Excerpt from LOST TREASURES- TRUE STORIES OF DISCOVERY
by Larry Verstraete
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Home Run
In 1996, when schoolboy Chris Scala chose baseball great Babe Ruth as his subject for a school dress-up project, his great-grandmother, Viola Bevilaque, found something to go with Chris’s outfit — a long-forgotten ball with Ruth’s signature on it. The baseball had been stored in a box in her attic along with other things belonging to her husband, who had been given the ball in 1927. An inscription inside the box proved that the baseball was the very first one hit by Ruth for a home run in Yankee Stadium. In 1998 the ball sold at auction for US$126,500.
Dirty Glass?
On January 17, 1934, Johannes Makani was washing a bucketful of gravel near a mine at Elandsfontein, South Africa, when he spotted something unusual in the rubble. The rock was caked with dirt, but it was distinctly different in shape and colour from the others.
After scrubbing the object, Makani immediately recognized it for the treasure it was. Throwing his hat in the air, he shouted, “Oh god, I have found it!” It took Makani awhile to convince Johannes Jonker, his employer that the chunk of dirty-looking “glass” was actually an ice-white diamond the size of an egg. At the time of its discovery, the Jonker Diamond was the world’s fourth largest at 726 carats.
Since then the diamond has changed hands several times. In 1977 it sold in Hong Kong for an estimated £1.25 million.
From Lost Treasures- True Stories of Discovery. Copyright © 2006 Larry Verstraete. All rights reserved.
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