Earth Oil
Mineral oils naturally appear at the earth’s surface in various forms, often with associated gases, in many parts of the world. As Scienti c American informed its readers in 1856, ‘There are a number of different kinds of it’, from naphtha, the most liquid, volatile and ammable form of oil, to the thicker ‘ uid bitumen [that] is of a dark color, and oozes from certain rocks and crevices in the earth, and becomes solid by exposure to the atmosphere’, to the most dense ‘asphalt, which is sometimes too hard to be scratched with the nger nail’.1 There is archaeological evidence of bitumen having been used from as early as the Middle Palaeolithic era as an adhesive for tool-making,2 and for millennia people have made use of petroleum in a wide variety of ways: as a waterproo ng agent; as mortar for stone- or brick-work and as a sealant; for medicinal and ceremonial purposes; for art and craft-work; for embalming and mummi cation; as a lubricant; as a material for surfacing pavements and roads; and to burn for its heat and light.3
The Middle East and Central Asia
In the Middle East, evidence has been found of the use of bitumen for tool-making during the Neolithic and Palaeolithic eras – up to about 70,000 years ago – in modern-day Turkey, Syria, Iran and Kuwait. From about 3500 BC the beginning of urbanization and the rise of the Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) led to an increase in demand for bitumen, sourced initially from Hit, then from Mosul, and later from southwestern Iran, as well as some from Kuwait. These sources supplied a trading region covering the length of the Tigris
and Euphrates rivers and the northern Persian Gulf, while bitumen from the Dead Sea supplied a distinct trading network extending across modern-day Israel and Egypt.4 According to the Gilgamesh epic, as translated from cuneiform stone tablets dated between 2100 and 600 BC , Noah’s Ark, a hugely scaled-up version of the circular boats used on the Tigris and Euphrates, required about 270 tons of bitumen to waterproof its hull. Model boats made from bitumen were found in graves at the Sumerian city of Ur dated about 2500 BC , and the sixthcentury BC Book of Genesis tells us that bitumen was used as mortar for building the Tower of Babel in Babylonia, in modern-day Iraq.5 In ancient texts, it is often unclear whether the author is writing about pitch derived from tree sap or from a petroleum source, a distinction expressed in about 5 AD by Ovid in his Metamorphoses : Byblis, deranged by desire, dissolves in her own tears, ‘like resin-drops dotting the bark of a new-cut pine, or bitumen stickily oozing out of the oil-rich earth’.6 However, it is evident that Herodotus, in 450 BC , was referring to petroleum when he told of how bitumen from Hit was used as mortar in the building of Babylon, south of present-day Baghdad:
[W]ere you to leave Babylon and travel for eight days, you would come to another city, Is [Hit], which shares its name with the river, an insigni cant tributary of the Euphrates, next to which it stands. The waters of the River Is are full of lumps of bitumen, which are brought to its surface – and this was the source of the bitumen used in the building of Babylon’s wall.7
He also wrote of a well in the vicinity of Susa (Shush), near the Karun River, in present-day southwest Iran, which yields three distinct products. Asphalt, salt and oil: all of these are extracted from it. As for the means of extraction, the various substances are drawn up using a swipe to which half an animal skin has been attached to serve as a bucket. In goes the swipe and up comes a liquid, which is then poured into a container. From there, it is strained into a further container, and diverted along three different channels. The asphalt and the salt solidify immediately, but the oil . . . this rhadinake, as the Persians call it, is black, and gives off a revolting stench.8
Vitruvius, in about 30 BC , mentioned petroleum from the region of Babylon, as well as from modern-day Lebanon, eastern Turkey, north Africa and Ethiopia.9 In about 20 AD Strabo, followed by Tacitus roughly eighty years later, wrote of how asphalt oating on the Dead Sea was gathered:10
The asphalt is blown to the surface at irregular intervals from the midst of the deep, and with it rise bubbles, as though the water were boiling . . . [People] reach the asphalt on rafts and chop it and carry off as much as they each can.11
Writing of the oil found in Mesopotamia and Persia, Strabo contrasts the dense asphalt, used as mortar and for waterproo ng boats, with ‘black naphtha, liquid asphalt, which is burnt in lamps instead of [olive] oil’.12 He elaborates:
