Gold in the Search for the Americas

J. R. Fisher

Department of Modern History, University of Liverpool, England

Gold is a metal most excellent above all othersand of gold treasures are formed, and he whohas it makes and accomplishes whatever he wishesin the world and finally uses it to send souls intoParadise.

The meaning of these words of ChristopherColumbus hardly requires explanation, notwith,--standing his rather obscure reference to religion.Although the Genoese discoverer was motivated tosome degree, like the thousands of men who were tofollow him to the New World in the century after1492, by the desire to carry Christianity to the heathen,his primary purpose was to seek the precious metalwith which a man could accomplish whatever hewished.

Long before Columbus began to formulate hisidea that the legendary Cipangu (Japan) and Cathay(China) of the Venetian traveller Marco Polo mightbe reached by sailing west across the Atlantic,Portuguese explorers, inspired by Prince Henry theNavigator between 1419 and 1460, had been probingdown the African coast in search of a sea-route toAsla. As early as 1442, with the settlement of theAzores, Madeira, and the Cape Verde Islandsalready behind them, these skilful navigators wereable to bring back from West Africa Touareg goldobtained by barter. It is not known how much goldreached Lisbon in the years which followed, but thevolume was sufficient to enable the mint to resumeissue in 1457 of a fine gold coin, the cruzado; in thefirst half of the century Portugal had been one of thefew states in Europe without a gold currency.

After the capture of Constantinopie by the Turks in1453 the traditional Levantine trade route which

Among the complex motives that inspired Columbus in hislong endeavours to secure financial support for his proposedvoyage to "The Indies" the prospect of finding gold wasprominent. When Icing Ferdinand and Queen Isahella ofSpain finally agreed to sponsor the expedition in 1492 theyprovided him with a Book of Privileges setting out histitles as Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy and Governorof the lands to he discovered and according him one-tenttiof the hoped-for gold and other treasureCourtesy of the Naval Museum, Genoa

supplied Europe with Asian silks, spices and gold,together witti, some Sudanese gold, became moreuncertain and the quest for an alternative avenue tothe east became even more urgent, despite the factthat the shortage of buision was alleviated byPortugal's West African supplies and by the revivalof silver mining in Germany after 1470. Convincedthat their African route was the true one, thePortuguese turned down Columbus' proposals whenhe first went to Lisbon in 1484. But Isabella ofCastile, after a long delay, reacted more positively.It was thus on behalf of Castile that Columbus setout westward on August 3rd, 1492, armed with a let-ter of introduction to the Great Khan and a patentgranting him, among nnany other privileges, one-tenthof the profits from all the precious metals and stonesthat he might acquire.

This first voyage took Columbus to the Bahamas,Cuba, and Hispaniola (modern Haiti). Although hewas to continue to insist until his death in 1506 thatthe lands he had found lay off the coast of Asia--

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Melting gold in Central America in thesixteenth century. A Franciscan Friar,Bernardino de Sahagun, lived for mant'years among the natives and encouragedthem to describe their ways of life andthe story of the Spanish conquest,setting it down in the language of theMexican valley with a Spanish trans-lation and illustrating his vork, TheGeneral History of the Things of NewSpain, completed in 13 volumes inabout 1565, with a great number ofminiaturen such as this. The use of theblow pipe and of a pottery crucible onshort feet corresponds with a laterdescription by Sir Walter Italeigh of "agreat earthen potte with holes roundabout it, and when they had mingled thegold and copper Logether, they fastenedcanes to the holes, and so with thebreath of men they increased the firetill the mettell ran, then they cast it intomoulds of stone and clan"

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despite Amerigo Vespucci's denionstration that, infact, they lay off a new continent the j ournal that hekept makes it abundantly clear that, following hislandfall in the Bahamas on October 13th, the GreatKhan was virtually forgotten as the search for goldbecame paramount. His entry for that very day,describing his first encounter with the natives, tells us:

"And 1 was attentive and sought to learn whetherthey had gold and 1 saw that some of them ware asmall piece suspended from a hole they have in thenone: and I was able to understand by signs that,going to the south . ,, , there was a King who hadlarge versels of gold and who had a great deal of it."

