The Israelites worship the Golden Calf, by the English illuminator William de Brailes, c. 1250, ink, pigment and gold on parchment.
Gold has beguiled humankind from the earliest days of civilization. The most malleable of metals, and one of the most brilliant, it was fashioned early on into artful forms. Often found relatively unadulterated, it did not require sophisticated smelting techniques. Its softness rendered it largely useless for making tools (though modern science has found many uses for it): thus most of its earliest uses were decorative.
The ‘uselessness’ of gold, and not its inherent beauty or nobility, may also have been what prompted its use as currency. Its relationship to value – why it became such a highly prized medium for money – is, perhaps, an unanswerable question. Did early human civilizations use gold for money because of qualities they prized in it or do we attribute precious qualities to it, fetishistically, because ancient convention, for reasons now obscured, decrees that we use it for money? It is also notable that throughout history gold has been used to represent the antithesis of true value – in critiques of wealth and idolatry – almost as much as it has compelled admiration. The questions posed by the human desire for gold are central questions about value itself – and about meaning.
Gold is an element, one of the heavy metals. Unlike lighter elements, gold cannot be created by fusion within stars. Scientists now believe the gold in the universe likely came from collisions between dying stars (supernovas).1 When the earth was formed, most of its gold – possibly as much as 1.6 quadrillion tons – sank into the planet’s core, with subsequent surface deposits (all the gold that is humanly accessible) deposited by meteorites.2 The meteorite collisions that produced the gold humans mine took place a very long time ago. Gold deposits in the Witwatersrand region of South Africa – the origin of 40 per cent of the gold ever mined from the earth – are dated to 3 billion years old, 1.5 billion years younger than the earth. Compared to these events, any human encounter with the metal is quite recent. But humans have used gold since the dawn of our own history. It is found on every continent, and was among the first metals prehistoric peoples mined and used.
The Israelites worship the Golden Calf, by the English illuminator William de Brailes, c. 1250, ink, pigment and gold on parchment. |
Primary deposits of gold are found as particles or in veins lodged in minerals like basalt and granite and in rock formations called ‘turbidites’ (sedimentary rock layers formed through the action of ancient oceans). The combination of gold and the rock that hosts it is called an ‘ore’; the gold contained in the rock is also called ‘lode gold’. Often, gold is found together with quartz and iron pyrite (also known as ‘fool’s gold’), and typically as a natural alloy with silver or copper. Nuggets of pure gold may be the result of the activity of bacteria. Scientists have studied two in particular, Delftia acidovorans and Cupriavidus metallidurans, which have a genetic resistance to the toxicity of heavy metals. They have been shown to dissolve gold into nanoparticles that can travel through sediment and may collect as nuggets.3
Miners and their wives posing with the finders of the Welcome Stranger Nugget, Richard Oates, John Deason and his wife, albumen silver carte-de-visite photograph, 1869.
The shiny nuggets we associate with the discovery of gold are typically found in ‘placer’ deposits, dense concentrations of particles of gold eroded from rocks and deposited in the banks of rivers and streams. (Placer is a Spanish word for a sandbank.) The biggest nuggets, however, have been found in underground mines. The one that is probably the biggest ever found (at a refined weight of 71.018 kg), the ‘Welcome Stranger’, was found in Australia in 1858 and melted down in London in 1859. The Canaã nugget, found in Para, Brazil, in 1983, may have been part of a nugget even larger than the Welcome Stranger, and is today the largest nugget in existence, containing 52.332 kg of gold.
Woodcut image of dowsing, from Agricola, De re metallica (1556). |
Gold-seekers have used some extraordinary techniques to discover hidden gold deposits, from dowsing (using specially shaped sticks to try to identify magnetic impulses from buried gold) to gold-dreaming (treasure hunters in nineteenth-century Ireland reported success upon following information given to them in dreams), to the modern use of botanical indicators (horsetail, for example, can assimilate large quantities of gold and serves as an indicator of high soil concentrations of the metal).4 But historically most attempts to extract gold have originated with a chance find of a flake or nugget in a body of water, as in the case of James W. Marshall’s discovery of gold – in the tailrace or sluice of a sawmill he was building – which sparked the California Gold Rush. Indeed, the earliest gold-seekers of the chalcolithic period likely used placer mining techniques one would recognize from a film about the California Gold Rush – rinsing gravel with water to uncover gold flakes and nuggets. ‘Panning’ for gold is a version of this technique: sifting gravel in a large pan filled with water until the gold, which is denser than other substances, settles to the bottom. On a larger scale, one can shovel gravel into ‘sluice boxes’ or ‘rockers’; on an even larger scale, one can use pressurized jets of water to dislodge rock or sediment and wash the slurry into sluice boxes.
