The first phase of mineral exploitation hardly concerns us: it consisted of orpaillage—gold-washing—and the rapid pillage of long-accumulated Indian ornaments in the Caribbean, New Spain, and Central America; in this phase gold was dominant and, with the massive loot of the Incas, gold consignments to Spain did not reach their peak until the 1550s. But in 1527–30 the first silver from New Spain reached Seville, by mid-century it was closing up to gold, if not ahead, and after 1571–80 was never less than 98 per cent by weight and 90 by value of officially recorded consignments. The great take-off of silver came with the discovery (1546) and working (1548) of the deposits at Zacatecas (still today a producing area) and the introduction from 1554 onwards of the patio or mercury amalgam process of extraction from the ore (Figure Plate XIV, “LLAMAS AND MINING. ”). Peru enters the scene with the accidental discovery of Potosi (1545) and draws ahead of New Spain from 1575, after her Viceroy, the extremely able Francisco de Toledo, had been convinced by demonstration that the amalgam process would work, and had cut through legal and illegal tangle to arrange what he called ‘the most important marriage in the world, between the mountain of Potosi and the mountain of Huancavelica’.^[39] The latter produced more mercury than the combined output of the only European mines, at Almaden in Spain and Idria just north of the Adriatic. Shipments of bullion, overwhelmingly silver, remained high up till about 1630, peaking in the 1590s according to Hamilton or in the next decade according to Chaunu; there was then a decline, quite slow at first but precipitous after 1650.^[40]

This is the standard account, based on Earl Hamilton; his figures were clearly minima but acceptable at least as indices, with some modification by Chaunu, who took volume of shipping at Seville as an index. Recently, however, a new approach, using the annual amounts of mercury made available for amalgamation, suggests a rather different scale and tempo. Mercury figures are relatively reliable, since there were only three sources of the metal, all under Habsburg control, while other indices (registered bullion imports, the Royal Fifth or quinto) were liable to understatement. There are still of course unknowns and unreliables—the exact ratio between mercury used and silver reduced; the amount of silver produced by smelting, which continued when and where mercury was in short supply—but this approach suggests a summit in the 1620s, perhaps as late as 1625–40, for the Indies as a whole, New Spain peaking before Peru. The really catastrophic drop would be not in the 1650s but some thirty- 187 -

- 188 -years later—when indeed all accounts agree that the Spanish state and Spanish society were at their nadir.^[41]

Although Hamilton's work was meticulous, it was based on the official records of imported bullion, as registered at Seville. But obviously the books could have no entries covering precious metal smuggled into Spain to avoid the royal charges (and the risk of seizure in times of fiscal stress), or seized by the King's enemies, or used for contraband trade with foreign interlopers, or diverted licitly or illicitly to the Philippines, or expended in the Indies on public or private account: a formidable list of omissions. However, Hamilton's figures do have the merit of representing the amount the Spanish government and private agencies had to work with in Europe; and even without any upward adjustment his totals are impressive: from 1503 to 1660, Seville registered 185,000kg of gold and 16,886,000 of silver—67 per cent of this last amount between 1581 and 1630. And this is absolutely the minimum influx. To strike a modern equivalent, in our own inflationary age, is impossible, nor is it easy to see it in terms of its own time. Earlier estimates were that the input added one-fifth to the gold stock of Europe in 1500, but tripled that of silver;^[42] more recent ones tend to scale up European holdings of precious metals in 1500 (admittedly much of them locked up in the treasuries and Chapter Houses of the Church) and suggest an increase of something like 50 per cent. But this took place in only a century and a half; the old stock had been built up over nearly twenty centuries, the new input came in at unprecedented speed, and into an economy already equipped with credit and fiduciary devices, so that there was a great increase in the velocity of circulation.^[43]

Serious mineral development had indeed a less lustrous side: before Cortes sent Charles V his parade cannon cast in silver, he had mined and smelted tin and copper to make more realistic guns of bronze. By and large, however, non-precious metals were not much mined in the Indies, except for Chilean copper or when European supplies were cut off by war.^[44] Between 1525 and 1530 a number of silver lodes were worked in the present States of Mexico, Jalisco, Nayarit, and Guerrero, but these were not of much significance. The main advance began between 1546 and 1555, along the axis of the Sierra Madre Occidental through Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and Durango, this last about 800km from Mexico City (Figure 18, “NEW SPAIN: THE SILVER FRONTIER”), ‘The mine needs men but fears water’,^[45] and these places lie near the 500mm isohyet, in a zone dry enough to obviate drainage problems (at least in the earlier, shallower, mining phases) but still not in really desert country. Pachuca and Real de Monte, quite near the capital, date from 1551; but Parral, some 350km north of Durango, and San Luis Potosi, nearer Mexico City but in more arid country, were not developed until the last decade of the century; the latter is surely an early example of the Norte Americano booster name!

