Gold in the search for the Americas


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 others
and of gold treasures are formed, and he who
has it makes and accomplishes whatever he wishes
in the world and finally uses it to send souls into
Paradise.

The meaning of these words of Christopher
Columbus hardly requires explanation, notwith,--
standing his rather obscure reference to religion.
Although the Genoese discoverer was motivated to
some degree, like the thousands of men who were to
follow him to the New World in the century after
1492, by the desire to carry Christianity to the heathen,
his primary purpose was to seek the precious metal
with which a man could accomplish whatever he
wished.

Long before Columbus began to formulate his
idea that the legendary Cipangu (Japan) and Cathay
(China) of the Venetian traveller Marco Polo might
be reached by sailing west across the Atlantic,
Portuguese explorers, inspired by Prince Henry the
Navigator between 1419 and 1460, had been probing
down the African coast in search of a sea-route to
Asla. As early as 1442, with the settlement of the
Azores, Madeira, and the Cape Verde Islands
already behind them, these skilful navigators were
able to bring back from West Africa Touareg gold
obtained by barter. It is not known how much gold
reached Lisbon in the years which followed, but the
volume was sufficient to enable the mint to resume
issue in 1457 of a fine gold coin, the cruzado; in the
first half of the century Portugal had been one of the
few states in Europe without a gold currency.

After the capture of Constantinopie by the Turks in
1453 the traditional Levantine trade route which

Among the complex motives that inspired Columbus in his
long endeavours to secure financial support for his proposed
voyage to "The Indies" the prospect of finding gold was
prominent. When Icing Ferdinand and Queen Isahella of
Spain finally agreed to sponsor the expedition in 1492 they
provided him with a Book of Privileges setting out his
titles as Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy and Governor
of the lands to he discovered and according him one-tentti
of the hoped-for gold and other treasure
Courtesy of the Naval Museum, Genoa

supplied Europe with Asian silks, spices and gold,
together witti, some Sudanese gold, became more
uncertain and the quest for an alternative avenue to
the east became even more urgent, despite the fact
that the shortage of buision was alleviated by
Portugal's West African supplies and by the revival
of silver mining in Germany after 1470. Convinced
that their African route was the true one, the
Portuguese turned down Columbus' proposals when
he first went to Lisbon in 1484. But Isabella of
Castile, after a long delay, reacted more positively.
It was thus on behalf of Castile that Columbus set
out westward on August 3rd, 1492, armed with a let-
ter of introduction to the Great Khan and a patent
granting him, among nnany other privileges, one-tenth
of the profits from all the precious metals and stones
that he might acquire.

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

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Melting gold in Central America in the
sixteenth century. A Franciscan Friar,
Bernardino de Sahagun, lived for mant'
years among the natives and encouraged
them to describe their ways of life and
the story of the Spanish conquest,
setting it down in the language of the
Mexican valley with a Spanish trans-
lation and illustrating his vork, The
General History of the Things of New
Spain, completed in 13 volumes in
about 1565, with a great number of
miniaturen such as this. The use of the
blow pipe and of a pottery crucible on
short feet corresponds with a later
description by Sir Walter Italeigh of "a
great earthen potte with holes round
about it, and when they had mingled the
gold and copper Logether, they fastened
canes to the holes, and so with the
breath of men they increased the fire
till the mettell ran, then they cast it into
moulds of stone and clan"

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despite Amerigo Vespucci's denionstration that, in
fact, they lay off a new continent the j ournal that he
kept makes it abundantly clear that, following his
landfall in the Bahamas on October 13th, the Great
Khan was virtually forgotten as the search for gold
became paramount. His entry for that very day,
describing his first encounter with the natives, tells us:

"And 1 was attentive and sought to learn whether
they had gold and 1 saw that some of them ware a
small piece suspended from a hole they have in the
none: and I was able to understand by signs that,
going to the south . ,, , there was a King who had
large versels of gold and who had a great deal of it."

