John Thorburn
Lifespan: 1838 England - 1908 Johannesburg [70] Occupation: Bookbinder (England), waste paper dealer (England), adventurer, trader, prospector, politician. John Thorburn (seated).¹ Timeline Some dates are estimates. Early life John Thorburn was born into a family of bookbinders in Westminster, England. At the age of about 16, he traveled to Newfoundland before settling in the American South during the 1860s, where he worked as a planter and slave merchant prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. When the American Civil War broke out, he served as a soldier and apparently witnessed the historic naval battle between the world's first modern ironclads, the Monitor and the Merrimac . Photo by A. Debenham (n.d.) The global rush for wealth eventually drew him to the Eastern Transvaal in c.1869, where he tried his luck at both the Wet and Dry Diamond Diggings. He made a small fortune on the Kimberley diamond diggings in the eighteen-seventies (by 1876 he was located there). Then in ...