Seven Elements That Have Changed the World (45 page)

119.
The IPCC concluded that there is a potential of at least 2,000 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide of storage capacity in geological formations, about two orders of magnitude more than total worldwide carbon dioxide emissions each year.

120.
In 2006, as the Miller oilfield in Scotland came to the end of its life, BP sought to implement just such an EOR project. The empty pipeline through which to pump carbon dioxide back into the field was already in place and would spark new life into the nearly depleted reservoir. Ultimately the project never happened because of delays in regulatory and financial support from the British government, on whom BP was dependent to make the project economically viable. As long as the costs of CGS remain lower than the revenue it can generate from enhanced oil recovery, there exists potential for CCS to be adopted as part of the upstream oil and gas industry. Carbon dioxide injection now accounts for more oil production in the US than any other enhanced oil recovery method.

121.
EU member states have committed to cut emissions to 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. The EU Emissions Trading System is the first and largest international carbon-trading scheme in the world. Under the scheme, factories and power plants have a cap on their yearly emissions, but within this cap they are granted emissions allowances which can be traded.

1.
‘Eldorado Raft’, c.
AD
700–1600. The raft measures approximately 10 by 20 centimetres. It was cast in one single piece using the lost-wax technique in a clay mould. It is made from a mixture of gold, copper and silver, known as tumbaga, the low melting point of which makes the material even easier to work.

2.
The El Dorado ritual was described by historian Juan Rodriguez Freyle in
Conquest and discovery of New Granada
(1636). The ritual at the lake had ceased before the first Spaniards arrived in Colombia, but the story was passed on from descendants of the tribe to Freyle. However, the exact root of the legend of El Dorado is disputed. The legend was not connected with the Muisca area until many years after the first expeditions that sought to find the city of gold, El Dorado.

3.
In contrast to Xue, the villainous moon Chíya signified darkness, sorcery, instinct and the sinister side of human nature.

4.
Before gold’s modern denotation as Au in the eighteenth century, the chemical symbol for gold was a representation of the Sun. Even Au is the stem of aurora, the Latin for ‘shining dawn’.

5.
There are exceptions to our universal desire for gold. In the mid-nineteenth
century, Fijian islanders captured a chest of gold coins from a trading brig close to the islands. When Captain Cook arrived on Fiji, he found them skimming them across the water. Again, in Africa early traders happily swapped gold in favour of salt, which they considered far more useful.

6.
Peter Bernstein,
The Power of Gold
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000), p. 121.

7.
Wama Poma, Andean chronicler. Michael Wood,
Conquistadors
(London: BBC Books, 2000), p. 134.

8.
John Hemming,
The Search for El Dorado
, (London: Michael Joseph, 1978), p. 126.

9.
One tribal leader, known as Delicola, hearing of the fates of other chieftains, created a story about a great empire of gold that served to heighten the delirium of Pizarro’s men for gold and send them on further into the jungle.

10.
In 1548, Pizarro was hanged outside Cuzco after rebelling against the New Laws for the government of the Americas; he believed them to be too liberal.

11.
By 1700 the world stocks of gold and silver were five times those of 1492.

12.
During the sixteenth century Europe suffered a period of immense inflation, known as the Price Revolution. These financial problems were largely the result of profound social and political changes that were sweeping through Europe long before Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. The large influx of gold into Spain only exacerbated the problem. The value of a precious metal is not absolute. When gold becomes more plentiful, its value decreases, causing the price of other commodities, which are bought with gold, to soar. The greed of the conquistadors was the seed of their own destitution.

13.
B. Hammer and J. K. Norskov, ‘Why gold is the noblest metal of all’,
Nature
, Vol. 376, 20 July 1995.

14.
The Mold gold cape is a piece of ceremonial dress made of solid gold dating from the European Bronze Age. It was found near the Welsh town of Mold by workmen quarrying for stone in the nineteenth century. The sheet of gold from which it was created was beaten out of single gold ingot and then embellished in astoundingly intricate detail so as to mimic strings of beads and folds of cloth.