The Asian mainland, Columbus believed, lay furtherto the west, but, following receipt of this information,he "resolved to go to the south-west, to seek the goldand precious stones'S.. The island of Cuba, which hefound by taling this new course, proved, in fact, to besomething of a disappointment, but prospectsbrightened on the north coast of Hispaniola. Therethe explorers not only obtained gold nose-plugs andbracelets from the natives but also discovered a riverwhich yielded sand "all full of gold, to such aneitent that it was a marvel, although very small".Some grafins, however, were "as large as lentils", andColumbus predictably nareed the source of thiswealth Rio del Oro, River of Gold.

Following further discovertes of placer gold by aparty sent to the interior of Hispaniola, Columbus setout for home to inform Ferdinand and Isabella, theSpanish sovereigns, of his and their good fortune.

The key sentence in his first letter to them is thefollowing:

"In this Espanola ... is the best district for thegold mines and for all the trade bath with thiscontinent and with that over there belonging to theGreat Khan, where there will be great trade andtrofit."

His reference to "mines" was strictly inaccurate, for itappears that all pre-Columbian gold throughout theAmericas was obtained from placer deposits, but thegold objects which he was able to display persuadedthe crown that Hispaniola could rapidly be turned intoa self-sufficient, gold-producing colony. By Septem--ber 1493, only six months after his return, Columbuswas ready to set out again with no less than twelvehundred settlers, including not only artisans andfarmers but also miners.

For the next two decades the Spanish conquistadorsrampaged through the Antilles in their search forgold. The crown made half hearted attempts toprotect the native population by encouraging theemigration of peasant families who might devotethemselves to agriculture, but without notablesuccess. The reason was aptly summed up byHernan Cortés' reply to an official who offered himland when he reached Hispaniola in 1504: "But 1same to get gold", declared the future conqueror ofMexico, "not to tilt the soit like a peasant";.

Within three decades of the island's discovery theexploitation and abuse of the native populationwhich this quest involved had wrought a demo-

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This rather imaginative representation, hy the sixteenth century Fiemish author and engraverTheodor de Bry, shows Indians busily mining gold in Hispaniola and bringing their output toa group of Spanish soldiers. In fact the gold in the newly discovered Americas was virtuallyall obtained from ailuviaa deposits in the river beds

graphic catastrophe which, in its turn, stifled econo-mic activity until Negro slaves began to be introducedin large numbers in the second half of the sixteenthcentury. In an attempt to redress the consequentialdecline in gold production the Emperor Charles Varranged in 1529 for the Welser Company of Augs-burg to send eighty Silesian miners to Hispaniola.Although this particular venture appears to haveended in failure, with heavy mortality among theminers, it is significant as the first known attempt toexploit the expertise of German miners in theAmericas. As Georgius Agricola's famous work,De Re Metallica (1 556) proudly illus trates, theGermans had been in the forefront of the recoveryof European gold mining in Bohemia and Silesia inthe fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The greatAugsburg banking families of the Welsers, Fuggers,and Hochstetters, moreover, had been prominent formany years in the mining of silver and base metals invarious parts of southern and eastern Germany,partly as a result of a tendency to accept miningconcessions as security for Joans. In attempting toexploit their experience in both mining and trade,therefore—German involvement in overseas eco--nomic activity as a whole was at a height in 1524 to38—Charles V was both showing good sense and, aswe shall see, setting a precedent which Elizabeth I ofEngland and her ministers were to take note oflater in the century.