Indians panning for gold in the early colonial period, from Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Corónica de las Indias (1547), woodcut.
If you took all the gold ever mined by humans, you would have a cube that measured more than 20 metres (65 feet) on each side and weighed 176,000 tonnes.5 Gold ores under the earth’s surface are extracted through tunnelling or open-pit mining. Though placer mining likely came first, human beings have been digging pits to mine the earth for a very long time. In southern Georgia mining activities date to the fourth millennium BCE, the very beginning of the Bronze Age. The Egyptians mined underground gold in Nubia beginning around 1300 BCE, developing a sophisticated operation; the diversity and complexity of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs for gold demonstrate divisions by colour, degree of purity and geographic origins.
The Romans may have learned their mining techniques from the Egyptians. They mined throughout their empire, as far north as Dolaucothi in Wales, a location that shows archaeological evidence for mining dating from the Bronze Age, and as far west as Las Médulas in the province of León in northwestern Spain, where aerial laser technology has recently pointed to a far greater extent of mining activity than was previously thought to have existed. The prolific Roman writer Pliny the Elder describes a method known as ‘hushing’, introduced by the Romans, which uses floods of water, often from displaced streambeds, to uncover mineral deposits. Roman methods were so advanced that they could undermine hills, which would collapse and wash away, revealing their gold deposits. The Romans used hushing from the first century BCE until the end of the empire. Although Georgius Agricola does not mention it in his fifteenth-century De re metallica, it was used intermittently from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries, most prominently to mine for gold in Africa.
James May Ford, Portrait of a Boy with Gold Mining Toys, 1854, hand-coloured daguerreotype.
The California Gold Rush of the 1840s and ’50s saw the development of ‘hydraulicking’, in which jets of water are shot at alluvial deposits in hillsides and riverbanks – sometimes washing entire hillsides away. This earth had to go somewhere, and it did: it built up in lowlands, redirecting rivers and causing devastating floods. Downstream farmers successfully sued to stop the practice in 1884, but California allowed it again after 1893, albeit with more rules about containing the run-off.
All this effort to extract the precious metal depends on the demand for it, which has existed for a very long time indeed. Stories of the quest for gold go back millennia. The most prominent example is that of Jason and the Argonauts (illustrated on page sixteen), recounted by Apollonius of Rhodes, among others, in his Argonautica. Jason’s father Aeson was the rightful king of Iolcos, but his half-brother Pelias usurped the throne. Hoping to get rid of his troublesome nephew, Pelias sent Jason to Aea to fetch the skin of a golden-fleeced flying ram. This was some sheep: the son of Poseidon, it was the flying ruminant that was carrying Helle when she fell off and drowned in what is now known as the Hellespont. It was sacrificed to Poseidon and became the constellation Aries. Its skin was hung in a grove and protected by a dragon until Jason showed up to snatch it away.
Since time immemorial, people have tried to rationalize the tall tales of their ancestors, and the Golden Fleece is no exception. Strabo, writing in the first century CE, proposed an explanation that is still considered plausible: the region around Colchis (the land at the eastern end of the Black Sea where earlier writers had decided Aea was located) was rich in gold, and ‘It is said that in their country gold is carried down by the mountain torrents, and that the barbarians obtain it by means of perforated troughs and fleecy skins, and that this is the origin of the myth of the golden fleece.’6 In fact, people were still using fleece to pan for gold into the Soviet era.
Hydraulic mining near French Corral, Nevada County, late 19th century.
This rationalization of legend is known as euhemerism, after Euhemerus, a fourth-century BCE Greek mythographer who saw mythology as ‘history in disguise’. It’s a reasonable effort – it is fairly unlikely that a flying, talking golden ram actually existed once upon a time. However, the archaeologist Otar Lordkipanidze, in a survey of different ‘historical’ explanations for the Golden Fleece legend, draws a line in the sand: ‘I shall venture to doubt that the miraculous ram, which according to Greek mythology could fly and speak and for whose fleece such a perilous expedition, celebrated in Greek literature, was undertaken, was “liver-damaged”’, referring to a scholar’s suggestion that the legend was referring to jaundiced livestock.7 Whether the story relates to specific techniques for finding gold, it certainly attests to the desire for it.