15.
The nomadic tribes of Scythia, an area that spread across parts of Central Asia and Eastern Europe, produced ornate decorative objects in gold, silver, bronze and bone from the seventh to the fourth centuries
BC.
The Hermitage owns the most spectacular collection of Scythian gold artefacts, such as shields, combs and bowls depicting wild animals and fighting warriors.

16.
Marshall puts the date somewhere between 18 and 20 January. However, one of his workers writes in his diary entry on 24 January: ‘This day some kind of mettle was found in the tail race that looks like goalds, first discovered by James Martial, the boss of the mill.’ John Walton Caughey,
California Gold Rush
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

17.
H. W. Brands,
The Age of Gold
(London: Arrow, 2006), p. 16.

18.
Ibid.

19.
Peter Browning,
Bright Gem of the Western Seas
(Lafayette, GA: Great West Books, 1991), p. 3.

20.
On 29 May the
Californian
newspaper announced: ‘The whole country from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and from the sea shore to the base of the Sierra Nevada, resounds to the sordid cry of gold! GOLD!! GOLD!!! while the field if left half planted, the house half built, and everything neglected but the manufacture of shovels and pick axes … ’ Caughey,
California Gold Rush
, p. 21.

21.
In one particularly brutal attack in 1850, labelled the ‘Bloody Island Massacre’ after the incident, a United States Cavalry regiment killed more than fifty native Pomo in Lake County, California. The attack was retribution for the killing of two brutal and sadistic settlers by a group of Pomo, and led to a foundation being set up by a survivor’s descendants to improve relations between the Pomo and other residents of California.

22.
An early method of assaying the purity of a coin was to use a ‘touchstone’. The edge of the coin was rubbed on the stone and then compared to a series of stones rubbed with gold of a known purity. However, touchstone sets were often inaccurate and could be manipulated by the owner of the set for his own benefit.

23.
Non-metallic coins were used before the inventions of gold and silver coins, such as the mollusc shells, called cowries, that were used by the ancient Chinese. But these objects were only of use for small transactions and were not valued outside their own culture.

24.
In the British Museum in London, where I was a Trustee between 1995 and 2005, they own a large collection of Lydian coinage, from misshapen electrum lumps to the intricately stamped pure gold coins of Croesus.

25.
King Croesus was concerned about the growing power of the Persians and so consulted the oracle at Delphi on the matter. The oracle told him that if he made war on the Persians he would ‘destroy a great empire’. The oracle was renowned for the accuracy of its prophecies, and this one was no exception; a great empire was indeed destroyed, but, unfortunately for Croesus, it was his own. Bernstein,
The Power of Gold
, p. 35.

26.
A gold ducat weighs 3.5g and is 0.997 fine, giving it a full quota of 24 carats (essentially 100 per cent pure).

27.
Frederic Lane and Reinhold Mueller,
Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice
: Vol. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. xiii.

28.
A circle of raised beads was designed to be aligned with the edge of the coin metal to reduce this practice, but, apart from the ducat, the alignment of this circle was often off centre.

29.
In one trial in March 1393, a man called Leonardo Gradengio was suspected of
clipping in Alexandria. The Venetian consul in Alexandria investigated and found nearly three hundred clipped ducats in his strongbox. He fled but was tried in absentia in Venice, where he was found guilty and charged with the loss of his right hand, both eyes and banishment. Fifteen years later his wife pleaded for a pardon on the basis of his youth at the time of the offence, and it was given. But when he was caught in Venice in 1413, the sentence was carried out anyway.

30.
Thomas Levenson,
Newton and the Counterfeiter
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), p. 59.

31.
Newton is also celebrated on the British two-pound coin, which is engraved with a quotation from one of his letters to Robert Hooke: ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’.

32.
Thomas Levenson,
Newton and the Counterfeiter
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), p. 112.

33.
William Jennings Bryan, ‘Cross of Gold Speech’, 1896.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5354/

34.
Bernstein,
The Power of Gold
, p. 279.

35.
http://goldsheetlinks.com/production.htm

36.
Sebastião Salgado,
Workers
(London: Phaidon Press, 1993), p. 19.

37.
Serra Pelada is due to be reopened by a large mining company in 2013, but operated by heavy machinery rather than by hand.

