Category Archives: Jewels

Turquoise

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PHOTO: Robyn Jay

Oh dear. So much for New Years’ Resolutions (see last post from, ahem, four months ago). Today I have just added another page from my archives (Turquoise) and made some private resolutions to do this better and more often. A reader wrote to me a couple of days ago asking if I had any photos of the textiles I wrote about in Colour, and whether I could put them on this blog. That thought did pass recently (and briefly) though my mind quite recently but then I realised they are all either slides or prints, which means they have to be scanned individually.

“Why on earth would you do slides and prints when you could take pictures in digital?” asked a young person in the office of the environment charity I work for, looking with total astonishment at the folders of slides as if they came from another century, which they almost do.

That said, in Chicago last month I saw, to my delight, some quipus (Inca message strings, dyed with cochineal and other dyes) and do have the pictures on my digital camera. So perhaps that will be a good start.

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Happy 2011

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New Year’s Resolutions… I might not make them every year but I certainly think about making them. The one New Year’s Resolution I’ve at least thought about making every year since I was six or seven (and saw a fabulous, tall American-looking woman step onto a curb and call a taxi with Panache with a capital P), is learning to wolf whistle. People have tried to show me over the years – there’s a trick with curling the tongue like a tube, apparently – but so far narry a piercing toot has come from me. Perhaps 2011 is that year.

I’ve had such nice feedback about this little blog (aka collection of random notes) that I might make a bit more of an effort in 2011 to find some emails I wrote to my lovely agent Simon while I was researching the colour book around the world, sitting in various internet cafes to tell him what I was up to. And I’ve also got a scanner now, so perhaps it’s time to put some of the photos up too. We had an intern for a few months at the charity I work at as communications director and I asked her a couple of months ago to scan some of their slides. “Why would you have slides,” she asked, looking puzzled as if she’d never seen one before, “when you could have done it digital?”

Oh, and 2011 is also the year that I’m going to concentrate on writing the first half (why stop at half?) of a story about Italy that I’ve been thinking about for the past four years.

Let this one at least not be like the New Years Resolutions I’ve ignored every year. Let “thinking about” be “acting on” too.

Happy New Year!

The biggest diamond in the world? Ever?

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Yellow Topaz with smoky quartz from China. PHOTO: Rob Lavinsky http://www.irocks.com

(more notes from the notebooks in the attic)

There are no pictures of the great Braganza diamond, and nobody knows quite where it might be. But here’s the story, and the mystery.

In around 1790, three criminals were banished “into perpetual exile” in the interior of Brazil. The rule was that they could not go into any big towns – and if they did so, they would be imprisoned for life.

The three men decided to try their luck mining in the Rio Plata area, hoping that a big find of gold might reverse their fortunes and maybe even, with some bribery funds, their sentences. In 1797, after six years of searching (and avoiding cannibals and government soldiers on the way) they came to the river Abaite. It was a drought and the waters were at their lowest levels known in living history.

While panning for gold they were surprised to find, in one of the pans, a stone of excellent heft that weighed nearly an ounce. A clergyman helped get them access to the governor at Villa Rica who consulted a jeweller to decide whether the stone was or was not a diamond. It was decided that it was, and the men were pardoned. It does not appear that they were allowed to keep the jewel.

It was called the “Braganza”, after the Portuguese Royal House of Braganza. However now the stone has disappeared from sight, and it is believed by many experts not to have been diamond but topaz.

Edwin Streeter notes there are other accounts and many possible weights attributed to the Braganza. He tells a story of the German Aulic-councillor Beireis of Helmstadt, who possessed a stone he believed to be a diamond – weighing 6,400 carats. He kept it locked up in a cabinet and spread the story round that he had received it from the Emperor of China. “Nobody of course believed this story, but the strangest part of it was that at his death [in 1809] the stone had disappeared” – even though Goethe himself testified to its existence. It could be that he loved mystery, or it could be that he wanted to save his reputation by preventing the true character of the gem from being known. “It is well to remember that the topaz, which consists of a fluorosilicate mixed with silicate of aluminium is apt to be mistaken for the diamond by unpractised eyes.” (p.45)

A final note on the Braganza, Portugal has not has a King since 1932, when its last monarch, the exiled Manoel II, died at Twickenham, after a day of watching tennis at Wimbledon.

More on topaz on the latest “The Ones that Got Away” page.

An enormous garnet, discovered in a sewer

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The finest large garnet crystal

The sewer garnet is part of the seal of the NY Mineralogical Club

I’ve just looked back at my old notes on garnets – thank goodness they didn’t all disappear, quite, with my ancient hard drive – and have been reminded of the jeweller George Frederick Kunz’s excitement in 1885 when what he estimated to be the finest large garnet crystal found to date in the United States, was found in a sewer.

“It was discovered, strange though it may seem, in the midst of the solidly-built portion of New York City” below W35th Street (between Broadway and Seventh) by a labourer who was digging for a sewer. It had not, incidentally, been lost in the sewer – garnets were evidently simply part of the bedrock of Manhattan. It was almandine, which is a nice way of saying purply-brownish, “weighed 4.4 kg, and was partly a trapezohedral shape”. Trapezohedral is the kind of description you skip over with ease, initially, thinking you know what it refers to, then in my case at least you realise you don’t have the first idea. Wikipedia describes it as ‘the dual polyhedron of an n-gonal antiprism” which didn’t help, but the illustration below is a good way to picture it. Since dubbed the “sewer garnet” it is now, apparently, part of the seal of the New York Mineralogical Society and I’m told by one of my very first blog readers (thanks!) that it can be seen at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in a place in the gallery that isn’t that obvious… so please get hunting, and let me know if you find it.

The Kunz garnet - New York Academy of Sciences Transactions 5. (1886)

You can find a few more of my random and unused notes on garnets on my new, to-be-expanded, “garnets” page here. Also, if you’re interested in the sewer garnet, the John Betts website has a good account of some of the happy and unhappy controversies and correspondences its discovery inspired.

How a life changed with a friend’s carelessness

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The Heddle Family in around 1890

I have just been rereading my notes about the eminent 19th century Scottish mineralogist Matthew Forster Heddle, who studied at the University of Edinburgh and found he loved studying chemistry and botany, and wanted to devote his life to those subjects. But then he lent his herbarium to a friend, who ruined it.

“Thinking over his loss he determined to relinquish botany as a special study and to devote himself to geology and mineralogy, which determination he never afterwards regretted,” wrote David Douglas in his 1901 book, The Mineralogy of Scotland.

Heddle went on to teach mineralogy at St Andrews, spending every summer exploring Scotland’s rocks: “Few parts of Scotland and its adjacent Islands… were unvisited and unexplored… The slitting of agates, rocks and minerals for specimens and microscopic slides, which he did actually by thousands amid all his other work, was little less than marvellous…”

I wonder how often, as he crouched alone with his rock hammer and collecting bags in all sorts of weather beside the cliffs, beaches, tarns and precipices of remote highlands and islands, he remembered that friend. Did he thank him or her, or did he always wonder with a little regret whether he might instead have discovered a great cure for malaria or TB, or what his very different life might have been like, had that herbarium survived?

Link here for some extra notes about agates, which nearly merited a chapter, but then at the last minute did not.

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Coming soon!

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Hello. Thanks for finding me! Actually I’m not sure that I’ve really found myself. As you’ve probably guessed, I’ve just picked up the keys for wordpress.com and I’m just learning how to drive it.

Once I’ve done that I’ll be back soon with a blog.. or something.