The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession

by Peter L. Bernstein

  It was not just a matter of sailing down the coast until they found the rio d'oro. Although the Phoenicians and a few later explorers had made some short voyages in that direction, no one had ever thoroughly explored the west coast of Africa by sea. The few reports that existed were unanimously scary. Arab sailors, who were used to plying the east coast of Africa, fed the Mediterranean folklore of boiling hot seas on the western side, swarming with serpents waiting to grab human flesh from the decks of the ships. The lucky survivors of such a voyage would suffer the terrible fate of seeing their skin transformed from white to black.' The winds were dangerous, the natives unfriendly, and the actual source of the gold an unsolved mystery.

  Despite the perils, the prize was too seductive to be frightened away. Bit by bit, in successive voyages, the Portuguese navigators crept down the coast, braving poisoned arrows, building fortresses, and capturing slaves (Moors would do when blacks failed to appear, or Moors cooperated by supplying the blacks). Even though progress was slow, the Portuguese mariners never lost faith that they would ultimately discover the elusive river of gold. Finally, around the middle of the century, the Portuguese caravels succeeded in rounding the thick western part of Africa where the coast faces southward. There was the area of Guinea, where the population was predominantly black rather than Moorish.

  The participants in these adventures were colorful characters. One in particular stands out, a merchant of Venice by the name of Alvise da Cadamosto. Cadamosto arrived in Portugal in 1454 and approached Prince Henry for permission to participate in the African trade. Convinced that Venetians knew more about maritime trading than anybody else, Henry hastened to agree to Cadamosto's request. Cadamosto fully lived up to Henry's expectations: he was an expert in evaluating commercial prospects.

  We are grateful to Cadamosto for having left a journal of his voyages that is invaluable for its information and irresistible for its charm. It was he, for example, who first reported back to Europe on the silent bartering of salt for gold along the Niger River. Yet, with all his travels into the interior-at one point he was 250 miles inland-and his ability to get along with suspicious natives, he was unable to unlock the secret of the source of West African gold.

  One of Cadamosto's unforgettable encounters was with King Budomel, a petty tyrant who ruled over a group of villages composed of grass huts. Budomel had countless wives, each of whom was waited on by five or six young girls. Cadamosto noted, "It is customary for the King to sleep with these attendants as with his wives, to whom this does not appear an injury." That was hard work: "Budomel demanded of me importunately, having been given to understand that Christians knew how to do many things, whether by chance I could give him the means by which he could satisfy many women, for which he offered me a great reward." Cadamosto did not reveal his response to this request.'

  By the early 1470s, the Portuguese had established a major trading post on the south-facing coast of West Africa, which they named San Jorge de Mina. Although they erected an imposing capital at San Jorge and carried on an active business with the natives to the north and to the west, the Portuguese never managed to become owners or even to participate in the operation of any of the African gold fields. The gold that returned to Portugal by way of San Jorge de Mina was acquired in a set of barter arrangements in which the Portuguese paid for it by trading salt, capes and robes, red and blue cloth, canvas, copper and brass pots and pans, coral, red shells, and white wine.' Business was good. By the early 1500s, approximately seven hundred kilograms of gold a year was moving from Africa to Portugal, a meaningful sum when all of Europe's total annual output was no more than about four tons and Portugal's was no more than zero.6

  In August 1487, Bartholomeu Dias, an experienced Portuguese explorer of African waters, sailed from Lisbon in command of two caravels and a supply ship with orders to go around Africa to India. Six months later, Dias was the first European to moor his ship on the southeast coast of Africa. He continued on some way, with every intention of continuing on to India, but his men were impatient to go home, especially as the supply ship had fallen far behind. Dias had no choice but to turn back, which meant that Vasco da Gama would be the first to reach India in 1497 and start the process of establishing major Portuguese posts throughout Asian waters. Turning his ships around, Dias sailed once again past the cape at the bottom of Africa, which his king would later name the Cape of Good Hope, because it leads on to the passage to India.7

  In December 1488, Dias returned to Lisbon, sixteen months after his departure. One of the people in the audience who came to hear him report in detail on his voyage was a Genoese seaman named Christopher Columbus, who took copious notes as he listened to Dias's presentation.

