Before they even enter a gold mine, travellers are surprised by the logistical ability of the countries in the Amazon region to transport everything that is needed for the miners, from food through to petrol. Extracting about two hundred and fifty tonnes (and probably more) gold per year as chips, fine grains or nuggets, transporting the precious metal and its ingredients, fuel and mercury all represents a highly profitable business whether using dugout canoes, quads or small stunt planes. Attempts to protect the Amazon require the involvement of the region’s countries to implement campaigns, to ban  illegal mining and the use of mercury, but are faced with the complete hypocrisy of these countries’ representatives irrespective of whether it is Brazil, France, Surinam or Venezuela.

Why criticise the business when these same country representatives are using every available means to extend it, by a laissez-faire attitude, by turning a blind eye or even by their active involvement. Not only is the situation in the Amazon rain forest not improving but it is worsening to the point where you have to wonder if even the countries are profiting from its destruction. Part of the problem stems from how the gold is pulled from the ore. Across Brazil, thousands of garimpieros, itinerant gold miners, remove ore by washing a rock face with a high-pressure stream of water. The ore is then broken down in a hammer crusher, and the gold-bearing ore is sluiced with mercury in a process known as amalgamation. The amalgam is filtered manually and then retorted to release the mercury from the gold. The mercury vapor that results is distilled and reused, although a small fraction remains bound to the gold, to be released by the gold dealers during processing. The Brazilian Gold Rush began in 1980 when gold was discovered in Serra Palada in Palá state. Most of the incoming population (at least 250,000) worked for a low wage in very crowded, highly competitive gold mines with very lax environmental practices. Up to 9000 tons of mercury, used in the mining process, has been washed into the region’s rivers, along with huge quantities of sediment. The miners have also polluted the rivers with oil, litter and human sewage. All around the vicinity of the mines, vegetation, animals and settlements have been destroyed.

The profits to be made from providing transport are often as great as those to be made from mining. The town of Maripasoula in French Guyana controls an area the size of Belgium and gains a large part of its revenues from the gold. However, in Brazil, the transporters do not care as they send their goods to the other side of the river Oyapock, on the Guyana side, and wait for their commissions. The same occurs with Surinam, where the gold money ends up in bank vaults or on casino tables. Why bother saying that the gold helps the local population when everyone from Caracas to Cayenne, from Rio to Paramaribo, knows perfectly well that it provides no local benefit and is removed to foreign countries?  The gold leaves whilst the mercury penetrates into the Amazon basin. The alchemy is damaging for the forest and is affecting the human population particularly those who eat mercury contaminated fish.

Includes exerts from the book J’Aurai de l’Or by Olivier Weber. See video clip  curse for gold

British gold is rare indeed. Unlike the vast mining industries in Nevada, China and South Africa, gold reserves in the UK are modest. Most mines have been alluvial where the precious metal has been sifted from rivers and silt rather than dug from rock. Gold has been mined in the UK since around 600 BC when the first mine was opened in Wales. One of the reasons the Romans invaded Britain was that they believed it to be rich in precious metals. More Roman gold artefacts have been found in Britain than anywhere else in Europe.

Wales

Gold has been mined in Dolaucothi Wales since prehistoric times. The pre-Christian Celtic chiefs wore fine gold torcs and armbands and became wealthy as a result of metal trading. The Romans later controlled some of the mines, developing large-scale mining operations. During the Roman occupation, British metalwork was widely circulated. Reaching their peak during the great expansion of the Celtic Church in the 8th century AD, Celtic goldsmiths produced work of unrivalled craftsmanship. Later, the Welsh princes became wealthy and powerful rulers due to rich supplies of metal ores.

The Acts of Union passed in 1536 and 1542 made mining rights the property of the English Crown and royalties of 4% are still payable to the Crown on any gold mined in Wales. Welsh gold, which is mined by hand, is found in an area stretching from Barmouth, past Dolgellau and up towards Snowdonia. Welsh gold-bearing rock lies in seams, like coal, and has been known to yield up to thirty ounces per tonne.  Gwynfynydd Gold Mine in Dolgellau opened in the 1860s and was one of the richest gold mines in Britain with a recorded output since 1884 of more than 2,000 ounces of fine gold. Gold was first worked on a serious scale at. In 1862 a small scale British gold rush was triggered by the Clogau mine, which excavated more than 165,031 tons of ore and was a key producer of gold on a serious scale

Welsh gold due to its rarity is very expensive and has a distinctive rose colour.  The Clogau and Gwynfynydd mines are the only mines to have recently produced significant quantities of gold, and it is from these two mines that gold for the Royal wedding rings, traditionally made of Welsh gold, has been obtained. In is rumoured that the queen obtain a kilogram of welsh gold many years ago to ensure sufficient remained for more royal rings

Scotland

Scottish Highlands are famous for many things: ancient mountains, sparkling lochs, whisky and wildlife. But now a new and highly lucrative attraction has been found in the Highlands - gold.

