Gold Rush

by Jim Richards

  The social effects of this shared adventure helped to forge the independent spirit of California, and as many Argonauts returned to their home states they also played a role in crafting how Americans came to view themselves as a nation.

  The economic stimulus from the gold rush fuelled a boom in America that developed the country and its burgeoning railroads. Yet, just as in modern times, mining booms led to busts.

  The loss of the SS Central America, sunk in a hurricane off the coast of Florida on 11 September 1857, was a human tragedy in which 425 people died. However, this ship also carried, by some estimates, around 600,000 ounces of gold (worth $720 million today) from California, a portion of which was destined for already stressed New York banks. The sinking helped trigger the first global financial crisis, the Panic of 1857, and the world’s financial system did not recover until after the Civil War ended in 1865.

  But as the years after the California gold rush passed, the veterans’ memories of the hardships and privations of their youth faded. They were replaced with nostalgia and affection for a bygone age, lived with companions ‘staunch and brave, and true as steel’.

  And I often grieve and pine,

  For the days of gold,

  The days of old,

  The days of forty-nine.

  ‘The Days of Forty-Nine’, California Gold Rush song

  Towards the end of 1850, against the advice of friends and colleagues, a digger named Edward Hargraves had decided to leave the California gold rush and return to his native Australia to find gold.

  Hargraves was a massive man, and a shrewd one too. He did not enjoy the hard work at the diggings and had a more elegant plan: to do just enough to claim the sizeable government reward for the discovery of the first payable goldfield in Australia.

  Finding gold in Australia was a radical idea at the time and Hargreaves was derided for taking such a path. But he was not the type to be swayed by the opinions of others and he returned to Australia, landing at Sydney, capital of the British colony of New South Wales. Hargraves managed to borrow some money to kit himself out with a horse and rations. He set out on his gold-prospecting trip on 5 February 1851 and he badly needed something to come out of his venture.

  Travelling alone and on horseback, Hargraves crossed the Blue Mountains to Guyong, about 200 kilometres inland, where he stayed at the Wellington Inn. That evening he noticed with great interest specimens of quartz on display above the fireside. Quartz was a mineral that Hargraves knew well, as it was often associated with gold.

  He linked up with the innkeeper’s son, a youngster named John Lister, who had found the quartz and knew the district. Their subsequent prospecting trip netted five small specks of gold – hardly payable – but the wily Hargraves left Lister behind and hastily returned to Sydney to claim the substantial government reward for the first discovery of a payable goldfield. Those few specks, though, were not enough to persuade Charles Augustus FitzRoy, governor of the colony, that the goldfield was payable.

  Meanwhile, back at Guyong, the industrious John Lister and his friend William Tom were working a rocker, a trick from California introduced to them by Hargraves. They worked hard in various spots and finally, on 7 April 1851, the two lads washed four ounces of gold from Summerhill Creek. This was worth nearly £10, or the equivalent of a labourer’s wage for six months. Lister and Tom had found Australia’s first payable goldfield.

  They immediately sent word to Hargraves in Sydney, whom they considered their partner. Hargraves informed the government of the find before riding back to meet up with the pair. He took the four ounces of gold from Lister and Tom and then set about his true vocation: promotion. Hargraves was a master propagandist, taking a small truth and building it up into a big story. He renamed Summerhill Creek ‘Ophir’, after the biblical mines of King Solomon, and the name caught the public imagination.

  Hargraves was also a convincing orator, and he fired up public meetings with tales of glory that awaited men of courage. His credibility as a Forty-Niner prospector from California lent him gravitas. The newspapers loved it, and Hargraves was spectacularly successful.

  Honourable, though, he was not.

  He took the accolades, the glory, and the £12,000 in government reward money (worth over $3 million today), and disowned Lister and Tom. Hargraves did everything he could to write them out of history, yet the families of the two men would not shut up and so started a feud that continued for decades and included three parliamentary enquiries.

  Hargraves’ behaviour is a good example of the corruptive nature of gold. He retired a famous and wealthy man, but the stench from the way he treated his partners follows him to this day.

  Within a week of Hargraves’ first public talk at Bathurst to promote the new gold discovery, 600 men had rushed to Ophir. The government geologist, Sam Stutchberry, reported back to the governor:

  Gold has been obtained in considerable quantity, many persons with merely a tin dish having obtained one or two ounces per day. I have no doubt of gold being found over a vast extent of country. I fear unless something is done very quickly that much confusion will arise … Excuse this being written in pencil, as there is no ink yet in this city of Ophir.

  Sydney went mad and the harum-scarum rush to the diggings turned the social order of the colony on its head. Businesses closed, farm workers absconded, and it was even a struggle to bury the dead. A long line of motley adventurers braved the Blue Mountains and made their way to the Macquarie River. The population of Ophir swelled to 2,000 people and they toiled, ripping up the riverbanks to access the auriferous gravels.

  It was rough and tumble and early justice was dished out by hastily convened miners’ meetings, or kangaroo courts as they became known, which could easily end in a hanging.

