Mining
At the beginning of the modern era or the early sixteenth century, the mining districts of central Europe—particularly those of the Tyrol, Thuringia, Saxony, and Bohemia—produced a large share of the metals used in international commercial exchange, and the merchants of the imperial cities of Augsburg and Nuremberg, who marketed these metals, contributed substantially to the transfer of mining technology from Europe to the New World.
While German involvement in American mining in the sixteenth century focused on Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean, North America became a destination for German miners in the eighteenth century. In the 1780s Spain, which had kept its American empire closed to foreign migrants and investors for more than two centuries, cautiously opened its colonies to attract technical experts who might revive the declining mining operations there. Germany once again began to furnish skilled personnel for Central and South American mines and continued to do so after Latin American independence. Many individual German mining ventures in the New World failed, but collectively they had a notable impact on the transfer of technology from Europe to America.In 1527 representatives of the Welser firm of Augsburg contracted with the Spanish crown to transport fifty miners from Saxony to America, where they were to extract precious metals on the island of Santo Domingo and other provinces. The following year the company also obtained exclusive gold-mining privileges in its own province of Venezuela and neighboring Santa Marta. The Welsers’ representatives in America, however, showed little interest in mining activities and recruited some of the miners for their military expeditions to the interior regions of Venezuela. Of the eighty to ninety miners whom the Welsers shipped to the New World, eleven are known to have returned to Saxony where some of them sued their former employers for neglect of their duties.
In 1535 three south German merchants residing in Seville—Lazarus Nurn- berger, his brother-in-law Hans Cromberger, and Christoph Raiser, agent of the Augsburg merchant Sebastian Neid- hart—established a business partnership for trade with the New World that included silver mines in the Mexican regions of Tasco and Zultepeque. About a dozen Europeans were sent to Mexico, but the mines apparently yielded little profit. In 1542 Nurnberger transferred his share to Cromberger, who continued operations for a few more years.
After a Flemish expert had inspected the Cuban copper mines, Hans Tetzel (1518—1571), who came from an old patrician family in Nuremberg, traveled to the West Indies in 1542 to investigate conditions there. Back in Nuremberg, Tetzel successfully experimented with smelting Cuban copper. In 1546 he concluded a treaty with the Spanish crown that gave him exclusive mining and smelting privileges for ten years and formed a company with his brothers Jobst and Gabriel, two brothers-in-law, and Lazarus Nurnberger in Seville. The following year Tetzel traveled to America in the company of five Germans and one Fleming, and with the help of slave labor the group established a copper works near Santiago de Cuba. Tet- zel encountered considerable opposition from local mine owners who resented his monopoly, until in 1550 he agreed to share his technical know-how. Cuban copper production flourished for a few years, and some copper was exported to Spain. From 1554 onward, pirate attacks on Santiago and natural disasters brought Tetzel to the brink of ruin, but he was apparently able to mobilize additional capital. In 1571 he journeyed back to Spain to renew his treaty with the crown and hire additional workmen but died before he could return to Cuba. Spanish and Portuguese investors continued his enterprise.
In 1713 the Swiss nobleman Christian von Graffenried, who had founded a shortlived settlement in North Carolina a few years earlier, recruited forty-two ironworkers and their families from the principality of Nassau-Siegen for Virginia governor Alexander Spotswood.
They contracted to work for three years in an ironworks Spotswood planned to establish in the northern part of the colony. The Siegerlanders were placed in a small palisaded outpost above the falls of the Rappahannock, and an iron furnace was built at the settlement, which Spotswood named Ger- manna. While most of the Siegerlanders left Germanna in the early 1720s and settled on land nearby, other German-speaking migrants continued iron making there. In subsequent decades German miners, especially from Nassau-Siegen, were hired for ironworks in various colonies. Several dozen unemployed miners from Clausthal and Zellerfeld, an economically depressed region in the upper Harz Mountains, even received support from Hanoverian public officials when they emigrated to Nova Scotia, New York, and Pennsylvania in the early 1750s. As mining in the Harz region continued to decline in the nineteenth century, large numbers of workers emigrated to the New World, and the Hanover and Brunswick governments resumed subsidizing their emigration in the 1840s and 1850s.While iron making in the mid-Atlantic region was dominated by ironmasters from England and Scotland in the eighteenth century, some German speakers also entered the field. In 1743 Jacob Huber established Elizabeth Furnace, a small ironworks in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, which his son-in-law Henry William Stiegel and his partners, the Philadelphia merchants Charles and Alexander Stedman, greatly enlarged after 1757. Stiegel also branched out into glassmaking but went bankrupt on the eve of the American Revolution. His nephew George Ege, who had learned the trade at Elizabeth Furnace, began a successful career in iron making in the early 1770s. In 1764 Peter Hasenclever from Remscheid in Westphalia won English investors for a company that was to produce iron and potash in America. Hasenclever hired 500 German and English miners, ironworkers, colliers, laborers, and their families to build a complex of five iron furnaces and seven forges in the hills of northern New Jersey.
