Seven Elements That Have Changed the World (16 page)

In 1537, the Spanish conquistadors first encountered the Muisca people of the Americas. This sophisticated agricultural community supported more than a million inhabitants centred on Bogotá and expanding over an area of around 25,000 square kilometres in the high plains of the Eastern Cordillera Mountains. Swiftly, and with little mercy, the conquistadors took control of these territories. Mounted on horseback
with swords and shields, the Spanish easily outclassed the Muisca warriors who were armed only with weapons made from fire-hardened wood. Since Columbus’s arrival on the small islands of the Bahamas in 1491 a similar fate had befallen each native community encountered by the conquistadors. Whether facing small Caribbean island tribes or the expansive empires of the Aztecs and Incas, the Spanish military force was unbeatable. The conquistadors had followed Columbus in search of fertile land and a trade passage to the South Sea, but most of all they sought gold. As King Ferdinand of Spain commanded: ‘Get gold, humanely if possible, but at all hazards – get gold!’
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No story illustrates the conquistador’s insatiable lust for gold more than the capture and murder of the Inca Emperor Atahualpa. In November 1532, Francisco Pizarro stormed the Inca provincial town of Cajamarca. As the Emperor was brought forward on a golden throne, Pizarro gave the signal for his men, who had been hiding in houses around the town square, to ride out with firearms blazing. The Spanish were greatly outnumbered by the Inca warriors, but they killed them ‘like ants’ as they ran from the stampeding horses and gunpowder explosions.
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Atahualpa was taken prisoner and, fearing for his life, he sent a message out across his empire: the Spanish must be granted both freedom of passage and as much gold and jewels as they desired. He promised Pizarro that he would give them enough gold to fill a room seven metres long by five metres wide. Every day more Incas would arrive carrying gold pitchers and jars, each filled to the brim with pieces of gold. Despite doing everything he could to appease his captors, Atahualpa was tried for treason and sentenced to be burnt at the stake. At the last minute he agreed to convert to Christianity and was spared the fire; instead, he was simply garrotted. Pizarro then swiftly moved through the empire to capture Cuzco, the Inca heartland.

The gold wealth of the Muisca and Inca people was beyond the wildest expectations of the conquistadors. It provided a foundation for the increasingly extravagant vision of the gold riches of El Dorado. In 1541, the first expedition set out in search of El Dorado from Quito, in modern times the capital city of Ecuador, led by the city’s charismatic Governor Gonzalo Pizarro, brother of Francisco. Gonzalo rounded up over two hundred gold-hungry Spaniards and twenty times as many native slaves. On horseback,
they headed east out of Quito into what, as he would soon learn, was one of the wildest and most hostile regions of South America. Cutting through the dark, dank and impenetrable forest, Pizarro’s men marched blindly onwards for weeks. They tangled with crocodiles, giant snakes and jaguars; with every stroke of the machete, insects would cascade down on them from above. Trudging further and further into the inhospitable marshes, many of Pizarro’s men died from diseases never before encountered. With no food, and few native slaves remaining alive, Pizarro was forced to turn back.

The Spanish conquistadors conducted a ruthless campaign, tantamount to genocide. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of natives were murdered as they took control of their territories. Even more natives died from diseases, such as measles, brought from Europe and against which they had no immunity. The native population was close to being exterminated. Legal records of cases brought against conquistadors provide a horrific insight into their widespread crimes. In the town of Cota, the local chief gave Juan de Arévalo less gold than he demanded and so he ‘destroyed it, killing many Indians in it, cutting hands or noses off others or breasts off the women and cutting the noses off small children’.
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When Gonzalo Pizarro arrived in a remote village, he asked about a city made of gold; if the villagers failed to give him the answers he wanted, he had them tortured or impaled with a stake inserted between the legs emerging at their head or simply burnt alive.
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Pizarro led the first of what would become many failed expeditions in search of El Dorado.
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Over the next three centuries, thousands more men, among them Sir Walter Raleigh, would march through the dangerous jungles and grasslands of Colombia in their pursuit of El Dorado. More ground was covered and the legend became increasingly discredited, but enticing rumours continued to pour into the Spanish colonial towns. As late as the early 1900s the Krupp family, the ‘iron barons’, organised an expedition into the Mato Grosso region of Brazil in search of the Gilded King’s legendary wealth. Like all those before, the expedition ended in failure.

