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  In 1616 the most populous city in the Americas was located in an unlikely place, a barren mountain peak high above the Andean tree line. A motto on its coat of arms announced:

  I am rich Potosí,

  Treasure of the world,

  The king of all mountains

  And the envy of all kings

  The Andes had been associated with treasure in European minds ever since the conquest, when conquistadors led by Francisco Pizarro promised the hostage Inca Atahualpa his freedom if he would order his subjects to fill a large room with gold. The room was filled, but Atahualpa was killed.

  Before long the conquerors were hungry for more treasure. They demanded to be told the sources of the precious minerals from which the Inca made their beautiful objects, which the Spaniards melted down into pure metal, some to adorn altarpieces glorifying their god. The Inca had known about the Potosí lode, but they valued silver only as ornamentation and not as currency, and they had more convenient sources that were sufficient for their limited needs. They kept their knowledge of the Potosí silver veins to themselves — native peoples throughout the Americas quickly learned that revealing the sources of the minerals the Europeans coveted tended to turn out badly for them.

  The secret was kept until 1545. Even after the Spaniards got wind of the rich source of silver, they had difficulty extracting the prize. Native smelters knew how to mix silver with lead in portable wind ovens to facilitate its melting, a skill the Spanish were slow to master. The colonizers found themselves in the disagreeable position of being forced to pay for silver that was mined and smelted by natives. It upset their sense of the order of things to watch some of their conquered subjects grow rich before their eyes. Consequently, in 1570 a special commission determined that forced conscription of native labor (called the mita) was justifiable on the basis of the greater public good. Henceforth the people of the Andes would be forced to labor not for themselves but on behalf of the Spanish. In 1589 Philip II of Spain formally approved this decision, provided that the native miners be given the consolation of religion, along with wages, food, and medical care.

  Around the same time, a new method of extracting silver that involved the chemical application of mercury was put into effect. The new method vastly increased the yields of silver, at the expense of subjecting the workers to grave environmental hazards. As a measure of the increase, in the decade of the 1570s, during the early years of the galleon trade, China imported about 1200 tons of silver from the New World; by the turn of the century the quantity was 3000 tons. Being made to work in the mines had now become a virtual death sentence. This was considered an acceptable trade-off since the mines made everyone rich, except for the region’s original inhabitants, or the African slaves who were brought in to take their places after so many had perished that production began to slacken.

  Indian Miners at Potosí, 1590, by Theodor de Bry (detail). Engraving from José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias.

  Andean Americans were forcibly conscripted to work in the silver mines at Potosí, in present-day Bolivia. Conditions in the mines were atrocious. Especially after the application of extraction methods involving mercury in the 1570s, labor in the mines often resulted in death. To ensure a steady supply of labor, slaves were brought to Potosí from Africa.

  Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies was one of the first realistic accounts of the history and natural world of the Americas. De Bry’s engravings were reprinted often during the early seventeenth century, in Acosta’s work and many other titles.

  Potosí’s main silver lode was in a mountain called the Cerro Rico. “In contrast to pictures showing the grand Cerro Rico from the outside,” scholar Jane E. Mangan has written, “de Bry’s engraving opened up the view to indigenous workers laboring inside. For those who know Potosí’s grand, conical shape, and the slope of the mine entrances, it would appear that de Bry, who had never seen Potosí, had it all wrong. His image became legendary, however, because it portrayed the Indians’ victimization by the Spanish. In this aspect de Bry could not be accused of misrepresentation.”

  “He who has not seen Potosí,” said an early seventeenth century visitor, “has not seen the Indies.” Called by many the eighth wonder of the world, the city rivaled London in size. It was larger than Madrid, Paris, or Rome. Matteo Ricci made certain to include it on the world map he produced for the Chinese imperial court. The city’s wealth was legendary: “To compensate you as you deserve,” Don Quixote told Sancho Panza, “even the mines of Potosí would not suffice.” A seventeenth-century French traveler oberved that in Potosí “even the common people live comfortably, all very proud and haughty, and go about well dressed in gold- and silver-embroidered clothing of scarlet silk, adorned with a lot of gold and silver jewelry.” A Spanish writer from the same period remarked on on clear nights in Peru one could see a “white stain” in the sky that resembled a a cloud. This white cloud was believed to have settled over the Cerro Rico—the “Rich Mountain”—of Potosí as a sign of God’s favor.