In contrast to the wide spread of silver mining in New Spain, that of Peru was- 189 -dominated, almost from the beginning (1545) until well into the next century, by Potosi; but Potosi was dependent in turn on the mercury of Huancavelica; as another Viceroy Toledo said in 1648, these were like ‘two poles which support this kingdom, and that of Spain’.^[46]

Huancavelica was indeed the key to the vicissitudes of silver mining at all times in Peru, and at some times in New Spain. The mine was under 300km from Lima and 200 from the sea, in a well-peopled area; these were essential factors in its success. At first the mercury was sent to Potosi via Cuzco and Oruro, but by the end of the century it went to the nearest harbour, Chincha, and thence by sea to the main port of Upper Peru, Arica (Figure 9, “PERU: CALLAO TO ARICA AND POTOSI”).^[47]

- 190 -

In both Viceroyalties, fuel for smelting was scarce; the mines of New Spain nearly all lay in steppe or at best scrub country; Potosi is in the desolate windswept puna, and the Indians who originally refined its ore had to use dry grass or llama dung.^[48] Whether the patio method had long been known in central Europe, or whether, as Hispanic authors naturally assert ‘with an almost undue alacrity’, its onlie begetter was the Sevillean merchant Bartolomé de Medina (who himself said that he got the general idea from a German in Spain), is not a matter of the first moment.^[49] The important facts are that amalgamation meant that lower-grade ores could be used, and with a great saving in fuel—indeed, some variants were cold and needed little or no fire. On the other hand, it did need more capital equipment and more power for ore-crushing, the power being generally animal in New Spain and water in Peru; and it tied processing to a commodity at once ‘heavy and liquid, the traditional terror of seaman and muleteers’,^[50] a commodity moreover at first produced in only two places, both across the Atlantic.

This however was soon changed: the quicksilver of the New World was tracked down by a Portuguese merchant and poet, Enrique Garcés. This son of Mercury noticed that the Indian women used its ore cinnabar as ornament or cosmetic, and proceeded to search for a source. His first finds were disappointing, but in 1563–4 one Amador de Cabrera found the Huancavelica deposits: his troublesome claims for special privileges as the discoverer were not extinguished until 1591, and indeed his heirs were demanding a Marquisate and much else as late as 1680.… Garcés, however, had a prior licence for exploitation. In 1568 (or 1572) a shipload was sent to New Spain, and later Garcés and Fernando de Velasco much improved the mercury process, which in Peru was carried out in containers, not in an open patio or courtyard as in New Spain. As a result of these endeavours Garcés prospered, returned to the Peninsula, published a Castilian version of Os Lusiadas, and won the approbation of Cervantes: an attractive ending to a career, but he left a hell behind him.^[51]