The liquid kind, which they call naphtha, is of a singular nature; for if the naphtha is brought near re it catches the re; and if you smear a body with it and bring it near to the re, the body bursts into ames; and it is impossible to quench these ames with water (for they burn more violently), unless a great amount is used, though they can be smothered and quenched with mud, vinegar, alum, and bird-lime.13
In about 78 AD Pliny the Elder mentions the occurrences and use of petroleum in the Middle East: near the bank of the Euphrates in modern-day southeast Turkey; in southeast Iran; on the coast of Lebanon; in the Dead Sea; and in Iraq where, at Babylon, he wrote, oil skimmed from the surface of brine was used for burning in lamps.14 In about 385 AD Ammianus Marcellinus wrote of how in Assyria, centred on the upper Tigris and Euphrates rivers, bitumen is found near the lake called Sosingites . . . Here naphtha also is produced, a glutinous substance which looks like pitch. This too is similar to bitumen, and even a little bird, if it lights upon it, is prevented from ying, sinks, and disappears utterly. And when uid of this kind catches re, the mind of man will nd no means of putting it out, except dust. In these regions there is also to be seen a cleft in the earth, from which rises a deadly exhalation, which with its foul odour destroys every living creature that comes near it. If this pestilential stuff, rising
from a kind of deep well, should spread out widely from its opening before rising on high, it would by its fetid odour have made the surrounding country a desert.15
Plutarch, in about 75 AD, wrote of Alexander the Great, telling us that,
As he traversed all Babylonia, which at once submitted to him, he was most of all amazed at the chasm from which re continually streamed forth as from a spring, and at the stream of naphtha, so abundant as to form a lake, not far from the chasm. This naphtha is in other ways like asphaltum, but is so sensitive to re that, before the ame touches it, it is kindled by the very radiance about the ame and often sets re also to the intervening air. To show its nature and power, the Barbarians sprinkled the street leading to Alexander’s quarters with small quantities of the liquid; then, standing at the farther end of the street, they applied their torches to the moistened spots; for it was now getting dark. The rst spots at once caught re, and without an appreciable interval of time, but with the speed of thought, the ame darted to the other end, and the street was one continuous re.
He goes on to embellish an earlier account, by Strabo, of how an attendant suggested to Alexander that he try an experiment with this uid on a young singer, Stephanus:
‘Wilt thou, O King, that we make a trial of the liquid upon Stephanus? For if it should lay hold of him and not be extinguished, I would certainly say that its power was invincible and terrible.’ The youth also, strangely enough, offered himself for the experiment, and as soon as he touched the liquid and began to anoint himself with it, his body broke out into so great a ame and was so wholly possessed by re that Alexander fell into extreme perplexity and fear; and had it not been by chance that many were standing by holding vessels of water for the bath, the youth would have been consumed before aid reached him. Even as it was, they had great dif culty in putting out the re, for it covered the boy’s whole body, and after they had done so, he was in a sorry plight.16
Indeed, these deadly properties of petroleum came to be used in warfare when added to the traditional incendiary mixes of pine-tree
resin, sulphur and quicklime. Thucydides described the deployment of burning pitch in the siege of Plataea in 429 BC during the Peloponnesian War, when the Greeks hurled a burning mixture of pitch and sulphur at the city’s forti cations, a weapon that became known as ‘Greek re’.17 But since the word ‘pitch’ conventionally referred to pine resin, it is unlikely that this and similar instances of the deployment of Greek re – as related by Herodotus and Xenophon, for example – involved the use of petroleum. However, Pliny, writing in about 78 AD, made this particular innovation explicit in his account of a method by which, a few years earlier, soldiers of Mithridates VI of Pontus had defended their forti cations against a Roman attack. Near the banks of the upper Euphrates River there was a pool which discharges an in ammable mud, called Maltha. It adheres to every solid body which it touches, and moreover, when touched it follows you, if you attempt to escape from it. By means of it the people defended their walls against Lucullus, and the soldiers were burned in their armour.18
