Diálogos Series

From the Colonial Era to the Present

Kendall W. Brown

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780826351074
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Lateinamerikanische & karibische Geschichte

For twenty-five years, Kendall Brown studied Potosí, Spanish America's greatest silver producer and perhaps the world's most famous mining district. He read about the flood of silver that flowed from its Cerro Rico and learned of the toil of its miners. Potosí symbolized fabulous wealth and unbelievable suffering. New World bullion stimulated the formation of the first world economy but at the same time it had profound consequences for labor, as mine operators and refiners resorted to extreme forms of coercion to secure workers. In many cases the environment also suffered devastating harm.
All of this occurred in the name of wealth for individual entrepreneurs, companies, and the ruling states. Yet the question remains of how much economic development mining managed to produce in Latin America and what were its social and ecological consequences. Brown's focus on the legendary mines at Potosí and comparison of its operations to those of other mines in Latin America is a well-written and accessible study that is the first to span the colonial era to the present.

Chapter 1: The Lure of Gold, the Wealth of Silver

***

From the first landing to the end of his days gold obsessed Columbus, directed his explorations and dominated his conduct.

—Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main

Writing in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, who had overseen gold smelting in the Caribbean and in New Spain for the Crown from 1514 to 1532, reported the story of three Spanish peasants who sailed to the Caribbean in search of their fortune. They had sold their scant possessions in Spain to finance the voyage, but a few weeks in the New World showed the futility of their ambitions. They searched and dug but found no gold to reward them. Exhausted, hungry, and destitute, they rested under a tree, cursing their luck. Finally, the one who had complained most loudly adopted a fatalistic tone. He recognized God’s power to give them what they wanted and expressed confidence that in due time, He would reward them with the gold they sought. Just then one companion saw shining not twenty yards away a gold nugget. Looking around, they easily found other nuggets, enough to fill their boots. Delighted with their treasure and giving little thought to the future, the peasants took their gold and returned to Spain on the return voyage of the ship that had carried them to the Caribbean.1 The people of Santo Domingo shook their heads in amazement.

Oviedo’s story contains many of the themes found in the history of mining in Latin America. The newcomers from Europe considered the New World a treasure trove of precious metals. Many believed that in the Americas with a little work and God’s blessing they could soon amass a fortune, which would permit them to return home to live in comfort. Their Christianity reassured them not only that God had placed gold and silver in the New World for their use, but also that He would intervene on their behalf. So firmly held was this belief that Spaniards and Portuguese were willing to confront great hardships and horrifying dangers as they searched for gold and silver. In so doing they brutalized the indigenous inhabitants, explored and settled the American continents, and changed the world economy. They established a culture that saw mining as a panacea for poverty and as a vehicle for economic prosperity. Those beliefs endured even when mining shifted from precious to industrial metals in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, however, mining brought misery and despair to many. Indians and African slaves toiled and died in the American mines. Many mine owners and refiners found temporary wealth and then lost everything when their lodes gave out. Unlike the three peasants in Oviedo’s story, some Spaniards stayed on in the Indies, never able to satisfy their greed for gold no matter how much they found. Others despaired that they had found only a modest treasure when America’s fantastic riches seemed so ready for the taking.

In the early years of discovery and exploration, gold obsessed the newcomers. This situation resulted in part from a remarkable conjuncture of Christian mythology and world monetary flows that provided the context through which Columbus understood his grand undertaking. Their Bible spoke to medieval Christians of the wealth of King Solomon, symbolized by the gold he obtained from the mines of Ophir. The Greek historian Herodotus had written of a desert land north of India where the sands were filled with gold. Giant ants, he claimed, guarded the treasure. Perhaps from reading Herodotus, Saint Jerome identified the land of Ophir with India. Other writers, including Saint Isidore, repeated and embellished the story, until they had situated Ophir far to the east. By the late Middle Ages, they had also substituted fantastic creatures like griffins and dragons for Herodotus’s giant ants.2

Europeans consequently believed that somewhere in the East lay a great source of gold, where miners had only to shovel the sand from the beach and avoid the dangerous griffins. Venetian Marco Polo’s account of his travels in China seemed to prove the existence of the land of Ophir. Polo also provided a new name for Ophir: Cipangu, the Land of the Rising Sun. As fate would have it, when Marco Polo visited China in the late thirteenth century, Japan was a major supplier of gold to the Asian mainland.3 European cosmographers avidly read the Venetian’s account and speculated on the relationship between Ophir and Cipangu (Japan). By the time Columbus sailed in 1492, he had convinced himself that the gold of the Orient lay in Cipangu, the biblical Ophir.

