Vanessa Herry, age 12, of Huntsville, Alabama, for her question:
Where did the Hope Diamond originate?
Naturally, one would not hope to find a gem of this sort on a rock hunting field trip. As a matter of fact, such big brilliant blue sparklers are not expected to turn up in the richest diamond mines. The origin of the Hope Diamond is somewhat uncertain and so are parts of its dramatic history.
It so happens that you and some 200,000,000 other people share equal ownership of the famous Hope Diamond. It is part of America's national treasure in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. Its weight is 44 1/4 carats, which makes it too bulky for a finger ring and its former owners had it tastefully set as a jeweled pendant. Smaller, glittering "white" diamonds are mounted to form its necklace and are set in a circle around its sparkling blue,eye. When it was last sold, the Hope Diamond fetched a price of $700,000. But its marketing days now appear to be over. So, apparently, are its travels and all the other dramatic events of its known and unknown history.
The famous gem gets its name from H. T. Hope, a jewel fancier in the 19th century, paid 18,000 English pounds for a collection of assorted stones. Among them was this big diamond of vivid blue. A gem of such rare color and quality should have had a history, but where it came from nobody knew. This mystery added to its fame and the so called Hope diamond was resold in 1906 and again in 1909, each time for a bigger price. Naturally everyone was curious about the famous beauty and experts set about tracing back its mysterious past.
All the clues suggest that the Hope diamond originated in India. Most likely,. it was unearthed from masses of sandstone and conglomerate minerals along the eastern side of India's Deccan Plateau. We know for a fact that a French traveler named Jean Baptiste Tavernier visited mines in this area during the mid 1600s. And Tavernier was a trader who specialized in selling valued Indian diamonds to the rich courts of Europe. His diaries describe one as a whopping uncut stone of 112 carats. It was cut and polished to a dazzling jewel of about 67 carats with a rare and remarkable deep blue color. The big blue stone was sold to the court of France. Later, during the French Revolution, it was stolen with other crown jewels and never recovered. Most likely, the rare beauty was„ zo well known that no thief could sell it without pointing a guilty finger at himself.
After almost a century, the smaller diamond of remarkable blue appeared in the Hope collection from who knows where. Two smaller diamonds of the same unforgettable color have since joined private collections. Experts suspect that all these blue eyed beauties were cut from the same larger stone, most likely the stolen French jewel. If all these clues are correct, our Hope Diamond originated in the Kollar mines in India. Tavernier reports that when he visited them some of these mines had been worked for about a century. Hence the big, blue diamond in the rough most likely was unearthed at some unknown date between 1550 and 1650.
The mines of India have yielded some of the world's biggest clear white diamonds and a multitude of tiny colored diamonds, but very few large colored stones. And rarity, naturally, adds to the cash value of a precious gem. An American collector, Harry Winston, paid $700,000 for the Hope Diamond. Then, in November of 1958, he donated the big beauty to the Smithsonian Institution. It is guarded as part of our national treasure.