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Lumps of gold weighing several pounds, found in our days in Florida and North and South Carolina, prove the primitive wealth of the whole basin of the Antilles from the island of Cuba to the Appalachian chain. It is also natural that the product of the gold-washings should diminish with greater rapidity than that of the subterraneous working of the veins.
We have now a sadder tale to tell; one that philanthropists have grieved over so often. Gold-washings are soon exhausted, but they frequently lead to the discovery of silver mines, which become so profitable as to drive away the very memory of the gold-washings.
These men are so thoroughly acclimatised to their cold and lofty abode, that when formerly carried down by the Spaniards to the low eastern plains, and when now tempted down by high wages to the gold-washings, they suffer a frightful rate of mortality. Nevertheless Mr.
Fortunately, the most precious of all metals is obtained by the most simple process, and the gold-washings of the Mescala and other parts of the south, which the Indians had but partially wrought, received more attention as soon as they learned how readily the precious metal could be exchanged for the gewgaws of the Europeans.
Farther west lay the now unknown kingdom of Abutua, which was formerly famous for the metal; and then, coming round toward the east, we have the gold-washings of the Mashona, or Bazizulu, and, farther east, that of Manica, where gold is found much more abundantly than in any other part, and which has been supposed by some to be the Ophir of King Solomon.
Thus the fact that gold-washings ever existed in Mexico, or even in Brazil, is almost forgotten, and the places where those washings were rests in vague tradition.
The coffee and sugar plantations and gold-washings were abandoned, because the labor had been exported to the Brazils. Many of the Portuguese then followed their slaves, and the government was obliged to pass a law to prevent further emigration, which, had it gone on, would have depopulated the Portuguese possessions altogether.
According to these estimates the produce of gold in Brazil, making deductions for fraudulent exportation, was, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the years of the greatest prosperity of the gold-washings, 6600 kilogrammes, and in our days, from 1817 to 1820, 600 kilogrammes less.
Whatever activity may be attributed to causes of destruction, such as the tyranny of the conquistadores, the faults of governors, the too severe labours of the gold-washings, the small-pox and the frequency of suicides,* it would be difficult to conceive how in thirty or forty years three or four hundred thousand Indians could entirely disappear. See Patriota tome 2 page 50.
I do verily believe that all that class of Arabian tales are but the reproduction of the romances from the Oriental gold-washings. The most important mines in the State of San Luis Potosi are those near Cuatorce.
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