  Governor FitzRoy was taken by surprise. The whole affair was alarming for landowners, whose power and wealth were threatened by the disappearance of their labour supply. FitzRoy tried to discourage more people from leaving their established jobs by forcing each and every digger to take out a licence, at the usurious charge of 30 shillings a month. It was to prove a poor decision.

  Initially things worked well. The rich and easy pickings of the early rushes allowed the diggers to pay the high licence fee, and the revenue paid for the police and mining wardens to settle disputes.

  Just to the south in the neighbouring colony of Victoria, events were moving fast. During the latter half of 1851, a succession of gold rushes started that would eclipse New South Wales and even California.

  In the first six months of the Victorian gold rush, a staggering 3 million ounces of gold (worth $3.3 billion today) were produced. The newly proclaimed colony was transformed. The Ballarat field alone went on to produce 20 million ounces.

  But trouble was brewing. The miners found it irksome that farmers could lease vast areas of land for grazing at £10 a year while the gold miner had to pay a licence fee of 30 shillings a month, or £18 a year, for just a few square yards of dirt. This was regardless of whether they made any money or not; it was a tax on just being there.

  Equally galling were the goldfields police who enforced the licence system. They were little more than thugs in uniform. To make matters worse, the police were entitled to a share in the fines of any successful prosecution, which led to wholesale corruption of the process of law. The sale of alcohol became a protection racket, with the police as enforcers. The most contentious issue was always the mining licences, which the diggers were required to carry at all times. The police would conduct spot searches they called ‘digger hunting’. Should a miner not immediately produce a licence, when asked, then a bribe was demanded. Diggers caught without licences were at times beaten or chained to logs in the burning sun or freezing cold.

  An extraordinarily sadistic police superintendent named David Armstrong would burn down the diggers’ tents and beat those who questioned him with the brass knob of his riding crop. When finally dismissed, Armstrong left boasting he had made £15,000 in t
wo years of bribes and fines. That is over $4 million in today’s money and illustrates the astonishing levels of police corruption.

  There was little recourse. Almost the entire system was rotten and the diggers’ hatred of the authorities festered. These were free-spirited men, many of them veterans of California, and they were not easily intimidated.

  By 1854, the alluvial gold was becoming harder to win, and thus the licence fee was even more onerous. Something had to give. The trigger came on the night of 6 October in Ballarat. A digger named James Scobie was killed with a blow to the head following an altercation with the landlord of the Eureka Hotel, an ex-convict named James Bentley. A trial ensued, with Bentley and his drinking companion, a policeman, accused of murder. Both were acquitted by a bench led by stipendiary magistrate John D’Ewes, a friend of Bentley and a part-owner of the Eureka Hotel.

  Sensing corruption, the diggers were outraged. On 17 October 1854 they held a protest meeting. This meeting soon got out of hand, and the Eureka Hotel was burnt to the ground. The police arrested three diggers, ostensibly for arson; in reality they were taking them as hostages.

  The governor of Victoria, Sir Charles Hotham, was a military martinet lacking in intelligence or guile. His flawed judgement was compounded by his equally inept resident commissioner for Ballarat, Robert Rede. Instead of listening to the diggers’ grievances, Hotham and Rede suspected sedition and troops were sent in to quell the unrest.

  Both sides became entrenched, with neither willing to give ground. By November the demands of the diggers had increased from just the release of the three held men. They now wanted the abolition of the licence, together with land and political reform, including the vote for all white males, not just those with property rights. The social injustice of the licences and the lack of representation made this a political movement; it was the corruption of the officials that turned it into a battle.

  Tensions in Ballarat rose and, in the final week of November, the town was at boiling point. Then more soldiers arrived.

  On 29 November 1854, a meeting of diggers attracted 15,000 men. It was to become one of the most famous public meetings in Australian history and two significant events occurred. After a vote, the diggers burnt all of their licences and vowed to resist arrest. Then they raised a new flag upon a tall flagstaff: the blue-and-white flag of the Southern Cross.

  The next day was windy, foul and hot. The authorities, not for backing down, embarked on a violent licence hunt that ended in a riot. Shots were fired and more arrests made.

  The diggers rallied, in no mood for compromise. An Irishman, Peter Lalor, was elected their leader. Mostly wearing the digger’s outfit of moleskin trousers, checked blue-and-white shirt and felt hat, they all swore an oath: ‘We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties.’

  Expecting an attack, the diggers prepared a stockade at Eureka Lead, a gold mine situated on top of a hill. Some of the miners then returned to their tents for the night, leaving others at the stockade.

  At dawn the following morning, 276 soldiers and police attacked. The much larger military force took the diggers by surprise and a fierce battle ensued. It was all over in about ten minutes. The miners did not stand a chance against disciplined, well-armed troops. Fourteen diggers lay dead, and a further eight later died from their wounds. Peter Lalor lost an arm in the battle. Six police and military also died. The soldiers behaved appallingly in the aftermath and further outrages continued in the ensuing days.

