Harder heads have always understood that gold is the key to power. Had not the Pharaohs reigned for 3,000 years relying on their gold to contain the more ingenious Sumerians and Babylonians? Had not the Romans been driven to conquest by their envy of the gold possessed by the Gauls, the Carthaginians and the Greeks?
Such is the monetary value of gold that natural deposits tend to acquire an aura so dazzling that they soon become detached from any real geography. Ophir was the biblical source of Solomon’s gold. It is the port, probably in southern Arabia, from which sails the gold-laden quinquereme of Nineveh in John Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’. Strabo’s Geographica mentions gold mining on the African bank of the Red Sea, presumably one source of the Egyptians’ gold. But as the means expand so do the imaginative horizons. By the time of the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama, the best advice was that Ophir lay in southern Africa, roughly where Zimbabwe is today, or perhaps in the Philippines. Columbus thought Ophir was to be found on the island of Hispaniola. With the Spanish expeditions to the New World came new stories of fabulous gold and a new myth of El Dorado. El Dorado, literally ‘the golden man’, was said to be a tribal priest who was covered in gold for the performance of a sacred ritual, but in the imagination of Western explorers it became another unmapped place of riches, a new Ophir.
In March 1519, Hernando Cortés set out on such an expedition, sailing from Cuba with eleven ships and a force of 600 men to claim the mainland of Mexico and its treasure for the Spanish crown. After various skirmishes, Cortés reached the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, where he and his men were ceremonially received by the emperor Montezuma II and showered with gifts of gold. By means of a subterfuge during the hospitality the Spanish managed to take Montezuma prisoner; before long the Aztec empire had fallen, and Spain was in control of most of Mexico. For all their victory, however, Cortés’s men found little gold besides the presents they had been given by their hosts. It was left to later settlers to develop the Mexican silver mines that would bankroll the Spanish empire.
Thirteen years later, Francisco Pizarro, after lengthy preparations including a voyage of reconnaissance down the Pacific coast to the northern fringe of the Inca empire and another back to Spain to obtain funding, set forth to Peru in search of Inca treasure. Once again betraying the hospitality they were shown (Pizarro had been coached by Cortés back in Spain), the conquistadores launched a surprise attack and captured the Inca ruler Atahualpa. As before, their plan was to control the territory by holding him as vassal ruler. But Atahualpa had another idea, a ransom calculated to appeal to the Spaniards: he bargained his freedom in exchange for a room, some six metres by five metres, that would be filled once with gold and twice with silver as high as a man could reach. This ‘ransom room’ still survives in Cajamarca, Peru. It is clear it cannot have been literally filled. Nevertheless, the Spaniards melted down some eleven tonnes of handsomely crafted gold artefacts for transport as bullion back to Spain. As the ships set sail, they reneged on the deal and put Atahualpa to death.
These were great windfalls. But where was El Dorado? The search went on. Pizarro’s half-brother Gonzalo set off inland from Quito in Ecuador in 1541, but found no city of gold, only a route to the Atlantic Ocean via the River Amazon. Other Spanish adventurers heard stories of the Muisca people of Colombia, who threw gold offerings into a mountaintop lake in order to appease the golden god supposed to live at the bottom of it. When they arrived, they rudely set about trying to drain the lake, but in 400 years only a few pieces of gold have been dredged up.
In 1596, Walter Ralegh sailed to Venezuela, coming away with little gold but his belief in El Dorado nevertheless intact. Accounts of these voyages gave Voltaire plenty of material with which to lampoon the rapacity of the Europeans in his picaresque novella of 1759, Candide. The naive hero Candide is expelled from his vapid and paradisiacal life in Westphalia to travel the world and witness its hardships, from the Thirty Years’ War to the Lisbon earthquake. He finds Eldorado with no trouble and, after being royally entertained, is sent on his way with gifts of fifty sheep laden with gold and jewels. At first, Candide and his companions are buoyed up by the vision of themselves as the ‘possessors of more treasures than Asia, Europe and Africa could gather’, but as they travel on, the sheep fall by the wayside in ones and twos, bogged down in swamps, or fallen from preci-pices, forcing Candide to acknowledge ‘how the riches of the world are perishable’.
