Seas of Fortune(38)

“You want me to live alone in the wilderness, tending my mill by this yet-to-be-located watermill of yours? You will keep me supplied with food and lumber, come instantly to my aid if the Indians attack?”

David started to answer, then thought better of it.

Zager looked triumphant. “I thought not.”

David rubbed his chin. “You said, the ‘most efficient’ wheel. So what are the alternatives?”

Zager said nothing.

“Well?”

Zager sighed. “I suppose we could make do with an undershot wheel. If we must. It just needs flowing water, to strike the floats.” He spat. “But this river is rather slow-flowing. We won’t get a lot of power out of it.”

“Then we will find you a livelier river. Or we will have to bring you oxen, or donkeys. And, until then, if you don’t want to hassle with an undershot wheel, you can saw the old-fashioned way, in a pit with a platform over it.”

“Hmmph. At least as the senior man, I’d be at the top of the pit, where I can breathe. But all right, we’ll try the undershot wheel. Once I figure out where the current is strongest . . . probably by falling in and drowning.”

* * *

Heinrich Bender, formerly of Heidelberg, was clutching a piece of sketch paper in one hand, and a rock in the other. “Frau Vorst, Frau Vorst, we found it!”

Maria looked up. “Bauxite, you mean?” The sailors and colonists were searching creek beds and other rock exposures in the vicinity of old-time-line Paranam, some miles south of Gustavus, because the up-time encyclopedias had said that bauxite was mined there. Maria had divided them into groups, and given each a “wanted” sketch showing what bauxite looked like. Maria, who was an experienced artist, had made the drawings back in Grantville, basing them on photographs in various up-time field guides owned by the school libraries.

Heinrich nodded.

“Let’s see.” He handed her the paper and the rock. Maria compared her sketch with the specimen. The sketch was deliberately done in charcoal, to avoid misleading the searchers—bauxite could be white, yellow, red, or brown. This specimen was red.

For bauxite, the telltale sign was its “raisin pie” texture. Okay, the up-timers called it “pisolitic.” Yep, the pisolites—little pea-sized concretions—were present in Heinrich’s find.

Heinrich was fidgeting with excitement. Maria wasn’t surprised; David had promised a bounty to the first person to find bauxite. “Well, is it bauxite? Is it?”

“Looks promising, bear with me.” Maria tried scratching the rock with her fingernail. She brushed away the white powder to make sure that it was the rock, not her fingernail, which had succumbed. Yes, there was the scratch. That meant that on the Mohs’ scale of hardness, the rock was less than 2.5. Bauxite had a hardness ranging from 1, like talc, to 3, like calcite. A bit harder than most clays.

What else? Right, specific gravity. She hefted it; it seemed to have about the right density, two or two-and-a-half times that of water. She could measure it when she went back on board the yacht, but clearly it was in the ballpark.

“Good work, Heinrich,” Maria said. “Show me where you found it.”

“It was over here . . . no, over there.”

Maria saw a second rock, much like the first. She called over some more of the colonists, and set them to work digging test holes near the find, so she would know how deep the formation was. And then she wrote a note to David, and sent Heinrich off with it to claim his reward.

* * *

The formation turned out to be enormous in extent; miles wide, and usually just a few feet below the surface. In places, powdered bauxite, or so Maria presumed it to be, actually turned the soil to a dark purple-red, as if someone had soaked it in beet juice.

Out came the shovels, the pickaxes, and the wheelbarrows. For now, all they did was collect the bauxite. If the market for bauxite took off—meaning, someone succeeded in duplicating the Hall-Heroult process of making aluminum—then they would see about converting bauxite to alumina right in Suriname. Four tons of bauxite made two of alumina. That would reduce transportation costs—if the necessary reagents could be produced by the colony.

The Company even hoped that one day it could harvest the power of the cataracts of the Suriname river to produce electricity. If so, then they might actually be able to produce aluminum locally. Two tons of alumina, with great gobs of electricity and a dash of cryolite to reduce the melting point of the alumina, would make one ton of aluminum.

For that matter, she had been told that alumina made a great refractory. So even without cryolite, the bauxite might come in handy.