The Spanish quest for gold in the New World wasfacilitated by the fact that the metal had no monetaryvalue for the natives. Even in Inca Peru, where itsaffinity with the sun—gold was "the sweat of the sun"—gave it a religious significance, it was not used fortrade. The mutual incredulity of Spaniards andnatives at their respective attitudes towards gold iscaptured by Peter Martyr's account of Columbus'second voyage, published in 1530. He teils us:

"One old man only asked a little belt in return fortwo grains of gold weighing an ounce. Seeing that theSpaniards admired the size of these grains, andquite amazed at their astonishment, he explained totheet by signs that they were of no value ... It isnow known that the islanders set no value on goldas such; they only prize it when it has been workedby a craftsman into same farm which pleases them."

Por the Spaniard, however, as for virtually allEuropeans in the sixteenth century, gold objects, nomatter how beautiful, had no aesthetic significance.Gold represented power : power for the adventurerto return home to a life of luxury, power for themonarch—from 1504 the Spanish sovereign took afifth, or "quint", of all American treasure for hinlself—to wage an ambitious foreign policy. whienAlbrecht Durer saw the treasure of the Aztec emperorMontezuma on display in Brussels in 1520 he judgedit to be "more beautiful than the things of whichr iiracles are made" ., Every single piece, however, wasmelted down.

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It is possible to relate fluctuations in the remit-tances of treasure from the New World to Spain tothe various stages of the Spanish conquest. Ship-ments reached an early peak in 1511--I5, followingthe penetration of Panama and Costa Rica, where thenatives had for many centuries been producingpendants by the method of lost-wax casting. Theconquest of Mexico in 1519-21 provided a furtherboost, as a vast quantity of accumulated gold objectsfell into the hands of Cortés and his men.

A decade later the conquest of Peru by FranciscoPizarro brought the third great gold-producing areaof ancient America firmly under Spanish control.Native craftsmen there had been working gold for atleast two thousand years, and were masters of ad-vanced hollow-core casting and of decorative tech-niques involving the use of soldering.

Most of the gold objects which the Spaniardsfound in Peru were, in fact, not strictly "Inca",but the products of Barlier civilisations, such as theChimu, which had recently been absorbed into theempire ruled frons Cuzco. Whereas most earlyMexican goldware did not survive the conquest, aconsiderable number of Peruvian pieces did escapebecause they remained hidden in desert burial sitesuntil this century. Those items which did fall intothe hands of Pizarro and his followers, no matter howbeautiful, were simply melted down : they includedthe gold fitter of the Inca emperor, Atahualpa, andthe lifesize gold and silver animals and plants of thesacred garden of the sun-god in Cuzco. The lootingof the gold of Peru by Pizarro was facilitated by thevain attempt of Atahualpa to purchase his freedom byoffering to fi11 a certain room with gold and twice overwith silver.

The melting down of this ransom on nine forgescontinued for four months in 1533 and produced forPizarro's 168 men no less than 13,420 pounds of

22- carat gold and 26,000 pounds of good silver.Even the simple foot soldiers each received forty-fivepounds of gold and ninety of silver. Many retiredimmediately to Spain to spend the rest of their Jivesin luxury, and, by their example, to entouragethousands more to set out for the New World tomake their fortunes.

By the end of the 1530s the more far-sightedsettlers were turning from the simple looting of ad i minishing stock of native gold objects to mining.Both Peru and, to a lessen degree, Mexico were to be--come significant gold-producers by the middle of thesixteenth century, as were Chile and New Granada(modern Colombia). But, following the discovery offabulously rich silver deposits at Potosi (in modernBolivia) in 1545 and at Zacatecas (Mexico) in 1548,it became clear that silver mining was to become thebasis of economic life in Spanish America. Therelative importante of the two metals is starklyindicated by the estimate that between 1500 and 1650registered trade alone conveyed 181 tons of gold and16,000 tons of silver to Spain from her Americancolonies.

