by John Butman
It was at Porco that Spanish mine operators first heard about Potosí, however it may have been discovered. What they found was an extraordinary vein, measuring some three hundred feet long and thirteen feet wide, containing ore of 50 percent purity. As the news spread, a silver rush began.35 Within months, a mining camp had formed around the base of the mountain, and before long some twenty-five hundred dwellings had been erected, housing 14,000 people.36 The landscape was barren, the climate chilly, yet by 1550 Potosí was a sixteenth-century boomtown.37 Fortunes were quickly accumulated, and mine owners and merchants, as well as some individual miners, became avaricious consumers of luxuries from Europe and the East, including English-made hats and woolen coats—proof that new markets could be created and become profitable.38 It was the irresistible temptation of this magical city of treasure that had prompted John Dudley to ask Sebastian Cabot to prepare plans for a raid on the silver-rich viceroyalty of Peru, although nothing came of it.
Potosí became an important node in a global network of trade in precious metals, largely controlled by Spain. The most visible—and vulnerable—element of this vast commercial enterprise was Spain’s treasure fleet, which operated under the jurisdiction of La Casa de la Contratación and which maintained a relatively regular schedule of two outbound sailings of armed convoys—one to the mainland of South America, and the other to New Spain, or Mexico. As many as sixty merchant ships traveled together in a fleet, and they were accompanied by several warships and additional smaller craft, which facilitated transport and communication among the ships and patrolled the waters in search of pirates and privateers.39
The main ships were sturdily built and heavily armed galleons—one hundred feet long, with three or four masts, a capacity of five hundred to six hundred tons, and as many as three dozen cannon. They were well-suited for carrying large cargoes of supplies and treasure over long distances. As a comparison, Elizabeth’s Ayde, which Frobisher was using for transporting what he thought was a hoard of gold, had a capacity of just two hundred tons.
The New Spain fleet sailed from Seville in the spring, bound for Veracruz, east of what is now Mexico City on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. In the summer, another fleet sailed from Seville to Cartagena, on the northern coast of modern-day Colombia, and stopped there. The main purpose of the stopover was to send word overland to Spanish functionaries in Panama City, on the Pacific coast of the isthmus, and to begin transport of the silver from Panama City to Nombre de Dios, on the Atlantic coast, for collection.40
Meanwhile, transport from the mines had to be organized so the silver would reach Panama City in time to coincide with the arrival of the ships at Nombre de Dios. From Potosí, silver bars would be loaded onto llama packs for the trek overland to the coast—a journey that could take six months—where they were loaded onto coastal vessels for the voyage northward to Panama City. The silver was then off-loaded and taken by mule train or riverboat across the isthmus to the port of Nombre de Dios—a distance, as the crow flies, of some forty miles—where the big ships waited after the journey from Cartagena. One such llama train, which departed Potosí in March 1549, consisted of two thousand llamas bearing 7,771 bars of silver. It was accompanied by a thousand Incans, whose role was primarily to protect the silver from attack by bandits operating from their hideouts in the surrounding hills.41
When the silver at last reached Nombre de Dios, a great fair was held, where some of the silver was traded for goods, which were transported back to the mining operations in Mexico and Peru again by mule, ship, and llama. The homeward-bound Spanish convoys stopped at Havana in Cuba, where a large shipyard had been established, and supplies were plentiful and, to the delight of the sailors, the climate was mild.42 They then sailed together north along the coast of Florida, riding the Gulf Stream and prevailing winds. Here, they were more exposed to natural hazards—the waters were dangerous, the weather was variable, and the storms were fierce and frequent. Also, they were vulnerable to attack from privateers, hostile ships darting out from coastal harbors.
