27 August 2015
El Dorado’s Ghost
by Neil Tidmarsh
Gold! Innately beautiful, never tarnishing, durable, malleable, relatively scarce – is it any wonder that it’s always been mankind’s standard measure of all things, from aesthetics to economics? At the same time, is it any wonder that a gold coin will almost inevitably have its dark side? Flip it over and read in its ancient inscription an ugly tale of greed, violence and corruption.
Once again, the week’s good and bad stories shed an interesting light on each other; and this week that light is the reflected glitter – seductive, rich, exciting, beautiful but ultimately sinister – of pure gold. In America, a cargo of gold coins has been recovered exactly three centuries after it was lost; in Europe, a legendary Nazi treasure train has reportedly been found; and in the Middle East, Isis has begun to mint its own coinage – a solid gold Islamic dinar.
In 1715, the Plate Fleet – 11 treasure-laden Spanish galleons – was wrecked off the coast of Florida by a hurricane, and its cargo of New World gold went to the bottom of the Atlantic rather than to the court of Philip V of Spain. But now more than 350 of its gold coins have been found by divers in shallow water off Vero Beach. They are very beautiful (especially the nine Reals which were minted for the king himself), very valuable (worth $4.5 million) and their discovery is undeniably thrilling.
German trains loaded with Nazi gold shunted into hiding as the allies closed in on the Third Reich towards the end of World War II; such stories have become legend in Eastern Europe. But now two men claim to have found such a train, in a sealed underground tunnel beneath Ksiaz Castle in Poland, with 300 tonnes of gold and other treasures on board. They say they will prove their claims once they are guaranteed 10% of its value. Is it a hoax? Is it genuine? The excitement of that will get me out of bed promptly to check the headlines in spite of the cold and darkness of the autumn and winter mornings ahead.
In Syria, Isis is making efforts to justify the ‘State’ bit of its acronym by beginning to issue its own currency – a pure gold Islamic dinar. This announcement coincides with the current bad news coming out of Palmyra. It seems that their destruction of the ancient temple of Baal Shamlin was an act of pique triggered by the frustration of their attempts to make the site yield its imagined treasure; last week they murdered Khaled Assad, the 81 year old retired director of antiquities at Palmyra, after kidnapping and questioning him for 27 days. What were they questioning him about? “They kept asking me where the gold was, the jewellery, the rings and the crowns. They were focused on the treasures” said his son, Walid Assad, as reported in the Times. “Both my father and I said there had not been gold at Palmyra for decades, that the archaeological missions didn’t really find any treasures. But they were persistent.”
Isis will need a lot of gold if their new currency is to get off the ground. It has started melting down the bullion it has already seized or looted or extorted, but it will need a lot more. Hence its desperation at Palmyra. But whether Isis manages to produce a single dinar or millions of dinars, there will be no hiding from the world the fact that its shiny new coins are the fruits not of commerce and industry but of theft, murder, extortion, kidnapping, smuggling and other crimes.
This cold fact sheds a different light on the week’s other two golden stories. A dark and troubling light rather than a golden one. They might never tarnish, but the glamour of those Spanish coins begins to fade when you think about how the Spanish got hold of the gold from which they were minted. For the preceding two hundred years, they had plundered the whole continent of South America. Cortes kidnapped and murdered Montezuma, Pisaro kidnapped and murdered Atahualpa, the Incas and the Aztecs were destroyed, armies of slaves toiled away in hellish mines. All for gold. And when that heavy cargo took that fleet of eleven ships to the bottom of the Atlantic, it took 1000 sailors with it.
And as for the idea of Nazi gold, the product of another continent thoroughly looted and plundered – one only has to think about those accounts of gold dental fillings extracted from the teeth of holocaust victims for the notion of that train and its ghastly freight of eagle-stamped gold bars to make one shiver with horror.
Ironically but encouragingly, this attempt by Isis to prove itself a state may well be its undoing. Ed Conway, the economics editor of Sky news, writes in the Times that Isis’s choice of “the most benighted system of them all – a gold standard -” means that its “reign in the Middle East is ultimately doomed.” A gold standard (“that barbaric relic” as John Maynard Keynes called it) never works, he argues, and always ends in economic crisis or stagnation. It is “incapable of supporting a functioning banking system”, and there can never be enough gold to go around.
Let’s hope the economists know what they’re talking about for once.
