IN 1569, PHILLIP II OF SPAIN sent a special task force headed by Francisco de Toledo to investigate and reform the administration of the American empire. His goal was to increase the production of precious metals and, not incidentally, Crown revenues. Installed in the former Inca capital of Cuzco in February 1570, Toledo brought two new ideas that increased silver production at Potosí: the forced labor system known as the mita, and the patio process for extracting silver from low-grade ore. Both ideas were devastating to the Native American population of the Andes.
The mita required every Native American village, once a year, to send one-seventh of its men between the ages of eighteen and fifty for a four-month term of paid labor in the mines or on other projects. In theory, a given man would work a period of 121 days once every seven years, under closely regulated terms. In fact, men were frequently forced to work for longer periods than their term of service. Often, they were not paid, or they earned less than the regulated wage. Soon, villages were forced to send more men, more often.
Mining works, Trujillo, Peru 1780s
A summons to labor in the mines was seen as a virtual death sentence, thanks to a combination of excessive labor, dangerous conditions, and inadequate food. Miners worked in semi-darkness, exposed to foul air and toxic dust. Disease and accidents were rampant. The most dangerous job was carrying the ore out of the mines. Laborers climbed hundreds of feet through narrow, steep tunnels with large, heavy baskets of ore on their backs, only to emerge, exhausted and sweating, into freezing winds on the mountainside.
The mita remained in place for 250 years. During that time, more than three million Quechua Indians were forced to work in the mines. Hundreds of thousands died, reducing the native population of the Andes by 80 percent. Despite these enormous human costs, the mita made it possible to bring tons of low-grade silver ore out of the heart of the mountain. Bartolomé de Medina’s patio process made that ore usable by adopting and perfecting an old Roman method of using mercury to amalgamate gold and silver. Under Toledo’s direction, the patio process transformed silver production at Potosí. Highly skilled Native American smelters working small wind ovens on the side of the mountain were replaced by a vast refining and processing complex within the city. Toledo built 132 walled and fortified plants, each with a private residence for the owner, a chapel, common kitchens, and living quarters for the workers.
LIKE MUCH OTHER ANCIENT knowledge, the process of using mercury to amalgamate gold and silver was lost after the fall of Rome, though not entirely forgotten. By the 1540s, European silver refiners and alchemists were experimenting with the process, especially in Italy and New Spain.
MERCURY
The only metal element that is liquid at room temperature, mercury has fascinated mankind since ancient times. Egyptians believed it offered eternal life. Ancient Chinese and Hindus added it to elixirs designed to extend life. Alchemists used it to search for the philosopher’s stone that would transform other metals into gold. Sixteenth-century physicians prescribed it for syphilis.
Despite its historical associations with medicine and eternal life, mercury is toxic, whether absorbed through the skin or inhaled as a vapor. Mercury poisoning causes both psychological and physical symptoms, often resulting in death.
The Incas knew about mercury, including the toxic effects on those who mined and handled it. Because they had no use for it, they made mining it illegal and ordered the word obliterated from the language.
But later civilizations were slower to learn. For decades, industrialists mined mercury and used it in industries across the globe.
Eventually the poisonous metal found its way into waterways, contaminating both the water and the fish that lived there—the same fish and water supplies that were sustaining mankind. Twentieth-century scientists soon began linking mercury exposure among pregnant women to birth defects and cognitive deficits in children living in contaminated areas, such as the U.S. Great Lakes region. At last, civilization awoke to the dangers of mercury, and thus began a process of cleaning up mercury-contaminated lands and waterways.
That process continues today.
DISCOVERING AMALGAMATION
NEW SPAIN. 1553. IT IS DAWN WHEN BARTOLOMÉ de Medina opens the front door of his home in the mountain village of Pachuca, where he has lived for nearly two years on the banks of the Rio de las Avenidas. He is relieved to not encounter any of the dozen visiting mineros who have come to obtain news of his progress in the grand experiment of which word has traveled throughout the New World. Today Medina feels nothing like a messiah of metallurgy. Instead, he senses a black cloud of failure trailing him as he walks out of the gate.