More recent times have witnessed stories nearly as far-fetched as this one that excite the fantasies of explorers, kings and commoners alike. The seductive myth of El Dorado is one of the most famous. As V. S. Naipaul put it in The Loss of El Dorado, ‘The legend of El Dorado, narrative within narrative, witness within witness, had become like the finest fiction, indistinguishable from truth.’ This South American city of gold, which led thousands of European explorers to their deaths, did not start life as a city at all. El Dorado was probably a person, ‘the gilded man’. Once a year during a religious festival, members of the Zipa group of the Muisca tribe coated their king in a natural adhesive and covered him in gold dust. He then ritually jumped into Lake Guatavita near Bacata (present-day Bogotá, Colombia). A later account, from Juan Rodríguez Freyle’s picaresque history El Carnero, has it that the gilded king merely threw great amounts of gold into the lake ‘to make offerings and sacrifices to the demon which they worshipped as their god and lord’.8 The ‘Muisca raft’, the particularly impressive work of Muisca goldsmithery, which we will learn more about in Chapter Five, illustrates the dunking ceremony – with its golden chieftain surrounded by an entourage of golden courtiers.
Spanish conquistadors heard these tantalizing stories – one man, Diego de Ordaz’s lieutenant Martinez, claimed to have met El Dorado in 1531 – but when the Spanish conquered the Muisca in 1539, they found no gilded man or fabulous treasures. That failure was not enough to squelch the rumours, and as the decades passed the legend grew. El Dorado became a city, not a person, and newly conquered peoples were happy to tell the conquistadors that yes, there is a land of fabulous wealth – always just a little farther into the jungle.
Jason about to seize the golden fleece. Red-figure terracotta column-krater (a bowl to mix wine and water) from c. 470–460 BCE.
Enter Sir Walter Raleigh, the dashing poet-explorer, popularizer of tobacco, founder of doomed Roanoke and friend (perhaps lover) of Elizabeth I of England. He came into possession of a Spanish account of Manoa, a golden city in Guiana on the Orinoco River that he decided must be El Dorado. He journeyed there in 1595 but failed to find Manoa – or much in the way of gold. This initial setback only whetted his appetite for adventure. He returned to England and wrote The Discovery of Guiana, a sometimes fanciful, always hyperbolic account of his travels. It also contained words of wisdom that Raleigh himself would have been smart to follow: ‘In all that ever I observed in the course of worldly things, I ever found that men’s fortunes are oftener made by their tongues than by their virtues, and more men’s fortunes overthrown thereby also, than by their vices.’9
Detail from Theodor de Bry, The Golden Man, 1599, engraving.
Simon de Passe, The True and Lively Portraiture of the Honourable and Learned Knight Sir Walter Ralegh, 1617, engraving. |
According to the historian Joyce Lorimer, Raleigh’s first draft described in great detail the gold ornaments and fabulous clothing worn by native Guianans, but had very little to say about the possibility of mining for the precious metal. His backers, worried that investors would not come forward without assurances of future gold, convinced Raleigh to play up the riches that could be taken from the Guianan ground. In many cases, it was just a matter of changing a word or two, such as when his ‘beliefs’ about the presence of gold turned into ‘knowledge’.10 The changes he made to the manuscript worked, at least well enough to raise money for another trip. He sent his assistant Lawrence Kemys back to Guiana. Kemys arrived to find that the Spanish had founded a settlement, Santo Tomé, close to the putative location of the mines. Fearing an ambush if he were to make his presence known to the Spaniards, he returned empty-handed. Undaunted, Raleigh sent a Dutchman named Adriaen Cabeliau in 1597, but he also failed to produce any lucre.
By this time detractors were openly calling Raleigh a liar. The ore he had brought back from South America was worthless; naysayers were baldly accusing him of never having gone to Guiana; and subsequent voyages had failed to bolster his claims. His patroness Elizabeth I died in 1603, and he was imprisoned that same year in the Tower of London for allegedly plotting against her successor James I.
