. *'No yuce'll come out of that one," they heard him say. And to do him justice, no juice did.

We drove along ; and suddenly, striking a rock, we went over. The Cape cart lay athwart the road, the hood staved in, the horses kicking furiously at their traces ; for all we knew we had broken our necks.

"Save the limejuice!"

From out the debris z. clear voice had called, a voice, they told me afterwards, which was mine. The precious fluid was safe. So, wonderful to relate, were we. But in a dire strait, my presence of mind was made known to the great ones of the land.

I had been inspecting the Sheba on behalf of some London shareholders, and rode down the mountains into Barberton. The little town, already moribund these five years, was beflagged and excited. In terms of an old contract, a branch line of the Lourengo Marques-Pretoria railway had now been built into Barberton, and the first train was due in that very day. I accompanied the populace to the outskirts of the town.

The train drew in amid cheering. Among the first to alight, to my surprise, was a certain elderly man from Johannesburg, a casual worker about the mines, neither physically nor mentally strong, a person of no standing whatever. He was stooping, and his face was grey.

"What are you doing here?" I said.

"Oh! . . . I've left Johannesburg. I ought never to have gone there ... it was too hard a life. . . . If only I can get back to Cairo! ... I had good employment there once, and people knew me."

I said, "How are you going to get to Cairo? It will cost money from here."

"I have only two pounds ... I hoped to be able to work my way there. I have prayed the dear Lord that He will not desert me."

I had known this man for some years. He was elderly, and feeble, and I had seen him sinking. His tragedy was now upon him, and his appearance there, strange though it seemed, was inevitable. I told him to figure out a sum which would take him to Cairo, and meet me the next day.

We met. The Kaap Valley was bathed in morning light. In a broken voice he mentioned a sum; and because of the sunshine, because I was young and strong, or, perhaps, because of the matter of a Basuto pony, and of other things lying in my memory, I gave it to him, and stood by while he sobbed, and bought him his ticket to Delagoa Bay, placing him aboard the second train which ever ran out of Barberton.

The old man went off with my address, and he was to write. But from Cairo came no letter, nor from the long African coast. I think his God had shown mercy, and had rung down the curtain quickly.

My Transvaal mining education was rounded off as a managing director, a coal mine on the East Rand claiming my services. Three boreholes, put down haphazard on the level veld, had located a seam of coal forty-two feet thick, with twelve feet of good commercial value. The colliery had been well laid out by the manager, an able Scotch miner, and with so wide a seam we were prepared to do great things. But it was our trouble to be late in the field. A market for our coal had still to be secured, and an economic struggle with the other collieries round about loomed ahead.

We worked the output up to 12,000 tons a month, less than half the mine's capacity, with no great trouble. A big contract, with that powerful financial group aforesaid, was now in the market, and this we determined to secure. It meant a cut — something like ninepence a ton — and when we had made this, and secured the greater part of the contract, my efforts to lessen the cost of production became frantic. An itemised cost sheet became my bible, and my eye was upon every outgoing. Our colliery, in those days of extravagance, was a model, yet even here were abuses, wheels within wheels, which I could not reach. Some items too were highly vexatious. The Netherlands Railway, a great stickler for demurrage on empty trucks, became a nightmare to us; upon occasions, I stayed with the Kaffirs on our loading platform as late as two in the morning.

It was a great day when I tackled the item of Kaffir medicine. A Boksburg druggist had contracted with the colliery on a quantity basis, and kept sending forward immense jars of highly-flavoured liquids — opening, astringent, or antifebrile as the case might be — which at once disappeared into the stomachs of our eight hundred natives. A visit to the compound, and a dissertation on therapeutics from its superintendent, convinced me that for one kaffir who took medicine as medicine, a dozen were drinking it for the relish of its flavouring. A modified contract was at once enforced with Boksburg, and the cost of mining our coal decreased by precisely one farthing per ton.

Then there were candles. It seemed to me our consumption was excessive, that the allowance of, I think it was two candles per shift to each native, might be reduced. The manager could not see it, and for a time the point remained unsettled. One evening, as the natives were being hauled up, I stationed myself at the top of the shaft, searching each one as he stepped from the cage. They were taking, as was their wont, all unbumt candle for use in the compound; and, rejecting stumps, I collected off them three bucket loads of quarters, halves, and a goodly proportion of whole candles. Calling for assistance, I conveyed my trophies to the office, where I set them down without a word. The manager looked grim at first, but as he inspected the buckets a something mellower came into his face. We were fellow Scots, and, as I have said, there was a goodly proportion of whole candles. A cash saving might clearly be effected, and his features relaxed to its aesthetic significance. Art is Art, the world over.

Let me say this : our mine, before I left, was producing coal a shilling a ton below our neighbours. We had added a Scotch sales manager to our team — a football international; the scrimmage was now in the enemy's ^'25." y I made expeditions to the Free State, to inspect dia-

mond mines there, and visited Kimberley again. The vast Premier mine, near Pretoria, was not then known, but one could realise that the five mines of De Beers', yy together with Jagersfontein, were able to flood the

markets.

The diamond a precious stone ! I saw them poured by

^ the bushel at De Beers, handled as a grocer would handle

currants. There is a practical monopoly, it is true, and

great financial interests which regulate prices; but the

HOW I OPENED THE SHELL 2T

foundations of the diamond industry do not really rest on these. They rest on the vanity of woman, on the desire of man. They rest on the sexual instinct itself, a security which I conceive to be gilt-edged.

I did not see Rhodesia in its earliest days. On the Rand we had a horror of quartz mines, of their tendency to lose value at a shallow depth; and we noted that all mines in the Northern Transvaal, that is to say nearest the Rhodesian frontier, while often rich at surface, invariably went wrong in this way. To a seeker of mines the Transvaal had offered more scope; and the Matabele rebellion was some time past, the country settled down, before ever I went North.