Unable to reconcile the contradiction, Beijing finally allowed Fujianese merchants to trade overseas without fear of punishment. Now acting in the open, they sent thousands of people—younger sons from extended families—throughout Asia to establish beachheads for later trading or extortion. Even a backwater like the Malay village of Manila may have had as many as 150 Chinese residents in 1571, when Legazpi showed up. Hundreds more apparently resided elsewhere in the islands. The unexpected discovery of silver-bearing foreigners in the Philippines was, from the Chinese point of view, a godsend. The galleons that brought over Spanish silver were ships full of money.
“THE TREASURE OF THE WORLD”
How did silver get on those galleons? According to the stories, it began with a man named Diego Gualpa or Hualpa in April 1545. He was out walking at thirteen thousand feet, possibly looking for a lost llama, on a plateau in the Andes Mountains, at the southern tip of Bolivia. (The altitude, amazingly, was not extreme for the Andes, where most of the population lives on high plains that are almost at that level.) No trees, no animals, no crops, no homes—just a bare, dome-shaped hill, clawed by wind and snow, surrounded by still taller mountains splashed with ice. Stumbling on a high ridge, he steadied himself by seizing a shrub. It came out of the shallow soil. Beneath it, in the hole made by its roots, was a metallic sparkle. Gualpa or Hualpa was on a ledge of silver ore three hundred feet long and thirteen feet wide and three hundred feet deep—the biggest silver strike in history.
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 mines would no longer be dependent on Indian technology, which in turn meant that Spaniards could treat natives wholly as a source of labor. Andean peoples had a tradition of communal work that had been co-opted by the Inka to build a great highway system. Taking a page from the Inka playbook, Viceroy Toledo forced natives to deliver, as a tribute, weekly quotas of men to the silver and mercury mines—at the start, roughly four thousand a week each for Potosí and Huancavelica. As lagniappe, mineowners also imported several hundred African slaves each year. Sometimes it is said that the mines killed three to eight million people. This is an exaggeration. Still, conditions were appalling, especially at Huancavelica.
The entrance to the mercury mine was a great archway with pilasters and the royal coat of arms cut into the living rock of the mountain. Inside, the tunnels rapidly narrowed and spread out like jellyfish tentacles. Candles strapped to their foreheads, Indians hauled ore through cramped tunnels with next to no ventilation. Heat from the earth vaporized the mercury—a slow-acting poison—so workers stumbled through the day in a lethal steam. Even in cooler parts of the mine they were hacking away at the ore with picks, creating a fug of mercury, sulfur, arsenic, and silica. The consequences were predictable. Workers served in two-month shifts, often several times a year; after a single stint, many shook from the initial effects of mercury toxicity. Foremen and supervisors died, too—they also spent too much time in the mine. So determined were natives to avoid the mercury pits that parents maimed their children to prevent them from having to serve.
Huancavelica ore was refined in a ceramic oven; the mercury boiled off and condensed on the inside surfaces. If the oven were opened before it was cool—something mineowners, eager to start the next refining cycle, often insisted upon—the result was a faceful of mercury vapor. Numerous official inspectors urged the crown to shut down Huancavelica. But reasons of state always won out; the need for silver was too great. As the mineshafts went deeper into the mountain the inspectors urged that the state dig ventilation shafts. The first was not created for eight decades. Officials who dug up graves in 1604 reported that when miners’ corpses decomposed they left behind puddles of mercury.5
Conditions at Potosí were less lethal, but no less inhumane. In near-complete darkness gangs of conscripted Indians carried hundred-pound loads of ore up and down dangling rope-and-leather ladders. Like ants on a string, one chain of men descended one side of the ladders while another chain climbed up the other. Initially Indians were given two weeks’ rest above ground for every week of work beneath the surface. Later the rest periods vanished. When miners hit a patch of low-quality ore, they were forced to work harder to make their quota of silver. Failure to meet the quota would be punished by whips, clubs, and stones. Horrified antislavery activists denounced the “hellish pits” of Potosí. “If twenty healthy Indians enter on Monday, half come out on Saturday as cripples,” one outraged priest wrote to the Spanish royal secretary. How, he asked, could Christian lead
ers allow this?