But his fortunes began to change. In 1610 his biggest enemy, Sir Robert Cecil – Secretary of State, spymaster for King James, and the man responsible for having Raleigh locked up – died. England’s treasury was empty and war with Spain was imminent. Raleigh seized the opportunity. He suddenly remembered that he had in fact seen gold mines, and knew exactly where they were. He brandished letters from a mysterious Spanish informant that conveniently bolstered his story. The worthless ore that he had brought back, when re-tested by a friendly (and generously rewarded) mineralogist, turned out to be rich in gold. James I released him from the Tower in 1616, and by 1617 Raleigh had outfitted another trip to Guiana. The one condition was that he not cause any trouble with the Spanish.
It was this condition, finally, that caused the adventurer’s downfall. He was prohibited from personally leading the expedition, so his lieutenant Kemys headed down the Orinoco. What happened next is unclear: the result was a skirmish with the Spanish at Santo Tomé that left Raleigh’s eldest son Walter dead and Kemys in command of the town. Unable to negotiate a settlement with the angry Spanish forces surrounding him, Kemys ordered the town looted and burned. After he explained to Raleigh what had happened, he shot and then, when that was not fatal, stabbed himself to death. When the heartbroken Raleigh returned to England empty-handed, having caused an international incident that almost sparked yet another war with Spain, James i ordered his execution. Although offered several chances to escape, the explorer refused. He was beheaded at Westminster on 29 October 1618.
Sir Walter was far from being the first person to have lost his head over gold, and he would not be the last. Many a fruitless quest has been pursued over the gleaming metal. Throughout human history, the idea of gold – its imagined presence in a faraway place more than its actual existence – has had fantastic powers of attraction, powers that have usually had more unintended than intended consequences. Adventurers seeking gold have, more often than not, failed. But gold has been used to rationalize all kinds of other territorial activities and claims, whether the exploration of unknown territories or the seizure of lands where gold has been newly found. Driving exploration and conquest, gold has had an enormous impact on large-scale movements of population, perhaps even more than its monetary value would suggest.
The Americas have been the source of many tales of fabulous cities – and, of course, actual fabulous cities, like those of the Aztec and Inca empires. Perhaps the greatest single example of this wealth is found in the person of Atahualpa, the last king of the Inca empire. When Francisco Pizarro captured him in 1532, the king offered to pay a unique ransom: he would fill a large room with approximately 85 cubic metres (3,000 cubic ft) of gold if Pizarro would let him live. It took Indian goldsmiths working with nine forges almost a month to melt down the treasure – a devastating loss for our knowledge of the workmanship of Inca artisans. In the end the ransom didn’t even work: after holding him for several months, Pizarro had the emperor executed. His only concession was to have Atahualpa garrotted instead of burned at the stake, as Inca religion held that the soul would not go to the afterlife if the body were burned.
At around the same time, the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado explored northern Mexico looking for the mythical Seven Cities of Gold. The four survivors of the doomed Narváez expedition – the only men who lived to tell the tale from among the 600 Spaniards who sailed to Florida in a vain attempt to colonize the peninsula in 1528 – reported that, during their eight-year odyssey, they had heard rumours of cities full of fabulous riches. A Franciscan friar who was sent to investigate reported that he had seen, at a distance, one of the seven cities: Cibola, which he said rivalled in size and wealth Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Aztecs. Coronado was dispatched to gather the gold, but when he arrived in present-day New Mexico, he found that Cibola was actually a settlement of Zuni farmers living in adobe pueblos. Undeterred, Coronado occupied the area and used it as a military base.
Jérôme David, after Claude Vignon, Portrait of Atahualpa (Atabalipa Rex Peruviae), 1610–47, engraving.
Then he heard of a place called Quivira far to the east, where the chief drank from golden cups hanging from trees. Guided by a native nicknamed ‘the Turk’ (because the Spaniards thought he looked Turkish), Coronado set off across the Great Plains, eventually realizing when he reached present-day Kansas that he had been misled. The Turk admitted as much: according to Coronado,
the people at Cicuye had asked him to lead them off on the plains and lose them, so that the horses would die when their provisions gave out, and they would be so weak if they ever returned that they would be killed without any trouble, and thus they could take revenge for what had been done to them.
Coronado had the Turk strangled, but the revenge was complete, at least for a time – Coronado never found his cities of gold, and the Spanish would abandon the southwest for another generation.11
Within the lore about the search for gold, we often find the well-worn trope of buried treasure, pirate booty that you can find if you have the right antique map. There is, however, no evidence that any pirate ever concealed the location of his treasure under a large X on a coded map. The closest example is Captain Kidd, who in 1699 did bury some gold on Long Island. But he didn’t make a map, and despite what 200 years of treasure hunters will tell you, it was all recovered and sent to England as evidence in his trial. We can blame Robert Louis Stevenson for popularizing the fictional treasure map in his 1883 novel Treasure Island.
