Modern Keswick where the 16th-century Company of Mines Royal had its headquarters and centred its copper production.
“Herr Gans reads the Old Testament in its original language!” So a young smelter apprentice tells his father in Divining the Vein.
Gans explains: “while a child of the Ore Mountains of Bohemia, I am also a son of Judah, a Hebrew.”
This metallurgist, employed by the Company of Mines Royal in Elizabethan Keswick, was also the first known Jew to set foot in North America.
The governor of Mines Royal, Sir Francis Walsingham, was Secretary of State at the time of Raleigh’s initial expedition to North America, and intimately involved with this first colony. During the scouting mission, Raleigh’s men encountered natives wearing copper ornaments. An industry was essential for a colony to endure and what could be more lucrative than mining? So it was that three Germans from Keswick—Daniel Hochstetter the Younger, Joachim Gans, and Hans Waters—were included on Raleigh’s next expedition.
The new colony was founded in 1585, off the coast of modern North Carolina, on Roanoke Island. As chief metallurgist, Gans tested metals the natives provided. Excavations in the dirt floor of Gans’s work shed, have revealed the remains of his smelting operation: fragments of chemical glassware, assayer’s flasks, retorts for distilling liquids, charcoal, a large lump of bog iron and copper-incrusted crucible shards.
Remains of Gans’ makeshift furnace have also been found, causing some to wonder why he would not have brought his own. Most metallurgists of his day would have a portable steel assay oven, so why not Gans?
The answer may lie in the expedition’s arrival. In the search for safe harbour, they had entered an inlet between the outward islands where the 160-ton Tyger ran aground. The crew had to jettison valuable provisions to lighten their load. Gans’s weighty furnace was a likely object.
The natives’ copper beads had most probably been acquired through trade. Copper was plentiful in the Great Lakes region but not, however, on Roanoke. Gans and his mineral men went in search of a source of copper in the winter of 1585-6. They explored 130 miles north of their base, up Currituck Sound and entered Chesapeake Bay.
When they returned, they found ill-treatment by the colony’s leadership, had soured the native’s initial friendliness. The colonists were terrified. Sir Francis Drake arrived and offered to sail them back to England. Gans and his men left North America in June 1586.
We next hear of his arrest in Bristol on a charge of blasphemy. In September 1589 he was working at the Mines Royal project in Neath, a short hop across the Bristol Chanel near Swansea in Wales. Gans was involved in a discussion about the Old and New Testaments at a Bristol inn. His companion demanded to know if Gans believed Jesus Christ was the son of God.
“There is one God,” answered Gans, “and he has neither wife nor child.”
Later that day, Richard Curteys, Bishop of Chichester, arrived. Speaking in Hebrew, he declared to Gans that Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews whom the Jews had crucified, was and is the son of God.
“Jesus is not the son of God,” replied Gans in the same language.
The cleric then switched to English: “What! Do you deny Jesus Christ is the son of God?”
“What needeth the almighty God to have a son?” said Gans. “Is he not almighty?”
He was brought before the Town Council and Mayor of Bristol to whom he declared that he did not believe in Christian doctrines because he had not been raised a Christian. He affirmed that he was a circumcised Jew, born in the city of Prague. Furthermore, he had never been baptized.
Gans was transported to London to face judgment. Here Sir Francis Walsingham sat on the Privy Council, the judiciary that oversaw his case, as did William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Both were concerned with the success of Mines Royal.Gans was now their most valued metallurgist. Sir Walter Raleigh, who enjoyed high favour with the Queen, was also well disposed toward Gans.
Records show that Walsingham visited Gans in Southgate Prison. It was here that Gans wrote out for him the most up-to-date document on how to produce saltpetre, the key ingredient of gunpowder—vital information for mining and munitions.
“Protection against my enemies” was all Gans requested in return.
The penalty, if convicted of heresy, was death. The distinction between heresy and blasphemy was a fine one. Gans claimed exemption since he was not Christian, but Jews had been banished from Britain in the 13th century. A Jew still had no legal right to live in England. However, one of Queen Elizabeth’s physicians was a Jew. The Queen was far from fanatical when it came to religious matters, so perhaps this matter was swept under the rug.
There is no report in the Privy Council records that Gans was executed or deported and I found no further firm records of him. There is a suggestion the Jewish scientist Joabin in Sir Francis Bacon’s utopian novel, New Atlantis, was based on Gans. Some have intimated he purchased a house near Prague. Others report he lived in Bristol, where he gave Hebrew lessons to English gentlemen who wanted to read the Bible in its original language. For my novel, I chose the latter option while giving him the safety net of the former.
A question one has to ask is how could Gans have kept the fact that he was a Jew secret for so long? A modern scientist provides one likely answer:
“The men running the metallurgical assays on Roanoke were top-notch experts and like most scientifically minded research efforts today, quality of mind brushed aside barriers of race, religion or national origin.”1.
As for his earlier time in Britain, Gans worked in Keswick, where Augsburg’s Haug, Langnauer & Co, the principal shareholder of Mines Royal, had brought all their craftsmen, artisans and miners from Bohemia, a culture in which Jews comfortably mixed. By the time Gans arrived in this northern county town, many of the Germans had married local women and the initial anti-German feeling had abated.
Gans dramatically reduced copper smelting to four days. The standard at the time was sixteen weeks. When extracting ‘hurtful humours’ in the roasting process, Gans preserved vitriol, a mixture of iron and copper sulphate, to use as a dye fixative for textiles. The production of wool cloth was England’s top industry. As an immigrant, Gans made a significant contribution to England. He would certainly have introduced Renaissance scholarship to Keswick with his close family ties to Renaissance giants Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler.
What became of Joachim Gans remains a mystery, but his fellow Jews finally gained the right to dwell in Britain in 1655, after a ban lasting 365 years.
1. Ivor Noel Hume, “Roanoke Island: America’s first science Centre,” Colonial Williamsburg 16.3 (Spring 1994) p.20
2. Grassl, Gary G. “Joachim Gans of Prague: The first Jew in English America.” American Jewish History, vol.86, no.2, June 1998, pp.195-217. {http://www.jstor.org/stable/23886470}
3. Hamilton, Henry. The English Brass and Copper Industries to 1800. London, Longmans, Green, and Co.
Divining the vein 