The precious metal trade quickly expanded beyond the Atlantic trade routes into India and China, initially conducted by the Portuguese. The Chinese had an “extraordinary preference” for silver over gold.43Although they had mines of their own and had developed advanced expertise in metallurgy and smelting, they regarded mining as bad for the earth and as a source of human corruption. Indeed, it was banned in 1078, and China became what has been called a “receptacle” country, preferring to let others engage in the nasty work of mining but more than willing to buy the product.44
Eventually, the Spanish pioneered the Pacific crossing from South America to the Far East, trading much of the silver in the Philippines. Spain’s silver ships would depart from Acapulco on Mexico’s west coast and sail across the Pacific to the great bay of Manila—a distance of around nine thousand miles as the crow flies. There, they would meet merchants from China and use their American silver to buy a range of goods that Spanish consumers desired, including silks, beautifully crafted Ming porcelain, and custom-made furniture.45
This trade became an important part of the global trading system, fueling Spain’s imperial ambitions. Its most striking symbol was the peso de ocho reales—the piece of eight. This large silver coin, about one and a half inches wide, was first minted at Potosí in the 1570s.46 It became the first global currency, beloved of princes and pirates.
For Michael Lok and his fellow investors, including Elizabeth, Spain’s global activity in precious metals was an ever-present reminder of the power—and potential—to be had from mining a rich seam of gold or silver. They dearly wanted to find their own.
IN MAY 1577, as Martin Frobisher prepared to depart on his second voyage, he received some specific instructions, probably drafted by William Cecil. According to these, the fleet was to proceed to Hall’s Island and, after finding a good harbor, repair to “the place where the mineral ore was had which you brought hither the last year.” There he was to set the miners to work.47 It was a sign of the changed priorities of the voyage that Frobisher commanded a crew of 120 men that included several miners and gold finers. They were under the supervision of Jonas Schütz, the assayer, who was funded by William Winter and Michael Lok and given the title “chief master of the mines.”48
While the workers gathered ore and loaded it on to the Ayde, Frobisher was to proceed farther into the strait, search for more mines, try to locate and recover the five mariners lost on the previous trip, and continue far enough into the passage to be certain that he had reached the South Sea. Once he had attempted—and ideally achieved—these goals, he was to return to Hall’s Island to evaluate the progress of the mining operations. Also, he was to consider implementing the idea of settlement propounded by Sir Humphrey Gilbert. This would mean leaving some men behind to stay over the winter so that they might “observe the nature of the air and state of the country, and what time of the year the Strait is most free from ice.”49
Although the goals of the voyage were ambitious, the investors were realistic about the chances of success. One instruction noted that if Frobisher failed to find the gold he was looking for, he was to send the Ayde home and “proceed toward the discovering of Cathay” with the two barks.50
On May 26, 1577, the fleet departed Blackwall, another of the little shipbuilding villages on the banks of the Thames. Frobisher commanded the Ayde, while Edward Fenton, his second-in-command who had seen service in Ireland under Sir Henry Sidney, took the helm of the Gabriel. After a two-month voyage, the fleet arrived at Hall’s Island, where the rock that started it all had been picked up. But try as they might, they could not find anything “so big as a walnut.”51 So they sailed on to the neighboring island, which Frobisher named after the Countess of Warwick, the wife of his chief sponsor, Ambrose Dudley, and an investor in her own right.52
There the men found a “good store of the ore,” and after washing it, gold was “plainly to be seen.”53 Leading by example, Frobisher, alongs
ide five miners, pitched into the work of digging the ore. Soon, a “few gentlemen and soldiers” joined them. It was not normal practice for gentlemen to dirty their hands with the manual tasks of such a venture, but Frobisher was no typical gentleman. Indeed, George Best, who had been hired to write an account of the voyage, gives the admiral and his fellow commanders a hearty “commendation” for their “great willingness” and “courageous stomachs” to take on such backbreaking, tedious work.