Because of its greater value and its legendaryappeal, however, gold---or, to be more precise, thequest for gold—continued for many more decades todraw Spaniards deeper into the Americas. Muchof the present-day territory of the United StatesSouth-west and South-east was traversed in 1540--43by the expeditions of Hernando de Soto and FranciscoVázquez de Coronado as th.ey searched for the metal.Coronado penetrated as far as eastern Kansas beforefinally accepting that the legendary Seven Cities ofCibola were merely the humble dwellings of thePueblo Indians, and Soto's exploration of Florida asfar north as the Savannah River also proved fruitless.Thereafter, although retaining Florida for strategiereasons, Spain left the rest of the eastern seaboard of

The forin in which gold from theAmericas was shipped to Spain. Thislarge disc shows the circular RoyalScals which were stamped after theRoyal Fifth had heen paid, the reet.angular mark with snx letters denotingthe place where it was cast, and, inRoman numerals, the gold content ofthe alloy in quilates (carats) andgranos (grains). This disc, only 153carats fine, was recently recovered fromthe wreek of a Spanish Galleon, NuestraSefiora de Atocha, which sank in ahurricane off Florida in 1622

Photograph by Jim Leggett

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A track chart of the Atlantic Ocean prepared in 1588 by Baptista Bragio, an Italian cartographer living in London, frominformation Biven to him hy Francis Drake after his raid on the Spanish Indies. It also records Drake's visit to Roanoke, offthe coast of wliat is now North Carolina, to take off Raleigh's colonists and bring them back to England after their unsuccess-ful search for gold in the island Courtesy of the Paul Mellon Collection, Upperville, Virginia

North America to the attention of other nations.The challenge was taken up primarily by England,

and there is abundant evidence that the hope of find-ing gold was one of the main considerations that laybehind the increasing involvement of Elizabethanexplorers and adventurers with the new continent.The significance which Elizabeth I and her ministersattached to mining and national self-sufcieney inbath precious and base metals was evident from theverg beginning of her reign, when German tech-nologists, brought into the country originally torefine its base coinage, were encouraged to prospectfor minerals in England itself. Daniel Hochstetter, amaster miner and refiner from Augsburg, andThomas Thurland, an Englishman, found rich copperore containing silver at Keswick, in Cumberland, in1564-5. The outcome was the incorporation in 1568of the famous Company of the Mines Royal toexploit domestic urineral resources. Although amajority of its shareholders were English, control ofthe mining and refining operations was in the handsof German specialists led by Hochstetter. Cumber--

land remained the centre of operations, but mineswere also opened in Wales and Cornwall, and aDutch shareholder, Cornelius de Vos, was involvedin gold mining at Crawford Moor on the RiverClyde in Scotland.

It was generally recognised, however, that theprospects of large-scale gold production at homewere remote. America, on the other hand, seemed tooffer a much more attractive prospect, particularlysince the expertise of the Germans might be used toadvantage there. The first significant involvementarose out of the voyage which Martin Frobisher madein 1576 in search of a Northwest Passage to Asia (andits gold), for he returned to England from BaffinIsiand witti, samples of a glittering black rock,probably marcasite, which he believed to be gold ore.The German scientist Burchard Kranisch, whoearlier in his career had smelted lead in Derbyshireand silver in Cornwall, confirmed this opinion. Itseems that for reasons which are unclear he "salted"melts of the ore with gold and silver coins of therealm. Frobisher brought back no less than two

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hundred tons of "ore" from a second voyage in 1577.It was only when he returned home a third time froma major expedition carrying Cornish miners that hediscovered his error.

The powerful clique of adventurers and entre-preneurs, led by Richard Hakluyt and Sir HumphreyGilbert, which was emerging in London to promoteschemes for English colonisation in North America,was not deterred by this setback. Gilbert himselfsailed in June 1583 to explore the southern shores ofNew England with a party which included, accordingto the narrative of Edward Hayes, "the minerall manand refiner ... a Saxon borne, honest and religious,named Daniel". They went first to Newfoundland,which Gilbert formally annexed, and there Daniel,Hayes tells us:

"after search brought at first some sort of Ore,seeming rather to be yron then other metaal. Thenext time he found Ore, which with no smalt shewof contentment he delivered unto the General, usingprotestation, that if silver were the thing whichmight satisfie the Generall & his followers, there itwas, advising him to leek no further."