  But the labor in the mines was a different kind of stain on the city. It is estimated that over the years the mines were in operation around eight million men died working in them. One-seventh of the population of sixteen districts stretching from Potosí north to the old Inca capital of Cuzo was conscripted to work in the mines. The workers were organized into three shifts of more than four thousand men each, so that one group could be working at all times, day and night.

  After their mina service was completed, many mine workers found it difficult to return to their home areas and resume their former lives. As a result, a large urban underclass was created in the city. Volutary laborers at minimal wages consequently added to the pool of workers, though those conscripted through the mina system were forced to do the most onerous tasks. The Bolvian writer Eduardo Galeano has described a priest newly arrived in the city who was disturbed by the sight of miners with lash scars on their backs filing by like ghosts. Told to simply shut his eyes he replied that he couldn’t. “With my eyes shut,” he said, “I see more.”

  A seventeenth-century writer of native Andean descent, Guaman Poma, tells a similar story:

  At the mercury mines of Huancavelica the Indian workers are punished and ill treated to such an extent that they die like flies and our whole race is threatened with extermination. Even the chiefs are tortured by being suspended by their feet. Conditions in the silver mines of Potosí and Choclloccocha, or at the gold mines of Carabaya, are little better. The managers and supervisors, who are either Spaniards or half-castes, have virtually absolute power. There is no reason for them to fear justice, since they are never brought before the courts…. Beatings are incessant. The victims are mounted for this purpose on a llama’s back, tied naked to a round pillar, or put in the stocks.

  Indian Parents Defend Their Daughter from the Lascivious Spaniard, drawing 325 from El Primer Nueva Coronica y Buen Gobierno (“The First New Chronicle and Good Government”), 1615–1616, by Guaman Poma. Bound book; ink and colors on paper, 119 × 205 cm. Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, Denmark.

  In Memory of Fire: Genesis, in which he described the priest haunted by a vision of oppressed miners, Eduardo Galeano also offered a moving account of a defiant Guaman Poma, who “curses the invader in the invader’s tongue and makes it explode.” According to Galeano (who dates his scene 1615), “Today, Guaman finishes his letter. He has lived for it. It has taken him half a century to write and draw. It runs to nearly 1200 pages. Today, Guaman finishes his letter and dies. Neither Philip the III nor any other king will ever see it. For three centuries it will roam the earth, lost.”

  Galeano has slightly fictionalized his story — there is no evidence that Guaman Poma died shortly after finishing his letter to Philip, and certainly not on the day he completed it. The latest datable incident referred to in Poma’s text occurred in the latter half of December 1615. Current scholarship suggests that he finished his book in the early months
of 1616; nothing is known of his death. Who can say when a project like Poma’s began? Galeano’s “half a century” supposes that Poma had begun his work as a young man, and indeed he had poured his life into it, so in a sense he had always been composing it. But based on the evidence of the text itself, it appears that he began writing sometime after 1600 and then spent several years intensively writing and drawing.

  There is a reason Poma began his book around 1600. In that year he lost a protracted legal battle, with catastrophic results. Poma’s full name was Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. Guaman Poma is a name of Quechua origin that means “Falcon Puma”; de Ayala was the name of a Spanish conquistador whose line became entangled with that of the native family in ways that are not clear. “From their beginnings,” historian John E. Wills, Jr., has observed, “there was a great deal of ethnic mixing in the colonies, as Native American women bore the children of Spanish men.” Poma’s Quechua origins were at the center of his identity as well as of his name, but he moved in both worlds. He was fluent in several Andean dialects and was literate in Spanish, having been educated by Catholic priests in childhood. In the latter half of the sixteenth century he worked for the Spanish as a translator from Quechua and served as a minor functionary in the colonial and church administrations.