Between 1520 and 1660, Spain imported 200 tonnes of gold, never finding it in one convenient hoard, but by expanding its mining activities throughout its territories in the New World. El Dorado was never a place; always an idea.
What these recurrent episodes have in common, apart from European greed and treachery, is the presumption that all parties are agreed that gold is the most valuable substance known to man. This was nothing like the case. The Aztecs and the Incas and other New World indigenous peoples made golden offerings to the gods but did not use the metal for money, so it had little tradeable value, and in some cases other metals were more desirable even for religious purposes.
The Taíno inhabitants of Hispaniola, Cuba and Puerto Rico, for example, assigned distinct roles to gold and silver, and also to a range of coloured alloys. These natives, treated as slaves by Columbus and his followers, found a friend in Bartolomé de Las Casas, the first Christian priest to be ordained in the New World. Las Casas was the author of a history of the Indies, a founder of utopian communities and a believer in liberation theology who thought Cortés a vulgar adventurer. He observed the Taíno customs and found that they did not prize gold for its weight or colour, or regard it as self-evidently valuable as the Spaniards did. The Taíno placed more importance on guanín, an alloy of copper, silver and gold. What pleased them about it was its reddish-purplish colour and most of all its peculiar smell, probably arising from a reaction between the copper and the grease of human fingering. Pure gold, by contrast, was yellow-white and odourless and unappealing. Both gold and guanín were associated with power, authority and the supernatural world, but guanín carried the greater symbolic charge. Unlike gold, which was found native, guanín had to be smelted. This made the alloy still more precious, especially since the technology was not available on Hispaniola and had to be imported from Colombia, which made it seem as if it came from another world. Gold could be dredged up from river-beds, but it seemed as if guanín could only be made in heaven.
Brass, an Old World alloy entirely unknown to pre-Columbian societies, had the same attractive qualities as guanín. Brought by the Spanish, it too was seen as coming from the remote heavens and given a local name likening its brightness to the sunny sky. How much did gold appreciate in value with each nautical mile on its eastward journey to Spain? And how much did humble brass gain as it sailed west? The image of Spanish ships ferrying the two yellow metals each way across the Atlantic with no other point than to feed two mutually uncomprehending societies’ taste in luxury is one to bring an ironic smile to the lips of any Veblen or Voltaire.
I feel it is time I got my hands on some gold, and arrange to meet Richard Herrington, an economic mineralogist at the Natural History Museum in London and an authority on the stuff. The floor of his office is strewn with variegated rocks, red ochre, glittering white, metallic black, each snug in its own box. I have to pick my way carefully just to take a seat. Herrington himself wears a lumberjack shirt as if he has just come in from the mountainside. ‘I love gold,’ he says simply. ‘I love finding it in the rock.’ He hands me a paperweight-sized piece of quartz with a dark yellow inclusion of gold the size of a fingernail. ‘Everybody understands gold. We’ve seen it in the credit crunch. It’s an alternative and trusted commodity. Even a popular paper will quote the gold price every day.’ The value of a diamond depends on its optical quality, that of a painting on everybody else’s opinion of the artist. But gold is always gold, pure and simple. ‘I can’t see it being replaced.’
Gold became a more democratic pursuit with the gold rushes o
f the nineteenth century. The American president James Polk inadvertently launched the first of these when he mentioned that gold had been found at Sutters Fort, California, in his annual statement to Congress in December 1848. By the end of 1849, the non-native-American population of the state had quadrupled to 115,000. In Australia not long after, the British crown attempted to assert its medieval prerogative over gold mines, but the gold rush was so frenzied, and the administration so inept, that it could not be enforced. Repeated over and over again in North America, Australia and elsewhere up until the early years of the twentieth century, the rush for gold, and the consequent increase in gold production, led economists, unable to see the metal as anything other than coin currency, to fear a wholesale collapse in the value of money itself.