The mining went on for nearly three weeks, during which time almost two hundred tons of rock were loaded aboard ship. Finally, on August 20, with the weather turning nasty, Frobisher determined that the work was done: the ships’ holds were filled and it “was a good time to leave.” By then the men were physically exhausted. Some of them were badly injured—their “bellies broken” and their “legs made lame.” But there was a sense of achievement and, as they departed the island, Frobisher ordered the firing of a farewell volley “in honor of the right Honorable Lady Anne, Countess of Warwick.”54
The fleet returned to England, carrying not only the ore but also three Inuits: a man, a woman, and her baby. As before, there was great anticipation as the ships sailed along the Thames. Had gold been found? Had Frobisher finally navigated through the Northwest Passage? In his diary for Tuesday, September 24, Francis Walsingham, one of the biggest investors, wrote, “Captaine Furbusher arrived at the Court, being returned from Cathay.”55 Walsingham clearly harbored hopes that the sought-for destination had been reached at last.
Frobisher made his way to Windsor. There he was “courteously entertained and heartily welcomed of many noblemen.”56 Elizabeth gave a great show of support, and “because that place and country, hath never heretofore been discovered, and therefore had no special name, by which it may be called and known, her Majesty named it very properly Meta Incognita, as a mark and bounds utterly hitherto unknown.”57
The name Meta Incognita—literally, “unknown limit”—did not necessarily indicate that Elizabeth wanted to take possession of this distant land. And yet, in November, a couple of months after Frobisher’s homecoming, she received a visit from her favorite astrologer, John Dee, urging her to do just that. He came with a sheaf of documents he hoped would make her think differently about Meta Incognita as an extension of what he termed the “Brytish Impire.” As he noted in his diary, he bestowed upon her the “title to Greenland, Estotiland and Friseland,” which he contended were Arctic lands that fell within her realm.58 Greenland was well-known, and it may have surprised Elizabeth that she could claim this territory. Friseland was supposedly an island—and Frobisher named its ice-topped mountains on what was actually the southern tip of Greenland after his navigational tutor: Dee’s Pinnacles. Estotiland, believed to lie far to the west of Friseland, was almost certainly modern-day Baffin Island.
It is not clear how Elizabeth reacted to Dee’s argument. However, the Cathay Company seems to have been inclined toward settlement. In Frobisher’s second voyage, a small group of “condemned men” were taken along on what seemed like a suicidal mission: they were to overwinter in the Arctic. In the end, they got no farther than Harwich, on England’s east coast, where they were off-loaded to cut costs.59 This time, however, the directors of the Cathay Company took the idea more seriously, partly because they had received secret intelligence that the French might be eyeing the territory for themselves. As Frobisher learned, the French king had armed twelve ships “to pass to the same new country, to take possession of the straits and to fortify the mines there.”60
Accordingly, the company instructed Frobisher to assemble a colonial party of one hundred men. The task fell to Edward Fenton, Frobisher’s second-in-command, who assembled a community of carpenters, bakers, tentmakers, coopers, and smiths—ordinary artisans who were given the honor of establishing England’s first colony in the New World. In a sign that this was a serious investment, Lok ordered 10,000 bricks for the construction of a permanent fort, as well as the component parts of a prefabricated building that would provide temporary lodgings for the settlers.61 Also, victuals were ordered for an eighteen-month stay, even though resupply vessels were expected to return within a year. Drawing up his provisional list, Fenton calculated that he would need 15,600 pounds of beef, 5,200 pounds of bacon, and 1,200 pounds of pork, as well as beer, bread, fish, cheese, and peas.62
The colonial venture was still subsidiary to the main purpose of the third voyage: the hunt for gold. Soon after Frobisher’s return from the second voyage, Walsingham and his fellow investors heard the crushing news that the fast route to Cathay lay undiscovered. But they remained excited by the mountains of ore that Frobisher had extracted from the New World, and the curious black stone was treated very differently than it had been after the first voyage. There was none of the casual passing around of souvenir rocks, no tossing them into the fire. The Ayde and the Gabriel put in at Bristol, where the rock was transferred to the castle and locked away. Four men were entrusted with keys, including Frobisher and Lok. The Michael had proceeded to London and off-loaded its ore at the residence of Sir William Winter, on St. Katherine’s Hill, just east of the Tower of London, where a furnace was being prepared for the testing of the ore.
