“Iron men and wooden ships,” murmured Pitt.
“They were that,” agreed Perlmutter. “Anyway, Scaggs and his crew must have labored like demons to save the ship from one of the worst storms of the century. But when the winds died and seas calmed, Gladiator was little more than a derelict. Her masts were swept over the side, her superstructure was destroyed and her hull was taking on water. The ship’s boats were gone or smashed, and Captain Scaggs knew his ship had only hours to live, so he issued orders for the crew and any convicts handy as carpenters to dismantle what was left of the ship and build a raft.”
“Probably the only option open to him,” Pitt commented.
“Two of the convicts were Arthur Dorsett’s ancestors,” Perlmutter continued. “His great-great grandfather was Jess Dorsett, a convicted highwayman, and his great-great-grandmother was Betsy Fletcher, who was given a twenty-year sentence to the penal colony for stealing a blanket.”
Pitt contemplated the bubbles in his glass. “Crime certainly didn’t pay in those days.”
“Most Americans don’t realize that our own colonies were also a dumping ground for England’s criminals until the Revolutionary War. Many families would be surprised to learn their ancestors landed on our shores as convicted criminals.”
“Were the ship’s survivors rescued from the raft?” asked Pitt.
Perlmutter shook his head. “The next fifteen days became a saga of horror and death. Storms, thirst and starvation, and a mad slaughter between the sailors, a few soldiers and the convicts decimated the people clinging to the raft. When it finally drifted onto the reef of an uncharted island and went to pieces, legend has it the survivors were saved from a great white shark by a sea serpent while swimming to shore.”
“Which explains the Dorsett hallmark. It came from the hallucinations of near-dead people.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. Only eight of the original 231 poor souls who left the ship staggered onto a beach-six men and two women more dead than alive.”
Pitt looked at Perlmutter. “That’s 223 lost. A staggering figure.”
“Of the eight,” Perlmutter went on, “a seaman and a convict were later killed after fighting over the women.”
“A replay of the mutiny on the Bounty.”
“Not quite. Two years later, Captain Scaggs and his remaining seaman, luckily for him the Gladiator’s carpenter, built a boat out of the remains of a French naval sloop that was driven on the rocks by a storm with the loss of all hands. Leaving the convicts behind on the island, they sailed across the Tasman Sea to Australia.”
“Scaggs deserted Dorsett and Fletcher?”
“For a very good reason. The enchantment of living on a beautiful island was preferred to the hell of the prison camps at Botany Bay. And because Scaggs felt he owed his life to Dorsett, he told the penal colony authorities that all the convicts had died on the raft so the survivors could be left in peace.”
“So they built a new life and multiplied.”
“Exactly,” said Perlmutter. “Jess and Betsy were married by Scaggs and had two boys, while the other two convicts produced a girl. In time they built a little family community and began trading food supplies to whaling ships that began making Gladiator Island, as it later became known, a regular stopover during their long voyages.”
“What became of Scaggs?” asked Pitt.
“He returned to the sea as master of a new clipper ship owned by a shipping company called Carlisle & Dunhill. After several more voyages to the Pacific, he retired and eventually died, twenty years later, in 1876.”
“Where do diamonds enter the picture?”
“Patience,” said Perlmutter like a schoolteacher. “A little background to better understand the story. To begin with, diamonds, though instigating more crime, corruption and romance than any other of the earth’s minerals, are merely crystallised carbon. Chemically, they’re sister to graphite and coal. Diamonds are thought to have been formed as long ago as three billion years, anywhere from 120 to 200 kilometers deep in the earth’s upper mantle. Under incredible heat and pressure, pure carbon along with gases and liquid rock forced their way toward the surface through volcanic shafts commonly referred to as pipes. As this blend exploded upward, the carbon cooled and crystallized into extremely hard and transparent stones. Diamonds are one of the few materials to touch the earth’s surface from remote depths.”
Pitt stared at the floor, trying to picture nature’s diamond-making process in his mind. “I assume a cross section of the ground would show a trail of diamonds swirling upward to surface in a circular shaft that widens at the surface like a raised’ funnel.”
“Or a carrot,” said Perlmutter. “Unlike pure lava, which raised high, peaked volcanoes when it reached the surface, the mix of diamonds and liquid rock, known as kimberlite pipes after the South African city of Kimberly, cooled rapidly and hardened into large mounds. Some were worn down by natural erosion, spreading the diamonds into what are known as alluvial deposits. Some eroded pipes even formed lakes. The largest mass of crystallized stones, however, remained in the underground pipes or chutes.”
“Let me guess. The Dorsetts found one of these diamond-laden pipes on their island.”
“You keep getting ahead of me,” Perlmutter muttered irritably.
“Sorry,” Pitt said placatingly.
“The shipwrecked convicts unknowingly found not one, but two phenomenally rich pipes in volcanic mounds on opposite ends of Gladiator Island. The stones they found, which were freed from the rock by centuries of rain and wind, simply appeared to be `pretty things,’ as Betsy Fletcher referred to them in a letter to Scaggs. Actually, uncut and unpolished diamonds are dull-looking stones with almost no sparkle. They often feel and look like an oddly shaped bar of soap. It was not until 1866, after the American Civil War, that a U.S. Navy vessel on an exploratory voyage to find possible sites for deepwater ports throughout the South Pacific stopped at the island to take on water. On board was a geologist. He happened to see the Dorsett children playing a game with stones on the beach and became curious. He examined one of the stones and was amazed as he identified it as a diamond of at least twenty carats. When the geologist questioned Jess Dorsett as to where the stone came from, the cagey old highwayman told him he brought it with him from England.”
“And that timely little event launched Dorsett Consolidated Mining.”
“Not immediately,” said Per’ mutter. “After Jess died, Betsy sent her two boys, Jess Junior and Charles, no doubt named after Scaggs, and the daughter of the other two convicts, Mary Winkleman, to England to be educated. She wrote Scaggs for his help and included a pouch of uncut diamonds to pay for this undertaking, which the captain turned over to his friend and former employer, Abner Carlisle. Acting on behalf of Scaggs, who was on his deathbed, Carlisle had the diamonds faceted and polished, later selling them on the London exchange for nearly one million pounds, or about seven million dollars, in the currency of the time.”
“A tidy sum for college tuition for those days,” Pitt said consideringly. “The kids must have had a ball.”
Perlmutter shook his head. “You’re wrong this time. They lived frugally at Cambridge. Mary attended a proper girl’s school outside of London. She and Charles married soon after he took his degree, and they returned to the island, where they directed the mining operations in the dormant volcanoes. Jess Junior remained in England and opened the House of Dorsett in partnership with a Jewish diamond merchant from Aberdeen by the name of Levi Strouser. The London end of the business, which dealt in the cutting and sale of diamonds, had luxurious showrooms for retail sales, elegant offices on the upper floors for larger wholesale trading and a vast workshop in the basement, where the stones from Gladiator Island were cut and polished. The dynasty prospered, helped in no small measure by the fact that the diamonds that came out of the island pipes were a very rare violet-rose color and of the highest quality.”