38.
John Maynard Keynes,
Essays in Persuasion
(London: Macmillan, 1984, originally published in 1931), pp. 183–4.

39.
Our obsession with the Egyptian gold in Tutankhamun’s tomb, for example, led us to overlook historically and archaeologically more significant discoveries.

1.
An account of the conquistadors’ search for the silver mountain can be found in Enrique de Gandía’s
Historia crítica de los mitos de la conquista Americana
(Buenos Aires: 1929), pp.145–96.

2.
In Ayamá language: ‘Pachacamac janac pachapac guaccaichan’. Waldemar Lindgren & J. G. Creveling, ‘The Ores of Potosí, Bolivia’,
Economic Geology
, May 1928, Vol. 23, No. 3, p. 234.

3.
In Capoche’s
Relación general de la Villa Imperial de Potosí.
Peter Bakewell,
Miners of the Red Mountain
:
Indian Labor in Potosí 1545-1650
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), p. 3.

4.
Lewis Hanke,
The Imperial City of Potosí
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), p. 28.

5.
Ibid., p. 2.

6.
On one occasion Don Quixote de la Mancha quotes his servant, Sancho Panza, as
using the saying.

7.
Lewis Hanke,
The Imperial City of Potosí
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), p. 30.

8.
Bakewell,
Miners of the Red Mountain
, p. 45. Indeed, the name of the forced-labour system, the
mita
, came from the pre-Conquest days under Inca rule. For the yanaconas, the free-floaters in Inca society who were previously attached to nobles and military leaders, the new arrangement could even have been beneficial. In the early years, over 7,000 yanaconas worked at mining or ore smelting in Potosí, many of them serving Gonzalo Pizarro. After providing two marks of silver a week they were allowed to keep anything else they produced; some became quite rich.

9.
As the scale of mining at Potosí increased, Spaniards scoured the countryside for new workers, drawing the
mita
from an ever-greater distance. Those from the lower regions couldn’t survive the cold harsh climate of Potosí and many died en route.

10.
Dominican monk Santo Tomas’s 1550 report to the Council of the Indies. Hanke,
The Imperial City of Potosí
, p. 25.

11.
Each year, Luis Capoche wrote, fifty miners died in hospital ‘swallowed alive’ by the ‘wild beast’ that was Potosí. Combined with those who died outright in the mines, it is probable that a few hundred miners died each year as a result of mining accidents. Bakewell,
Miners of the Red Mountain
, p. 145.

12.
Hanke,
The Imperial City of Potosí
, p. 25.

13.
Many of the Bohemian silver mines were abandoned because of flooding or the persistence of ‘noxious air’ in the shafts. These problems were eased by the development of drainage and ventilation technologies, but were not effectively solved until the invention of the coal-powered steam pumps in the eighteenth century.

14.
The modern ‘dollar’ can be traced back to the ‘thaler’ from Joachimsthal.

15.
Agricola,
De re metallica
, p. xxv.

16.
Ibid., p. 5.

17.
Ibid., p. 5.

18.
Agricola wrote that the miner must understand ‘Philosophy’, ‘Astronomy’ and ‘Arithmetical Science’ if he is to find veins, determine their direction and whether they can be mined profitably. Philosophy in its medieval meaning encompassed the natural sciences, while astronomy, it was generally believed, enabled you to determine the direction of veins. Agricola,
De re metallica
, p. 4.

19.
Ibid., p. 36. People flocked to the Freiberg mines, as they would to Joachimsthal 350 years later. The nearby village of Christiandorf, grew suddenly and haphazardly, becoming known as Sachstadt, ‘the town of the Saxons’. Otto financed the building of new town walls and gave 3,000 marks of silver to the nearby monastery. He also purchased huge swathes of land and stored in his treasury more than 30,000 marks
of silver, later seized by the Bohemians in 1189.