This is not to say that treasure maps have never existed. Indeed, among the Dead Sea Scrolls is the Copper Scroll (called that because it was etched on copper instead of written on parchment or papyrus), which dates from the first century CE and appears to give readers directions on how to find enormous caches of gold and silver. However, the directions are not very specific, and the loot remains undiscovered.12
An even older map is the Turin Papyrus, created around 1160 BCE by a scribe of the Egyptian pharaoh Rameses IV. The map, which now exists in several fragments, is about 208 cm (82 in.) long by 41 cm (16 in.) tall. It currently resides in the Egyptian Museum in Turin, and attests to the long history of gold exploration in Africa. Certainly, before Europeans ever lusted after the fabled golden cities of the Americas, they dreamed of African gold. And long before Europeans dreamed of African gold, other Africans did. From the dawn of history, the gold of Africa has attracted the attention of traders and invaders. At least since the dawn of cartography, that is, for the Turin Papyrus is the oldest existing geological map (meaning that it shows types and locations of geologic features such as rock outcroppings). It is surprisingly modern in its detail. It shows us, among other things, the location of a gold mine in the Eastern Desert, the barren area between the Eastern Nile and the Red Sea. It informs us that the gold-mining settlement at Bir Umm Fawakhir (Well of the Mother of Pottery) consisted of four houses, a temple of the god Amun, a statue of King Sety I, a reservoir and a well. It even notes that the valley was full of tamarisk trees.13
Map of the gold mines in the Sinai on a papyrus fragment, from the 20th Dynasty (12th–11th century BCE), New Kingdom, Egypt. |
Most of Egypt’s gold, however, came from Nubia, an area of eastern Africa corresponding to present-day southern Egypt and northern Sudan. (The name Nubia came late in history, possibly from the Egyptian word nub, meaning gold, but more likely from the Nobatae, an African group that settled the area around 300 CE.) In ancient Nubia gold mining was so important to the economy that royalty wore jewellery made of pierced nuggets of unworked alluvial gold, apparently touting the material’s local origins.14 Nubia’s millennia-long history is intertwined with and often inseparable from that of its more famous northern neighbour Egypt, as much of what we know of its history is from Egyptian sources. Over the centuries, Egypt and Nubia traded, made war and conducted diplomacy with one another. Their royalty intermarried, and Nubian dynasties even ruled over all of Egypt during the Middle Kingdom period.
Nubia is defined by the series of six rapids, or cataracts, along the southern course of the Nile between the point at Khartoum where its tributaries join and the point at Aswan where it exits the forbidding sandstone and granite of Nubia and flows through Egypt’s vast, fertile floodplain. The land was the home of some major kingdoms that interacted with more familiar Egyptian kingdoms. The Kerma Kingdom corresponded roughly with the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. The Kingdom of Kush, once a colony of the New Kingdom of Egypt, became independent when that kingdom collapsed, and in the eighth century BCE Kush conquered Egypt and founded the Twenty-fifth dynasty. When the Kushite dynasty was expelled in 656 BCE, its rulers retreated south; this latter phase of the Kingdom of Kush is also called the Kingdom of Meroë or the Meroitic Kingdom, after its second capital at Meroë.
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In the religion of ancient Egypt gold was a divine and indestructible metal associated with the sun; the very skin of the gods was thought to be golden. Egyptians did not use it as money – there were coinlike objects made of gold as early as 2700 BCE, but they were used as gifts, not currency. Instead pharaohs prized it for ritual and religious uses such as funerary objects – Tutankhamun’s solid-gold sarcophagus being the most famous example.
Starting in the Egyptian Old Kingdom (c. 2685–2150 BCE), a newly centralized and powerful Egypt wanted Nubian commodities, especially gold but also ivory and the bekhen-stone used for statuary, and pharaohs began making military incursions to secure them. Control of Nubia’s gold rested mostly in the hands of Egyptian rulers for the next millennium, but Nubia took advantage of power vacuums, such as the occasional Intermediate Periods, to retake Nubian areas and even conquer Egypt. By around 800 BCE at the beginning of the Kush-founded Twenty-fifth Dynasty, the gold-mining industry in Nubia collapsed, perhaps because it was impossible to retrieve any more gold from the mines using the technology at hand. Ptolemaic rule brought new mining techniques from Greece, but by this time attacks by nomadic peoples made it impossible to look for new sources of gold. After the Muslim conquest around 700 CE, there was quite a bit of placer mining in the area, but even that ceased by 1350.