The politics of quicksilver were peculiar. There was an element of rape in Toledo's ‘marriage’, since it involved the virtual expropriation of the mine as a Crown monopoly; though the working itself was leased out to contractors, whose gremio, or guild, was for two centuries a resolute and usually successful opponent of any serious innovation. Since the costs of shipment were so high as to inhibit private tenderers, by the 1590s the Crown found itself compelled to take over trading in mercury, buying (in theory) the entire output at rates negotiated in an asiento, and this trading monopoly enabled it to manipulate, albeit often clumsily, a delicate mercantilist balance. Almaden and Huancavelica, despite the disparity in map distance, were at much the same effective distance from Mexican mines, and although Huancavelica could normally have supplied both Viceroyalties, as a rule its surplus over Peruvian needs was used as a stop-gap only when Almaden supplies to New Spain were interrupted by war or accident; otherwise it was stockpiled as a reserve despite the risk of leakage by rotting of- 191 -the leather containers: how serious a risk is shown by the loss of four-sevenths of the Almaden mercury shipped to Callao between 1623 and 1650, though we may be sure that by no means all of this loss was accidental. One factor in this policy was the fear, surely justified, that licit mercury shipments would facilitate illicit general trade between Peru and New Spain. For some years after 1623 Almaden mercury was largely diverted to Peru to make up for shortfalls from Huancavelica; the Crown had a greater interest in retaining Peruvian rather than Mexican output at a high level, since in Peru the royal share was still the quinto, 20 per cent, while in New Spain most producers had gained the concession of paying only the diezmo, 10 per cent.^[52] When this emergency had passed Almaden itself was declining, and in the later seventeenth century the situation became chaotic: there were serious shortfalls in supplies from Almaden, while appeals from Mexico to Huancavelica produced only irregular and inadequate shipments, so that by the 1690s New Spain was looking to Idria and even, with scant success, to China. Indeed, as early as 1600 the Viceroy of Peru itself, Luis de Velasco, wished for supplies from China, but this was in connection with his desire to get rid of underground work by the Huancavelica mitayos.^[53]

In the next century Huancavelica's performance was extremely irregular, and towards its end Potosi (from 1776 in the new Viceroyalty of La Plata) and other Peruvian mines at times depended quite heavily on Almaden or even Idria. There was also a chronic shortage of cash for working expenses—‘no silver without mercury, no mercury without silver [coin]’—and payments to mine operators by the Crown, the only legal buyer, were often in arrear; hence much selling on the side and smuggling. The fluctuations in output were due not only, perhaps not as much, to mine accidents and the exhaustion of richer or easier-worked deposits, though both these played their parts, as to the erratic changes of official policy in its efforts to cope with the inefficiency (for everything but corruption and obstruction) of the gremio, and the latter's dreadful exploitation of the labour force.

If Toledo's marriage had an element of fiscal rape, the gremio brought an element of sheer murder into the operation. There can be no rational doubt that the mita of Huancavelica was exceptionally frightful. To the merely normal hardships and dangers of gas, cave-ins, fire, pneumonia, over-work and underfeeding, was added the horror of mercurial poisoning: ‘ “the disease of the mine” … in less serious cases rotted and ulcerated the gums, destroyed the dental system through excessive salivation [ptialismo], and led to paralytic symptoms or a “sleeping sickness” [modorra].’^[54] As the shafts and galleries had to go deeper, unit returns fell, mortality increased, and the region lost people by death or flight. Lohmann Villena discounts the more sinister legends of mitayos receiving funeral honours when drafted from their villages and of long chain-gangs; such stories were spread not only by zealous priests but by interested parties wishing to keep Indian labour for themselves. He points out that there were numbers of volunteer labourers; but these strongly preferred to work above ground and- 192 -were able to stand out for higher wages. Luis de Velasco wished to obviate the evils of the mine by turning the whole hill into an open-cut; even if technically practicable, in Huancavelica's climate this might have been as bad for the mitayos as work below the surface. In 1604 restrictions were placed on underground work; Fugger interests, jealous for their Almaden monopoly, may have had some influence in this, but there can be little doubt that the Crown's main motive was a conscientious and honourable one, to mitigate suffering. But output fell by nearly 50 per cent, and a few years later economic reasoning and the needs of the Treasury once more prevailed, as they did in 1716–19 when the complete closure of the mine, for humanitarian reasons, was seriously considered.^[55]

As might be expected, as a general rule (there were exceptions) reliance on the mita went hand-in-hand with technological stagnation; New Spain was much more innovative, and under the Bourbons outstripped Peru. But in the great days, twenty-five or forty years from 1575, something like half the world's silver came from one mountain, the Cerro de Potosi (Figure Plate XV, “POTOSI AND THE CERRO. ”).