Thus, when Columbus and his men reached the West Indies, they immediately began searching for the gold of Ophir. His log for the days immediately after landfall shows him setting course “to seek the gold and precious stones” of “the island of Cipangu” rather than to find the Great Khan in China. Using signs and the Arabic-speaking interpreter he had taken with him on the assumption that the East Asians would have had contact with Muslims, Columbus repeatedly tried to question the natives about the source of any gold they possessed. On November 12 he imagined that the Arawaks had informed him that on the island of Babeque “the people collect gold on the beach by candlelight.”4 Perhaps such nocturnal labor was necessary to avoid the griffins and dragons. By December 24, he had decided that Cipangu, or “Cibao,” as his Indian hosts called it, lay on the island of Hispaniola.5 Arawak guides led the Spaniards to Cibao in the interior of the island, and then over the next decade the Indians showed the Spaniards the location of all their goldfields.6 The Arawaks knew how to gather nuggets from the streambeds but apparently did not pan or mine for gold.7

Back in Spain, Columbus’s exaggerated reports about his discoveries inflamed European imaginations. Gold seemed everywhere. All one needed to do was to dig along a riverbank to find the glittering grains washed clean by the flowing waters. “Gold constitutes treasure,” wrote Columbus to Ferdinand and Isabella, “and he who possesses it may do what he will in the world, and may so attain as to bring souls to Paradise.”8 Enthused by his optimistic letters, the monarchs ordered in 1494 that four or five miners from the royal quicksilver mines of Almadén be sent to the Caribbean to raise the technical level of gold mining there.

Columbus and his comrades bartered with islanders for gold when possible, but indigenous trade could not satisfy the Spaniards. The next step was to demand tribute from the Arawaks and thereby force them to produce more gold. This seemed promising, given the sizable population of Hispaniola, which may have numbered a million or more.9 In an infamous edict of 1495, the Admiral ordered all male Indians over the age of thirteen to produce a hawk’s bell full of gold every three months.10 Brutal punishment awaited anyone who failed to comply: his hand would be cut off. Columbus deemed such coercion necessary because the islanders lacked the discipline for heavy labor, but even this cruelty proved futile. The natives could not find enough gold to meet the Spaniards’ tax, and many ran away rather than submit to the foreigners’ mania. With the arrival of more and more adventurers from Europe, the demand for gold increased.

Some Spaniards turned to prospecting, as in the case of Oviedo’s three peasants who discovered enough nuggets to fill their boots. Those fortunate enough to discover pay dirt resorted to forced Indian labor. Isabella had chastised Columbus for enslaving the islanders, but the Crown allowed Spaniards to make chattels out of Indians who rebelled or otherwise made war upon the invaders. Slaves were cheap. A horse cost the equivalent of one hundred Indian slaves.11 Another solution to the labor shortage in the goldfields was the encomienda, a grant of Indian tribute to a Spaniard, the encomendero, who usually collected the obligations in labor. Although encomienda Indians were nominally free, conditions in the Caribbean provided little protection from extreme exploitation and abuse at the hands of the encomenderos. After Isabella’s death, Ferdinand urged the Spanish to step up gold production, even if it meant forcing more Indians to work in the mines or taking Indians from other islands to those where gold was found.12 Trying to protect the islanders, the missionary friar and humanitarian Bartolomé de las Casas condemned the encomienda “as the despotic slavery it actually is.” The Indians, he noted, “died of the inhuman and bitter treatment they received in the mines and from other pestilential practices.”13

Whether slaves or encomienda Indians, they worked the Spaniards’ claims. In the goldfields, a work gang was generally a five-person team: two men to dig the gold-bearing dirt; two men to carry it to the river or other water source; and one person, often a woman who used a batea or pan, to wash away the gravel and dirt, leaving the grains, flakes, and nuggets of ore. The actual panning required dexterity rather than strength, and women excelled at the task. A Spaniard with a good claim might have ten such teams. The first problem was to reach gold-bearing alluvium. Sometimes that meant clearing forest and systematically processing layer after layer of dirt down to the bedrock to see if gold was present. Other Spaniards prospected along riverbanks. Because the water carried flakes of gold downstream, some Spaniards had their gangs divert streams so they could work the riverbeds.