Weary from a night of little sleep and excessive self-doubt, Medina reverses direction and heads, not to his courtyard workshop, but to the small church in the center of Pachuca. Unlike his native Seville, Pachuca has a haphazard look, its main road flanked by hastily erected warehouses, stables, and servants’ quarters—all built in recent years to support the silver mining industry that employs the region’s able-bodied men and enriches New Spain.
Medina greets friendly passersby with a polite “Buenos días,” growing sadder as he remembers the shocked expressions and dire warnings he received from fellow traders, his friends, and business associates in Seville after he announced his intention to quit the mercantile trade and risk everything, at age fifty, to pursue an elusive chemical process in this godforsaken land. He pushes such thoughts out of his head, trying to allay his frustration at his lack of progress in this mission.
He is relieved again, as he opens the heavy wood door, to find the church empty. He makes his way to the altar, then holds on to a railing as he slowly bends two stiff legs to kneel on the stone floor. In front of him, adjacent to a large wooden cross, an aged statue of the Virgin Mary looks down on him with a kindly smile. Medina’s gaze rests on the Blessed Mother.
“Our Lady,” he prays, “I come to you a broken man. I left my wife and children and traveled here for the purpose of rendering a great service to Our Lord and to his Majesty and all the realm. After spending my life’s fortune and years of my life on this task, I’m anguished to admit I am not worthy of this great project. And so, I beg you to enlighten and guide me, so that I might be successful.” With that, he crosses himself, rises, and exits the chapel.
Medina feels lighter, his head a bit clearer, after leaving the church. He is ready to return to his work. En route, he recalls the formula his German friend Maestro Lorenzo, the man who inspired this mission, had given him back in Seville. “Grind the ore fine,” Lorenzo had said. “Steep it in strong brine. Add mercury and mix thoroughly. Repeat mixing daily for several weeks. Every day, take a pinch of ore mud and examine the mercury. See? It is bright and glistening. As time passes, it should darken as the salt decomposes the silver minerals and the silver forms an alloy with the mercury. Amalgam is pasty. Wash out the spent ore in water. Retort residual amalgam; when the mercury is driven off, silver remains.”
“So why hasn’t it worked?” Medina asks himself as he enters the large courtyard patio with the broad, well-grouted flagstones that front formal gardens and provide the staging area for his grand-scale experiments with silver ore.
Today, like every day at the workshop, ground ore is spread out on the flagstones like tortas, arranged in pancake-like circles of thick mud. Across the courtyard, Medina sees his assistant, Juan de Plazencia, an experienced local silver miner who shares his curiosity and zeal for making silver extraction easier. Plazencia walks toward him.
For months now, the two men have been putting mercury droplets on pieces of ore in varying amounts, hoping the globules would darken, indicating that the salt strewn on the surface is decomposing the silver ore. According to Lorenzo, that’s the first step in the process of converting ore to metallic silver. So day after day they have mixed, combined, waited, and watched . . . yet nothing has changed. The mercury continues to glisten in the sun, losing none of its sheen—sullying only their reputations.
B
ut today, as he meets Plazencia’s glance, a new idea comes to Medina. “What if we add another chemical to the mercury?” he asks, placing both hands on his heart as if suddenly breathless.
“What chemical?” Plazencia inquires, raising his eyebrows at Medina’s sudden intensity.
“I can’t believe I haven’t thought of this before,” Medina says, looking around the workshop as if searching for something. Plazencia watches as Medina paces and throws his hands up in the air before finally explaining how in Seville, tanneries use vitriol, a highly corrosive sulfuric acid, to darken leather. What if they were to mix a corrosive additive into the mercury globules on the silver ore? The same chain reaction might occur!
Wasting no time, Medina and Plazencia spend the next several days trying different acids before they come up with one they christen “magistral,” a combination of iron and copper sulfates. At the moment of reckoning, Plazencia pours several drops of magistral onto the globules of mercury covering a pancake of iron ore. In a matter of seconds, the mercury begins to lose its sheen and becomes leady, thick, and pasty.