- 193 -

Potosi, over 4100 metres above sea-level (c. 660 higher than Lhasa!), was a sport, a freak; by far the highest city in the world, it was itself dominated by the Cerro.^[56] This immense ruddy cone rose nearly 650 metres higher still, and was riddled by the veins of one of the world's richest ore-bodies; the surface exposure found in 1545 was ninety by four metres and 50 per cent silver. Altitude and terrain were themselves advantages from a technical point of view, since there was no fear of flooding and much of the ore was accessible, to begin with at least, by adits and relatively short shafts. But these factors added a new dimension of suffering for the mitayo: an average winter day may range from −16 to +7°C; some mine entrances were at 4500 metres, nearly 15,000 feet. In the shafts, up which men and women carried heavy burdens on dizzying ladders, the air was hot and humid, poor in oxygen but rich in carbonic gas; at the exits, sweating and under-nourished bodies were plunged immediately into icy and rarefied air, well above the altitudinal optimum even for Andean Indians. Well might it be said that only the heat of human greed could temper such a climate.^[57] Yet on this highly unfavourable site, too dry and cold for cultivation, rose one of the greatest cities, numerically, of the early modern world. It had some 120,000 souls of all colours in the late sixteenth century, and by 1650 claimed 160,000—as large as Amsterdam or any Italian city, probably twice as large as Madrid itself.^[58] The European population was numbered in thousands or even tens of thousands, and a very mixed lot it was.

The basis however remained, as it had to, the Indians, whether conscripted mitayos or more or less free ‘fringe dwellers’. Until the introduction of the amalgam process, the refining itself was in Indian hands, and primitive enough, carried on in over 6000 little clay furnaces: some Indians could attain a modest competence, or rather more. With the new capital-demanding technique, the Spaniards took over: between 1574 and 1621 over a score of reservoirs were formed to supply water and power to the crushers and stamping-mills. By 1585 the Cerro was honeycombed by 600-odd adits and shafts, with about 1500 registered mine-owners; but a much smaller number of azogueros—‘mercury-men’—controlled the refining, and they in turn depended for capital on a dozen or so big silver merchants. By an odd twist, however, a custom grew up by which anybody—and that meant mostly Indians—had the right to dig for themselves in any mine, from Saturday night till Monday morning. ‘Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy’?^[59]

The creation of this freak market in a mountain wilderness had a strong multiplier effect on the Peruvian economy, and not only on the export of silver or merely local trade.^[60] The mitayos lived mostly on chuño,^[61] frozen and dried potatoes, and kept themselves going by chewing coca leaves (the source of cocaine) from the eastern Andean slopes and Cochabamba, whence also mine timbers had to be brought. Amalgamation needed great quantities of salt—1500 quintals a day in the 1630s—but this was available from the great salt-pans of the Altiplano 200 km or so to the west (Figure 9, “PERU: CALLAO TO ARICA AND POTOSI”).^[62] Staple European foodstuffs- 194 -came from Arequipa or from Salta, Jujuy, or Tucuman, which was also a great provider of mules; further south the inland plains of La Plata supplied leather and tallow. While the official port of entry and outlet was Arica, this reaching down into the northern marches of modern Chile and Argentina was to become a major, though officially improper, trade route. Silver exports to Europe by La Plata were forbidden (a ban not so irrational as it looks (below, Ch. 8)); but since silver could be sent for normal trade as far as the customs station at Cordoba, and this was more than halfway to Buenos Aires, there was a standing invitation to contrabandistas. In time this was to prove a major lesion in the system of Seville.

Alongside this mundane trade in subsistence and production goods was that in sinfully costly frivolities for the conspicuous consumption of the newly rich élite. Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, the gloriously inconsequential eighteenth-century chronicler of the city, gives a glittering and much-quoted list of the luxuries which flowed in from all quarters of the world for the pleasures of opulent Potosinos;^[63] many of these came through the back door, brought from La Plata by Portuguese merchants, the notorious Peruleiros—another leak from the official channels of exchange.^[64] Between these Peruleiros and the Peruleros, the merchant capitalists of Lima or their factors at Seville, the profits of Potosi were largely drained away; enough were left, however, to support a society raffish on the grand scale, out-Westerning the Hollywood West. Solid piety and good works did exist, but were overlaid by an atmosphere of fiesta and brawl: alongside the eighty churches were fourteen dance-halls and thirty-six gaming-houses, staffed by 700 or 800 professional gamblers. Civil commotion was violent and endemic. Respectable Spanish women were relatively few, partly because child-birth at the high altitude was thought dangerous; but apart from many Indian women living by exercicios amorosos, there were 120 professional ladies, at their head one Doña Clara, who lived in a style ranking her with the grandes horizontales of the French Second Empire or Third Republic.^[65] And all around, gasping in the mine or shivering in the thin sharp air, the drafted relays of mitayos choked their lungs and lives out.