Cassius Dio, in about 220 AD, wrote that after many victories won by Lucullus’ army, during a later attack on a Pontic city, ‘. . . the barbarians did him serious injury by means of their archery as well as by the naphtha which they poured over his [siege] engines; this chemical is full of bitumen and is so ery that it is sure to burn up whatever it touches, and it cannot easily be extinguished by any liquid.’19 Dio subsequently described how, in 198 AD, a Roman siege of the Mesopotamian city of Hatra was repelled by the Parthians, who in icted the greatest damage on their assailants when these approached the wall, and much more still after they had broken down a small portion of it; for they hurled down upon them, among other things, the bituminous naphtha, of which I wrote above, and consumed the engines and all the soldiers on whom it fell.20
A little before 550 AD, Procopius, in his History of the Wars, recounted how the Romans’ battering-rams were about to break through the walls of a Persian fort in the Caucasus, ‘But the Persians hit on the following plan.’ From the fort wall they
lled pots with sulphur and bitumen and the substance which the Persians call ‘naphtha’ and the Greeks ‘Medea’s oil’, and they now set re to these and commenced to throw them upon the sheds of the rams, and they came within a little of burning them all . . . for the re kindled instantly whatever it touched, unless it was immediately thrown off.21
Petroleum was added to the mixtures used for aming arrows and other incendiary projectiles that were deployed for setting re to siege engines and wooden defences at a distance. During the mid-seventh century the Romans began to use incendiary weapons also at sea to repel Arab ships attempting to blockade their capital, Constantinople. Soon they were equipping their Byzantine galleys with quite sophisticated ame-throwers – sometimes also used in land warfare – that employed a piston mechanism to project aming petroleum-based uids. Emperor Constantine VII , in his manual on statecraft that he wrote for his son in about 950, cautioned his heir that ‘the in del and dishonourable tribes of the north’ would make excessive demands to which he should not accede. ‘Similar care and thought,’ wrote Constantine, you must take in the matter of the liquid re which is discharged through tubes, so that if any shall ever venture this demand too . . . you may rebut and dismiss them in words like these: ‘This too was revealed and by God through an angel to the great holy Constantine, the rst Christian emperor, and concerning this too he received great charges from the same angel . . . that it should be manufactured among the Christians only and in the city ruled by them, and nowhere else at all, nor should it be sent nor taught to any other nation whatsoever.’22
If anyone were found to have revealed this information, his son should ‘dismiss him to a death most hateful and cruel’. Constantine listed several sources of petroleum around the Black Sea: rstly, near modern-day Taman on the Taman Peninsula, on the eastern side of the Kerch Strait between the Azov and Black seas; secondly, in the territory between Maikop and Sochi; and thirdly, in eastern Turkey. Due to the geology of the Taman Peninsula region, the oil found there at the surface was especially light and uid, making it particularly suitable for use in ame-throwers. However, by the end of the twelfth century the
Byzantine navy was no longer being equipped with ame-throwers, perhaps because the Romans had by then lost easy access to these sources of petroleum.23
Fragments of pitch found in the excavation of an early medieval ship burial, located in a seventh-century cemetery at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, England, were initially thought to have been ‘Stockholm tar’ rather than native pitch or bitumen. On later analysis the fragments turned out, indeed, to be bitumen, but most likely from the Dead Sea region, evidencing the extent of overseas trade routes in Anglo-Saxon times, particularly for rare and valuable items that would be symbols of high status.24
When, in about 760, the Persian Abbasids displaced the Syrian Umayyad Caliphate, the Persians gained control over the oil springs at Baku, a trading port on the western shore of the Caspian Sea in the southern Caucasus, in present-day Azerbaijan. The Persians levied a tax on these springs, and the new dynasty sourced bitumen also from Ferghana (in present-day Uzbekistan).25 Indeed, the Kurramiyya revolt of 816–37 in Azerbaijan may largely have been a con ict over whether the region’s mineral resources would be controlled by local rulers or by a foreign empire.26
