In the 1660s when these operations were discovered by a French wholesale jewelry set and traveler, Jean Baptiste Tavernier, the diamond mining was intensive. He reported that over sixty thousand people were working the mines.
The men would do the digging and then the women and children would carry the hunks of diamond material in baskets to be washed and sorted. The fortress where this was located in India was called Kollur, near Golconda.
In 1725, diamonds were discovered also in Brazil. A Portuguese adventurer named Bernado da Fonseca Lobo, found this new source of diamonds. He had originally come to Brazil for gold.
Samples of the diamond looking stones he had acquired from gold prospectors there were sent to his home country of Portugal. They were indeed found to be diamonds. The town of Tejeco where the diamonds were found, was renamed Diamantina, by wholesale tiara of Portugals king.
The gold prospectors were soon to be removed and only royal favorites had permission to excavate the diamonds. Of coarse the gold prospectors found ways to illegally mine, and eventually Portugals king decided to lease diamond beds to them for periods of time and share the profits.
As in so many instances in history, slaves were forced to do much of the back breaking labor that would make others rich. It is said that slaves could earn their freedom by finding stones of 17.5 carets or more.
Diamonds have since been discovered in many other parts of the world, but these were the beginnings of a diamond market that is still thriving today more than ever.
The diamonds mines in India were alluvial, meaning the ore was taken from live river beds, or in river beds that dried up thousands of years ago. Some of the great diamonds to be found in India were The Great Mogul, The Regent, and the Kooh-i-Noor.
The Nizam was one of the last great diamond finds in India. It was found in 1835 and weighed an astounding 440 carets. Today the accessory wholesale mines of India are all but exhausted. Further exploration was done there to locate new deposits and at least one was found, but yielded no significant amount.