The Asian mainland, Columbus believed, lay further
to the west, but, following receipt of this information,
he "resolved to go to the south-west, to seek the gold
and precious stones'S.. The island of Cuba, which he
found by taling this new course, proved, in fact, to be
something of a disappointment, but prospects
brightened on the north coast of Hispaniola. There
the explorers not only obtained gold nose-plugs and
bracelets from the natives but also discovered a river
which yielded sand "all full of gold, to such an
eitent that it was a marvel, although very small".
Some grafins, however, were "as large as lentils", and
Columbus predictably nareed the source of this
wealth Rio del Oro, River of Gold.

Following further discovertes of placer gold by a
party sent to the interior of Hispaniola, Columbus set
out for home to inform Ferdinand and Isabella, the
Spanish sovereigns, of his and their good fortune.

The key sentence in his first letter to them is the
following:

"In this Espanola ... is the best district for the
gold mines and for all the trade bath with this
continent and with that over there belonging to the
Great Khan, where there will be great trade and
trofit."

His reference to "mines" was strictly inaccurate, for it
appears that all pre-Columbian gold throughout the
Americas was obtained from placer deposits, but the
gold objects which he was able to display persuaded
the crown that Hispaniola could rapidly be turned into
a self-sufficient, gold-producing colony. By Septem--
ber 1493, only six months after his return, Columbus
was ready to set out again with no less than twelve
hundred settlers, including not only artisans and
farmers but also miners.

For the next two decades the Spanish conquistadors
rampaged through the Antilles in their search for
gold. The crown made half hearted attempts to
protect the native population by encouraging the
emigration of peasant families who might devote
themselves to agriculture, but without notable
success. The reason was aptly summed up by
Hernan Cortés' reply to an official who offered him
land when he reached Hispaniola in 1504: "But 1
same to get gold", declared the future conqueror of
Mexico, "not to tilt the soit like a peasant";.

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

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

graphic catastrophe which, in its turn, stifled econo-
mic activity until Negro slaves began to be introduced
in large numbers in the second half of the sixteenth
century. In an attempt to redress the consequential
decline in gold production the Emperor Charles V
arranged in 1529 for the Welser Company of Augs-
burg to send eighty Silesian miners to Hispaniola.
Although this particular venture appears to have
ended in failure, with heavy mortality among the
miners, it is significant as the first known attempt to
exploit the expertise of German miners in the
Americas. As Georgius Agricola's famous work,
De Re Metallica (1 556) proudly illus trates, the
Germans had been in the forefront of the recovery
of European gold mining in Bohemia and Silesia in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The great
Augsburg banking families of the Welsers, Fuggers,
and Hochstetters, moreover, had been prominent for
many years in the mining of silver and base metals in
various parts of southern and eastern Germany,
partly as a result of a tendency to accept mining
concessions as security for Joans. In attempting to
exploit their experience in both mining and trade,
therefore—German involvement in overseas eco--
nomic activity as a whole was at a height in 1524 to
38—Charles V was both showing good sense and, as
we shall see, setting a precedent which Elizabeth I of
England and her ministers were to take note of
later in the century.

The Spanish quest for gold in the New World was
facilitated by the fact that the metal had no monetary
value for the natives. Even in Inca Peru, where its
affinity with the sun—gold was "the sweat of the sun"
—gave it a religious significance, it was not used for
trade. The mutual incredulity of Spaniards and
natives at their respective attitudes towards gold is
captured 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 for
two grains of gold weighing an ounce. Seeing that the
Spaniards admired the size of these grains, and
quite amazed at their astonishment, he explained to
theet by signs that they were of no value ... It is
now known that the islanders set no value on gold
as such; they only prize it when it has been worked
by a craftsman into same farm which pleases them."

