shillings, pebbles, or buttons
It is money and ownership.
William soon understands that who owns the land is critical. All land can hold a mineral claim, an offer for the rights for a share of the profits. Cornwall has its own legal system for the ownership of mineral rights, its own courts – the stannaries – to decide on penalties for infringements. There are complex disputes over the inheritance of mineral rights. It is possible to own almost nothing of almost nothing and still live in hope of riches.
There is so much money to be made here, so much money to be lost, that everything needs to be done at speed, the shaft lashed together, barely propped. Your claim can lapse. You can wager your work against the future, buy credit for food and beer for your rights. You can buy a month of possibility on a few fields.
This is a landscape of speculation.
It isn’t just the rich who become richer. It is 1735 and to William, upright and prudent, used to his profit-and-loss ledger, everyone in Plymouth and in Cornwall seems to be speculating. There are the Friends who are buying shares in prize cargos on the value of a hold full of snuff and tobacco. Everyone has heard of the mine where £100 was invested and in the first week £4,000 of copper ore was raised, £2,800 in the second week. Everyone knows the prices. These first years that William is in Plymouth, it is £7, fifteen shillings and tenpence a ton for copper. It matters because you are paid in complicated ways. You listen to the fluctuations in price as keenly as a trader in the bazaar knows the way that gold is heading.
You see what speculation brings – estates and livings and titles. Thomas Pitt, over at Boconnoc, near Lostwithiel, is the grandson of ‘Diamond’ Pitt who made a fortune in East India acquiring the largest and most beautiful gem ever seen, and selling it on at vast profit to the dauphin in Paris.
The Tinners, with only their coats on their backs, illiterate, can still ‘assign the properties of a parcel of Copper or Tin Ore, with the utmost accuracy, by the help of twenty shillings, pebbles, or buttons’. Buttons or diamonds.