Both the Spanish conquistadors and the Incas valued gold, but the Spanish lust for it was wild and insatiable. The Incas could not understand this since, while they endowed gold with religious significance, they had
few uses for it. For them, labour was the unit of currency and gold was not a means of payment. Gold is an impractical metal, too soft and heavy to be used in tools and weapons; gold ploughs make no furrows and gold swords take no edge. The Incas saw more value in the iron objects brought to the Americas by the Spanish. For the Spanish more gold simply meant more wealth, and more wealth meant more power. The objects of the religious and artistic heritage of the Americas were melted down and shipped back to Spain, in convoys of sixty ships, each carrying 200 tonnes of gold, simply to be fashioned into coins.
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That windfall left Spain almost as quickly as it arrived. Much was wasted on extravagant luxuries from the East and on funding equally extravagant wars. Easy money provided little incentive to work, and industry at home stagnated, made worse by emigration of the workforce to the Americas. Spain was quickly led into a spiral of debt and ultimately bankruptcy. As in the late 2000s, easy access to ‘free money’, today in the form of cheap credit, weakened their economy.
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The systematic pillaging and melting down of pre-Columbian gold wiped out a big portion of the cultural legacy of South America. In 1939 the Museo del Oro in Bogotá was founded with the aim of preserving what little remained. The founding object of the museum is a small gourd-shaped object called a
poporos
made by the ancient Quimbaya people. A
poporos
is used to store and crush lime (the mineral, rather than the fruit), which is chewed with coca leaves to increase significantly the release of cocaine-like compounds. It has a particularly sensuous shape, the bulbous curves evoking human sexual organs and fruit. It is a magnificent demonstration of the art of the goldsmith, so much so that I decided that I should find one for my collection. Many false starts and offers of suspiciously found or copied
poporos
later, I acquired what I wanted. The gold work of the Quimbaya influenced much of the subsequent sculpture in Central and Mesoamerica. But these shapes also influenced the great masters of the modern age. The forms were absorbed into the work of Picasso and Matisse, and, in Britain, into the work of Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein. Little reminders of greatly sophisticated shapes of past gold work are everywhere.

Gold casts an extraordinary spell. One of its great attributes is that it is incorruptible, something which has been known since the time of the early pharaohs. The ancient Egyptians revered gold as the unblemished flesh of
the Sun god Ra, just as the Muisca, 2,000 years later, adorned their new leaders with gold dust and jewellery to symbolise their divine connections. Only recently, however, in 1995, did two scientists working at a university in Denmark work out why gold does not tarnish.
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It is because of how the electrons on the surface of gold are distributed. They effectively deny other foreign atoms, such as oxygen or sulphur, the chance to bond. Gold is also a great conductor of electricity. Its power to conduct and not to tarnish makes it a superb way of connecting small electronic components. You can see this on a SIM card in a mobile phone. Electrical applications account for almost 20 per cent of all gold not used for bullion, coins or investment.

The bulk of the rest, some 80 per cent, is fashioned into things to adorn the body. It is so malleable that one gram can be drawn into a wire almost two and a half kilometres in length or be beaten into a one square-metre sheet. There is almost no end to the variations of shapes and decorations that great goldsmiths can make. The Mold gold cape in the British Museum, London, beaten from a single ingot and profusely decorated, 4,000 years ago, is one of several early masterpieces.
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The Scythian gold jewellery, shining in its case in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, cannot fail to amaze anyone.
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The gold souks in Iran and the Arabian Gulf sell items both of beauty and value, since a dowry may come simply in gold. I remember the Bakhtiari women in southern Iran both sewing gold coins of their inheritance into the hems of the skirts and wearing large numbers of bracelets with the characteristic yellow colour of pure gold. And on St Mark’s Square in Venice there is still a shop, which traces its trade back many generations, making and selling magnificent gold necklaces and rings. Gold jewellery has been an important part of ritual and decoration for millennia. The colour can please everyone. Perhaps that is why it makes women from Hong Kong to Cap d’Antibes believe that they are as alluring as the gold they are wearing. That allure can drive men into a fever, as happened in California.

