Gold Rush

by Jim Richards

  I was quite nervous that night, fretting about the faster water. If I got into trouble diving, there was nothing Charlie could do except pull on my air hose. If I got stuck he could go and get Colin, but by the time they came back it would be too late.

  In the morning I looked with some dread at the dark river. What lay under it? No point in speculating.

  We started quite well. Using the ropes on each corner of the dredge we secured the machine within the falls. I then straddled the 6-metre-long orange suction hose and mined the gravels lodged in various crevices.

  In the strong current I could hang on to the hose and use it as my anchor, preventing myself from getting swept away. I dived till lunch, working on some promising-looking gravels. No potholes, but promising.

  After lunch I ducked under again, working around the main channel, which had the fastest water. As I fought the current, I soon tired and eventually went to pull myself out of the channel for a break.

  Right then, I lost my grip on the hose. The current grabbed me and in an instant I was tossed around and the air hose started to ravel around my neck. I struggled and sank to the bottom, pulled down by the lead weights on my diver’s belt. The current bounced me helplessly along the base of the river until I felt a heavy blow to the back of my head that stunned me.

  I quickly came to my senses. I was still under the water and breathing, just, but face down and barely able to see a thing. The air hose was tight around my neck, half strangling me. Instinctively, I got my fingers between the air hose and my hooded neck and gasped in a full breath through the air-regulator. I still had air, thank god.

  I was stuck under some kind of underwater ledge and being pushed further into the tight crevice by the current as it searched for the narrow exit on the other side, which I was partly blocking. The water was keeping me in place; I was stuck like a plug in a plughole.

  There was no way I could fight the current. It was way too strong for that. And I could not turn myself, either, as the crevice was too tight. Each time I moved to make some room, the water just pushed me in further to fill the void.

  I was aching with fear, which was only tempered by adrenalin. With one hand I dealt with the most immediate danger and got the air hose from around my neck. I didn’t think about it, I just did it by instinct.

  My previous nightmare of being stuck in the pothole may have saved my life here, as I didn’t panic. I did the only thing I could do. In the tight space, I used my hands as flippers to push against the rock and, moving parallel to the crevice, slowly inched myself feet first towards the channel.

  After what seemed like an age, I could feel my feet freeing up, then my legs moving into the open water. By the time I had got my groin into the channel, I was pulled out of the crevice by the current and swept down the falls. There was plenty of air hose and I was unceremoniously dumped in the pool below the main falls, handily close to our camp.

  I stood up in the shallows. Charlie was running towards me looking mightily relieved. He had known I was in trouble from watching the air hose enter the main channel, but as a non-swimmer he was powerless to help.

  We stumbled into camp. I sat there battered and bruised, shaking with cold and shock. I had picked a bad week to give up smoking and I succumbed to one of Charlie’s Bristol cigarettes.

  I had been damned lucky not to have hit my head any harder or it would have been all over. I proceeded with considerably more caution after this incident. Commercial success, though, remained elusive. Maybe Sarah had been my lucky charm?

  I decided we would take a break in town to wait for the water levels to drop, so we stowed our gear at Colin’s camp and organised some space on Cyrilda’s next flight out.

  Ekereku was a sandy gravel airstrip, and a bad one. It incorporated three unwelcome aspects of a bush airstrip: it was high (thin air), it was hot (even thinner air), and it was short (hard to abort a take-off). On top of all that, the airstrip ended at the edge of the tepui, which was a 500-metre sheer drop into the solid jungle below; no second chances there.

  In our twin-engine Islander aircraft, we accelerated down the strip as usual. I looked out of the window in a brooding frame of mind, concerned about our lack of success on the trip. I forgot these worries a few seconds after take-off when I saw oil streaming from the port engine. Then the engine stopped.

