The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-01-13
TIE KAEEIR MENES.
Their Discovery and Deveiopment--storie
 of Their Earlier Days.

Their Discovery and Oeveiopment--Storie
 of Their Earlier Days.
 In the getting of gold--the medallion the purpose. of possessing gold-as money--there has always been an elo- ment of romance. "How quickly na- ture falls into revolt when gold becomes her object" as Shakspere says. But if
 For gold the merchant blows the main The farmer blows the manor
 what shall we say of him who pursues a paper chase of gold shares in the ''Kaff1r Cirucus?" This name 'KafIir Circus' is probably the most remark able evolution in the history of finance since the days of the South Sea bubble. Lest the comparison be thought invid- ious, seeing that South Africa has a solid basis of gold bearing and other productive land, let us hasten to add that the designs of the South Sea com pany were originally much more prac- tical and practicable than has been commonly supposed, and that the tre- mendous imitation of prices during the | "bubble' time was hardly, if at all, greater than that of gold shares during 1 the South African boom There is material for the philosopher in the fact 1 of the modern madness having oc- cured in connection with a part of the world to which King Solomon the Wise sent for supplies of gold and 'talmug trees" for the mysterious Ophir has been located in Mashonaland, and the Queen of Sheba identified with the Sabia districts which, though not in :" the Randt," are curiously connected with the rise and progress of the mania.
 Let us briefly trace that romantic his tory, merely mentioning by the way. that, even in European history, African gold is no novelty, for the Portuguese brought back gold dust (and negro slaves) from Cape Bojador 450 years ago. The ruins of Mashonaland were discovered in 1864 by Karl Mauch, who also discovered the gold field of Tate, on the Zambesi, of which Livingstone had reported that the natives got gold there by washing, being too lazy to dig for it. When Karl Mauch came 1 back to civilization, people laughed at his stories of ruined cities in the center of Africa as travellers fables, but q number of Australian gold diggers thought his report of the Tate gold field good enough to follow up.
 1 So about 1867 a band of them went out and set up a small battery on the Tate river for crushing the quartz. This may be called the first serious attempt at lsrol fr,fE A f,.iae ci, days of the lost races who built the cit- ies whose ruins Karl Mauch discovered and which MT. Theodore Bent has de- scribed. A Natal company assisted the Tate diggers with supplies, and enough gold was found to justify the Notation of the Limpopo Mining company in London. This was in 1868, and was practically the foundation of the "Kaf- fir Circus,'' though its founders knew 1t not. Sir John Swinburne was the nov I ing spirit Of this enterprise, and went l out with 8 lot of expensive machinery only to meet with a good deal of disap- pointment. The diamond discoveries in Griqualand soon drew away the gold seekers, who found the working ex- penses too heavy to leave gold mining profitable, and for . time the Tate fields were deserted. They Were taken up again, however, twenty years later by Kimberly enterprise, out of which developed the Tate Concession and Exploration, to whom ex-King Loben- gula granted mining concession over no less than S00,000 square miles of Ma tabeleland
 Just as the Australians were break- ing ground on the Tate, Thomas Baines. the traveller, was making Up his mind to test the truth of tales of gold in the far interior, which the Portuguese from Da Cana onwards had received from natives. In 1869 he set forth from Natal with a small expedition, and in 1870 re- ceived from Lobengula permission to dig for gold anywhere between the rivers Gwailo and Ganyona. Some sev- enteen years later this same concession was repeated to MT. Rudd, and became the basis from which sprang the great Chartered Company of British South Africa.
 In the course of bis journey, Baines encamped on the site of the present city of Johannesburg, without having the least idea of the wealth beneath him, and intent only upon what he hoped to find further inland. On the map which he prepared of this journey is marked the " farm of H. Hartley, pioneer of the gold fields" in the Wit watersrand district Hartley was known to the Boers as "Oude Baas," and was famous elephant hunter, but as ignorant as Baines himself that he was dwelling on top of gold reef. And it was not in the Witwatersrand, fore most as it now is, that the African gold l diggers began.
 While the Tate diggers were pursu- ing their work and Baines his explora- tions, a Natalian named Button went ! with an experienced California miner named Sutherland, to prospect for gold in the northeast of the Transvaal. They found it near Lydenburg, and compa- nies were rapidly formed in Natal to work. Such big nuggets were sent down that men hurried up, until soon there We're some fifteen hundred active ly at work on the Lydenburg. field. The l operations Were fairly profitable but the outbreak of the Zulu war, and then the Boer war, put an end to them for some years.
 And now We come to one of the most romantic chapters in the golden his tory of South Africa, a history which !