  Poma was from a region in the central Andes, where he insisted that his family had hereditary land rights. The lands were also claimed by another clan, the Chupas. The dispute was the subject of multiple lawsuits, beginning in the 1590s, in which Poma generally prevailed. Finally his antagonists tried a roundabout approach—they claimed that Poma had falsified his identity. Calamitously for Poma, this time they were victorious. In 1600 a colonial court publicly proclaimed its finding that Poma was nothing but a “poor Indian” named Lazaro who “always behaved and sought offices with malicious intentions and is an Indian of evil inclination.” He was condemned to be publicly lashed, stripped of his property, and exiled from his home city for two years; he was also liable for the court costs.

  Poma was forced to relocate to an area farther south in the Andes, where he began obsessively writing his extraordinary book, El Primer Nueva Coronica y Buen Gobierno (“The First New Chronicle and Good Government”). The book was influenced by Fray Martín de Murúa’s Historia General del Piru (“General History of Peru”) which was published in 1616 but begun before Poma’s work. There are indications that Poma assisted Murua as a translator, source of information, and illustrator, and that he saw Murua’s work in manuscript. Poma seems to have felt that Murua presented a one-sided view of Peruvian history. In Poma’s book Murúa appears in an illustration kicking a woman working at a loom over the caption “The Mercedarian friar Martín de Murúa abuses his parishioners and takes justice into his own hands.”

  A Spanish Traveler Mistreats His Native Bearer, drawing 215 from El Primer Nueva Coronica y Buen Gobierno (“The First New Chronicle and Good Government”), 1615–1616, by Guaman Poma. Bound book; ink and colors on paper, 119 × 205 cm. Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, Denmark.

  Poma’s book is 1189 pages long and is as remarkable for its 398 full-page line drawings as for the text itself, which is divided into two parts as indicated by the title. The first part broadly chronicles the history of the Andes, beginning with biblical history and including a detailed portrait of the Inca empire. The second is a denunciation of the Spanish government of Peru, which Poma insists was inferior in many respects to that of the Inca. The entire work is presented as a letter to King Philip III of Spain in which Poma pleads for the king to curtail abuses by placing indigenous people in positions of authority.

  The Coronica is the longest and most thorough critique of Spanish colonial rule by a native American of the period. Poma piles detail upon detail in his relentless documentation of the abuses of the Spaniards. He is outspoken and direct in his criticisms, his energy never flagging, up to his sly concluding sentences: “There is no god and there is no king. They are in Rome and Castile.”

  Poma’s manuscript reached Spain but was probably never seen by the king. It entered the library of a Danish diplomat as an intriguing curiosity, and was lost in the Danish Royal Library from the 1660s until 1908, when a German researcher chanced upon it. Today, with the support of Rolena Adorno, the leading authority on Poma, the library has made the entire work available in facsimile on the Internet, its illustrations electronically enhanced to be truer to the original than the print reproductions of the twentieth century. Although Poma’s appeal was not heard during his lifetime, his voice now thunders across the centuries.

  Mining disrupted the lives not just of those who worked in the mines but also of the wider Latin American society. In the mid-1500s silver was discovered in the arid mountains of the states of Zacatecas and Durango in northwestern Mexico; these lodes would become the largest producers of silver after Potosí, and eventually they would even exceed its output. The Spanish called this region La Gran Chichimeca, after the Aztec name for the seminomadic peoples who inhabited the area. For both the Aztecs and the Spanish the name Chichimeca had pejorative overtones somewhat equivalent to the term “barbarian” (the Aztecs were probably peeved because they had never managed to conquer the Chichimecans). The Spanish believed that they had pacified the region, but in 1616 they learned otherwise.

  After the discovery of silver Zacatecas had almost overnight become Mexico’s third-largest city. The explosive growth not only of mining communities but of the ranching and commerce that came with them brought pressure to bear on the region’s native peoples. Among these were the Tepehuans, a formerly warlike and fiercely independent people who had settled into a peaceful coexistence with the Spanish during the colonial period. Some Tepehuans worked in the mines, but it was not the mining itself that affected them as much as the intrusions into their territories that followed in the mines’ wake. In 1615 the Tepehuans were devastated by an epidemic whose spread was facilitated by the region’s population growth. Tepehuan elders feared that their traditional ways of life were threatened with extinction. Secretly they plotted a carefully coordinated rebellion.

