“These people,” says Didorus, “though by their labour they enriched their masters to an almost incredible extent, did it by toiling night and day in their golden prisons. They were compelled, by the lash, to work so incessantly that they died of their hardships in the caverns they had dug. Such as by great vigour of body continued to live, were in a state of misery which rendered death a preferable fate.” Again Didorus, in describing the conditions under which mining was carried on at this period, tells us that infinite numbers of slaves of both sexes were thrust into the mines, kept at work night and day, and guarded so strictly as to make escape an impossibility. Naked, maimed, and sick they laboured on beneath the lash of the brutal overseers without rest or remission. “Neither the weakness of old age, nor the infirmities of females,” says this authority, “excuse any from the work, to which all are driven by blows and cudgels, until borne down by the intolerable weight of their misery many fell dead in the midst of their insufferable labours. Deprived of all hope, these miserable creatures expect each day to be worse than the last! and long for death to end their griefs.”
THE CANAL SYSTEM, RIO TINTO.
The mortality among the workers in the mines of Spain at this period must have been appalling, and the conditions were calculated to decimate the entire race. Soon it became necessary to recruit the fast thinning ranks of native labourers with imported workers, and these were brought in thousands from Africa. Negro slaves had previously been introduced, to a small extent, into Etruria; but the traffic had not hitherto
MINING MAP OF SPAIN.
attained the gigantic proportion that it was then to assume. Jacob, in his History of the Precious Metals, says: “This oppression and exhaustion of the native labourers led to a trade in human beings which was carried on by the Carthaginians with the interior of Africa, and supplied to Andalusia the place of those native workmen who had been destroyed by the excessive toil imposed on them by their Asiatic intruders. This horrid traffic was extended and continued, and it augmented the produce of the mines of Spain in such a degree as to have an influence on the whole commerce of the world at that period. That influence was continued for upwards of seven hundred years, until the Government of the Romans, who succeeded the Carthaginians in the mastery of Spain, had fallen into the hands of the Gothic monarchs.”
The spoils which Phoenicia had won from Spain led to her spoilation by Darius of Persia, in the fifth century before the Christian era; three hundred years later the silver hoards of Carthage excited the cupidity and envy of Rome, and Spain, which provided the booty, was wrested from the Carthaginians by the armies of the Commonwealth. Up to B.C. 400, when mining in Spain was reduced to a regular system, and the output was enormously increased, Carthage was able to utilise her silver in her Indian trade; but with increasing returns the necessity arose for establishing other markets for her precious metals. In Carthage and in Rome the numerary money system still obtained, but about this date the Carthaginians adopted silver currency and endeavoured, but with little success, to dispose of their surplus supplies of silver by offering them in the markets of Rome. But Rome still held to her copper tokens, and was as yet free from the fatal influence of the mines. “Rome trusted to itself and its sword,” says Heeren in his Researches, African Nations, “Carthage to its gold and its mercenaries. The greatness of Rome was founded upon a rock; that of Carthage upon sand and gold-dust.”
