1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [80]
Typical ores are at most a few percent silver. The ledge was as much as 50 percent. It was so rich that the Spaniards didn’t know how to purify it—they kept boiling away the silver. Andean Indians had some of the world’s most advanced metallurgy. Locals were able to do what the foreigners couldn’t, in low-temperature smelters fueled by dry grass and llama dung. Soon thousands of native smelters sent their smoke into the chill Andean air. By the early 1560s, two decades after the first strike, the Imperial Villa of Potosí, to give the new boomtown its formal name, had a population of as much as fifty thousand. It would have had even more if Spain hadn’t done everything it could to keep people out. Despite these efforts the count grew to 160,000 by 1611. Potosí was as big as London or Amsterdam. It was the highest, richest city in the world.
Lawless, louche, and luxurious, Potosí set the template for countless boomtowns afterward. Courtesans in Chinese silk walked on Persian carpets in rooms sprinkled with scented water. Miners gave fortunes to beggars and spent fortunes on swords and clothes and elaborate celebrations. In a market-stall bidding war, two men drove the price for a single fish to five thousand silver pesos, many years’ income for most Europeans. Another man showed up for a duel in “a brocaded tunic the color of mother-of-pearl, studded with diamonds, emeralds, and strands of pearl.” At one celebration a city street was actually paved with silver bars. “I am rich Potosí,” crowed the city coat of arms, “the treasure of the world, the king of the mountains, the envy of kings.”
Shown in this drawing from 1768, Potosí spread across the plains below the silver mountains. Cold, crowded, and violent, it was the highest city in the world and probably the richest. (Photo credit 4.4)
Enviable, perhaps, but also uncomfortable. Wind and altitude conspire to make the town amazingly cold and the terrain almost lifeless. The air is so thin that the first time I visited I got woozy carrying my suitcase up a flight of stairs. Humiliatingly, my host’s ten-year-old sister scooted to my side, grabbed the bag, and ran with it to my room. During the silver era every cup of flour, every piece of clothing, and every scrap of wood had to be carried into the city by llama. Now Bolivia has cars and trucks, but many houses in Potosí still lack heat, as they did in centuries past. In the morning my blanket crackled with frost. Seeing my blue lips, my host’s mother kindly melted a cup of coca tea.
Almost as important as the mountain of Potosí was a second Andean peak, Huancavelica, eight hundred miles northwest, which gleamed with mercury deposits. In the 1550s Europeans in Mexico discovered a way to use mercury, rather than heat, to purify silver ore. (Rediscovered, actually—the technique had been known in China for centuries.) Miners pulverized silver ore, spread the powdery result over a flat surface, typically a stone patio, then used rakes and hoes to mix in saltwater, copper sulfate, and mercury, forming a stiff cake. Men, mules, and horses walked over the cake, their footfalls providing the energy for a complex reaction that slowly forced the mercury to combine with the silver in the ore, forming a sticky amalgam. Workers poured water over the cake, washing away everything but the amalgam, which was then scraped into cloth sacks. In time the loosely bonded mercury and silver separated; mercury being a liquid, it dripped out of the sacks, leaving bagfuls of pure silver. After watching a demonstration of the technique, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo seized the Huancavelica mines for the crown, thus arranging what he called “the most important marriage in the world, between the mountain of Huancavelica and the mountain of Potosí.”
As long as the mercury lasted, the viceroy realized, the