Ruby - The John Saul Ruby Mine (JSRM)

Wednesday 6 February 2008

The first gemstone deposit to be found in East Africa was the ruby deposit at Longido, Tanzania. Other ruby deposits were discovered in Tanzania subsequently, most of them of the anyolite type, as at Longido, but production was generally small or of poor quality gems or of rubies which had been fractured in attempting to free them from their host rock. Then in mid-1973, our father received a visit from a Park Ranger from Tsavo West National Park. The ranger, Frances Wainaina, had some nicely crystallized fragments of tourmaline, a gemstone which comes in almost any color.

Although the fragments were not quite gem-quality, they had clearly come from large crystals - larger than a finger, it would turn out - and were well crystallized in places. But most importantly, they were of the splendid tone of green readily associated with the presence of chromium. Further, they were accompanied by other minerals which were also nicely crystallized, a good sign when prospecting for colored gemstones. (The term "colored gemstones" is a trade term for transparent or translucent gems other than diamonds. By convention, yellow and blue diamonds are not "colored gemstones", but colorless tourmalines or sapphires are…)

Dad, a geologist, was familiar with the area and liked what he saw. Although he had confidence in the Park Ranger, he took the preliminary step of sending a small field team led by his long-term employee Mwaura Bagite to bring back additional samples. For when tracking the origin of someone else's mineral samples, gem or not, it is wise to verify if they actually came from where they are said to have been found. (Years before, Dad had been shown a sample of small fractured rubies said to have come from "a deposit very near Nairobi". After much running about, he discovered that they had come from the pathway to the Sapieha chapel!)

In this case, the chrome-green tourmalines did indeed come from where the ranger had said, and there were many more of them, but only a few which were at all transparent. But their color was promising.

Following the several months it took to obtain the permits to prospect in a protected area, Mwaura was again sent to the site and when he dug the first test pit as instructed he found himself in what geologists sometimes call "rotten rock". In fact, he was digging at the very edge of a block, some 500 m wide by 100 m long, of a so-called "ultrabasic intrusive", a chromium-rich rock that had been brought up from a depth of some 30 kms in a process not unlike the squeezing of toothpaste from a tube. The chrome-tourmalines had formed at the very edge of the encasing rocks and were of little value. But in the contact zone with the intrusive were large good quality rubies brought up from deep in the Earth, also colored by chromium.

The JSRM was called the “Nganga Location� in the Mines Departments register. The deposit produced gem green tourmaline before the first ruby came out, the green of the tourmaline and the red of the ruby both coming from the presence of trace quantities of chromium. Kenya mining regulations were not the same for these two materials, with ruby classified as “precious� and tourmaline as “non-precious�.

The very first person to spot a speck of a red mineral was another employee, Henry "Cowboy" Asusa, a Kenyan who wore a Stetson and had an improbable way about him. Cowboy possessed a John Wayne demeanor, spoke in slow American-accented English, and had a potbelly and asqueaky voice. He was a city person who hated the bush and would use anything as a pretext to return to Nairobi (which is probably why he had lost previous jobs as a tour guide). In any case, Cowboy came rushing into Dad's office after just a couple of days in Mwaura's camp crying "Ruby! I saw a ruby!".

Dad chartered a small plane whose pilot reluctantly landed at a Parks Department airstrip close to Mwaura's camp, insisting once he got on the ground, that nobody look at any of rocks until the warthog holes on the strip had been filled-in. Nobody did his bidding (though he was given a shovel) and in consequence he and other pilots refused to land on the strip on flights in the days which followed. The Voi Airstrip, 50 miles away, was used instead. This strip, which was at the time warthog-free, is well known to those who have seen "Out of Africa" for it is there that Karen Blixen's great love, Denys Finch Hatton, crashed and died in May 1931.

Everyone had been right, the Park Ranger, Dad, Mwaura and Cowboy, and The Ruby Rush was on! Mining at the outset was very easy. For the intrusive, which had certainly been very hard when it formed thirty kilometers (almost 20 miles) down, was chemically unstable in the wet, oxygen-rich, low-pressure, low-temperature conditions at the Earth's surface. It wasn't just a bit "rotten", it was falling apart. In a section of the deposit which would be nostalgically referred to as "the crumbly zone", rubies had been extracted with the bare hands, not from soil, but from their primary host rock.

Registration of Saul and Mungai locations - These mining locations were extensions to the main block of claims at the JSRM. Mungai was an excellent employee who did much of the actual pegging at various sites. People would follow Dad in the bush and peg next to him and some got wealthy by doing so.

Export Permit -First production from the JSRM, but not all of the 120 kilos were gem quality! Gordon Tait, who signed the export authorization, was a highly knowledgeable civil servant who often came to work in a kilt, much to the approval of the Maasai whose own apparel, known world wide, had been inspired by the Scotch kilt.

The color of these stones was splendid and their discovery put East Africa on the map of gem-producing countries along with the classical gem-producing lands of Burma and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Indeed some of the rubies from the "John Saul Ruby Mine", as it came to be called, were of the fine distinctive shade of ruby-red which would become a standard of quality. On a trip to the gem-cutting center of Jaipur in Rajasthan in the 1980s, Dad was offered a ruby by an Indian cutter who insisted in broken English that it was "johnsaul". Dad's Indian translator tried his best to explain who Dad was but he had no luck. To the cutter, "johnsaul" was simply the English word that meant "very fine red".

Van Cleef - Our grandfather knew members of the Arpels family who wound up with some fine stones.

Watchmaker - This is overstated. A good 99+ percent of the stones mined were either bead quality or simply waste.

All good things come to an end and within a short period of time, extracting rubies from The John Saul Mine became hard work, as is the case for virtually all gemstone mining worldwide. That is one of the reasons why gemstones are expensive.

The JSRM in later years. The plant, technically known as a “sink-float� plant, was called “the chunga-chunga� in both English and Swahili.

The JSRM in operation - The picture with the truck was taken of the “Kimbo Pit�, named after our dog (who himself was named after a local brand of margarine). The Kimbo pit produced very large quantities of low grade stones.