
In 1869, it was picked up by a shepherd boy on the Zandfontein Farm near the Orange River. Schalk van Niekerk, a young farmer who three years earlier had had a stroke of luck with a "pebble" that proved to be a 21.25-carat diamond (the Eureka Diamond), traded the young native for the stone, giving him five hundred sheep, ten oxen, and a horse. It was practically all of Niekerk's possessions, but a few days later in Hopetown he sold the rough crystal for $56,000.
Later, the stone was purchased by Louis Hond, a diamond cutter, and fashioned to what was described as an "oval, three-sided brilliant" and was sold to the Earl of Dudley for $125,000 (or about £25,000). The Countess Dudley wore it as a hair ornament, surrounded by 95 smaller diamonds.
The diamond now resides in the Natural History Museum in London and is part of their permanent collection, donated to them by a private collector who bought it in 1973 in Geneva for FS 1.6 million ($225,300).
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