Just as the Australians were breaking ground on the Taté, 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 Gama onwards had received from natives. In 1869 he set forth from Natal with a small expedition, and in 1870 received from Lobengula permission to dig for gold anywhere between the rivers Gwailo and Ganyona. Some seventeen years later this same concession was repeated to Mr Rudd, and became the basis from which sprang the great Chartered Company of British South Africa. In the course of his 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 that he hoped to find farther inland. On the map which he prepared of this journey is marked the 'farm of H. Hartley, pioneer of the gold-fields,' in the Witwatersrandt district. Hartley was known to the Boers as 'Oude Baas,' and was a famous elephant-hunter, but as ignorant as Baines himself that he was dwelling on the top of a gold-reef. And it was not in the Witwatersrandt, foremost as it now is, that the African gold boom began. While the Taté diggers were pursuing their work and Baines his explorations, a Natalian named Button went, with an experienced Californian miner named Sutherland, to prospect for gold in the north-east of the Transvaal. They found it near Lydenburg, and companies were rapidly formed in Natal to work it. Such big nuggets were sent down that men hurried up, until soon there were some fifteen hundred actively at work on the Lydenburg field. The 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 history of South Africa, a history which was marked by hard and disheartening days what time the lucky diamond-seekers at Kimberley were swilling champagne, as if it were water, out of pewter beer-pots. There is more attraction for adventurers, however, in gold-seeking than in diamond-mining, for gold can be valued and realised at once, whereas diamonds may not be diamonds after all, and may be spoilt, lost, or stolen, before they can find a purchaser. It is to be noted that much as the Transvaal Republic has benefited from gold-mining, the Boers were at first much averse to it, and threw all the obstacles they could in the way of the miners. And it was this attitude of the Boers, especially towards the Lydenburg pioneers, that led to the next development.