Click here to view a larger image.
The itinerant artist and editor Theodorus de Bry never saw the mines of Potosí, but he captured something of their cruelty in this engraving from the 1590s. (Photo credit 4.5)
Part of the reason that the rule of law broke down beneath the surface was that it had broken down above the surface as well. Violence of every conceivable variety flourished in Potosí. Construction workers found murder victims stuffed into walls or shoved under rocks. Tailors rioted after a guild election, forcing one faction leader to seek shelter in an Augustinian monastery. When the government sent agents to arrest him, the friars jumped on them with drawn swords. City council members wore chain mail at meetings and carried swords and pistols. Political disputes were sometimes resolved by duels fought right in the room. As one may imagine, the ambience was hostile to family life. Despite Potosí’s huge population, no child was born there to a European for more than half a century. So unexpected was the first birth that the baby’s arrival—on Christmas Eve, 1598—was widely attributed to the miraculous intervention of Nicola da Tolentino, the patron saint of infants.
Potosí was as conflict prone as pirate-ridden Yuegang, but the battles were regarded differently, at least by their chroniclers. The main Chinese accounts of the wokou—county gazetteers and official reports—are terse and matter-of-fact, whereas Potosí’s most important chronicler, Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela (1676–1736), spent three decades writing a massive, 1,300-page history of the city that is, among other things, a breathless paean to romantic honor of the sort mocked in Don Quixote. Arzáns never published his book, partly because he was afraid to go public—local families might not have liked his descriptions of their forefathers’ mayhem, no matter how glorified.
Despite the golden haze Arzáns cast over events, one can see from his account how the city’s violence evolved from cinematic face-offs between alpha males into full-fledged battles between ethnic groups. In 1552, seven years after Gualpa or Hualpa discovered silver, the bellicose adventurer Pedro de Montejo arrived in Potosí. In Arzáns’s telling, Montejo put up placards challenging one and all to combat, “spear against spear.” Such fights “were an admirable thing in Potosí,” Arzáns explained. In a city with a permanent European population that almost exclusively consisted of young men on the make, “killing and hurting each other was the sole entertainment.”
By general consensus, Montejo had one obvious opponent: the equally bellicose Vasco Gudínez, who had already established a reputation as the city’s go-to man for threats and mayhem. Early on Easter morning both men, accompanied by their seconds, rode to the battleground, followed by a crowd of layabouts. After an exchange of insults, Arzáns recounted, the two men “charged at each other and collided so hard that it was like bringing together two rocks.” Gudínez, badly wounded,
withdrew some distance and threw his spear at Montejo with such violence that he did not have time to dodge, and it struck his buckler, passing entirely through it and wounding him in the arm, breaking through the chain mail and the steel plate, and much of the tip went into his body.… Montejo, fatally injured and without the defense of his buckler, attacked his opponent with diabolical force with the tip of his sword; he responded to Gudínez’s parry with his shield, and raising his arm brave Montejo unleashed a fierce blow to the head that dazed Gudínez and, worse, wounded and knocked his horse to the ground, spilling much blood. Now Montejo had him down and was about to cut off his head, but at the first step he [Montejo] fell dead, pierced through the chest. Gudínez got up with alacrity, and stumbled to the corpse and put his sword to its neck, thinking that he wasn’t yet dead.
Arzáns evidently embellished the details of this encounter—he claimed that the two men’s seconds thereupon engaged in a three-hour battle to the death, which the wounded Gudínez tarried to watch en route to his sickbed. Arzáns may even have gotten some basic facts wrong (no record exists of any Potosino named Pedro de Montejo, for instance). But the underlying scenario seems indisputable: the city was chock-full of brutal thugs. To reestablish control, the provincial government in Lima sent in troops. After a round of skirmishes, Arzáns wrote, Gudínez’s second, a specially vicious hoodlum, was drawn and quartered; Vasco Gudínez himself was jailed.