During the European Middle Ages there was no direct trade between Europe and Africa. Muslims in the Middle East served as intermediaries, and the military force of the Moors of North Africa ensured that Europeans who wanted African commodities, including most of the gold that made its way to Europe, would have to stick to established trade routes. Europeans heard rumours through traders that the gold they were getting from the Arabs came from a race of black people south of the Western Nile, but not even the Islamic rulers of North Africa knew exactly where the gold was coming from: the celebrated Arab geographers al-Biruni of the tenth century CE, al-Idrisi of the twelfth century and Ibn Said of the thirteenth century simply left the land south of the Nile blank.15
Eventually, the rumours accumulated more details. The Catalan Atlas, made in 1375 for Charles V of France, depicts the Malian emperor Mansa Musa holding an enormous gold nugget and refers to him as ‘the richest and most noble lord of all this region on account of the abundance of gold which is gathered in his kingdom’. Musa could hardly have avoided attracting the attention of the entire world with his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324. Reportedly bringing with him a retinue of attendants that included 500 slaves, each carrying a 1.8-kg (4-lb) golden staff, he also was said to have distributed so much gold dust that the Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi claims he caused a depreciation in the value of the gold dinar that lasted twelve years.
Among the Europeans whose interest was piqued by stories of African gold was Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal (1394–1460). Henry – the man most responsible for the Age of Exploration – was, like many of his royal contemporaries, a big spender and was constantly in debt. The historian P. E. Russell attributes this to keeping up with the Joneses – or the Burgundians and Castillians: a shortage of gold in Europe, rampant inflation and a labour shortage in Portugal, and a lengthy period of peace that removed any chance for gaining wealth and fame on the battlefield combined to make it difficult for the nobles of Portugal to live as they thought nobility should. Henry maintained a large household of knights and squires and other hangers-on, and he was in debt for most of his life. As one of his captains, Diogo Gomes, remarked, Henry wanted African gold ‘to sustain the nobles of his household’.16
Nubian gold nugget with coiled suspension loop at the top, 700–500 BCE (see page 24). |
In 1415 he captured Ceuta, opposite Gibraltar, and over the next several decades the Portuguese under Henry explored and settled West Africa, breaking the Arab monopoly on European trade with Africa and making Portugal, for a time, the richest nation on earth. By the early 1470s Portuguese traders were sending back shiploads of gold dust to Lisbon. In 1482 they built their first settlement in the area that would become known as the Gold Coast, in present-day Ghana.
As the name suggests, this region of Africa was the source of a great deal of gold. During the Middle Ages Muslim traders travelled from North Africa to the region with wool, salt, glass, copper, steel and other commodities that they traded for slaves and gold. Abu ‘Ubayd al-Bakri, a geographer from Andalusia who visited the Ghana Empire in the eleventh century CE, described the king ‘adorned in jewelry and a golden headdress’, and sitting ‘in a pavilion around which stood ten horses in gold trappings. Behind the throne were ten pages holding shields and gold-hilted swords.’17
Mansa Musa, emperor of the Mali empire, in the Catalan Atlas by the cartographer Abraham Cresques, 1375, ink, pigment, gold and silver on parchment over wood panel. |
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Anticipating the imminent discovery of gold ore, the Portuguese called their fort São Jorge da Mina de Ouro (St George of the Gold Mine). The name proved to be unwarranted, as there were no gold mines near the coast where they built. However, their effort was not wasted – the Portuguese used the fort as a gold-buying outpost, and plenty of African gold flowed from this location into Portuguese coffers. But in the end, they found a more lucrative source of treasure. The kingdom’s New World colonies, it turned out, were perfect for growing sugar cane. What they lacked was the cheap labour needed to do the work. Their foothold in Africa gave them the brutal solution. As Prince Henry’s biographer P. E. Russell says, ‘it was soon found that black gold – slaves – was the most attractive cargo Guinea had to offer.’18
Thomas More, in his book Utopia (1516), decries the greed and rampant commercialism that accompanied the influx of gold from the Americas and Africa. He reports that every household has two slaves who are bound with golden chains. Perhaps he was familiar with Herodotus, who in his Histories suggests that gold was so plentiful in Ethiopia that they used golden chains to fetter their slaves?19 And could he have foreseen the moment, two centuries later, when the Prussian kingdom sold its settlements in present-day Ghana to the Netherlands for, among other things, six slaves bound in chains of gold?
