There is always a way.
I was stuck solid. Upside down inside a pothole at the bottom of a fast-flowing river – and my air supply was giving out. With rising panic I started to struggle, but this just made it worse as I packed myself in even tighter. Suddenly I was getting no air at all. I sucked and sucked on my mouthpiece: nothing. How the hell had it come to this?
Over millions of years, quirks of geology created a small number of fabulously rich gold occurrences at places that are now famous, such as Northern California, Ballarat in Australia and the Klondike in Canada. In these special places, gold nuggets littered the surface. Bonanza gold deposits built up to carpet rivers until they were speckled with yellow. When the first prospectors arrived, they could win vast riches in hours.
That is how gold rushes start.
Gold is portable, anonymous and permanent. This makes it the ultimate currency. These unique physical properties have rendered it desirable to human beings for millennia. Gold has caused wars and the destruction of entire civilisations, yet it can also be used to express love and beauty.
In AD 1533, during the conquest of South America, the Inca Emperor Atahualpa tried to buy his life from the Portuguese conquistador Pizarro by filling a room full of gold. Pizarro took the bounty and murdered Atahualpa anyway. Gold can do that to people.
Gold is rare. All of the gold ever mined in world history would fit into a 20-metre cube that would easily fit under the first section of the Eiffel Tower. More than half of this gold has been produced in the last fifty years and the production rate is increasing.
The metal is dense and malleable, conducts electricity and has an attractive yellow lustre that does not tarnish. Gold has limited industrial uses, mainly in electronics and dentistry. Most gold mined every year ends up as jewellery, coins or bars.
Gold can be trusted, whereas governments cannot. An ounce of gold would buy roughly the same amount of bread today as it did in ancient Rome. No other currency has stood that test of time. You cannot counterfeit an ounce of gold.
More than ever in today’s uncertain times, gold is considered worth holding in its own right as a physical store of value. For much of the last two centuries, finance was underpinned by the gold standard, which directly linked paper money to an equivalent weight in gold. Every country has now abandoned this gold standard, the USA being the last to do so in 1971, and doomsayers predict the return of high inflation as a result of the undisciplined printing of paper money where there is not the gold to back it up.
The quest for gold is unrelenting. Every year, miners produce in the region of 80 million ounces of gold, worth around $96 billion. About a quarter of this gold comes from 15 million small-scale miners who, in turn, support a further 100 million people.
The miners take the gold from one hole in the ground and the bankers put it back into another hole. It is the journey in between that is the interesting bit.
People continue to join gold rushes in ever more remote locations. A recent rush to La Riconada in Peru, where gold is mined from under glaciers, has put 30,000 people onto the side of a mountain at over 5,000 metres, creating the highest city in the world. Ongoing gold rushes in West Africa, Indonesia and Brazil still attract modern-day fortune hunters, dreaming and scheming for profit and adventure.
All this goes some way to explaining how I came to be trapped, upside down, in a South American river with my air supply cut off. I had left my ordered life as a young army officer in the UK to follow a dream that had become an obsession: to strike it rich in a modern-day gold rush. I had come to South America because that’s where the gold rush was.
I shared a common purpose with the countless thousands of other people who had chased gold rushes throughout history. The aim was to make a lot of money – quickly.
This is my story: a tale of adventure, disaster and skulduggery, where vast fortunes could be made or lost based upon luck or persistence. There are plenty of screw-ups, nightmare encounters, relationship problems and mad characters from my experiences in various gold and diamond rushes around the world. And yes, there are potholes packed like jewellers’ boxes with gold and diamonds too.
Mining is messy, some of it is destructive and at times it is downright lethal. But the industry also supports a vast web of otherwise impoverished and marginalised people. Some of these people I have known, respected and loved. You will meet a few of them in this book.
There is only one rule in a gold rush: you have to turn up. So my quest moves from diving for diamonds in the piranhainfested rivers of South America to discovering a fabulously rich gold mine in Western Australia; from getting caught up in the world’s biggest ever gold-mining scam in Indonesia to accidentally starting my own gold rush in the war-torn jungles of Laos.
To find the gold, I first had to find myself. I needed to dig deep and discover the resilience and fortitude required to overcome the solitude, remoteness, disease and violent criminals – to come out on top.
Joining a gold rush is an act of self-belief. In the face of overwhelming odds, I had to believe that I would find the gold I was seeking; why else would I go?
To sustain that self-belief for an extended period, I had to grow. In my case, from an inquisitive but ineffective boy into a fit and determined man, and then from that man, I hope, into a more insightful, rounded and potent individual.
But should you go through all of the sacrifice, adversity and hardship of joining a gold rush today (and you can), and should you be one of the lucky few to actually find something – be careful. Gold can do strange things to you. It can magnify a weakness in your character, it can corrupt your values and it can persuade you to do terrible things. This was the moral dimension to my journey.
Would I own the gold, or would the gold own me?