Metallurgy, mining, and English colonization in the Americas, 1550-1624

• Main Author: Amundsen, Karin Alana
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: University of Southern California Digital Library (USC.DL) 2019
• Subjects: History; metallurgy; metallurgical; mining; mines; alchemy; colonization; colonies; Atlantic; England; Ireland; North America; Virginia; Guiana; Newfoundland; Martin Frobisher; Sir Walter Ralegh; Edward Hayes; Richard Hakluyt; Thomas Harriot; gold; copper; silver; brass; iron; Falling Creek; transmutation; Ophir; El Dorado; political economy; bullionism; exploration; debasement; currency; coinage; bimetallism; trade; commerce; munitions; Powhatan; Algonquian; Lawrence Keymis; Joachim Gans; Burchard Kranich; Jonas Schutz; Michael Lok; Cathay Company; Virginia Company; Sir Humphrey Gilbert; John Dee; Sir Thomas Smith; Sir Richard Martyn; Arctic; Indian; Hayes; Dee; Martyn
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-386207; https://digitallibrary.usc.edu/asset-management/2A3BF165P2DK

This dissertation considers metallurgy’s central role in defining English projects in the Atlantic World before 1624 and the alchemical worldview that shaped these ventures. It challenges the intractable narrative conflating mining with plunder, which reduces the quest for precious metals to ventures of quick profit, and makes clear that these projects required long-term capital investment, extensive infrastructure, and a substantial labor force to be successful. For overseas mining colonies to be self-sufficient from and profitable to the metropole they would need the support of husbandmen, tradesmen, and soldiers. In other words, mining in the Americas went hand-in-hand with settler colonization. The central claim is that after minimal participation in the first half century of European exploration, advances in metallurgical technologies in the mid-Tudor period contributed to a growing confidence among Englishmen to embark on large-scale Atlantic projects. From the mining industry, projectors obtained expert personnel for their overseas ventures, a cohort of investors, and portable technologies for prospecting. Further, improvements in the manufacture of iron ordnance and wares, as well as lodestone compasses, helped advance English shipbuilding and the art of navigation. In these early ventures, projectors prioritized the acquisition of metals from the New World to address various socioeconomic problems. The arctic voyages of Martin Frobisher (1576-78), with its attempt at a mining colony and employment of experts in alchemy and metallurgy, laid the framework for the first era of colonization. It convinced many English investors that the Americas held rich mines worth exploiting, but warned of the risks of fraud and improper motives. Concerns about currency and the balance of trade in Europe drove Edward Hayes to propose plans for colonization in North America and a debased silver coinage in Ireland, whereas Sir Walter Ralegh promoted his second Guiana venture as a means for King James to build a perpetual stock of gold to raise his reputation among Europe’s princes. Ralegh did this after his first Guiana venture, an alchemical quest for El Dorado to challenge Spanish hegemony, failed to appeal to Queen Elizabeth and reminded too many investors of Frobisher’s fraudulent gold ore. Precious metals may have received the greatest attention, but in Virginia it was base metals that determined the course of colonization efforts. From Roanoke to Jamestown, the indigenous exchange of copper granted adventurers a point of entry into the region to search for Appalachian mines and sources of quality calamine, copper, and iron to rescue English mineral enterprises from collapse in the face of competition from cheaper Swedish imports. If metals helped Jamestown gain a permanent foothold, they also triggered breaches in Anglo-Indian relations, most significantly the 1622 attack on the colony, which led the Crown to revoke the Virginia Company’s license in 1624 and ended the first era of English colonization. In re-centering the search for metals in the narrative of early English colonization, this dissertation recuperates these initial projects not as misguided ventures driven by gold fever, but as rational responses to the social and political contexts in which they emerged and prevailing assumptions about the generation of metals.