  This was a bad scenario. Just after take-off you do not have the speed or height to recover. There was only one place to safely land and that was where we had just taken off from. The pilot gunned the remaining engine and banked a rapid turn. We were still in this turn as we reapproached the plateau. The wing tip just missed the ground, the pilot straightened the aircraft and almost that same instant we landed heavily. I was thrown to one side, smashing my head on the metal aircraft interior and dazing myself. Charlie (who was scared of flying) had been cushioned by his blanket, which he had wrapped around his head to block out the take-off, so he had missed most of the drama.

  When we stopped, I speedily opened the aircraft door and got Charlie and myself out; I was worried about any potential fuel leaks after the hard landing. Bit scary, but not too bad, I thought, rubbing my head and checking for blood, could have been worse.

  The pilot had already alighted from his door and was some distance away, trying to spark up a cigarette, his hand shaking so hard he couldn’t manage it. Charlie gave him a light.

  ‘Did-did-did you fucking see that?’ the pilot stammered.

  ‘Sure mate, well done, good job. You got her down.’

  ‘Yes, but I had to rev the other engine so hard that it was just about to blow, its temperature went off the dial … another five seconds or any more weight on board and we would have crashed into the jungle for sure. Shit, man, that was close.’

  After hearing that, I did not feel quite so blasé about the incident. The pilot radioed in our situation and I had plenty of time to mull over our close shave as we waited for another aircraft. I am not superstitious, but was Ekereku trying to tell me something?

  The big puzzle about diamonds in Guyana is: where do they actually come from? Are they alluvial artefacts within the sandstones of the tepuis – the Roraima Formation – being moved around and concentrated by the present-day rivers? Or is there a primary source, a diamondiferous kimberlite pipe(s) lurking somewhere, just waiting to be found? Geologists have been arguing about this question since diamonds were first found in the area in the 1920s, and it is one of the great mysteries of diamond geology.

  After all of my travels and exposure, I came up with my own theory. The diamonds vary considerably between rivers: Kurupung has the largest stones; Eping smaller stones with good shape; near the mouth of the Eping River, I saw a pork-knocker work a site that was all small macles (diamonds in the shape of triangular prisms); Ekereku had good-sized, clear, white stones with some bottle-greens, and so on.

  The diamond buyers could always tell which area the stones had come from by their size, clarity and colour. Because of this, I felt it unlikely that the diamond source was the Roraima sandstones, otherwise the diamond population would be far more homogeneous from being mixed up during the laying down of the sandstones.

  On the other hand, if the source were a large kimberlite pipe (or several), then each pipe would have its own distinct diamond population, as would the greater area around it. But this was not the case – the creeks all had different types of diamonds. And why had one of these large pipes not yet been discovered despite so much mining activity?

  Because of this evidence, I believe the sources of the diamonds in Guyana are kimberlite dykes, not pipes. Kimberlite dykes are thin (roughly 1 to 2 metres wide), they fill weaknesses within the host rock (plenty of faults and fissures in the Roraima Formation) and, as every dyke is a separate kimberlite, each could have its own unique population of diamonds. Dykes are hard to find, because they are narrow and they recessively weather; neither do they make good mining targets, as they are small. Was the blue clay I found in the fissure at the bottom o
f the Ekereku River one of these kimberlite dykes? I hope some smart young geologist will one day come along and find some of these dykes and finally lay the question to rest.

  By February 1992, I was wondering how to address my lack of recent success at Ekereku. Despite my rising business problems, I did find solace in town among some most attractive expat girls. They were either diplomats or working on aid projects. My diamond selling was popular among these women, and I found myself in the unique position of the girl paying the guy for the diamond, and then the guy, on occasion, getting lucky.

  Charlie was having a break to patch up a domestic dispute, and I was also happy to take a pause to recover before flying back to Ekereku. I was sitting back in Palm Court one afternoon, relaxing over a cold Banks beer, when in walked Mikey, a Guyanese pilot I knew. We chatted and I told him I was struggling at Ekereku.

  ‘You should try Boa Vista, in Brazil. Things are really running hot there right now, gold coming out in buckets,’ Mikey said.