One of the early American prospectors was Samuel Clemens, who only became the writer we now know as Mark Twain when he failed in his quest for gold. Clemens went west in 1861 to the Nevada Territory, where his brother was the governor. He tried his luck at several seams and wrote about his experience in his memoir, Roughing It. The memoir is peppered with the grandiloquent names given to the modest ledges and seams he acquired as stakes, but it also betrays Twain’s sheer distaste for the work, repeatedly blasting and sifting the ‘hard, rebellious quartz’ to obtain the tiniest specks of colour.
Twain had every reason to feel disheartened, for he may even have finished his spell as a prospector down on the deal. Having failed to find gold, he fetched up in Virginia City, Nevada, and took a job in an ore mill separating the precious metal from the dross. One means of doing this was by amalgamation, using mercury to dissolve the gold, which could then be recovered from the amalgam by heating. Unfortunately, Twain neglected to remove the gold ring he habitually wore, which he soon observed had crumbled to pieces under attack from the mercury.
The gold may now be gone, but evidence of the rush remains in the towns that sprang up when a major deposit was found. Years ago, I visited Cripple Creek, in the high valleys of Colorado, once the site of the world’s biggest gold mine. The story of the town began when a rancher, Robert Womack, found ore there in 1890. The ore was a rare mineral that contained silver and gold in the form of salts rather than as native metals. One version has it that the discovery was made when the heat from a furnace hearth caused the ground to sweat with molten gold. The prospectors came, and a year later, on the Fourth of July, a carpenter, Winfield Stratton, laid claim to Independence lode, one of the largest gold deposits ever found. In 1900, Stratton sold his mine for $10 million, while Womack drank away what little money he made. Cripple Creek eventually yielded some $300 million in gold.
I walked the length of the broad main street, a gently curving dip like the track of a pendulum. At each end, vistas opened towards snow-covered mountains with the geology naked above the tree line. The buildings that lined the street–an ice-cream parlour, a general store, a few craft shops, the boarded-up Phenix Block yet to rise again–sported a rich variety of Victorian ornamentation in brick and plaster and were overhung by elaborate wooden cornices. Many of them bore the date, the same in every case: 1896. A town that had grown from nothing in a year and where nothing had happened since. It was easy to picture the mad excitement of the rush that made these places overnight and then almost as quickly left them to rot. I noticed the offer of ‘free gold ore samples’ at Frego’s Emporium. It seemed to confirm that the great days were over. (People still seek instant riches today even if they are no longer prepared to work for it: the town has recently sought to revive its fortunes by introducing legalized gambling.)
Mythology has often associated gold with water. The Phrygian king Midas washes away his curse of the golden touch in the River Sardis, while the story of the Golden Fleece originates from the trick of placing wool in a running stream to catch fine particles of precious metal. It is no surprise then to learn that scientists too have directed their quest beneath the waves. The Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, the first director of the Nobel Institute, made significant strides in many fields, including prescient speculations about the greenhouse effect in the earth’s atmosphere. Much of his research was done on the electrical conductivity of solutions, during the course of which, in 1903, he arrived at an estimate of the amount of gold dissolved in the sea. His calculations put the concentration of the element at six milligrammes per tonne of seawater. At this level, the total reserve of gold in the world’s oceans would be eight billion tonnes. The global annual production of gold at the time was a few hundred tonnes.
In May 1920, Arrhenius’s German friend Fritz Haber travelled to Stockholm to collect the Nobel Prize that he had been awarded (for the year 1918, but postponed because of the First World War) for his discovery of a synthetic route for making ammonia from nitrogen in the atmosphere, a breakthrough that had quickly proved vital for the manufacture of both fertilizer and explosives. The two men held long discussions. A few days after Haber arrived back in Germany, the victorious Allies announced their peace terms: his country was to pay 269 billion goldmarks in reparations. He resolved to find the money using science.