  The diggers lost the battle, but went on to win the war. The authorities and Governor FitzRoy lost all support from a public outraged by the bloodshed. No jury would convict the miners who had been arrested, and a Commission of Enquiry went on to uphold almost all of the reforms demanded by the diggers. This included the vote for all white males, implemented in Victoria in 1857, the birthplace of Australian democracy.

  The next book I picked up was about a shipwreck. The Royal Charter was a sturdy and modern iron-hulled steam clipper. In September 1859 she set sail from the port of Melbourne bound for Liverpool; many of the passengers were miners carrying their own hard-won gold.

  These miners were the lucky ones. Having survived great hardship, perhaps even the Eureka Stockade itself, they had struck it rich at the diggings and were headed home to marry sweethearts or rejoin families.

  At the end of the long voyage, the sight of the British coast was greeted with pleasure, but as the ship rounded Anglesey in Wales, a bad storm was rising. The wind eventually rose to hurricane force 12 on the Beaufort scale, with enormous seas. Both anchors were deployed to hold position. At 1.30 a.m. on 26 October the cable holding the port anchor broke, followed by the starboard anchor cable an hour later. The Royal Charter was driven onto shore.

  As the ship broke up on the rocks, some of the miners dropped the gold they carried and tried to save the women and children and themselves. Others refused to let go of their precious cargo. Those men sank and perished, bandoliers of gold nuggets and coins still around their shoulders.

  There were over 440 deaths, including all of the women and children on board. Only 39 men survived.

  To be so tantalisingly close to home, their fortunes made, and after all they had been through! If I had been there, would I have relinquished my gold to help the women and children? Or would I have drowned under the weight of a bandolier full of nuggets?

  ‘Come on son, we’re closing up. It’s not a library, you know,’ said the kindly bookshop owner.

  I walked out of the shop into the cold and wet of a darkening Charing Cross Road, a boy with dreams but no time machine. It was a pity you couldn’t get that kind of action anymore, I thought.

  CHAPTER 3

  PAYING THE PRICE

  Our first university geology field trip was to Torquay in Devon, which does not sound very exotic. However, in 1922 when Professor Gordon of King’s College London took his geology students to Hope’s Nose on the coast at Torquay, they made a discovery.

  As the professor was making a particular point to his students, he hit a calcite vein with his hammer. The usually soft calcite did not shatter, and to their great surprise they found that it was held together by strands of gold. Specimens were gathered and a small gold rush began. These days, not surprisingly, the site is protected and collecting is banned. A fine crystal specimen of gold from Hope’s Nose is still on display at the Natural History Museum in London today.

  There is a good lesson behind this tale. Many of the discoveries I was learning about in my studies were made by accident. In the world of geology, it pays to always keep your eyes and your mind open.

  Geology is foremost a practical science; laboratory work was central to our course. Under a microscope we studied the endless variants of the three main types of rock: igneous (derived from molten magma), sedimentary (usually formed in water) and metamorphic (altered). Over time, the knowledge began to fit together in a most beautiful and elegant way. It was knowledge I would later put to good use.

  While my geology course was captivating, some part of me hankered for adventure. So I joined the university officers training corps (OTC) – the army reserve for students. Not exactly an Ernest Shackleton exploit, but it was a start.

  Every Tuesday evening was drill night at the OTC headquarters in Central London. We paraded in our army uniforms, then received military instruction on weapons, first aid or tactics.

  As a bonus there were plenty of female officer cadets, and after the lessons we all retired to the cosy bar to get better acquainted. There was also the occasional training weekend away and a two-week annual camp. It was good to get out of claustrophobic London and back to the outdoors, which I loved.

  The previous year, with the whole of Britain, I had closely followed the coverage of the British Forces in the Falklands War against Argentina. I had been particularly impressed by some of the remarkable feats of arms achieved by the British Army Parachute Regiment in the winning of that war.
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  This, together with my positive OTC experiences, gave me the desire to join the elite Paras. My wish was perhaps pushed along by the reality that there were almost no jobs at the time for graduating geologists.

  It could be a life-changing decision – if I saw it through. Fortunately, I could follow the path to the Paras while studying for my geology degree. Indeed, this was encouraged by the military, who wanted university-educated officers.

  There was a crucial test I needed to pass before I (or anyone else) could join the Paras: Pegasus Company (or P Company), the second-hardest course in the British Army, after SAS selection.

  Although only a student, I was eligible for P Company by virtue of having been accepted as a potential officer to the Paras. The course lasted for three weeks. I just took the time off from my university classes – nobody noticed.

  This was where I started to pay the price for my adventurous ambitions.

  I attended P Company at the Para Depot in Aldershot. On the course there were about a hundred regular soldiers and a dozen officers – real army officers, not officer cadets like me.

  I was the youngest person on the course and was to be treated as an officer which, it turned out, was not a good thing. As we settled into the officers’ mess that first night, the others all looked worried.

  The next morning we had an early parade in which the P Company officer-in-charge gave us a pep talk.