  Columbus was the son of a weaver; like many other Genoese, he had gone to sea at an early age. He had been on a ship sunk in battle, had sailed to the eastern Mediterranean and possibly to Turkey, had been on a voyage to Iceland that had stopped at Ireland, and had sailed through many of the known waters on the African coast. Samuel Eliot Morison, his most distinguished biographer, emphasizes that Columbus was one of the best navigators and seamen of his day. He had no doubts that the sea route he envisaged straight out into the Atlantic would not only replace the overland routes to Asia but by heading straight west would make much more sense than the tortuous eastward routes that the Portuguese were attempting to establish. Columbus was confident that he would find gold, but by shortening the time involved he would also significantly reduce the cost of the voyage to India and the rest of Asia, making possible the shipment of a substantially larger variety of goods. He was also deeply religious and dreamed of spending the gold he would earn from his pathfinding voyage on a crusade to win back the Holy Sepulcher from the Muslims.8

  Columbus lived for a long time in Lisbon, where he married a local girl and worked on occasion as a mapmaker. Convinced that Portugal would be the obvious country to back him, Columbus approached the throne in 1484, offering the first chance to sponsor and finance his voyage. Yet King John II, the nephew of Prince Henry and grandson of John I, turned Columbus down flat. The Portuguese, growing fat on their African arrangements and their newfound linkages to the Indies via the Cape of Good Hope, saw no need to take on another big risk. John was in any case put off by Columbus's insistent demand that the king make him a knight, admiral of the Ocean Seas, and viceroy and governor of all lands discovered, in addition to turning over 10 percent of all profits from these lands-which specifically included gold. These were precisely the terms that Columbus would later manage to squeeze out of Ferdinand and Isabella.

  Still hopeful, Columbus turned to the Spanish monarchs in 1486. The commission they appointed to study his proposal took until late 1489 to decide that his idea was without merit: the trip would take too long, and they doubted whether any lands remained to be discovered. After that, Columbus was rejected by Henry VII of England, whose advisors ridiculed the whole idea as fantastic. Charles VIII of France also said no.

  At that point, Columbus saw no choice but to give up the whole thing. Four European monarchies had turned him down, scorning his conviction that he was offering them the most direct, the most economical, and the fastest route to the Indies. He decided to return to mapmaking.

  Queen Isabella, however, had never lost interest in Columbus's ingenious plan. The risks were obvious, but the rewards could be tremendous: Columbus's shorter route would give Spain the means to take the leadership in the Indies away from the Portuguese, while the gold that he promised would finance and support the dynasty that she dreamed of creating. So Isabella summoned Columbus back, even providing him with money for a new suit and a mule to carry him to her. At first the news was excellent, as Isabella's new commission did approve his proposal. Then came the bad news: the Grand Council rejected what they considered to be Columbus's exorbitant demands for titles and financial rewards.

  Defeated and dejected, Columbus mounted his mule and headed back home. He had just begun the trip along the mule path whe
n a horseman caught up with him and told him to return to the queen. An influential advisor had prevailed upon her to change her mind. That was in April 1492. Four months later, just before sunrise on August 3, Columbus and his crew made confession, took communion, and boarded their ships. Columbus's command to weigh the anchors ended with the words, "in the name of Jesus." The rest is history.9

  Two days after touching land on San Salvador, which Columbus was certain was offshore from Japan, or Cipangu as the Spaniards called it, he sailed onward in search of his goal. He was confident that he would soon be able to confirm Marco Polo's observation that the palaces in Japan were roofed with gold-he carried a copy of Marco Polo's writings with him as a guidebook to the lands he expected to visit."' The bits of gold that the natives wore as nose plugs only increased the sense of anticipation. As soon as he noticed that the Indians did not put much value on their gold, he hastened to offer them beads and caps in exchange. That was a profitable trade-off!