Is there anything inherent in gold as a material that explains its lasting popularity with humans? Why do we travel so far and go to so much trouble to get it? As an element, gold has a characteristic atomic profile – atomic number 79. Its one naturally occurring isotope is also its one stable isotope, with 79 protons, 79 electrons and 118 neutrons. In the periodic table of elements, where it is classed with the transition metals, it carries the symbol Au – from the Latin word for gold, ‘aurum’. The way gold atoms bond to one another is called metallic bonding, and this helps to account for many of the properties of gold. The way metallic bonding works is often described using a concept called the ‘sea of electrons’. According to this model, gold cations (positively charged ions formed by the nucleus of the atom and its inner rings of electrons) bond together in a crystalline structure while allowing the other electrons to become ‘delocalized’, freed from their specific atoms and ‘swimming’ in a ‘sea’ of other electrons. The molecular structure is held together tightly because the electrons are attracted to multiple surrounding nuclei. This form of bond is thought to account for the malleability and ductility of metals. The sea of mobile electrons explains the high conductivity of metals. In the case of transition metals, extra electrons provided to the sea account for a high melting point. The density and mobility of the electron sea is what gives metals their special lustre when light bounces off them. The unreactive nature of gold also derives from the strength of the bonds between gold atoms – it does not easily release these bonds to react with other elements. This is why gold does not tarnish.
The reason why gold is yellow has to do with the theory of relativity proposed by Albert Einstein. Without relativity, gold might be expected to look more like silver: shiny but relatively colourless. But gold attracts its electrons more strongly, with 79 protons in its nucleus (as opposed to 47 for silver). Because of the relatively stronger attraction, its electrons must move much faster than silver’s in order to withstand the pull of the nucleus and stay in orbit. They thus achieve a speed that is more than half the speed of light, and this produces what scientists call ‘relativistic effects’: their orbitals (the routes the electrons travel around the nucleus) are deformed by their speed. Electrons that would be expected to absorb light in the ultraviolet (hence invisible) spectrum shift down to absorb in the blue (visible) end of the spectrum, reflecting the light of the rest of the spectrum, which combines to produce gold’s yellow colour.
Slight differences in colour are produced by alloying with other metals, but that yellow gleam is characteristic of pure gold, what jewellers refer to as ‘twenty-four carat gold’. When gold is alloyed with other metals, we describe the proportion of gold by weight in the resulting metal using a unit called the ‘carat’, which is 
of the total. Eighteen-carat gold is three-quarters gold (eighteen out of 24). The word ‘carat’ and its variants came into European languages from the Arabic qīrāt (
), which came from Greek kerátion (ϰεϱάτιον), little horn, used for the carob seed, a unit of weight.
None of this really answers the question, why gold? We know that it is pretty and shiny – its properties as a metal may account for its uses in adornment. Associations with purity and perfection may derive from the fact that it does not rust or tarnish, and thus appears incorruptible. For artisanal purposes, its ductility – it can be beaten to a thinness of 
inch, and drawn into fine threads – has long been prized. But this very ductility, as we noted at the outset, means that it is too soft and malleable to be used for tools. Even as money, it has to be alloyed with something else to be hard enough to withstand use. Useless but suitable as a container for value, gold also seems, throughout history, to have possessed qualities that (in the eye of the beholder, at least) transcended the material world.
This book is not a comprehensive history of gold. Rather, it explores the various roles gold has played in history and the human imagination. In fact, gold has played so many roles that it is difficult to fasten the metal itself in one’s sights. In the course of the book, we trace these tensions as we delve into gold’s history as a substance of desire. This book proceeds by dividing the variety of uses to which gold has been put, and the realms of inquiry it has inspired and shaped, into the six following chapters, examining wearable gold, religious gold, gold as currency, the science of gold, gold as a material for artists, and the many dangers associated with gold in myth and in reality.
In the next chapter, we explore the use of gold for human adornment. For all the developments that have changed the extraction of gold, we still use most of this shiny yellow metal in the same way the earliest humans used it – we wear it.