Por the Spaniard, however, as for virtually all
Europeans in the sixteenth century, gold objects, no
matter how beautiful, had no aesthetic significance.
Gold represented power : power for the adventurer
to return home to a life of luxury, power for the
monarch—from 1504 the Spanish sovereign took a
fifth, or "quint", of all American treasure for hinlself
—to wage an ambitious foreign policy. whien
Albrecht Durer saw the treasure of the Aztec emperor
Montezuma on display in Brussels in 1520 he judged
it to be "more beautiful than the things of which
r iiracles are made" ., Every single piece, however, was
melted down.

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It is possible to relate fluctuations in the remit-
tances of treasure from the New World to Spain to
the various stages of the Spanish conquest. Ship-
ments reached an early peak in 1511--I5, following
the penetration of Panama and Costa Rica, where the
natives had for many centuries been producing
pendants by the method of lost-wax casting. The
conquest of Mexico in 1519-21 provided a further
boost, as a vast quantity of accumulated gold objects
fell into the hands of Cortés and his men.

A decade later the conquest of Peru by Francisco
Pizarro brought the third great gold-producing area
of ancient America firmly under Spanish control.
Native craftsmen there had been working gold for at
least 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 Spaniards
found in Peru were, in fact, not strictly "Inca",
but the products of Barlier civilisations, such as the
Chimu, which had recently been absorbed into the
empire ruled frons Cuzco. Whereas most early
Mexican goldware did not survive the conquest, a
considerable number of Peruvian pieces did escape
because they remained hidden in desert burial sites
until this century. Those items which did fall into
the hands of Pizarro and his followers, no matter how
beautiful, were simply melted down : they included
the gold fitter of the Inca emperor, Atahualpa, and
the lifesize gold and silver animals and plants of the
sacred garden of the sun-god in Cuzco. The looting
of the gold of Peru by Pizarro was facilitated by the
vain attempt of Atahualpa to purchase his freedom by
offering to fi11 a certain room with gold and twice over
with silver.

The melting down of this ransom on nine forges
continued for four months in 1533 and produced for
Pizarro'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-five
pounds of gold and ninety of silver. Many retired
immediately to Spain to spend the rest of their Jives
in luxury, and, by their example, to entourage
thousands more to set out for the New World to
make their fortunes.

By the end of the 1530s the more far-sighted
settlers were turning from the simple looting of a
d 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 the
sixteenth century, as were Chile and New Granada
(modern Colombia). But, following the discovery of
fabulously rich silver deposits at Potosi (in modern
Bolivia) in 1545 and at Zacatecas (Mexico) in 1548,
it became clear that silver mining was to become the
basis of economic life in Spanish America. The
relative importante of the two metals is starkly
indicated by the estimate that between 1500 and 1650
registered trade alone conveyed 181 tons of gold and
16,000 tons of silver to Spain from her American
colonies.

Because of its greater value and its legendary
appeal, however, gold---or, to be more precise, the
quest for gold—continued for many more decades to
draw Spaniards deeper into the Americas. Much
of the present-day territory of the United States
South-west and South-east was traversed in 1540--43
by the expeditions of Hernando de Soto and Francisco
Vázquez de Coronado as th.ey searched for the metal.
Coronado penetrated as far as eastern Kansas before
finally accepting that the legendary Seven Cities of
Cibola were merely the humble dwellings of the
Pueblo Indians, and Soto's exploration of Florida as
far north as the Savannah River also proved fruitless.
Thereafter, although retaining Florida for strategie
reasons, Spain left the rest of the eastern seaboard of