An Australian-funded mining company has made several large finds of gold, potentially worth hundreds of millions of pounds, around the small village of Tyndrum.

The company, Scotgold, already owns a small mine near Tyndrum known as Cononish. First drilled 20 years ago, Cononish has never been commercially worked, until now where it is estimated that 4.5 tonnes of gold lie buried worth £100m..

The local community trust and tourism officials are discussing plans for a gold mine visitors centre in the village, gold panning “experiences” and jewellery boutiques selling rings, brooches and necklaces of “Tyndrum gold” to passing tourists at premium prices.

Chris Sangster, the director and CEO of Scotgold, said Cononish is expected to start producing 200kg of gold a year at the mine site when full-scale mining begins in 2011 – enough to produce 30,000 wedding rings a year – and another 500kg each year by sending rocks for processing elsewhere. Cononish will also produce roughly 17 tonnes of silver.

But Sangster said Cononish may only be the start of a major gold mining operation in the area. The company has a licence to explore a 2,200 sq km area of the southern Highlands for gold and it now believes there could be up to five times as much gold in the Tyndrum area.

The one-kilometre long shaft at Cononish has remained dormant until now because of the technical difficulty and cost of extracting the particles of gold from the quartz rock, which traps it. For every 10g of gold – roughly the weight of one wedding ring – about a tonne of rock will need to be crushed.

Most Tyndrum gold will be sold on the open market. The mine’s commercial value has been transformed by the sharp surge in its price during the recession.

Northern Ireland

The UK’s largest gold mine is in County Tyrone Northern Ireland, where 14 tonnes have been discovered in shallow deposits beneath a peat bog at Cavanacaw, in the same Dalradian rock strata that runs across the northern UK to the mine at Cononish in the Scottish Highlands.

In January 2007, after modern prospecting techniques discovered recoverable gold at Cavanacaw near Omagh in Co Tyrone, the first modern gold mine came into production. “This is Ireland’s first for two millennia”, announced Galantas, the Canadian company who owns and operates it.

It announced that Galantas expected to produce 30,000 ounces of gold a year – which alone would net close to 15 million pounds. Deposits were claimed to hold 14 tonnes of Irish gold. While most was to be sold as gold concentrate, a small part of what the company billed as “rare Irish gold” was to be used to make a range of branded 18-carat jewellery – Galantas Irish gold jewellery.

In addition to the Omagh gold mine, there are at least three other projects that are being explored.

Maurice Hall

John Augustus Sutter C. 1835

In 1848, for the first time in history, an accidental discovery in California gave everyone and anyone the chance to get rich thanks to gold. It all started in 1839 with John Sutter, an ambitious immigrant from the village of Kandern in Germany.

Sutter settled in California and decided to create an agricultural empire on the fertile hills around the Sacramento valley. It was here that he built a fort in order to protect his rapidly growing assets. Nearly ten years later, he owned 1,200 head of cattle and employed over 100 people.

He also had plans to build a flour mill in order to supply the needs of the people who came to settle in the west. Sutter needed wood to do this.

James Marshall arrived at Sutter’s Fort in 1845, at the age of thirty-four, and was immediately hired as a handyman by Captain Sutter. Anxious to get back to farming, Marshall bought a ranch on Butte Creek but continued to work for Sutter.
Marshall fought in the Mexican War, serving in Captain John Frémont’s California Volunteers for one year. When he returned to Sutter’s Fort in 1847, he was dismayed to find that all his livestock had either strayed off or been stolen. He had no choice but to go back to work for Sutter.  Sutter contracted him to build a saw mill and Marshall found a suitable location in the Nevada foothills some 40 miles from Sutter’s fort near an Indian village called Cullumah (Coloma)

The workers had to dig a big trench to bring water to the saw mill and the deepest part of the trench, called a race, was at the level of the land’s sub-strata. It was here on the morning of January 24^th 1948 that James Marshall was making his routine inspection when he made a discovery that would change the course of Californian and American history.

