1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (25 page)

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 duty 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.

Incredibly, the Basque-Vicuña war had almost no effect on the flow of silver. Even as Basques and Vicuñas fought in the streets, they cooperated on mining and refining the silver, then shipping it from Potosí. The last was a huge task. One account describes how a single shipment of 7,771 bars left the city in 1549, four years after the lode’s discovery. Each bar was about 99 percent silver and weighed more than eighty pounds. All were stamped with serial numbers by the foundry and marked with the owner’s stamp, the foundry stamp, and the tax man’s stamp. By the time the assayer individually certified its purity with his stamp, the bar looked as if it had been graffiti-tagged by a demented numerologist. Each llama could carry only three or four bars. (Mules are bigger than llamas, but need more water and are less surefooted.) The shipment required more than two thousand of the beasts. They were watched by more than a thousand Indian guards who in turn were watched by squads of Spanish pistoleros.

Despite these obstacles the Americas produced a river of silver—more than 150,000 tons between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, according to the silver trade’s most prominent historians, Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez of the University of the Pacific. For those centuries Spanish silver washed around the planet—it was 80 percent or more of the world’s output—overwhelming governments and financial institutions everywhere it landed. “Right at the beginning there was this
shot
of silver into Europe,” Flynn told me over the course of a long conversation. “We can’t be sure about the numbers, but the amount of silver in Europe may have doubled.”

The Spanish silver peso became a universal currency, linking European nations much as the euro does today. (It was called, famously, a “piece of eight,” because it was worth eight reales—reales were then the basic Spanish coin.) Pesos were the main currency in the Portuguese, Dutch, and British empires and widely used in France and the German states. “Because silver was the money supply,” Flynn said, “there was an uncontrolled jump—an explosion, really—in the money supply across Europe.” Flynn was trained as an economist. “Rapid, unplanned shocks to the money supply are generally a bad idea,” he said. Inflation and financial instability were the result.

After sixty years of frenzied production, Flynn and Giráldez wrote, the world had accumulated so much silver that its value began to fall. A million pesos in 1640 was worth about a third of what a million pesos had been worth in 1540. The impact was multifarious and planet-wide. As the price slid, so did the profits from silver mining—the mining that was the financial backbone of the Spanish empire. Spain did not adjust its tax rates for currency fluctuations (in modern terms, they weren’t indexed to inflation). The king collected the same amount of taxes in silver as he had before, but its value plunged, throwing the government into crisis. Spain’s economy turned to ash, followed by the economies of a dozen other states equally dependent on Spanish silver, one after another like a chain of firecrackers. The well-off felt beggared; the beggars felt desperate. With nothing to lose, they picked up stones from the streets and looked for targets. Ruin was followed by riot and revolution.

Much of the silver from Potosí and Mexico was transformed into “cob” coins, hammered between crudely engraved dies. This four-reale coin was made in Potosí in the 1570s, before the coins received dates. The “L” is the initial of the mint assayer. (
Photo credit 4.6
)

American silver was not the sole cause of the upheaval; still, threads of silver link the revolts against Spain in the Netherlands and Portugal, the ruinous Fronde civil war in France, and even the Thirty Years’ War. Flynn and Giráldez said that one of their contributions was to point out that the turbulence in Europe, though devastating, was “a kind of sideshow—most of the silver actually went to Asia.” And not just to some generalized part of Asia. A disproportionate share of the silver ended up in a single port in a single Chinese province: Yuegang, in Fujian.

“A FINE BOATLOAD OF WOODEN NOSES”

Once one of the world’s most important ports, Yuegang has become a nondescript industrial suburb. The sole remaining sign of its former prominence is a three-story, hexagonal tower that was once part of the city walls. When I visited not long ago, the gate was locked; I had to wait for a neighbor to show up with a key. Inside the tower were signs of occupation by a homeless man: grubby blankets, empty ramen packets, girlie magazines. All I could see from the top of the tower was a printing plant and a smoky trash dump and the long rectangles of spinach and tobacco fields. The docks where chroniclers had described junks “packed together like fish scales” were almost empty. Only the geography was unchanged: beyond the harbor was the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan itself, and the South China Sea.

By the mid-1580s, barely a decade into the galleon trade, Yuegang was sending twenty or more big junks to the Philippines every March, at the start of the rainy season. (Before the silver boom, just one or two small ships went there, even during the intervals when trade was legal.) As many as five hundred merchants crammed aboard each ship with every imaginable commodity: silk and porcelain, of course, but also cotton, iron, sugar, flour, chestnuts, oranges, live poultry, jam, ivory, gems, gunpowder, lacquerware, tables and chairs, cattle and horses, and whatever else the Chinese thought Europeans might want. “Some just brought little bits of stuff,” said Li Jinming, a historian at Xiamen University who is the author of a history of Yuegang. “Whatever they could get their hands on. They could sell it at a big premium.” Merchants with little capital could only obtain goods to sell by borrowing at high interest rates. “They had to leave their wives and children with the lender as security,” Li told me. “If a trader died, the family was out of luck.” Lenders took everything they had to repay the contract. If that was not enough, he said, “the wives and children would become servants. The lender could sell their labor to someone else—it was like slavery.”