Mining began its assault on the environment in the first decades. Verdant forests and grasslands became pockmarked by mining activity. Areas of intensive gold panning left the rivers clouded with silt, harming aquatic plants, fish, and other organisms. Mercury the miners used to refine the gold contaminated the environment. Diverting the indigenous population to mining also changed the ecosphere. Hard labor and unhealthy conditions weakened the islanders and made them more susceptible to diseases such as smallpox that were unwittingly introduced by the Europeans. Early claim holders had little reason to protect their workers’ health because they could obtain more labor by bringing in additional Indians from other islands and, later, from Mexico. Spaniards willing to trade a hundred Indians for a horse were not likely to worry much about the death of a few workers.

The Spaniards quickly exhausted the few Caribbean goldfields. Within a quarter century of Columbus’s arrival, they had worked over the Cibao and San Cristobal fields on Hispaniola. As the Indians died out, labor became more expensive, forcing miners to abandon all but the richest claims. Production costs rose to levels that made gold mining unprofitable. Spaniards also found gold on Puerto Rico and Cuba, where mining began again. The demographic catastrophe provoked by Old World diseases soon raised Puerto Rican and Cuban labor costs in turn. By then Columbus was dead and the sands of Ophir had proved elusive. Yet new marvels promising rich golden treasures were on the horizon in Mexico and Peru and later in Brazil.

Metaphorically, the hunt for Ophir’s riches continued throughout the centuries during which Spain and Portugal ruled their New World colonies. When Hernán Cortés and his men invaded Mexico, they received gold and other gifts from Aztec emissaries. The Aztecs later recalled that upon their receipt of the treasure, “the Spaniards burst into smiles; … They picked up the gold and fingered it like monkeys; … Their bodies swelled with greed, and their hunger was ravenous; they hungered like pigs for that gold.”14 The Aztecs were intrigued by a Spanish helmet and asked to take it to show Moctezuma, their ruler. Cortés agreed, on condition that they return it filled with gold, which they did, some three thousand pesos worth of small nuggets. More important, the gift showed the Spaniards “that there were good mines in the country.”15

Spanish territory expanded as the Spaniards investigated rumors about gold. In 1532, Francisco Pizarro and a small company of Spaniards captured the Inca ruler Atahualpa, who then tried to ransom himself by filling a room once with gold and twice with silver. The Spaniards thus enriched must have been as enraptured as Columbus had been when he hurried back to Spain with the news that he had reached Cipangu. Later, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado roamed the area that is now the southwestern United States from 1540–1542 searching for the Seven Cities of Gold in the land of Cíbola. Expeditions penetrated the tropical heartland of South America seeking El Dorado. From the Brazilian coast, bandeirantes (frontiersmen) explored westward, hunting for gold and Indian slaves and staking Portugal’s claim to the interior.

Although they never found the gold of El Dorado and Ophir, the Spaniards discovered great lodes of silver. By the mid-sixteenth century, they had found (or the Indians had revealed to them) the rich Mexican and Andean silver districts. Mining would undergird the social and economic structure of those two regions for the remainder of the colonial period. Mining came later to Brazil. Indians there had no metallurgical tradition, and they consequently could not reveal gold or silver deposits to the Portuguese. Aside from the Spaniards’ working of alluvial deposits in the Caribbean, most of the gold they obtained during the first half-century in the Americas came from their pl...

Table of contents

• Graphs, Figures, and Maps
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: The Lure of Gold, the Wealth of Silver
• Chapter 2: Potosí and Colonial Latin American Mining
• Chapter 3: Spanish and Portuguese Colonialism and Mining Labor
• Chapter 4: Workers’ Response to Colonial Mining
• Chapter 5: New Nations Resurrect Their Mining Industry
• Chapter 6: The Technological and Social Dimensions of Modern Mining
• Chapter 7: Miners and Revolution
• Chapter 8: Mining, Harmony, and the Environment
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index