The flowing water had carried away sand and dirt and lighter minerals, but a heavier metal was left behind to accumulate in the deepening ditch. Marshall hesitated twice before taking the trouble to bend down and pick it up. “I sat down and started some serious thinking, my heart was beating strongly, I was certain it was gold. The piece had the shape of a small pea”.

Marshall ran some crude test to determine the authenticity before returning to show Sutter who would later write: “Mr. Marshall started by showing me this metal. In reality, some small fragments and pieces, some of which could be worth a few dollars He told me that he had told the workers at the saw mill that it was possible that it was gold.”

Sutter decided to keep the find secret until one of his workers went to town to have a drink without any money on him. Once there, the worker searched his pockets and brought out a gold nugget that he had found in a stream; he slapped it down on the counter. ”Here’s some money, it’s gold” he said. The transaction took place in the general store owned by a Mormon called Sam Brannan who knew a bit about supply and demand at the frontier.

Sam Brannan saw an opportunity and  went to San Francisco and bought everything that he could get his hands on to supplies the miners would need over the following months. Then Brannan did everything to ensure that crowds of miners were attracted. He wandered around the streets of San Francisco announcing the new discovery: “Gold in an American river! Gold in an American river! ”

When the news reached the state of Oregon, two thirds of working men packed their bags and headed for California. They claimed to be gold prospectors. Finding the metal became a new trade. A Spanish official at Monterey commented: “farmers have left their ploughs, lawyers their cases, doctors their tablets, priests their flocks and everyone is now digging for gold”.

The news spread even faster by sea, the Chinese knew before the New Yorkers. “The news took so much time to reach the east of the country that these people were known as the 49ers, from 1849, instead of the 48ers.”

Forty Niners

In 1852, the population of California had more than doubled as 250,000 people arrived. Virtually the whole world had participated in the gold rush. You can read in the registers that people came from the Indian sub-continent and from every country in Europe but also from Australia, South America and, of course, the United States.

There were three possible routes to the gold bearing lands for the approximately 80,000 Americans who left the east coast. By train the journey could take up to six months. By ship, going around South America, it could also take six months. Or there was the combined ship and land route, crossing the panama isthmus; the shortest route and also the most expensive.

These three solutions all produced great suffering; there was hunger and terrible diseases plus many other dangers. We should not forget the bad country and the fear, worries not only for the family left behind but also about what you would find to live on in California.

When the ships moored in San Francisco, the sailors, tempted by the chance of earning twenty years of salary in just two months as prospectors, joined the passengers and accompanied them in this rush to the gold fields. The SS California arrived in April 1849 with a crew of 36. After only a few days, the only people left on board were the captain and a mechanic. Another ship’s captain went so far as to hang two deserters from the yardarm until inches from death as a warning, but to no avail. The gold fever had made everyone mad.

It was the chance of a lifetime for many people who had known nothing but poverty and had suddenly heard of this extraordinary news.

Before the find at Sutter’s saw mill, any gold that had been found immediately became the property of kings or conquerors. The Californian gold rush introduced a new facet or, to put it simply, allowed common people to search for gold and keep whatever they found for themselves.

All of a sudden, there were independent miners who managed on their own in the cold and rain, who broke their backs as they extracted and searched the gold-bearing gravel. It’s completely unique in the world’s history.

The 49ers worked a rocky region that was rich in gold which was referred to as the mother-lode. Over the course of millions of years, the gold had been carried by streams until it reached the river; this is why we talk about gold-bearing sand or gravel.

However, even though California was inundated with gold, money was scarce, the nearest place to obtain money was Philadelphia on the other side of the country. The Californians therefore has to improvise and used the foreign coins that were already present.

The Spanish silver dollar, called a piece of eight, was the most common; they could to be cut into eight smaller pieces with each of them worth 12.5 cents. e.g. six bits would buy you a haircut and a shave.

However, David Broderick, recently arrived from New York, started buying the gold dust which he melted into gold coin that  allowed the Californians to develop a reserve of money that became indispensable. It was only later that it was discovered that the so-called 5 and 10 dollar gold coins were possibly not made entirely of gold, thus Broderick to make a good profit from his business.