Meanwhile, during a civil war for control of the Caliphate of Baghdad, in 813 the invading forces of Al-Ma’mun captured a position near al-Anbar Gate. One of Caliph Al-Amin’s commanders launched an ultimately unsuccessful counter-attack on a nearby district and according to the Persian scholar Al-Tabari, ‘It was at this time that he commanded that al-Harbiyyah should be bombarded with naphtha and re and by manjanigs and arradahs [types of trebuchet]; people coming and going there were killed as a result of them.’27 In 855 the Caliph of Baghdad, al-Mu’tamid, granted the revenues from the Baku oil wells to the people of Darband (Derbent) just to the north, although from about 900 the local governor began keeping these revenues for himself.28 In 943 the Baghdad-born historian and geographer Abul’hasan al-Mas’ūdī wrote in his Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems of Baku’s naphtha sources, ‘from which re issues perpetually, throwing up a high ame’.29 The following year, competing groups fought for control over the oil wells, and in about 950 the widely travelled Abū-Dulaf wrote that two wells were each being leased for
1,000 dirhams per day; two hundred years later the geographer Yāqūt claimed that a single well could generate this revenue daily.30
In about 950 the Persian geographer Abu Is’haq Farsi Istakhri wrote of a bitumen mine, the ‘Kubbat-al-Mumiya’, in a cave near Darabjird (Darab) in Fars province, which was kept under guard and reserved for royal use.31 Thirty years later the geographer Ibn Hawqal wrote that near the border between the provinces of Khuzestan and Fars there was ‘a mountain, from which re issues at all times . . . and the general opinion is, that there is here a fountain of Naphta, or of pitch, which has taken re’; to the west, in northern Mesopotamia, there were ‘springs or fountains that yield . . . bitumen’, and to the north of Persia, in the Ferghana Valley, there were ‘springs of naphta, and of bitumen’.32
Muslim armies now adopted Greek re, although not the Byzantine ame-thrower apparatus itself. The armies of the Abbasid Caliphate and the Seljuk Empire had contingents of naphtha-throwers who wore re-protective clothing while hurling incendiary material at the enemy or to clear a pathway through vegetation.33 During the Crusades, from 1097 to 1270, the Muslim soldiers frequently used petroleum incendiary weapons, mainly defensively against the Christians’ wooden siege engines.34 For example, the thirteenth-century Arab historian Ibn al-Athir related how, in a battle during the 1189–91 Siege of Acre, Saladin’ s army
rst threw pots with naphtha and other things, not kindled, against one of the [siege] towers . . . [then] at the right moment threw onto it a wellburning pot. At once re broke out over the whole tower and it was destroyed. The re was so quick that the Christians had no time to climb down and they and their weapons were all burnt up. The other two towers were similarly destroyed.35
A French Crusader, Jean de Joinville, described how, during the 1249 siege of Mansura in Egypt, their siege engines were attacked one night when some Saracens advanced with a trebuchet and lled the sling of the engine with Greek re . . . [T]heir rst shot landed just in front of us . . . [but] [o]ur remen were ready to extinguish the re . . . The way the Greek re came was that in front it was
as large as a cask of vinegar, and the tail of re that came out of it was as big as a great spear. It made such a noise as it came that it seemed like the thunder of heaven; it looked like a dragon ying through the air. It cast so much light that the camp could be seen as clearly as if it were day, due to the great mass of re and the brilliance of its light . . . [Later] they brought up their trebuchet in broad daylight . . . and launched the Greek re onto our siege engines . . . As a result our two siege engines were burned.36
The deployment of petroleum as a weapon of war was accompanied by the rst attempts to distil crude oil. Some petroleum springs yielded oil that was naturally light – volatile and easily ammable – such as was used for illuminating the great mosques of Mecca and Medina until 860 AD, after which candles began to be used instead.37 However, most springs yielded heavier oil that, in order to be made more incendiary, had to be either combined with other ammable materials, such as pine sap, saltpetre, quicklime and sulphur, or distilled to separate out the lighter fractions.38 The process of distillation – collecting the condensed vapours of a heated liquid – was rst described in about 100 AD, but its use was con ned to the production of essential oils and perfumes. It was not until 900 that the early Persian scientist AlRâzî, in his Book of the Secret of Secrets, described the distillation of petroleum, which was ‘. . . an operation like the manufacture of water of roses. It consists in putting the thing into the alembic and lighting a re under it, so that its “water” ascends in the alembic and ows off to the recipient and collects there.’39