Vasco means “Basque,” and the name was no accident—a disproportionate number of Potosinos were from the Basque country in Spain’s Atlantic coast. Culturally, linguistically, and geographically isolated from the rest of Spain, mountainous and agriculturally unpromising, the Basque region was, so to speak, the Fujian of Spain—a center for nautical trade and emigration. Two-thirds of Potosí’s mines and the municipal council were controlled by Basques by 1602. Basque leaders bribed royal bureaucrats to look the other way when taxes were due; if non-Basque miners posed a competitive threat, Basque gangs provided muscle. When royal officials tried to sell off a Basque mineowner’s lease for unpaid taxes, a Basque gang stabbed to death the would-be purchaser in Potosí’s central square. Resentment grew among colonists from other parts of Spain, many of whom lived in wildcat mining camps outside the city. In furtive meetings anti-Basque miners took to identifying themselves with caps made from vicuña wool (the vicuña is a relative of the llama) and called themselves Vicuñas. Basques had no need to identify themselves by dress; they spoke their homeland’s native tongue, Euskara, which is unrelated to Spanish.
The struggle gained intensity in August 1618, when a new lawman came to town. In the loosely governed city, he was that most terrifying figure, a tax inspector. “Punctual and tidy, intelligent and modest, he enjoyed nothing more than fulfilling his duties,” wrote the Bolivian historian Alberto Crespo of the inspector. “His name was Alonso Martínez Pastrana and he was not Basque.” This humorless bean-counter soon learned that Potosinos had been cheating massively on their taxes. The king was supposed to be paid one-fifth of the silver from the mines, as well as part of the revenue from mercury sales and coin minting. Martínez Pastrana calculated that Potosinos had collectively shorted the king 4.5 million pesos, more than the mines’ official annual output. Because Basques owned the biggest mines and dominated the city government, they were responsible for most of the fraud. Eighteen of the twenty-four members of the municipal council owed back taxes, the inspector said; eleven of the offenders were Basque. Three years later, after a battle with corrupt treasury officials, Martínez Pastrana finally was able to ban overt tax cheats from membership on the municipal council.
In June 1622 a Basque gang leader was found dead on the street, his hands and tongue cut off and minced. Vicuñas correctly were blamed. Furious Basque goon squads roamed the squares, threatening to lynch the “Moors, treasonous Jews and cuckolds” responsible for the murder. If they met a stranger in the street, one account claims, they challenged him in Basque; anyone who responded in Spanish would perish. After a round of murders, a stone-throwing Vicuña mob converged on the home of Domingo de Verasátegui, head of a powerful Basque family—he was one of four wealthy brothers, two of whom were on the municipal council. He was saved only by the sudden appearance of the head of the royal court, who personally escorted him to the safety of the city jail. Verasátegui died a few months later of natural causes, unusual in Potosí.
The crown appointed a new governor for Potosí the following May. (The governor, or corregidor, was the highest district-level authority.) Felipe Manrique was a violent man with a short fuse—years before, in a moment of rage, he had slain his wife. On his journey to Potosí the widower met and was smitten by Verasátegui’s widow, inflaming Vicuña suspicions. They razed the governor’s house, shooting Manrique four times in the process. A full-fledged riot exploded two months later when a Basque tipped his hat to two Vicuñas “in a very arrogant manner.” Manrique dispatched military patrols but couldn’t stop several thousand Vicuñas from pillaging the homes of prominent Basques.
Seventy years before, Fujian’s Zhu Wan had learned the hard way that incorruptible pursuit of du
ty is not always a means for successful career advancement in government service. Zhu was driven to suicide. The implacable tax collector Martínez Pastrana was luckier: he escaped with his life, though not his career. His superiors bowed to pressure and ended his mission in August 1623, a few weeks before the Vicuñas burned down Governor Manrique’s house. He ended up in bitter retirement in Lima, where a street bears his name.
By contrast, the all-too-corruptible Governor Manrique left office on February 19, 1624. The next day he married Verasátegui’s widow and moved into her splendid manor—“serving to eliminate every doubt,” observed Crespo, the Bolivian historian, about “the badly concealed connections that linked the governor and the Basques.” Manrique moved to Cuzco (the Spanish name for the former Inka capital of Qosqo), a wealthy man who would become wealthier. With the departure of both men, passions ebbed. Vicuñas disappeared into the countryside, where they robbed travelers with impunity for years.