The Money Mountain

More sophisticated societies than the Nukak have functioned without money, it is true. Five hundred years ago, the most sophisticated society in South America, the Inca Empire, was also moneyless. The Incas appreciated the aesthetic qualities of rare metals. Gold was the 'sweat of the sun', silver the 'tears of the moon'. Labour was the unit of value in the Inca Empire, just as it was later supposed to be in a Communist society. And, as under Communism, the economy depended on often harsh central plan­
ning and forced labour. In 1 5 3 2 , however, the Inca Empire was brought low by a man who, like Christopher Columbus, had come to the N e w World expressly to search for and monetize precious metal.
The illegitimate son of a Spanish colonel, Francisco Pizarro had crossed the Atlantic to seek his fortune in 1 5 0 2 .
One of the first Europeans to traverse the isthmus of Panama to the Pacific, he led the first of three expeditions into Peru in 1 5 2 4 . The terrain was harsh, food scarce and the first indigenous peoples they encountered hostile. However, the welcome their second ex­pedition received in the Tumbes region, where the inhabitants hailed them as the 'children of the sun', convinced Pizarro and his confederates to persist. Having returned to Spain to obtain royal approval for his plan 'to extend the empire of Castile as 'Governor of Peru', Pizarro raised a force of three ships, twenty-seven horses and one hundred and eighty men, equipped with the latest European weaponry: guns and mechanical crossbows.

 This third expedition set sail from Panama on 27 December 1 5 3 0 . It took the would-be conquerors just under two years to achieve their objective: a confrontation with Atahuallpa, one of the two feuding sons of the recently deceased Incan emperor Huayna Capac. Having declined Friar Vincente Valverd's proposal that he submit to Christian rule, contemptuously throwing his Bible to the ground, Atahuallpa could only watch as the Spaniards, relying mainly on the terror inspired by their horses (animals

unknown to the Incas), annihilated his army. 

 Pizarro nevertheless determined to execute his prisoner, who was publicly garrotted in August 1 5 3 3 . 

 With the fall of the city of Cuzco, the Inca Empire was torn apart in an orgy of Spanish plundering. Despite a revolt led by the supposedly puppet Inca Manco Capac in 1 5 3 6 , Spanish rule was unshakeably established and symbolized by the construc­tion of a new capital, Lima. The Empire was formally dissolved in 1 5 7 2 .

Pizarro himself died as violently as he had lived, stabbed to death in Lima in 1 5 4 1 after a quarrel with one of his fellow conquistadors. But his legacy to the Spanish crown ultimately exceeded even his own dreams. The conquistadors had been inspired by the legend of El Dorado, an Indian king who was

believed to cover his body with gold dust at festival times. In what Pizarro's men called Upper Peru, a stark land of mountains and mists where those unaccustomed to high altitudes have to fight for breath, they found something just as valuable. With a peak that towers 4,824 metres ( 1 5 , 8 2 7 feet) above sea level, the uncannily symmetrical Cerro Rico - literally the 'rich hill' - was the supreme embodiment of the most potent of all ideas about money: a mountain of solid silver ore. When an Indian named

Diego Gualpa discovered its five great seams of silver in 1 5 4 5 , he changed the economic history of the world. The Incas could not understand the insatiable lust for gold and silver that seemed to grip Europeans. 'Even if all the snow in the Andes turned to gold, still they would not be satisfied,' com­

plained Manco C a p a c .

 The Incas could not appreciate that, for Pizarro and his men, silver was more than shiny, decorative metal. It could be made into money: a unit of account, a store of value - portable power.

To work the mines, the Spaniards at first relied on paying wages to the inhabitants of nearby villages. But conditions were so harsh that from the late sixteenth century a system of forced labour (la mita) had to be introduced, whereby men aged between 18 and 50 from the sixteen highland provinces were conscripted for seventeen weeks a year.

 Mortality among the miners was horrendous, not least because of constant exposure to the mer­cury fumes generated by the patio process of refinement, whereby ground-up silver ore was trampled into an amalgam with mer­cury, washed and then heated to burn off the mercury.

 The air down the mineshafts was (and remains) noxious and miners had to descend seven-hundred-foot shafts on the most primitive of steps, clambering back up after long hours of digging with sacks

of ore tied to their backs. Rock falls killed and maimed hundreds.

The new silver-rush city of Potosi was, declared Domingo de Santo Tomâs, 'a mouth of hell, into which a great mass of people enter every year and are sacrificed by the greed of the Spaniards to their "god".' Rodrigo de Loaisa called the mines 'infernal pits', noting that 'if twenty healthy Indians enter on Monday, half may emerge crippled on Saturday'.

 In the words of the Augustinian monk Fray Antonio de la Calancha, writing in 1 6 3 8 : 'Every peso

coin minted in Potosi has cost the life of ten Indians who have died in the depths of the mines.' As the indigenous workforce was depleted, thousands of African slaves were imported to take their places as 'human mules'. Even today there is still something hellish about the stifling shafts and tunnels of the Cerro Rico. A place of death for those compelled to work there, Potosi was where Spain struck it rich. Between 1 5 5 6 and 1 7 8 3 , the 'rich hill' yielded 45,000 tons of pure silver to be transformed into bars and coins in the Casa de Moneda (mint), and shipped to Seville. Despite its thin air and harsh climate, Potosi rapidly became one of the principal cities of the Spanish Empire, with a population

at its zenith of between 160,000 and 200,000 people, larger than most European cities at that time. Valer un potosi, 'to be worth a potosi', is still a Spanish expression meaning to be worth a fortune. Pizarro's conquest, it seemed, had made the Spanish crown rich beyond the dreams of avarice.