Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/540

524 speaking of the expeditions sent out by Cortes in search of mines, he says that Gonzalo de Umbria, who went to Zacatula, reported that there "the natives washed gold out of the sand in small troughs."

If this were the only means employed, it is improbable that the Spaniards saw it in all the instances and in the great quantity that Cortez and Bernal Diaz describe; and that their statements in this regard are grossly exaggerated is evident from the fact that, with the exception of a few small trinkets, not a relic of the beautiful things of which they speak remains. Neither do the chronicles record a very great amount actually gathered by the rapacious conqueror, yet all the schemes which his mind could conceive must have been directed to this one object, not for personal greed only, but to meet the expectations of the emperor, to whom, when he had feared that he was to be deprived of his command, he had promised wealth and treasure. Though torture of the most barbaric description was employed to induce the natives to reveal the riches that they were supposed to hide, no more were obtained; and, in order that the Spanish king and those about his court may afterward understand the absence of the treasure in the kind and quantity which he had led them to expect, Cortes cautiously wrote that it was all lost in that disastrous revolution which first drove him from the city.

It is not to be supposed either that the half-civilized Aztec was aware of those many complex chemical processes by which silver is separated from the ore. If we are to credit him with this, we must call him a great metallurgist indeed, skilled in an art known even now only to a few, and which demands all the machinery and scientific accomplishments of our modern times. We know to-day that Mexico is richer in silver than any other country in the world, yet the mention of this metal in the records is noticeably infrequent, and it is especially significant that it does not figure in the articles of tribute. Let us, nevertheless, believe the exaggerating Gomora, and we find that all the silver actually collected by the Spaniards was only five hundred marks. These facts can not be reconciled with a knowledge of smelting. The little silver they may have had was doubtless only the native metal which is to be found in Mexico, or that which was obtained like the gold from the placer-washings.

Bronze, too, is in Cortes's list of metals, and if we accept bronze we must also accept tin, its necessary component. Though Cortes tells us that he saw tin in the market-place of Mexico, we find him shortly afterward deploring its absence when he desires to cast some cannon. He does not ask the natives to show him whence the tin of the market-place was obtained, but sends only his own men "searching in all directions" until it was at last found in the form of coins among the natives of Tasco. Then, inconsistent with his past conduct, he does not rob the natives of this very coveted metal, though his "distress for it had reached its highest point," but he sends his