  The natives Columbus encountered on San Salvador told him about a large island nearby named Cuba, which sounded enough like Cipangu to convince Columbus and his crew that their goal was now within reach. They landed on Cuba on October 28, but they found no gold. Although they did discover tobacco, it held no interest for them; nothing except huge quantities of gold would satisfy them. From October 12, 1492, to January 17, 1493, when Columbus headed back to Spain, his diary mentions gold more than 65 times." Indeed, his entry of October 13, 1492, the day after the first landing, reports, "I was attentive and took trouble to ascertain if there was gold."12 He was encouraged by the dark skins of the natives, for Europeans had long believed that dark skins would be a sure sign of the presence of gold. While sailing along the Cuban coast, he noted in his diary, "From the great heat which I suffer, the country must be rich in gold."13

  Columbus was euphoric over his discoveries, but he as well as his early followers faced painful disappointments. The lands they had discovered were not the Indies after all, although Columbus still thought he was in Asia even during his third voyage six years after the first. Worse, the continental landmass they encountered appeared to be such an endless barrier that nobody could figure out how to get around it to reach the Indies, the only objective that made the whole dangerous business worthwhile. If the amount of gold on these lands had at least met their expectations, that would have been some compensation for the frustration of missing out on their ultimate objective. Gold there was, but surely no bonanza.

  The marching orders were nevertheless certain. As King Ferdinand had commanded, "Get gold, humanely if possible, but at all hazardsget gold."14

  In 1510, a debt-ridden, disgruntled Spanish farmer from Estramadura named Vasco Nunez de Balboa decided to leave Hispaniola (now Santo Domingo) and join an expedition to Darien, the area where the Isthmus of Panama connects to the northern shores of Colombia. There was gold in central Hispaniola, where the Spaniards worked both the mines and the Indians so hard that by 1519 only two thousand of an original population of more than one hundred thousand remained and slaves were already being imported from Africa to do the nuning.15 Nevertheless, rumors were rife in Darien about vast supplies of gold somewhere to the south, perhaps near a sea whose uncertain existence might lead to the gold. When Balboa arrived in Darien, he became close friends with an illiterate swordsman, also from Estramadura, whose name was Francisco Pizarro. Pizarro, like Balboa, was a man who did not flinch at danger if a venture promised a commensurate reward.

  The move to Darien did nothing to solve Balboa's financial problems. One day in September 1513, still frustrated and in trouble with the law, Balboa was weighing some gold when a barbarian chieftain came up, scattered the glittering metal around the room, and cried, "I can tell you of a land where they eat and drink out of golden vessels, and gold is as cheap as iron is with you."16 This was all Balboa needed to prompt him to lead a great enterprise he expected would bring him to King Ferdinand's attention. He proceeded to gather together a group of 190 Spaniards, aiming to track down the rumored gold sources once and for all and also to resolve the mystery of the incomplete search for an ocean route to Asia. Despite three weeks of attacks by hostile Indians, insects, and snakes, Balboa's men hacked their way westward until they came to an abrupt escarpment. The Indians told them that the slope on the other side of the crest led down to a great sea. John Keats had the wrong man but the right ocean-and the full sense of this great moment-when he wrote,

  A couple of days later, Balboa waded into the surf of the Pacific with drawn sword and claimed "the great South Sea ... with all that it contained," for the king of Spain." And then, setting a standard for cruelty to the Indians that many other Spaniards would emulate, Balboa and his men mercilessly plundered the copious treasure of gold objects that they found in the Indian villages. The elegance and dazzling sophistication of these semiabstract objects evidently held no meaning for them.'s They were far more fascinated by the traces of gold ore they uncovered on the sandy shores of their South Sea.

  This glittering achievement failed to solve Balboa's problems, and he seems to have been in chronic trouble with authority. Some time after the discovery of the Pacific, at a moment when Balboa was making plans to sail southward on his newly discovered sea toward Peru in search of more gold, the governor of Darien accused him of treason and ordered him to be beheaded. The governor, who had been sent out with fifteen hundred men by the king of Spain after receiving the electrifying news of Balboa's discoveries, happened to be Balboa's father-in-law; the executioner assigned by the governor to this task was none other than Francisco Pizarro.

