Gold Rush

How I Found, Lost and Made a Fortune

Jim Richards

• Publisher: September Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781910463376
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Mining Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

'Would you own the GOLD or would the GOLD own YOU?' When Jim Richards left home to make his fortune in a gold rush, he had no language skills, no money and no idea. But when he found diamond-filled potholes in the remote rivers of Guyana, his problems really began. Chasing gold and diamond rushes around the world, Richards worked with local miners in some of the maddest, baddest and most dangerous places on earth. His dramatic journey ranges from the piranha-infested rivers of South America to the blazing deserts of Australia, from the world's biggest mining scam in Indonesia to the war-torn jungles of Laos. To find the gold, first Jim had to find himself. He learned to dig deep and discover the resilience and fortitude needed to overcome isolation, disease, equipment disasters and gun-toting criminals to come out on top. Gold Rush is a blood-and-guts treasure hunt - the ultimate adventure story.

CHAPTER 1

FIRST STRIKE

How you react to chance, luck and random events is a defining factor in prospecting. My introduction to gold mining was the result of one such fortuitous encounter. This occurred when I was aged seventeen, in the prosaic setting of the school dinner queue. I glanced at the noticeboard, and saw displayed the following opportunity:

Gold Mine in West Wales

Summer Vacation Work

See Mr Hamer

I did not know that the course of my entire future lay in that modest sign.

One of my favourite places was my local museum in Cardiff, where I had often lingered over the gold artefacts and coins. So I already knew that I liked gold, or at least the idea of it. I saw Mr Hamer and signed up – to my surprise I was the only one who did.

The job also looked like a better option than staying at home with my parents when my school report arrived. Dad was never impressed by my academic progress at my boarding school – Christ College, in Brecon, Wales. It was fair enough: he was a brilliant and successful surgeon who saved people’s lives; I was a dreamy and unsuccessful teenager who sat around reading adventure books.

*

In Great Britain, gold has been mined intermittently at a number of places, including Scotland, Cumbria, Devon and Cornwall. Helmsdale, north of Inverness in Scotland, was the site of a gold rush that took place in 1869, triggered by a prospector who had recently returned home from the Australian diggings. It was a brief affair, although at its peak there were around 600 diggers. You can still go to Kildonan Burn today and pan for gold.

Crawford Moor in southern Scotland was probably a much more significant producer. Mining occurred there mainly in the Middle Ages, so the amount of gold that was mined is unknown. All that remain are tantalising written records describing fine specimens of gold in quartz.

By far the greatest recorded gold production in the UK has come from the Dolgellau area in North Wales, where around 100,000 ounces (worth $120 million at today’s prices) have been produced since 1861. This includes gold from the famous St David’s Mine in Clogau; since 1923 the wedding rings of the British Royal Family have been crafted from a single gold nugget from this mine.

*

I spent the summer of 1981 in the other Welsh gold-mining district, at Dolaucothi in West Wales, which is the site of the only known Roman gold workings in Britain. This area produced gold as recently as the 1930s, but when I arrived it was no longer an operating mine; the National Trust had transformed it into a tourist attraction.

Here, in this small and remote area, people over 2,000 years ago had mined considerable amounts of gold using little more than water and muscle. My thoughts ran riot: just imagine what was still left!

My job was to guide tourists around the old mine workings and to provide an informative commentary for the hour-long tour. My only qualification for the job was that I was prepared to work for nothing. The other guides were all either geology or mining engineering students from Cardiff University.

A fellow guide and I set off with twelve tourists on one of our five tours for the day. We were all kitted out with miners’ helmets and head torches. First up, we toured the tight tunnels and shafts of the modern underground workings from the 1930s. We then popped out of a small opening into the blazing sun and onto the side of a grassy hill. This was my favourite part of the tour: the old Roman gold workings. We crawled into one of the short adits (horizontal tunnels) and shone our miners’ torches onto the roof. There were thousands of small pick marks hewn from solid rock by the original miners from the local Welsh tribe, the Demetae, who had dug out the tunnel by hand.

Like me, the tourists found it deeply moving to run their fingers over notches that felt as fresh as the day they were made some 2,000 years earlier. We all sensed that physical connection with the ancient miners and their impressive endeavour.

Back in the open air, I continued my spiel. ‘The gold ore was found in quartz veins just below us, and to break up these hard veins, fire setting was used. This technique involved lighting fires against the area to be mined. Once the maximum heat was achieved, the hot rock was then instantly doused with water. This action fractured the rock, allowing it to be scraped out using hand tools.’

The tourists stared down the slope of the peaceful, green hillside trying to imagine this violent activity of long ago.

‘The ore was then crushed to allow the release of the fine gold particles. This crushing was done using waterwheelpowered, stone-tipped hammers. After crushing, the ore was stacked on the hillside and below were lain sheep’s fleeces. Water was released from the aqueduct-fed reservoirs you can see just above us, and this flushing water washed the ore over the fleeces. This process was called hushing.’

Hushing was used both for treating the ore and also for breaking up the hillside to assist in the mining or discovery of further ore. This extensive type of mining is well described by the Roman historian Pliny in his encyclopaedic book Naturalis Historia. Ironically, Pliny died in a geological event: the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79.

‘The fine wool of the fleeces caught and retained the much heavier gold. The lighter waste was washed away.’ I was getting animated as I approached the punchline. ‘Once the process was complete, the fleeces were hung out to dry and then burnt. The ashes were retained and washed, with only the near-pure gold remaining. This widely used technique may have been what gave rise to the myth of the Golden Fleece.’

‘What happened to the sheep?’ asked a woman with a Birmingham accent.

