Dartford is a dull little town on the Thames estuary. But if you head across the railway tracks towards the plant-hire yard down by the creek, you will find a long, crumbling wall. And there, sometimes, on those rare days when the sun is shining, you can see in the stone blocks a gleam of what looks suspiciously like gold.
That gleam has a history to it – of imperial adventure and Spanish spies, of industrial endeavour and scientific fraud. More than 400 years ago, the same gleam in those same rocks captivated England’s Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, and sent hundreds of men across the Atlantic in search of England’s own El Dorado. Predictably, it all ended in tears. But could the forgotten wall hold an unsuspected secret?
ENGLISH gold fever began in the 1570s. The Spanish king Philip II had subjugated mainland Europe with armies paid in gold and silver plundered from the graves and temples of the New World. Queen Elizabeth wanted a share and she sought men with “ambition and effrontery” to find treasure in distant lands.
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Up stepped Martin Frobisher, a young captain and part-time pirate. He claimed that a Portuguese sailor he met in a dungeon off the West African coast had told him of a “north-west passage” around Canada to “Cathay” or China. He offered to claim the route for England. City money-men put up the cash and in June 1576 Frobisher set sail down the River Thames, waved off by Elizabeth, who had bought a personal stake in the enterprise.
Frobisher barely knew the way, but past Greenland he found land and entered what he thought was a strait. He asked some local Inuit for pilots to take him west, but his emissaries were killed. Angry and frightened, Frobisher abruptly abandoned the journey, picked up some “tokens of Christian possession” – including a black rock and an unwary passing Inuit – and headed for home.
Back in England, Frobisher claimed success, though he had found only a dead-end bay. The real north-west passage was further north and it would take almost three centuries and countless lost men and ships to discover it. But the English public was more interested in the Inuit man. And the City and court were agog at stories of the shiny black rock Frobisher had brought back. It glinted beguilingly, and an Italian alchemist-cum-assayer called Giovanni Baptista Agnello claimed there was gold in the ore, “and that very richly for the quantity”.
Frobisher declared that he had seen enough of this ore “to lade all the Queenes Shipps”. And, fearful of Spanish interlopers, immediately prepared a second expedition to bring back more. In the general enthusiasm, it escaped everyone’s attention that Frobisher had not marked the spot where the stone had been found. But perhaps, if this was El Dorado, there would be gold everywhere.
This time, Frobisher took his own assayer, a German called Jonas Schutz, and a portable furnace to test potential ores. After five days searching various small islands, Schutz declared that some red sandy rocks, quite unlike the black rock from the first voyage, “helde golde plainly to be seene”. With 160 tonnes of black and red ore in the hold, Frobisher rushed home once more. Back in England, Schutz headed for Dartford to build a giant blast furnace, the largest piece of industrial equipment in England at the time, to smelt the ore.
Such was the fever at court that, without waiting for any further tests, the Queen commissioned Frobisher to go north once more to the land now named Meta Incognita – the Unknown Shore. Frobisher’s third mission, in 1578, took 15 ships and 400 men, including 150 press-ganged Cornish miners and 100 pioneers for a permanent Arctic settlement. By now, the Company of Cathay set up to prospect along the Unknown Shore was deep in the red and only gold could keep it afloat.
The colony was never established and a summer’s mining failed to yield any more red ore, the main objective of the trip. Instead, the expedition returned with a staggering 1200 tonnes of black rock, which was hastily shovelled into Schutz’s furnaces. But the smelters produced no gold, only a lot of very hot rocks.
The company collapsed, mired in acrimony. Frobisher went back to his old trade, preying on Spanish ships with his friend Francis Drake. Schutz fled to Bohemia, leaving his furnaces to rot and the unsmelted ore in heaps. Much of it became incorporated into a wall around one of Elizabeth’s many estates, part of which is now used by an engineering company.
How did it all go so wrong? With hindsight, the trips look like madness. But they didn’t seem so at the time. Half a century earlier, Hernán Cortés, acting on little more than rumour, had returned from sacking the Aztec capital in Mexico as one of the richest men on the planet. And Philip II was sufficiently interested in Meta Incognita to put a spy on board one of the ships in the third expedition.
Assaying was hardly a rigorous science. Lead was added to the heated ore to extract gold, but it was reused and often contained traces of gold from past tests. And Schutz’s furnaces were little better. His technique of using water-powered bellows to produce high temperatures in a primitive blast furnace was largely experimental.
But fraud and gullibility clearly played a part too. When Agnello produced gold from the first black rock, he explained the failure of others by claiming: “It is necessary to know how to coax nature.” Both Schutz and a second assayer, a Cornish metallurgist called Burchard Kranich, found gold in the second haul of ore. But both men were vying for the contract to build the Dartford furnaces and clearly had an interest in finding at least a few specks of gold. Kranich later admitted that the gold he found came from melting two coins out of his own pocket.
Frobisher’s endeavours are hardly remembered today. The champions of explorers at the Royal Geographical Society in London have reason to be silent. The 19th-century American explorer Charles Hall gave the society pieces of rock and other artefacts from Frobisher’s first camp, which he stumbled on while searching for the remains of another ill-fated English adventurer, John Franklin. But the remains were somehow lost in the society’s dusty basements.
Just as the Elizabethans initially could not conceive that the ore did not contain gold, perhaps we have lost sight of the fact that nobody has proved the contrary. After all, says Robert Baldwin, a former researcher at Britain’s National Maritime Museum in Greenwich who analysed the expedition’s metallurgy for the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the Dartford refineries never smelted the hard Canadian rocks satisfactorily.
Was there ever any gold? Geologist Donald Hogarth from the University of Ottawa has tested rocks from the Dartford wall and the original mining sites without finding significant amounts of gold. But Hogarth and others have only ever looked at the black hornblende rock brought back on the third voyage, says Baldwin. What, he asks, of the “rich sandy red ore” from the second voyage that Schutz believed contained gold?
Hogarth says the red ore was probably an iron-rich rock called gossan that in parts of northern Canada contains high concentrations of gold. “We searched for the red ore, but could not find any to test,” he says. He doubts that the sandy material Frobisher brought home would have been much use as a building material and reckons it probably disappeared long ago.
But intriguingly, says Baldwin, there are “some very red stones in the wall at Dartford”. They may have come from the second expedition’s haul and are “worthy of examination”. Nobody appears ever to have done so. You can still see them, gleaming in the sun. Maybe England’s El Dorado is sleeping on undisturbed, four centuries after it was first mined, in the back streets of not-so-dull Dartford.