Whether we refer to the works of the English traveler, William Methold, who visited the mines near Golconda in 1622, (where there were 30,000 laborers then at work) and mentions that it was impossible to prevent the abstraction of diamonds; those of Tavernier, the French traveler, who visited the Indian mines in 1766; Mawes’ description of the Brazilian diggings in the same century, where, in spite of the strict watch maintained over the slaves employed, they managed to steal half of the diamonds produced, or we study contemporary literature with regard to the mines of Griqualand West, we find that although most severe punishments have always been inflicted with a view to stamp out theft, they have never hitherto been completely successful. With this subject, however, I shall deal in a future chapter; in this I intend to treat of the rise and progress of the I. D. B. (illicit diamond buying) trade, and describe the various devices adopted by the black thieves and white receivers. On the Vaal River diggings there was very little thieving. The semi-patriarchal state of society existing there was not conducive to such a crime, and moreover the natives had not yet acquired a knowledge of the value of diamonds or “klips”[36] as they were then termed. Each digger had brought from the Cape Colony, Natal, the Free State, or Transvaal, his own servants, hired for a stated time; he lived in their midst, gave them both food and physic with his own hands, temptation they were delivered from, as they dared not roam about, and they generally remained honest and faithful. This state of things, however, did not last long, as dishonest white men and cute natives soon put the unsophisticated savage in the way they wished him to go; but it was not until a large population had gathered round the dry diggings, composed of the Du Toit’s Pan, Bulfontein, Old De Beers and the New Rush, or Kimberley mines, in 1870 and 1871, that diggers began to be alive to the enormous losses they were sustaining through the robberies of their native servants. At this time the white population might roundly be estimated at from 20,000 to 25,000, and the natives and colored people at from 40,000 to 50,000 souls, or to be within the mark say 60,000 altogether.