  The idea had already occurred to me. Boa Vista was the frontier mining town of the Amazon in northern Brazil, and the current gold rush capital of the garimpeiros.

  ‘Sure, why not? How do I get there?’ I replied.

  At this time there was no road through Guyana to the southern border with Brazil. It was just rainforest.

  ‘Man, we’re flying up there in a couple of days, looking to buy a plane. Come along for the ride,’ Mikey said. ‘And help pay for the fuel.’

  Two days later Mikey, his co-pilot and I set off for Boa Vista in a Cessna. The flight was around 500 kilometres and took three hours. Initially we flew over the magnificent Guyanese rainforest, which stretched to the horizon in all directions. We then passed over the mountain areas north of Mahdia with numerous tepuis rising grandly from the forest below, each with waterfalls cascading from their sides.

  Eventually this changed into the savannahs of southern Guyana and northern Brazil and then, approaching Boa Vista, the steady emerald green of the Amazonian rainforest came into view.

  As we circled Boa Vista, I noticed an extraordinary number of light aircraft around. We landed on the wide runway, far better than anything in Guyana. There was a scattering of service buildings, hangars and some shacks. As we taxied into a parking slot, half a dozen men ran towards us. We let the door down and they crowded around.

  ‘Comprar ouro, comprar ouro,’ they shouted at us, waving wads of $100 bills in our faces. Buy gold, buy gold. When they realised we were commercial travellers, and not miners flying in from the Amazon with gold to sell, they wandered off.

  Now that was a gold rush.

  It was true. All around us, garimpeiros and their support crews were unloading diesel, food and equipment from pick-up trucks and loading it onto small planes. There was a constant drone of light aircraft landing or taking off.

  It was just like a taxi service. Turn up with your people and mining gear, hail a plane (Brazilian-built Piper Cherokees), point at a map to tell the pilot where you’re going, pay cash up front and off you go.

  Mikey explained there had been some notorious incidents involving drunken pilots and passengers. The problem had been dealt with in typical Brazilian style.

  ‘There is only one rule. No one can drink within five metres of the aircraft,’ Mikey said matter-of-factly.

  Pilots drinking prior to flying were apparently not worthy of a mention.

  I was fascinated. In just two years Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima state, had been transformed from a sleepy backwater into the centre of one of the largest gold rushes in history. Boa Vista now had the busiest airport in South America, with a small plane taking off or landing every two minutes.

  A vehicle approached us and out lumbered Juan, the man Mikey had arranged to meet. Juan was one of those entrepreneurial types who, by way of introduction, hands you three different business cards. He was about forty years old, and heavily overweight. His shirt and hands were soaked with sweat. Crafty, rheumy eyes kept flicking towards me, trying to work out where I fitted into the picture. Juan spoke good English, but his politeness seemed affected, and for some reason he cut a sinister figure.

  We got into Juan’s vehicle and went to get our passports stamped in the administration building, then drove into town. Juan talked business with Mikey, who was looking to import a Brazilian aircraft into Guyana. With the car windows up and the air conditioning on, I could smell Juan. And he smelled bad.

  We arrived in Boa Vista and checked into a basic hotel. Mikey, Juan and the other pilot went off to meet aviation people and I wandered around Boa Vista. The town is the civic centre for the vast province of Roraima, and was attractive and friendly, lacking the menace of the big South American cities such as Caracas.

  The shops were busy; in fact, the whole town was busy. Many of the vendors were selling quality mining equipment the likes of which I could only have dreamt of acquiring back in Guyana. The prices were good too, about half of what I would pay in Georgetown. I wandered around for an hour and then ended up at the town’s main square, which had a statue of a miner panning gold. This was clearly a town that welcomed miners. I sat down at a nearby café to read the local newspaper.

  I had picked up a smattering of Portuguese from the Brazilians in Guyana and through self-study. They say that Portuguese is like Spanish spoken by a drunk German, so I had a local Brahma beer (to help my reading), and it tasted damned good. This was my holiday and I was enjoying myself.