  On November 16, 1616, the Tepehuans simultaneously attacked multiple targets, including a wagon train traveling to Mexico city, a mission, and several estancias, killing scores of people. Their single most damaging attack, which would become notorious among the Spanish, was on a church in Zape, where about a hundred people were killed — the shocking news was reported by the lone survivor, a teenage boy. The attack on the church was not random: the Tepehuans knew that an altar and a statue of the Virgin would be dedicated on that day, and they took advantage of the fact that many people would gather there for the ceremony.

  The Spaniards of New Spain were astonished and mystified by the uprising. They could not comprehend how the Tepehuans could be so ungrateful after having been given the gift of the faith. The only explanation was that treacherous Tepehuanes had engaged in “familiar intercourse with the devil.” The attack on the church and the killing of Jesuit priests were pointed to in support of this explanation.

  Completely unprepared for the assault, the Spaniards could offer little resistance. Without the assistance of native allies they would likely have been overrun. Instead, the warfare ground on for four years, over which the Spaniards were forced to summon more and more resources in order to finally prevail. A seventeenth-century historian called the revolt “one of the greatest outbreaks of disorder, upheaval, and destruction that had been seen in New Spain … since the Conquest.” A provincial governor reported in 1618 that the region had been “destroyed and devastated, almost depopulated of Spaniards. The churches of the faith were burned. The silver mines and their machinery were also burned.” In the end hundreds of Spaniards, along with countless of their native allies and African slaves, were killed, as well as more than a thousand Tepehuans. Mining was disrupted, and towns and ranches were destroyed.

  The attribution of diabolical origins to the revolt was used to help win assistance from other parts of M
exico and beyond. After the cessation of hostilities most of the remaining Tepehuans withdrew into isolated areas of the mountains. New waves of Jesuit missionaries were brought in to ensure against further satanic eruptions; to be on the safe side they were supported by a beefed-up military presence. “The Viceroy and the governor … desired that the Jesuits, who had founded the [Tepehuan] mission, rebuild it, and the land returned to peace, so the Spanish could do business as before,” the historian reported, “and the miners return to working the mines.”

  The exchange of silk and silver between China and the West required an enormous investment of energy on both sides. As silk was produced in greater and greater quantities in imperial workshops, China accelerated its movement from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Thousands of peasant farmers were displaced to urban centers where they were subsumed into an anonymous labor mass. Each year dozens of junks carried the silks to Manila. Spain sailed its massive galleons from there every year across the vast Pacific, enduring, as we have seen, great hardships. It conscripted thousands of native laborers to serve out death sentences in the black depths of its silver mines, and it transported slaves from Africa to assist in the labor. Pirates from the South China Sea to the Pacific coast of America strove to cut in on the action. Armadas were assembled and defeated and reassembled.

  It was all a passing vanity. It was all for momentary gain. Neither China nor Spain would derive much lasting benefit from all this striving. Within just a few decades both powers would collapse. China would fall in 1644 to invaders from its northern frontier who were no longer satisfied to be bought off with gifts of silk and porcelain. Its Great Wall proved powerless to stave off the outside world. Never again would a native Chinese dynasty bask in the mandate of heaven. Spain’s empire by the same time would be exposed as a chimera, a fleeting illusion. The riches of the Americas had been but a stopgap that disguised Spain’s need to streamline its bureaucracy, develop its resources, and restructure its economy. Spain’s armadas against England, Joris van Spilbergen, and the VOC base in the Moluccas had all failed. It had proven unable to suppress revolt in the Netherlands or prevent the rise of Protestantism in Germany. By the time of the fall of the Ming dynasty, Spain was incapable even of holding on to Portugal on its own peninsula. Never again would it be perceived as a supreme force in Europe.