The forin in which gold from the
Americas was shipped to Spain. This
large disc shows the circular Royal
Scals which were stamped after the
Royal Fifth had heen paid, the reet.
angular mark with snx letters denoting
the place where it was cast, and, in
Roman numerals, the gold content of
the alloy in quilates (carats) and
granos (grains). This disc, only 153
carats fine, was recently recovered from
the wreek of a Spanish Galleon, Nuestra
Sefiora de Atocha, which sank in a
hurricane 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, from
information Biven to him hy Francis Drake after his raid on the Spanish Indies. It also records Drake's visit to Roanoke, off
the 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 lay
behind the increasing involvement of Elizabethan
explorers and adventurers with the new continent.
The significance which Elizabeth I and her ministers
attached to mining and national self-sufcieney in
bath precious and base metals was evident from the
verg beginning of her reign, when German tech-
nologists, brought into the country originally to
refine its base coinage, were encouraged to prospect
for minerals in England itself. Daniel Hochstetter, a
master miner and refiner from Augsburg, and
Thomas Thurland, an Englishman, found rich copper
ore containing silver at Keswick, in Cumberland, in
1564-5. The outcome was the incorporation in 1568
of the famous Company of the Mines Royal to
exploit domestic urineral resources. Although a
majority of its shareholders were English, control of
the mining and refining operations was in the hands
of German specialists led by Hochstetter. Cumber--

land remained the centre of operations, but mines
were also opened in Wales and Cornwall, and a
Dutch shareholder, Cornelius de Vos, was involved
in gold mining at Crawford Moor on the River
Clyde in Scotland.

It was generally recognised, however, that the
prospects of large-scale gold production at home
were remote. America, on the other hand, seemed to
offer a much more attractive prospect, particularly
since the expertise of the Germans might be used to
advantage there. The first significant involvement
arose out of the voyage which Martin Frobisher made
in 1576 in search of a Northwest Passage to Asia (and
its gold), for he returned to England from Baffin
Isiand witti, samples of a glittering black rock,
probably marcasite, which he believed to be gold ore.
The German scientist Burchard Kranisch, who
earlier in his career had smelted lead in Derbyshire
and silver in Cornwall, confirmed this opinion. It
seems that for reasons which are unclear he "salted"
melts of the ore with gold and silver coins of the
realm. Frobisher brought back no less than two

162



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

The powerful clique of adventurers and entre-
preneurs, led by Richard Hakluyt and Sir Humphrey
Gilbert, which was emerging in London to promote
schemes for English colonisation in North America,
was not deterred by this setback. Gilbert himself
sailed in June 1583 to explore the southern shores of
New England with a party which included, according
to the narrative of Edward Hayes, "the minerall man
and 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. The
next time he found Ore, which with no smalt shew
of contentment he delivered unto the General, using
protestation, that if silver were the thing which
might satisfie the Generall & his followers, there it
was, advising him to leek no further."

Shortly afterwards "our Saxon refiner and Discoverer
of 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 were
deferred in favour of attempts further south, in
Virginia.

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 prepared
for the expedition which was to found the first
settlement on Roanoke Island in 1585 advised lijm:

"An alcamist is not Impertinent, to trye the
metaylls that maybe discouerd and ... sum of ye
myners of Cornwell ..."

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

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

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

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

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

"the fift part of al] the oare of golde, and siluer that
from 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 saw
no further English settlement in North America, as,
following the attack by the Armada, energies and
resources were diverted to fighting Spanish ships-
and seizing their treasure—on the high seal. It was
not until 1607 that the Jamestown colony, the first
permanent English settlement, was established by the
Virginia Company. Although its promotors and the
settlers continued to hope for gold John Smith
protested that there was "no talke, no hope, nor
worke, but dig gold, refine gold, load gold"—the
metal simply did not materialise. The colony
survived, however, for by 1614 its economie salvation
had arrived in a different guise, following the intro-
duction of tobacco from Trinidad. By the end of the
decade 50,000 pounds of tobacco were being shipped
to England each year for sale at high prices.

By the second half of the seventeenth century the
English settlers in both Virginia and New England
had reconciled themselves to making their fortunes
from agriculture and trade rather than mining. For
the individual and the nation the ultimate objective
remained the possession of gold, but, as Richard
Hakluyt had foreseen, it was to be obtained not from
mining, as in Spanish America, but from the sale of
agricultural produce and manufactured goods on the
world market. For the North American Indians this
latter course was to prove even more destructive than
the Spanish preoccupation with mining, for they had
to be driven from their land to release it for farming.
Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island,
anticipated this development with his shrewd
observation:

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

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