*[Darf ich dir einen Tee anbieten?]
Some of the books which treat the role of the German “mineral men” include Maxwell Bruce Donald's (the secretary of the Society of the Mines Royal ) “ Elizabethan Monopolies, The History of the Company of Mineral and Battery Works from 1565 to 1604 ”. Herbert Clark Hoover and his wife Lou Henry Hoover translated a work from the Latin pertaining to the mining in this period. They have been quoted as saying,
“There can be no doubt . . that in copper mining in Cornwall and elsewhere in England, the ‘Dutch Mynerall men’ did play a large part in the latter part of the 16th century.”
A leading metallurgist from the Germans was Master Dougham Gannes (Joachim Gans), who showed the English that only four heatings were necessary to produce rough copper as opposed to the sixteen heatings that the English had been using.
Gans was born in Prague around the middle of the Sixteenth Century. This was the golden age of the Prague Jews when learned men such as the astronomer David Gans (1541-1613) made the Prague ghetto into a spiritual center for Jewry. It is believed by genealogists that this David Gans was related to Joachim Gans. David worked with Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler in the Prague astronomical observatory. It is, or at least seems, clear that Joachim was raised in an intellectual environment that stimulated his interest in science and technology. Joachim acquired his knowledge of smelting and refining copper and silver in the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) that form the border between Saxony on the north and Bohemia on the south. Not only did Gans reduce the number of heatings but he was able to do so with peat and not the more expensive wood.
Prof. Donald of the University of London Chemical Engineering department declared in 1955 that the work of the continental technologists compared to the English workers of the period was like comparing science and alchemists.
In Virginia, Gans was a stranger, for he was the only Jew among the Christians. He was probably the first Jew in North America. In Virginia he hid his Jewishness, but it became public knowledge after he returned to England. Lane, the First Colony Governor, probably never knew that Gans was a Jew. Lane held regular worship services in Virginia at which attendance was compulsory. Probably Gans attended with the rest but kept silent as though he were mute.
Determining the exact numbers of German mineral specialists is not easy, for their names are often not completely written out, and even if they were they are written by English speakers. There are good hints that there may have been as many as twelve men.
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(08 Jan 07)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.