Note 515 — Chapter CIX

Acosta tells us that, when he wrote in 1608, most of the silver was extracted from the ore by means of quicksilver. Formerly, however, he says that there were more than six thousand huayras on the sides and summit of the hill of Potosi. “The huayras were small ovens in which the metal was melted, and to see them burning at night with a red heat, and throwing their light to a distance, was a pleasant spectacle. At present if the number of huayras reaches to one thousand or two thousand, it is the outside, because the melting is done on a small scale, nearly all the metal being extracted by quicksilver.” Acosta, lib. iv, cap. 9, p. 218.

The hill of Potosi is in 21° 40´ S. lat., and seventeen thousand feet above the level of the sea. The name is said to be derived from the Aymara word Potocsi (“he who makes a noise”), because, when Huayna Ccapac in 1462 ordered search to be made for a silver mine on the hill, a terrible voice cried out from underground that the riches it contained were reserved for other masters. G. de la Vega.

Zarate says, that in a short time after the discovery of the silver, seven thousand Indians were at work, who had to give two marcs of silver to their masters every week, which they did with such ease, that they retained more silver for themselves than they paid to their employers. Historia del Peru, lib. vi, cap. 4.

In 1563 Potosi was constituted a town, and was granted a coat of arms by Philip II; and in 1572 the viceroy Don Francisco de Toledo went in person to this great seat of mining wealth, and established regulations for its government. This viceroy also introduced the use of quicksilver, a mine of which had been discovered at Huancavelica, by a Portuguese named Enrique Garces, in 1566. Toledo also regulated and legalised the atrocious system of mitas, or forced labour in the mines. He caused a census to be taken of Indians in Peru, between the ages of eighteen and fifty, the result of which gave a total of 1,677,697 men liable for service, who were divided into 614 ayllus or lineages. Of these he assigned a seventh part of those living in the seventeen nearest provinces, or 11,199 Indians, to work at the mines of Potosi, under certain rules for their protection, which were generally evaded. According to Toledo’s law, each Mitayo, or forced labourer, would only have to serve for eighteen months during the thirty-two years that he was liable. They were to receive twenty rials a week, and half a rial for every league of distance between their native village and Potosi. In 1611 there was a population of one hundred and sixty thousand inhabitants in the town of Potosi, of whom seventy-six thousand were Indians, three thousand Spaniards, thirty-five thousand Creoles, forty thousand Europeans, and six thousand Negroes and Mulattoes. The riches accumulated by individuals were enormous, and a man named Sinteros, “the rich,” who died in 1650, was worth twenty million dollars. Mercurio Peruano.

In 1825 there were about five thousand mouths of mines on the mountain, of which only fifty or sixty were then worked. The upper portion of the mountain, indeed, was so completely honeycombed, that it was considered as nearly worked out. The lower part, about one-third of the cone, was then hardly touched, in consequence of the number of springs which impede the working.