  Pizarro was an illegitimate child, abandoned by his mother on the church steps of the town where he was born. He grew up tough, a man of great endurance and strong leadership skills. At a time when most men rationalized their mistreatment of the Indians as motivated in some way to improve their lot and bring them the blessings of Christianity, Pizarro refused to mask his goals. After the victory in Peru, when a priest asked him to do more to convert the natives, Pizarro's response was, "I have not come for any such reasons. I have come to take away from them their gold."19

  He was a man of iron will and unshakable confidence in his own abilities, regardless of the obstacles placed in his way. Consider this astonishing fact: Pizarro's first decisive contact with the Incas did not occur until 1532, which was eight long years after the first exploratory expedition down the Pacific coast from Panama with one ship and one hundred men. He even made two trips back to Spain during those eight years to firm up royal support and sufficient resources for the campaign in Peru.

  William H. Prescott's The Conquest of Peru, first published in May 1847, is one of the great works of nineteenth-century American literature, vividly written with exceptional grace and impeccable historical scholarship.* Prescott takes a dim view of the hypocrisy of the Spaniards in justifying their terrible deeds in the name of Christ, yet he cannot help but admire their courage, ingenuity, and audacity in the face of the staggering odds against them.

  After scaling the wild passes of the Andes, often on paths scarcely wide enough for a horse and flanked by sheer drops of thousands of feet into the abyss, two hundred Spaniards managed to subdue an empire of at least 3.5 million people'" that included large portions of the modern states of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina.21 At the turning point in the campaign, Pizarro's little army overcame the resistance of thirty thousand Inca soldiers trained to fight at altitudes of over ten thousand feet.

  The Spaniards were hardened, brave, and ruthless fighters, but, as with Cortez's men in Mexico, they were surprised at the advantage they achieved by appearing godlike to the Indians. The pale faces, cannons and muskets, trumpets, horses, shining armor, and wagons were awesome and frightening to the Indians. Despite a society that was in many ways more highly structured, agriculturally productive, and artistically sophisticated than the Spanish, these Indians had never invented the wheel and their ubiquitous llamas could hardly match the speed, ridab
ility, and intelligence of the horse. Their only technological advantage was an extraordinarily effective relay system of highly trained runners who carried news and information up and down the majestic Andes on roads as good as Roman roads, functioning with such remarkable efficiency that they even delivered live fish from the coast to the nobility living high in the mountain valleys.

  The decisive climax to what is a long story occurred in November 1532, when Pizarro and his men reached a watering place high up in the mountains called Caxamalca, where the Emperor Atahualpa, "the Inca," or Child of the Sun, had taken up temporary residence.* Atahualpa was well aware of the approach of the Spaniards and, in fact, had sent emissaries to bid them welcome. The Spaniards had been especially interested in one of those emissaries because he came drinking chicha-the fermented juice of the maize-from golden goblets that his attendants carried for him.

  As the Spaniards looked down on the verdant valley and the little city of Caxamalca with its ten thousand inhabitants, they spotted the hot baths where the emperor and the princes came to take the cure. They also observed a less attractive feature: a mass of white covering several miles. These were the tents of the Inca's army, a spectacle that startled the Spaniards by their immense numbers. But it was too late to turn back.

  The Conquerors, as Prescott calls them, found only empty streets as they entered Caxamalca. After a short distance, they came to an immense open plaza surrounded by low buildings containing capacious halls, presumably barracks for the Inca's soldiers. Pizarro was determined to occupy this area.

  Pizarro immediately dispatched a small force toward the Indian encampment, commanded by his brother Hernando Pizarro and his senior colleague Hernando de Soto. De Soto would later make his mark exploring in Florida for the Fountain of Youth; he died in 1542 on the shores of the Mississippi, having found neither the Fountain of Youth nor any North American gold, but he would have a Chrysler car model of the 1930s named after him. In addition, there was one Indian member of this detachment, who had been taught enough Spanish to act as interpreter. The Spaniards called him Felipillo.