Nature's Evil

When the Spanish captured native towns in the New World, they did find gold. The natives had forged nuggets and accumulated sacred pieces of metal for centuries. The continent was engulfed by gold fever. Somewhere to the south of the isthmus between the Americas lay the fabled Eldorado. In 1545 a native climbed a mountain peak in the Inca capital of Cusco in order to plunder an ancient tomb. This was how the silver deposit of Potosí was discovered; nowhere else in the world was silver so near the surface. The Spanish sent hordes of ‘Indians’ there, and soon Potosí was bigger than Seville. As in the Alps, smelting furnaces and waterwheels were established next to the mines. The natives carried supplies – timber, firewood, food, lead and mercury – up steps carved into the rockface. Supplying the world with silver, Potosí was the source of untold riches; but this town was nothing like Eldorado. To the inevitable smoke, dirt and slag heaps of a mining town was added the discipline of a military base. But Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor, gave Potosí a coat of arms on which was inscribed ‘Treasure of the world, king of all mountains and the envy of all kings’. 11

Back home in the Pyrenees, the Spanish had been working mines since Roman times, but using their skills in the Andes was not easy. They brought German masters to drain the bogs around Potosí and dig canals and reservoirs. More than a hundred watermills stood on two dozen dams, crushing ore; one dam burst in 1624 and hundreds of people perished. Natives worked down the mines, but black slaves were also brought there; the daily norm for each miner was to raise half a ton of ore. There were so few Spaniards there that the ‘Indians’ did almost everything – dragged loads, went down the mines and stoked the furnaces. So experts and managers who had mastered the secrets of metal emerged from the native population. The division of labour along ethnic lines, usual for raw materials economies, recurred in the division of property rights. The Spanish owned the mines in Potosí, while Native Americans owned the furnaces. The alchemical methods of metallurgy such as cupellation and liquation easily combined with the indigenous culture. In the same way as the Alpine magicians used folk magic to master the smelting of ores, the Native American metallurgists learnt this art with the help of their shamanic traditions. The natives underwent the typical process of class stratification: the furnace owners and master smelters got rich even quicker than the Spanish, but the workers died out or ran away from Potosí. The viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, introduced the system of mita : all districts of Peru had to send their indigenous people for compulsory service in the mines. As the mines got deeper, the expenses grew, productivity fell, and the shortage of manpower became even more acute. Then a German chemist who had studied in Italy invented a new method of processing ore. Realising the alchemists’ ideas, he mixed pulverised ore with mercury in a salt solution. The silver formed an amalgam with mercury, the mercury was driven off by evaporation, and pure silver remained at the bottom of the vessel. In the old Spanish mines of Rio Tinto, the German used his method to extract silver even from slag heaps. In Potosí, many old mines got a second wind. Having created enormous wealth with his discovery, this chemist failed to get rich, and even his real name remains unknown: he enters into history only as Maestro Lorenzo. Thanks to him, the production of silver in Spanish America in 1550 equalled that of Europe and continued to grow. Mines in the German and Austrian lands were closing. The guilds were powerless to stop this process; ironically, they could only make the European mines even less competitive.

In America, the new method was given the innocent-sounding name of the ‘patio process’. The natives poured mercury into stone baths filled with brine and crushed ore, then churned this poisonous concoction with their bare hands; later this deadly task was assigned to tethered mules. One and a half kilos of mercury were needed to produce a kilo of silver. Since mercury was thought to be unavailable in America, it was brought from Spain. As it happened, the mercury mines of Almadén were owned by Fugger. Emperor Charles V declared a monopoly on mercury, adding to Fugger’s profits. However, mercury deposits were later found not far from Potosí; again, the Spanish owed this discovery to the Native Americans who used mercury dyes in their textiles. 12