The two men shout out in excitement, and Medina falls to his knees, exclaiming his gratitude to “Our Lady” for this long-awaited breakthrough.
In his zeal to mine larger quantities of silver for God and Crown, Medina has discovered an important chemical principle: salt and silver ore minerals will only react in the presence of a chemical promoter, or catalyst.
In Medina’s process, water, salt, mercury and magistral were mixed with crushed silver-bearing ore. The dark, pasty substance was then spread out on a stone patio, where it would sit for weeks. Forced laborers, usually barefoot and up to their knees in the mixture, would tread on it throughout the day for up to a month so the materials would be properly combined and the silver would bond with the mercury. Once samples indicated that the chemical bonding of silver and mercury was complete, Medina would separate the amalgam from the mixture by placing it in water, where the heavy amalgam sank to the bottom. After the amalgam separated, he’d place it in a conical mold and squeeze it dry. The resulting cone, called a piña because of its resemblance to a pineapple, was made up of five parts mercury and one part silver. The piña was then heated to volatilize the remaining mercury, leaving behind high-grade silver and releasing tons of toxic mercury into the atmosphere.
A NEW METHOD
As would be the case with so many important discoveries during the next century’s scientific revolution, trader-turned-metallurgist Medina went through an elaborate process of trial and error, nearly giving up before the desired result appeared “miraculously” before his eyes.
The “aha” moment that Medina attributed to “Our Lady,” whom he believed had enlightened him on the essential combination of ingredients and methodology, would later be described as one step in the process called the scientific method. The phrase described an empirical investigation of the natural world in which, scientists would observe, explain, and predict real-world phenomena by experiment. Thus, their conclusions would be based on, not magic, alchemy, or miracle, but a large dose of a quality that separates mankind from other inhabitants of planet Earth: reason. In Medina’s case, and for many scientists since his time, the resulting discovery was both practical and lucrative—if not for the scientist, then for his patrons.
By the end of 1554, Medina had received a six-year patent on his patio process from the viceroy of New Spain. Applied on a massive scale in sixteenth-century Peruvian silver mines, his patio process would prove to be one of the most lucrative scientific discoveries humans would ever make.
Medina lived to see the king’s tax revenue increase by 20 million pesos over a twenty-five-year period, thanks in large part to the patio process. By the end of that period, the rate had jumped to the unprecedented sum of three million pesos a year from patio-process silver alone. Production boomed. Between 1550 and 1800, Peru and New Spain produced at least 136,000 metric tons of silver, 80 percent of the world’s silver production during that period.
THE SPANIARDS HAD A WELL-designed system for shipping precious metals back to Spain from their American colonies. Each year a heavily armed fleet sailed from Seville to South America. When it reached the Caribbean, known as the Spanish Main, the fleet split into smaller squadrons that visited the ports where colonial officials gathered gold and silver for shipment. The squadrons reconvened at the Cuban port of Havana and sailed home in convoy. It was a good system, but, like many systems, its weakness was its predictability.
Spain found it hard to defend the monopoly over the Americas that it claimed in the Treaty of Tordesillas. Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, sea raiders from other European nations smuggled goods into the Spanish colonies, preyed on Spanish ships in the Caribbean, and sacked coastal settlements.
In the 1620s and 1630s, English and Dutch settlers had a permanent base on the island of Tortuga, off the northwest coast of the large Spanish island of Hispaniola. The channel that lay between Hispaniola and Cuba, known as the Windward Passage, was a major coastal shipping lane, linking the ports of Cuba and the colony of St. Augustine in Florida with the Caribbean ports. Smaller squadrons of the annual treasure fleet used this same channel as they headed for the rendezvous in Havana. By the early 1630s, the Windward Passage was a favorite hunting ground for the pirates and privateers who preyed on Spanish ships.