On the morning of 24 January 1848, James W. Marshall took a routine walk to inspect the sawmill he was building on the southern fork of the American River, California. The mill, Sutter’s Mill, was nearing completion, but the
water channel was still not wide or deep enough. Each evening Marshall would open the gates of the channel to allow the river to carve out a path while his workmen slept. That morning, however, there was something different about the bedrock uncovered by the water during the night.
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A glimmering particle caught Marshall’s eye. At first he thought it was just a piece of quartz catching the dawn sunshine, but then he spotted several more of these unusual particles, some as big as grains of wheat. ‘I picked up one or two pieces,’ he recalled, ‘and examined them attentively; and having some general knowledge of minerals, I could not call to my mind more than two which in any way resembled this: sulphuret of iron, very bright and brittle; and gold, bright yet malleable. I then … found that it could be beaten into a different shape.’
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Back at the living quarters, Marshall’s workers were sitting down to breakfast when he burst in: ‘Boys, I believe I’ve found a gold mine.’
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His find sparked the California gold rush which transformed the lives of thousands of men and women who swarmed to the region in the hope of finding their own El Dorado.

It was impossible to keep Marshall’s discovery a secret but it was over a month before anyone else turned up to search for gold at Sutter’s Mill. Gold had been discovered in California before, but it had never amounted to much. Residents were sceptical and they believed they were better off putting their efforts into California’s thriving agricultural industry. That was until they saw the fruits of the discovery for themselves. One resident recalls a prospector opening a worn sack and out tumbled gold, ‘not in dust or scales, but in pieces ranging in size from that of a pea to a hen’s egg. I looked on for a moment; frenzy seized my soul; unbidden my legs performed some entirely new movements of Polka steps … piles of gold rose up before me at every step … in short, I had a very violent attack of the Gold Fever.’
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The fever swept through California and over to the eastern states. When President James Polk reported to Congress in December 1848 that the rumoured gold wealth of California was a reality, the whole world became gripped.
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Immigrant prospectors travelled from all corners of the world: the East Coast of the US, Chile, Australia, China and Europe. They arrived in California and lived in overcrowded makeshift settlements, racked by disease and lacking the most basic of amenities. But everyone was focused
on gold; no one took the time to build permanent shelters or infrastructure. They lived in extraordinary hardship. They inflicted immense cruelty on the native inhabitants, who regarded them as invaders. Whole native villages were surrounded and captured at night, often in retribution for attacks on a single prospector.
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They did not, however, steal their gold from the natives but worked to get it out of the ground. And while these prospectors were similar in many ways to the conquistadors, nothing could surpass the cruelty and tyranny of those Spanish.

Early arrivals in California quickly stumbled across windfalls of alluvial gold, easily digging lumps out of the river bed with their bare hands or a pocket knife. Seven weeks’ work provided one prospector with over a hundred kilograms of gold, worth around US $40,000 (over US $1 million today). In the first few months, as the search spread far beyond Sutter’s Mill on the American River, a few thousand prospectors took away with them over US $2 million worth of gold (US $60 million today). For many men, the hope of a lucky gold strike went unfulfilled. Surface deposits were soon picked over and so men had to spend long, back-breaking hours panning through pay dirt or digging side tunnels into the river bed. As the easy gold finds dried up, the gold seekers’ optimism was gradually worn down. Many had no choice but to stay, scraping just enough gold from the ground to sustain a life in the camps, known as ‘mining for beans’. James Marshall, who sparked the Gold Rush, died a destitute drunk.

In the early 1850s, gold became harder to find and its extraction was left to the growing body of industrial mining companies. They followed the gold back to its source digging deep into the river valleys and flattening entire hillsides using jets of water to break off ore. Gold was no longer found in lumps and rock had to be crushed into powder to extract the ever smaller gold particles it contained. The once ramshackle and lawless settlements began to take on a more organised appearance. Many unsuccessful gold seekers turned to shopkeeping. In 1853, a young Jewish-German immigrant to the US called Levi Strauss moved to San Francisco, the gateway to the goldfields, and set up a store. Two decades later he began the production of the world’s first denim jeans, the uniform of the gold miners, the Wild West and, in our times, the world.