Welcome to Prime Factors where we review each UK Prime Minister from Robert Walpole to Keir Starmer. We discuss their biography, highs and lows, and then rate them on a scale designed by a 10-year old before awarding the ultimate prize: Are they ”Known” or an ”Ice Cream Cone”?
9.1B - Smuggling the Pitt Diamond (Bonus Scene)
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9.1B - Smuggling the Pitt Diamond (Bonus Scene)
Episode Transcript
Abram: Welcome to Prime Factors. This week, deleted scene.
Parliament: Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray!
Abram: Hello and welcome back to Prime Factors. I'm Abram and I'm here with my dad. We usually review all the British prime ministers from Robert Walpole to Keir Starmer.
Joe: But this is not a usual episode. No. We recently teamed up with Palle Bo from RadioGuru to produce William Pitt, Part 1. And we hope many more. In writing that script, I initially penned a "Picture This" that followed the story of the Pitt Diamond. It was a great scene, but it kept us from getting to the subject of our episode, and so I cut it.
Joe: Palle yanked that scene right out of my discard pile and did a fantastic job with it. I am pleased to be able to present it to you as a short bonus episode.
Joe: We're still finding our footing and our voice. Please drop us a line on BlueSky, or wherever it is you find your podcasts.
Abram: And don't forget that you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, www.primefactorspodcast.com, also on Facebook and BlueSky. If you enjoy listening, please like, subscribe, comment, and review.
Joe: Content warning: it contains some light body horror, so turn off now if you're squeamish. Don't listen to it right before bed.
Picture This
Joe: Okay, before we begin, let me state that this story is a legend. I'm going to tell you a common version of the story, but scholars think that this was at least partially made up — for reasons you will understand in a bit.
Joe: It's dark. And it's been dark for a very long time. You're an inanimate object, so you don't really mind.
Joe: Eventually, you hear scraping sounds. First just distant rumbles underground, but gradually growing nearer. Eventually, you can work out voices. Some commanding, some complaining, some whimpering in agony. The voices and the scraping sounds get closer and closer, louder and louder, until —
Joe: The ground above you moves and the sky explodes with light.
Joe: Our camera pans out and we're in a giant open-pit mine. Hundreds of workers — bond laborers and enslaved prisoners of war, including both men and women and some children — dig deep in cone-shaped pits while their overseers, armed with long sticks, stand nearby. It's a hellscape of broken ground and broken people.
Joe: At the bottom of these pits, other slaves gather up and ferry away baskets of gravel and earth. Our view shifts as we move to follow one of those baskets, as a slave woman carries it up and out of the earthworks, down a long dirty road, and towards the Krishna River.
Joe: As the baskets arrive at the river, we watch as other slaves, perhaps an easier job, pan through the loose gravel looking for one thing in particular: diamonds. There aren't many. When they are found, they are small and uncut and must be immediately turned over to one of the overseers, all watching this group while they toil on the riverbank.
Joe: But we're zooming in now on one man in particular. He's weak and dehydrated, not unlike every other slave here. It's hard to see it in his bearing, but he was once a soldier. He and many others were captured by the Mughal Empire when they conquered this region a short time ago. He still has an open leg wound, festering, red, and infected.
Joe: The man's eyes widen when he spots it in his pan, the largest diamond that he, or almost anyone else, has ever seen. It was as large as an egg and nearly mistaken for gravel. With a flash of intuition and hope, the former soldier snatches the diamond and hides it where he knows no one would look.
Abram: Here?
Joe: No, Abram, not there.
Abram: Here?
Joe: No, Abram, not there.
Abram: Here?
Joe: Not there either.
Abram: Here?
Joe: He hides a diamond, somehow — and I'm not sure of the logistics of this — in his leg wound. To save my own lunch, I'm going to say that the screen turns black at this point. Maybe slightly reddish.
Joe: When we can see again, we're in a torchlit alleyway. The former soldier has been running despite the impossible pain in his leg. He gave slip to the guards at the end of the shift before stealing a fishing boat, and escaping down the river. He drifted for days, 80 miles, before ditching the boat just outside the city of Machilipatnam on the coast, where he can just make out the masts of British trading ships in the harbor.
Joe: He found a British man, and he's haggling with him, pleading for his life. The diamond, he thinks, is his ticket out of there. He offers it to the man, a captain of a nearby ship, in trade. All he wants is his freedom and a 50-50 split of the profit.
Joe: The British captain appears to consider this offer for a moment before drawing his pistol and shooting the poor man in the street. He pockets a diamond himself and escapes quickly into the dark streets before anyone catches on. Fade to black again.
Joe: We can see again. The diamond is being placed on a table in the back room of a British-run pub, a saloon near the shore where British sailors and merchants have a small taste of home. Money is exchanged. The diamond is passed.
Joe: The scene plays out again and again before it ends up in the hands of one Thomas Pitt. He offers 48,000 pagodas, the local currency, or something like 20,000 British pounds.
Abram: Aren't those buildings?
Joe: They are buildings, but there's apparently a very similarly named currency.
Abram: Uh-huh.
Joe: He tells the merchant that it's a steal for that price. Anyone holding onto a diamond like this, their lives are in danger. The merchant accepts and leaves through the back door.
Joe: Here, finally, we're on some solid ground. It's 1701, and we know for sure that Governor Thomas Pitt now owns that diamond.
Joe: We next see Thomas and his young son, just a teen, in their home. Carefully, they use a spoon to hollow out a spot in the bottom of Robert's boot. The heel seems unusually thick, but hopefully no one will notice that the teen is a little bit taller than he should be. They carefully place a diamond into the boot and replace the leather before putting the boot on the young Robert's foot. He practices walking on it to look natural.
Joe: Robert embraces his father one last time on the dock as he boards The Loyal Cooke to England with his hidden prize. When he gets there, and he will, he will have smuggled out of India the largest single treasure perhaps in the history of British India. And without a single soul knowing that this diamond, which will soon be called the Pitt Diamond, was on the move.
Joe: Robert would have the diamond cut and sold to the French monarchy, making the Pitt family fortune. We're going to imagine a nine-year-old William Pitt watching over his father and grandfather as they make the fated transaction, but that's well in the future for us.
Joe: This story is partially true and partially a legend, but one thing is for sure. The Pitt family, including Robert and his eventual son William's fortune, was tied inextricably to the British Empire. Were they legitimate businessmen, or were they robbing a nation of its treasures?
Joe: I'll leave that question to you.
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