At first they attacked the Spanish galleons using canoes and light pinnaces, depending on the speed and maneuverability of the smaller boats to provide an element of surprise. Over time, buccaneering settlements attracted runaway indentured servants and slaves and naval deserters as recruits. As their numbers grew, they acquired larger and more powerful ships.
Some of the pirates also acquired a veneer of respectability as French, English, and Dutch settlers established colonies on the islands of the Lesser Antilles, southeast of Cuba. For much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, France, England, and Holland were at war with Spain. During wartime, colonial governors were authorized to issue “letters of marque” (also known as “letters of reprisal”), which made the recipient a privateer rather than a pirate. Pirates operated outside the law; privateers operated on behalf of a government. Issuing letters of marque was an inexpensive way for a government to disrupt enemy shipping in exchange for a secure port and a percentage of the profits. In the Caribbean, where small, non-Spanish colonies seldom had the benefit of warships, privateering became a major element of warfare.
Portuguese map showing the boundary line after the Treaty of Tordesillas
THE TREATY OF TORDESILLAS
The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed on June 7, 1494, drew a new line of demarcation halfway between the Cape Verde Islands, owned by Portugal, and the island of Hispaniola, recently claimed for Spain by Columbus. The line divided the ocean between the two powers. With total disregard for the rights of the peoples already in possession, the treaty gave all lands discovered east of the line to Portugal and all lands west of it to Spain.
The treaty divided the world between Portugal and Spain as neatly as cutting an orange in two, but it didn’t stop other European countries from wanting their slice.
SIR FRANCIS DRAKE, PRIVATEER
MARCH 1579. THE GOLDEN HINDE SAILS IN THE middle of the Pacific Ocean off North America, the first English vessel to reach these seas. Not on an exploration, Francis Drake, the captain of the Golden Hinde, is out for treasure—and revenge.
But first, on the eve of the attack that will make his name synonymous with privateer, Drake is having musicians entertain his ship’s officers. After that, they will enjoy a fine shipboard meal.
Though renowned as a fearsome buccaneer, Drake is a refined, religious man. With the concert concluded, Drake leads the diners in a prayer. Now the food can be served.
After the meal, Drake pauses dramatically before revealing his daring plan for the following day. He tells his men they will have the honor of helping him exact vengeance against Don Martin Enriquez, the Mexican viceroy who
ambushed his friend John Hawkins’s fleet last year at San Juan d’Ulloa. They’ll do it by taking all the viceroy’s riches, which are presently on the Spanish galleon, the Cagafuego, en route from Peru to Panama and Spain.
MORNING HAS COME, AND FRANCIS Drake has the Spanish galleon in his sights. He does not want to attack before dark. Knowing that it will raise suspicions on the Spanish ship if he reduces sail, he drags wine pots filled with water in his wake to reduce his speed. That way the Hinde can creep up on the Cagafuego at dusk, as if it were a merchant ship rather than the Golden Hinde.
Soon dusk arrives, and Drake brings his ship up to the rear of the Cagafuego. Just as he predicted, the Spanish are surprised and unarmed.
Brandishing his gun, Drake tells them to strike their sail right away or he’ll send them to the bottom of the ocean. When they refuse, Drake fires a cannon, knocking down the Spaniards’ mizzenmast. His men then board the Cagafuego and seize its treasure: an incredible eighty pounds of gold bullion, thirteen chests of gold coins, and twenty-six tons of silver.
Queen Elizabeth’s share of Francis Drake’s plunder of the Cagafuego is larger than her entire royal income. Without question, Drake is the most daring, successful, and rightfully famous privateer ever to sail the world’s seas.
Meanwhile, the ill-fated Cagafuego never makes land.
doubloons and reales
PIECES OF EIGHT
Ferdinand and Isabella introduced the Spanish peso, literally “weight,” in 1497 as part of a currency reform. As the name suggested, it was a heavy silver coin, weighing 26 grams, a little less than the modern ounce. And it could literally be divided like a pie into eight reales.
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