Adamantia. The Truth about the South African Diamond Fields

Title continues: "Or, A Vindication of the Right of the Orange Free State to that Territory, and an Analysis of British Diplomacy and Aggression Which Has Resulted in its Illegal Seizure by the Governor of the Cape of Good Hope." An unusual 19th-century Englishman, Lindley was sympathetic to the causes of other nations and races, even Britain's enemies. A merchant ship officer, he took the part of the Chinese in the opium wars and wrote a treatise on the Abyssinian War from the Abyssinian point of view. Although the Orange Free State developed into a politically and economically successful republic, it experienced chronic conflict with the British until it was finally annexed as the Orange River Colony in 1900. Lindley's comments are blunt; he has written this book to "inform the British Parliament and the British Public how their Government has robbed the Orange Free State ... of its diamond fields" (p. iii).