  The newspaper was most informative. Boa Vista was indeed a town in the grip of a massive gold rush, but it was also a town divided. Over the last couple of years, around 50,000 garimpeiros had invaded previously untouched indigenous Indian territory in the Amazon rainforest to the west and south of the city.

  The 30,000 or so Yanomami and Macuxi Indians living there had been decimated by the garimpeiros, some of whom were involved in all kinds of bastardy. Slavery, prostitution, murder and theft were inflicted upon these defenceless people, who were completely at the mercy of the miners. Diseases carried in by the garimpeiros made things even more desperate, and pollution of the rivers with mercury and silt was also an issue.

  It seemed that for economic reasons many in the town supported the miners, but plenty also took the side of the Indians. The resources of these two disparate groups were totally out of proportion though: the miners held all the cards.

  The issue had touched a wider nerve in Brazilian society and indeed had split the whole country. The rest of the world was taking an interest and international pressure was gathering in support of FUNAI (the National Indian Foundation of Brazil), which was trying to get the miners kicked out of the Indian reserves. Basically, it was a great big steaming mess.

  I may have come here to make money, but not at any price. These stories confirmed some of what Bob Lutz had already told me in Guyana. What was happening to the Yanomami Indians here appeared to be a terrible injustice.

  Another headline caught my eye: ‘El Inferno Verde’. The Green Hell.

  A teenage Yanomami girl described how she had been abducted in the forest by garimpeiros and forced to work in their mining camp as a cook and sex slave. Over time, the eight garimpeiros were driven mad by the incessant green of the forest, which reportedly could have this effect. (I had also noticed a certain craziness creeping up on me after long periods under the forest canopy).

  The miners had argued over possession of the girl, and slaughtered each other in a machete fight, the final two each inflicting a fatal blow on the other at the same time. The girl had run away from the carnage and eventually found her way back to her village, which is where the journalist had interviewed her.

  This place really was a lawless free-for-all.

  That evening we met up with Mikey, Juan and a couple of others and dined in an open Amerindian-style restaurant with a high palm-frond roof. It was a warm and humid night. We ordered steak. In fact, you had to order steak; there was nothing else on the menu.

  For some bizarre reason, t
he two waiters were both dwarfs dressed up in morning suits. To serve the meal, the pair marched in step out from the kitchen, they both held in each hand an upright sword, diced onto which were large lumps of cooked beef. The waiters approached us and stabbed the ends of the swords into the wooden dining table (the polished stump of a tree). The swords stuck fast, the meat quivering on the still-moving blades.

  Juan looked pleased and started to cut meat for himself off the sword with his steak knife.

  ‘So, Jim, I hear you’re a miner. Are you interested in coming here and doing some business?’ he asked me.

  ‘Possibly. You have a huge mining boom going on here. But what about the Indians? What’s happening to them doesn’t look right to me.’

  Juan snorted a laugh and a ripple moved through his whole corpulent body. ‘These people need to come out of the forest and join the rest of us. This gold boom will flush them out, you’ll see. The Indians are just standing in the way of progress and giving us all a bad name. Don’t you worry about them, Jim,’ he said, leaning forward towards me. ‘Come over to Boa Vista and perhaps we could do some mining business together?’

  ‘That, mate, is not how I want to do mining business,’ I said, and I felt myself flush with anger, troubled at his comments about the Indians.

  ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ interjected Mikey.

  Juan shrugged his shoulders and we both backed off. This wasn’t the time or place for this discussion. But the fault lines dividing the region were clearly visible in our exchange.

  After coming all the way from the UK to join a gold rush in Brazil, I had found out that there were some things that gold could not buy. Thankfully, I was one of them.

  It was a moment of reckoning, a line in the sand. There were issues that had not occurred to me during my readings of the Californian gold rush, but plenty of North American Indians had been killed and lost their lands in that rush too.