Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Gold, Platinum,
Silver, Mercury, Copper, Gem-Salt, Sulphur And Alum May Become Objects
Of Important Workings.
The production of gold alone amounted, before
the outbreak of the political dissensions, on the average, to 4700
kilogrammes (20,500 marks of Castile) per annum.
This is nearly half
the quantity furnished by all Spanish America, a quantity which has an
influence the more powerful on the variable proportions between the
value of gold and silver, as the extraction of the former metal has
diminished at Brazil, for forty years past, with surprising rapidity.
The quint (a tax which the government raises on gold-washings) which
in the Capitania of Minas Geraes was, in 1756, 1761 and 1767, from
118, 102 and 85 arobas of gold (of 14 3/5 kilogrammes), has fallen,
during 1800, 1813 and 1818, to 30, 20 and 9 arobas; an arob of gold
having, at Rio Janeiro, the value of 15,000 cruzados. According to
these estimates the produce of gold in Brazil, making deductions for
fraudulent exportation, was, in the middle of the eighteenth century,
the years of the greatest prosperity of the gold-washings, 6600
kilogrammes, and in our days, from 1817 to 1820, 600 kilogrammes less.
In the province of San Paulo the extraction of gold has entirely
ceased; in the province of Goyaz, it was 803 kilogrammes in 1793 and
in 1819 scarcely 75. In the province of Mato Grosso it is almost
nothing; and M. Eschwege is of opinion that the whole produce of gold
in Brazil does not amount at present to more than 600,000 cruzados
(scarcely 440 kilogrammes). I dwell on these particulars because, in
confounding the different periods of the riches and poverty of the
gold-washings of Brazil, it is still affirmed in works treating of the
commerce of the precious metals, that a quantity of gold equivalent to
four millions of piastres (5800 kilogrammes of gold*) flows into
Europe annually from Portuguese America.
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