Broderick was not the only trader to make his fortune without ever touching a rock. At the height of the rush, Sam Brannan, who supplied all the miners, became the country’s richest man. Sam Brannan is known as the first millionaire: a million dollars in gold dust without ever having swung a pick.

However, only a handful of the 49ers got rich from the adventure. In 1849, California produced 10 million dollars of gold, when split between an average of 40,000 miners, this is about 250 dollars each. But people kept on coming by hundreds and thousands, attracted by the extravagant stories told about the rush.

Production reached 77 tonnes in 1851. Most of it left for the east of the country – an annual cargo which had a value that was greater that the whole of the federal budget. Production reached 93 tonnes in 1853 but the easy gold that could be panned in the rivers and streams had now virtually run out, the bell had tolled for the end of the Californian gold rush. The adventure only lasted for four short years but was fundamental for the future development of the American west.

It had had a scale, it was far greater than any other event of its type in history of America, not only in terms of the quantity of gold extracted but also for what it did for America. Those miners who realised that chasing gold was a pipe dream went back to doing what they did best and established productive  farms in California’s fertile land.

As with all the history of the American west, development has a cost. The massive immigration upset an economic and social system that had been stable for many years. The different routes to the gold had devastating effects on the native Indian populations, it was the beginning of the end of their way of life.

Over a five year period, the Californian Indian population fell from 150,000 to less than 30,000 people. Most died of hunger or disease, others were killed by miners.

Those who started the rush had similar fates: James Marshall, the man who found the first nugget in the river, spent the rest of his life a drunkard as he searched in vain for another seam

John Sutter’s prosperous agricultural empire disappeared. His workers went out into the gold fields and abandoned the land to squatters. Sutter refers to his broken dreams in his memoires: “This sudden gold find destroyed all my best plans, if only I had succeeded a few years before gold was found I would have been the richest person on the Pacific coast. But instead of being rich, I am ruined.”

Some 49ers were unable to get over their gold fever. In the next half century, there were several other gold rushes around the world. Each of them triggered a migration of prospectors stimulated by the simple rumour of the next great find.

In the gold fever, a ruined 49er found gold under the ground. The main gold seam that supplied the great Californian gold rush, the mother-lode as it is called, is in reality a vein of quartz containing gold that extends over 160 km across the mountains of northern California.

Edward Hargreaves

In 1850, Edward Hargreaves, aged 34, returned home to Australia after having spent two years there searching for gold in California. Even though he was now penniless, Hargreaves realised that the geology of the Californian region where he had been was similar to that in New South Wales in Australia. He forecast to one of his fellow travellers that he would find gold within a week. “There is as much gold in the country I am returning to as there is in California. And her gracious majesty the queen, blessed by God, will name me as one of its gold high-commissioners.”

Hargreaves was not far from the truth. In 1851, barely six weeks after his return, accompanied by a guide who’s service he had rented, discovered gold in his pan. In six months, some 50,000 prospectors, most of them ex-Californian dreamers, had descended on Australia.

A few months later, the news of the find reached England along with the first cargo of Australian gold.
Thomas Harvernot, the steamship’s captain, wrote: “Our colony is totally paralysed. Every man or boy capable of holding a shovel has already left or is leaving to dig. The price of almost every foodstuff has increased by as much as two hundred percent.”

Australia, which had been detested as a penal colony for  British convicts, suddenly became the promised land for anyone who had a dream and a shovel. 372,000 immigrants settled there in1852. They were simply ordinary people who said to themselves “it’s a gold rush, let’s get up, let’s go there and see if we can get rich.”

But as was the case in California, the Australian gold rush did not last long. Over four years, all the gold hidden on the surface and in the water courses was cornered. Edward Hargreaves boast became a reality. Queen Victoria named him High-Commissioner of the Lands. Apart from a payment of 10,000 pounds sterling, she also gave him a job for life. Even though he never found any more gold, Hargreaves continued to be venerated as the man who had the gift of changing everything he touched into gold.

The Californian and Australian gold rushes made common people into part-time prospectors. I suppose that it had almost become a semi-profession by the second half of the 19^th century. You were a prospector, your ear was always cocked to hear the latest gossip and discussions that circulate in bars.

With California and Australia now out of play, the ultimate advice was “go to the Rockies”. Watch this space…

Maurice Hall