Due to poor planning and the unreliability of Hasenclever’s financial backers, the venture failed after a few years. After lengthy legal disputes in England, Hasenclever went to Silesia in 1773 and engaged in various industrial enterprises there.In 1786 the Spanish government asked Fausto d’Elhuyar (1755—1833), a former student at the mining academy at Freiberg, Saxony, who had become director of the Mexican mines, to investigate mining and smelting technology in Europe and recruit experts for Spanish America. D’Elhuyar and his brother Juan led two groups of Saxon engineers and miners to Mexico and New Granada, while the Swedish Baron von Nordenflycht and the German mining director Anton Zacharias Helms led a third group to Peru. During his four years in the viceroyalty (1788-1792), Helms introduced new machinery and a recently invented, more efficient amalgamation method, which was used to extract silver from the ore with the help of mercury. In a book he published upon his return, Helms blamed the obstinacy of Peruvian officials and mine owners for the failure of his efforts.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the mining academies of Freiberg and Clausthal played an important role in the transfer of technical knowledge from Germany to the Americas. At least thirty students from Spain and thirty-four from Latin America studied at Freiberg from 1766 to 1866. In 1792 Fausto d’Elhuyar founded the Real Seminario de Minerιa in Mexico, which was closely modeled on the Freiberg academy; employed German engineers and scientists as teachers; and used textbooks translated from German. A number of students from South America and Mexico also attended the academy at Clausthal, while at least seventy-five German students from Clausthal are known to have emigrated to Latin America. The Freiberg graduate Hermann Joseph Burkart (1798-1874) went to Mexico in 1825 to work for two English mining companies. After his return to Europe he entered the Prussian mining administration in 1836 and published numerous works on Mexican geology and mining.
The most famous Freiberg graduate, however, was Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who had worked in the Prussian mining administration for several years before embarking on his great American journey (1799-1804). Humboldt recorded numerous observations on mineral resources and mining conditions in Colombia and Peru and prepared detailed surveys and reports on Mexican mines.Of the numerous German technical experts, engineers, and geologists who worked for foreign companies or state enterprises in the nineteenth century, the Hessian nobleman Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege (1777-1855) deserves particular mention. After his studies in Gottingen, Marburg, and Clausthal, Eschwege went to Portugal in 1803 and became director of an
ironworks there. In 1809 Eschwege, his collaborator Ludwig Wilhelm Varnhagen, and a number of miners and ironworkers traveled to Brazil and established several ironworks. Eschwege became general director of the gold mines in 1817. Like Varn- hagen, Eschwege returned to Europe during the political crisis of 1821 that ushered in Brazilian independence, but he continued to publish extensively on the country’s geology and natural history.
German entrepreneurs also invested in American mining operations. One of the largest enterprises of its kind was the Deutsch-Mexikanischer Bergwerks-Verein (German-Mexican Mining Society, later renamed Deutsch-Amerikanischer Berg- werksverein [German-American Mining Society]), formed in 1824 by a group of Rhenish and Westphalian merchants and manufacturers in Elberfeld. Several of the founders had already been active in trade with Mexico, and they now intended to reach out into the exploitation of mineral resources. Wilhelm Stein (1791-1870) from a Siegerland mining family became the company’s chief agent, and Friedrich von Gerolt his assistant. Both men had gathered experience in the mining administrations of Bonn and Duren. The company hired laborers, administrators, and technical experts from the Siegerland and leased a number of gold, silver, and lead mines in central Mexico.
Due to high mortality among the immigrants, technical problems, and the political instability of the country, the costs of the enterprise far exceeded the profits, and the company went bankrupt in 1837. Several German miners remained in Mexico, however, and von Gerolt later became Prussia’s diplomatic representative there.Mark Haberlein
See also Brazil; Conquista; Eschwege, Wilhelm Ludwig von; Humboldt, Alexander von; Mexico; Mexico, German- Mexican Relations in
References and Further Reading
Bailyn, Bernard. Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1986.
Bartolosch, Thomas A., and Marko Dillmann. “Siegerlander Berg- und Huttenleute in Virginia. Ein Beispiel fur den Technologie- und Kulturtransfer von Europa in die Neue Welt im fruhen 18. Jahrhundert.” Scripta Mercaturae vol. 34 (2000): 1-23.
Groβhaupt, Walter. “Bergbau der Welser in Ubersee.” Scripta Mercaturae vol. 25 (1991): 125-177.
Liesegang, Carl. Deutsche Berg- und Huttenleute in Sud- und Mittelamerika: Beitrage zur Frage des deutschen Einfusses auf die Entwicklung des Bergbaus in Lateinamerika. Hamburg: Heitmann, 1949.
Werner, Theodor Gustav. “Das Kupferhuttenwerk des Hans Tetzel aus Nurnberg auf Kuba und seine Finanzierung durch europaisches Finanzkapital (1545-1571).” Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte vol. 48 (1961): 289-328, 444-502.