The news generated huge excitement. Philip Sidney, son of Sir Henry and one of the main investors in the Frobisher voyages, sent off a letter to his friend Hubert Languet, a French Protestant considered to be “one of the most learned men of the day.”63 He reported that Frobisher had “given it as his decided opinion that the island is so productive in metals, as to seem very far to surpass the country of Peru.”64 In other words, better than Spain.
In his reply to Sidney, Languet eloquently warned of the dangers of the treasure hunt. England, he wrote, had “stumbled on that gift of nature, of all others the most fatal and hurtful to mankind, which nevertheless nearly all men desire with so insane a longing, that it is the most powerful of all motives to them to incur risk.” Languet reminded Sidney of the problem of land enclosure, which had been abused as a result of avarice. “And now I fear England will be tempted by the thirst for gold.”65
England was indeed tempted, and sorely so. Now began an assaying frenzy—with the queen watching and waiting for word. Jonas Schütz, who had conducted assays on the first piece of rock and had sailed with the second voyage, began working with the furnace at Winter’s house in the first week of October. Within a month he had preliminary results, which he said were positive. But even so he argued that he would need bigger and better furnaces to make a more definitive judgment.
Several assayers were drawn into the proceedings—not only Schütz but also Agnello and another German metallurgist, Dr. Burchard Kranich (sometimes known as Dr. Burcott), who also happened to be personal physician to the queen.66 The assayers bickered with each other and accused each other of tampering with the ore and with the results. There was, however, some agreement that a new furnace was needed for smelting the ore—a blast furnace of the kind only available in England’s mining districts, far from London.
After much searching, Lok and Frobisher identified what they considered to be a suitable existing mill to establish a larger furnace, at Dartford on the Thames estuary.67 At the start of 1578, the Privy Council’s Commission approved construction of the new works, and Frobisher and Lok traveled to Dartford with a mason and carpenter who drew up plans for the new house, mills, and furnaces. But it soon became clear that construction could not be completed before the departure of a third voyage, planning for which was already underway. They decided, therefore, to conduct preliminary tests on ten tons of the ore, using the existing blast furnace owned and operated by the Company of Mines Royal, in Keswick, three hundred miles north of London.68
The activity culminated in a report made by the Commission to William Cecil in March 1578. It stated that the “sundry proofs and trials made of the north-weste ore” showed that the “richness of that earth is like to fall out to a good reckoning” and that, therefore, a third voyage shou
ld be taken in hand to gather more ore and send one hundred men to inhabit those parts of the world.69
SOON ENOUGH, A third voyage was organized, and this was the grandest of the three, with Elizabeth once again as the lead investor. The total amount pledged was £6,952—more than the amount raised for the first two voyages combined.70 The fleet consisted of fifteen ships, with Elizabeth’s ship Ayde sailing for a second time as flagship. The mission was to proceed directly to the most promising ore site—the Countess of Warwick Island—where as much ore as possible was to be loaded and returned for smelting.
Frobisher set off at the end of May 1578, the ships churning toward what the English hoped would prove to be its own version of the fabled cerro rico of Potosí. And it was because of that perceived intention that Spain paid much closer attention this time. In April, prior to Frobisher’s departure, Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, had informed Philip II that the Englishman was commanding the expedition “on the Queen’s behalf.” She had, he revealed, “expressed herself very warmly as to the great importance of the undertaking for the welfare of her realm.” He also noted that “the number of men for colonization has been increased” and that “a quantity of easily erected wooden houses and other necessaries are being taken.” Mendoza had tried, without success, to get a copy of the chart that the Frobisher crew would employ—but he did manage to get his hands on a piece of ore, which he sent to the king.71
The route was a familiar one for Frobisher, and in mid-June he reached a familiar location: Friseland, or what he thought was Friseland. Previously, he had struggled to step ashore. This time, however, he made a successful landing, took possession of the island, and discovered, in the process, “a goodly harbor for the ships.” Also, perhaps with Dee’s words about a “Brytish Impire” in the back of his mind, Frobisher named this territory West England.72 It was the first foreign land to be named after the country.