‘Umm, no, no, madam. The fleeces had already been shorn from the sheep, it was just the wool they used.’ Her obtuseness shook my confidence, but I tried to recover.

‘So, ladies and gentlemen, standing on this one hillside in Wales, the five basic principles of mining can be seen: discovery, extraction, crushing, treatment and recovery. Just think,’ I finished, ‘you could do that too: you could actually mine gold!’

‘Wouldn’t the National Trust object if you did?’ asked the same woman.

‘Well, yes, they would. I didn’t mean right here, but you could mine it somewhere,’ I said, somewhat exasperated. Talk about a literalist.

We made our way back down the hillside and ended the excursion at the grave of Ned, a tour guide who had died of malnutrition. At the top of Ned’s gravestone stood the nonetoo-subtle tip box emblazoned in bunting. A bad poet had written onto the slate:

Here lies poor Ned, the best of geologists

He gave his life to guiding tourists

He wasn’t paid and never ate

Alas the tips stopped at his plate.

A convincing eulogy to Ned followed and even the lady from Birmingham got the hint.

In fact, the National Trust that ran the mine did supply food and basic accommodation. So all the tips were naturally spent down at the Dolaucothi Arms pub, which served an excellent pint of dark mild.

Every night, drinking was combined with wild speculation about lost mines, gold rushes and nuggets. You could still actually make money out of gold mining? This was an enthralling thought, especially as I considered myself lucky just to be here, in this wonderful place, working for nothing. My teenage brain, alcohol and a crazy idea were combining and, through this intoxicating mix, I became hooked on the idea of gold mining, and I have been ever since.

*

On a quiet day I headed out with one of the geology students and an old gold pan to make our own humble discovery. The geology student seemed to know what he was doing and we went down to the River Cothi just below the mine. This looked like a good place to search for alluvial (river) gold.

Gold is heavier than everything else in the river, so it is the first mineral to drop down from the flowing water and get caught in the bedrock. Just after a waterfall, we found a potential trap site that looked like a good spot. We dug a hole to the base of the river gravel and then exposed the bedrock. My student friend informed me that this boundary between the bottom of the gravel and the top of the bedrock was usually the best place for finding alluvial gold. We dug out the gravel at this interface and shovelled it onto a sieve that fitted over our gold pan.

Once the sieve was full, we lowered it and the gold pan together into the water and jigged them up and down so the finer material fell through the sieve into the pan below.

We then checked the sieve for gold nuggets – no such luck. Then, with a circular movement of the pan, we washed the remaining fines (less than 2 millimetres in diameter), removing the lighter material. A final swirl left the remaining heavy fraction of black sand in a tail at the bottom of the dish.

‘Look, Jim. Look!’ cried out my friend excitedly, pointing into the pan.

Right at the end of the tail were five fine specks of gold, unmistakable even to the untrained eye.

The psychology of gold panning is strange: you start out believing you are going to find a large nugget and end up perfectly happy with a fine speck. Gold is like a homely fire; just seeing it lifts your spirits.

Our specks weighed roughly 0.02 of a gram. We would need to wash 1,555 pans to get an ounce of gold worth $1,200. A strange queasy feeling developed just above my stomach, a mixture of eagerness and greed; we hadn’t found much gold, but we might have. If I went somewhere else and kept looking, who knew what I would find?

It was the first of many lifetime technical successes – i.e. commercial failures – and I became obsessed by the idea of discovering gold. However, this was not an easily fulfilled aspiration in the UK, which did not have a single operating metal mine, far less a gold mine.

So how could I get a piece of the action?

Gold mining was all about rocks. If you wanted to study rocks, you studied geology. Simple. The geology students I worked alongside at Dolaucothi were my kind of people. They loved science, the outdoors and gold mines.

My panning friend had encouraged me. ‘You should do geology at university, Jim. There are lots of field trips to study rocks in exotic places. It’s science without the maths, and unlike physics there are plenty of girls on the course.’

Learning about the earth, its rocks, minerals and structure sounded fascinating to me. This new interest led to my reading every mining-related book I could find. This included Men of Men, in which Wilbur Smith vividly described the diamond rush at Kimberley in South Africa in the 1870s. The idea of finding and mining diamonds gripped me from that moment.

So in my final year at school, I applied to London University to study geology and was thrilled to win a place. Maybe this line of education would help me learn how to find my own gold.

CHAPTER 2

MINING TIME

Dolaucothi had given me the gold bug, I wouldn’t call it gold fever, not yet, but it was definitely an itch that needed scratching. It was 1982, and although my undergraduate geology degree at Goldsmiths College was absorbing, there was a problem. It told me nothing specifically about gold mining.

As a teenager, I had read everything about travel and adventure I could lay my hands on. Papillon by Henri Charrière, the brutal true story of a convict escaping from a penal colony in French Guiana, I had found particularly enthralling. These books helped me to dream, and I liked to dream.

So at the age of eighteen, to dream my gold-rush dream, I descended on the second-hand bookshops that lined Charing Cross Road in central London. They had to be second-hand bookshops, as the only books about gold I could find were all very old.

Veteran bookshop owners took an amused interest in my enquiries.

‘Gold rush, eh? Off to make your fortune, are you, laddie?’ one asked.

‘Maybe, if you can sell me a book cheap enough.’

Chuckling, he led me to the darkest corner of his shop. The books on the bottom shelf looked like they hadn’t been touched in years. This was a whole section on gold, many of which were about gold rushes – a whole lost genre of literature. I sat on the carpeted step next to the shelf and started to read books I could not afford to buy.

In these books were tales of the wild gold rushes in California and the astonishing riches of the gold fields in Australia. There were real-life ...