Shortly afterwards "our Saxon refiner and Discovererof inestimable riches" and his ore were lost in a ship-wreck Gilbert, too, perished later on the voyage-and, despite the efforts of Hayes, plans for the settle-ment of Newfoundland and New England weredeferred in favour of attempts further south, inVirginia.

Sir Walter Raleigh, like his half brother Gilbert,whose patent he took over after the latter's death,clearly hoped to find gold in North America. Anony-mous notes written for his guidance as he preparedfor the expedition which was to found the firstsettlement on Roanoke Island in 1585 advised lijm:

"An alcamist is not Impertinent, to trye themetaylls that maybe discouerd and ... sum of yemyners of Cornwell ..."

We know that this advice was heeded, for variousaccounts of the colony refer to the presence of amineralogist who was clearly Joachim Gans, a Jew,born in Prague, who had produced an outstandingtechnical report on smelting techniques for theCompany of the Mines Royal at Keswick in 1581.Richard Hakluyt's list of colonists, published in 1589calls ham "Doughan Gannes"—it also has another"Daniel", who, it has been suggested, could havebeen Daniel Höchstetter—while the report ofRalph Lane, who was left in charge of the enterpriseby Raleigh, refers to him as "Master Yougham".Lane describes the search for gold in some detail,telling us:

"And touching the Minerall, thus doth MasterYougham affirme, that though it be but copper,seeing the Sauages are able to melt it, it is one of therichest Minerals in the worlde."

Copper, no matter how pure, was no substitute, ofcourse, for gold. Nor was the icon of which ThomasHariot, another participant, wrote in 1588:

cc. .. we found neere the water side the grounde to berockie, which by the triall of a minerali man, wasfound to hold yron richly."

The same commentator also reported finds of silver-"... we founde ... Riuers that yeelde also whytegraynes of Metaal, which is to be deerned Siluer". --which was more promising, but gold remained theprincipal objective. Despite his inevitable dis-appointment at the failure of the Roanoke colony-the settlement was abandoned in July 1556 Raleighcontinued to hope for precious metals in Virginia. Hetook care in 1589, for example, to reserve for himself,in an agreement drawn up with various merchantsfor fresh settlement:

"the fift part of al] the oare of golde, and siluer thatfrom time to time, and at all times after such dis-couerie ... shalbe there gotten and obtained ..."

In fact, the last decade of the sixteenth century sawno further English settlement in North America, as,following the attack by the Armada, energies andresources were diverted to fighting Spanish ships-and seizing their treasure—on the high seal. It wasnot until 1607 that the Jamestown colony, the firstpermanent English settlement, was established by theVirginia Company. Although its promotors and thesettlers continued to hope for gold John Smithprotested that there was "no talke, no hope, norworke, but dig gold, refine gold, load gold"—themetal simply did not materialise. The colonysurvived, however, for by 1614 its economie salvationhad arrived in a different guise, following the intro-duction of tobacco from Trinidad. By the end of thedecade 50,000 pounds of tobacco were being shippedto England each year for sale at high prices.

By the second half of the seventeenth century theEnglish settlers in both Virginia and New Englandhad reconciled themselves to making their fortunesfrom agriculture and trade rather than mining. Forthe individual and the nation the ultimate objectiveremained the possession of gold, but, as RichardHakluyt had foreseen, it was to be obtained not frommining, as in Spanish America, but from the sale ofagricultural produce and manufactured goods on theworld market. For the North American Indians thislatter course was to prove even more destructive thanthe Spanish preoccupation with mining, for they hadto be driven from their land to release it for farming.Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island,anticipated this development with his shrewdobservation:

"That God Land wilt be as great a God with usEnglish as God Gold was with the Spaniard."

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