Somewhere at the back of his mind must have been the legend of the Rhine gold. In the first opera of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Das Rheingold, the gold appears gleaming in the sunlight at the bottom of the river, guarded by three flippertigibbet Rhine maidens. The dwarfish Alberich eyes the girls, but settles for the gold and the secret they whisper to him that a ring made from it will confer upon the wearer power without limit. In common with Pliny and the great German metallurgist Agricola, Wagner is at pains to make clear that the native metal is quite innocent in all this, and it is only objects made from it by human art that are corrupting. As George Bernard Shaw explains in The Perfect Wagnerite, his critique of the Ring Cycle, the Rhine maidens value the gold ‘in an entirely uncommercial way, for its bodily beauty and splendor’. They sing that only man has the craft to fashion the gold into a ring, which is naturally what the jilted, venal Alberich goes and does. Over the course of the next three nights in the opera house, the ring is traded, stolen, fought over and paid as ransom, working its curse as it goes, until finally the river reclaims its own. It is perhaps significant that Wagner wrote the libretto of the cycle at the time of the first great gold rushes, while Shaw used the Klondike gold rush of 1898 to illustrate his criticisms.
The curse worked more slowly on Haber. He launched into the project by calling in samples of seawater from around the world to his Berlin laboratory. The chemical analyses confirmed Arrhenius’s figures. Then, backed by a consortium of metals interests, he equipped a ship and put to sea in 1923. But on this transatlantic journey and on subsequent voyages in other oceans over the next four years, his measurements seemed to show less and less of the precious metal. He concluded despondently–and, it now appears, erroneously–that there was only a tiny fraction of the dissolved gold that had been thought, and certainly not enough to cover the massive cost of extracting it.
More recent estimations of the quantity of gold in seawater are more optimistic, putting levels at three times those that Haber considered worth exploring–twenty milligrammes per tonne. In principle, the oceans of the world could contain gold worth some £300 million million at current prices, or to put it another way 400 million Kate Mosses. But even at this more attractive rate, according to Richard Herrington, ‘the cost of extraction is too great to be contemplated at the moment’. There really is, he further notes, gold in the Rhine, ‘with production in the best years reaching upwards of 15 kg’.
The sheer unexpectedness of dissolved gold has been successfully exploited on at least one notable occasion. By 1933, Nazi oppression of Germany’s Jewish scientists was leading many to emigrate or take refuge in foreign laboratories. Two Nobel physics laureates, Max von Laue, who won the prize in 1914 for his discovery of X-ray diffraction, and James Franck, who won it in 1925 for producing experimental confirmation of the quantization of energy, deposited their medals for safe keeping with Niels Bohr at the Institute for
Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. By the time the German army marched into Denmark in April 1940, Bohr had already donated his own Nobel medal for a war relief auction, but he was concerned to hide the Germans’ medals as their discovery in his laboratory would further compromise the already discredited scientists. The medals bore the names of their recipients, and, as they were made of gold, it was illegal to take them out of Germany.
Working with Bohr in Copenhagen was the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy, who in 1923 had discovered the element hafnium, naming it after the Latin for the city, ‘Hafnia’. Hevesy first suggested that they bury the medals, but Bohr felt it was too likely they would be discovered. Instead, as Nazi troops flooded into the city, he set about dissolving them in aqua regia–with some difficulty, he complained later, as there was a considerable amount of gold and it was reluctant to react even with this strong acid. The Nazis took over the Institute for Theoretical Physics and carefully searched Bohr’s laboratory, but omitted to enquire as to the contents of the bottles of brown liquid on a shelf, which remained there undisturbed for the duration of the war. After the war, Bohr wrote a letter to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences accompanying the return of the medal gold explaining what had happened to it. The gold was recovered, and the Nobel Foundation duly minted new medals for the two physicists.
Aqua regia was one of the many useful, and often unacknowledged, contributions to modern chemistry made by the alchemists, whose discovery that it would dissolve gold naturally occasioned great excitement. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan is given a tour of the wonders of the earth and sees that the ‘Rivers run / Potable Gold’. If solid gold was the symbol of perfection, immortality and enlightenment, its availability in a form that could be imbibed–the solution was typically blended with aromatic oils to make a sort of metallic vinaigrette–surely held promise for a general cure-all.
Periodic Tales Page 3