Instructions for the distillation of petroleum are included in Al-Hasan al-Rammah Najim al-din al-Ahdab’s 1285 Treatise on Horsemanship and Stratagems for War, which gives an extensive account of pyrotechnics, just as the technique of distillation was beginning to be taken up in Europe.40 By the early fourteenth century the itinerant Syrian scholar Al-Dimashqi was the rst to write of the regular distillation of petroleum in the Middle East, by Coptic Christians:
Many types of naft are water white by nature and so volatile that they cannot be stored in open vessels. Others are obtained from a kind of pitch (or bitumen) in a turbid and dark condition, but by further treatment they can be made clear and white by distilling them like rose-water.41
In 1168 a Crusader army under Amalric I of Jerusalem invaded Fustat, old Cairo, and according to several Arab historians such as Al-Maqrīzī the city was ordered by the vizier of Egypt, Shawar, to be burned down to deny it to the Franks as a strategic base; and it was said that an inferno lasting fty-four days was ignited with 20,000 jars of naphtha and 10,000 torches. However, it seems that these accounts of the re may have been greatly embellished and its causes misreported.42
The early thirteenth-century Persian writer Ibn al-Balkhi reported the use of high-quality lamp oil in the coastal town of Bandar Deylam near the head of the Persian Gulf, the petroleum most likely being sourced from the surrounding region.43 There was also a naphtha spring that yielded a signi cant revenue at this time at Khanikin (Khanaqin), on the trade route between Baghdad and Tehran, so the inhabitants of these latter cities may have sourced oil from there.44
Oil continued to be drawn from wells around Baku and traded in signi cant quantities, as Marco Polo described towards the end of the thirteenth century in his account of his travels:
On the con nes towards Georgiana there is a fountain from which oil springs in great abundance, insomuch that a hundred shiploads might be taken from it at one time. This oil is not good to use with food, but ’tis good to burn, and is also used to anoint camels that have the mange. People come from vast distances to fetch it, for in all the countries round about they have no other oil.45
An Italian merchant, Cesar Frederick, reporting on his travels through Mesopotamia in 1563, wrote,
I embarked on one of those small vessels which ply upon the Tigris between Babylon and Basora . . . They use no pumps, being so well daubed with pitch as effectively to exclude the water. This pitch they have from a great plain near the city of Heit [Hit] on the Euphrates . . . This plain full of pitch is marvellous to behold, and a thing almost incredible, as from a hole in the earth the pitch is continually thrown into the air with a constant great smoke . . . The Moors and Arabs of the neighbourhood allege that this hole is the mouth of Hell.46
In 1569 Geoffrey Duckett, on a trading mission for the Muscovy Company, travelled from England via Russia to Persia; he informed his employer that in the province of Azerbaijan there was a towne called Backo, neere unto which towne is a strange thing to behold – for there issueth out of the ground a marveilous quantitie of Oyle, which Oyle they fetch from the uttermost bounds of all Persia; it serveth all the countrey to burne in their houses.
This oyle is blacke, and is called Nefte ; they use to cary it throughout all the countrey upon kine and asses, of which you shall oftentimes meete with foure or ve hundred in a companie. There is also by the said towne of Backo another kind of oyle, which is white and very precious, and is supposed to be the same that here is called Petroleum. There is also, not farre from Shamaky, a thing like unto tarre, and issueth out of the ground, whereof wee made the proofe that in our ships it serveth well in the stead of tarre.47
The ‘white’ oil mentioned by Duckett – presumably a pale, almost colourless and very uid form of naphtha – was also described by Adam Olearius, secretary to a delegation sent to Persia by the Duke of Holstein, who witnessed the drawing of oil from Baku’s wells in 1638:
We saw, as we pass’d by, within the space of ve hundred paces, about thirty sources of Nefte, which is a kind of Medicinal Oil. There are, among the rest, three great ones, into which they go down by sticks, plac’d there to serve instead of a Ladder, fteen or sixteen foot into the ground. A man, standing above at the pits mouth, might hear the Oil coming out in great bubbles, sending up a strong smell, though that of the white Nefte be incomparably more pleasant than that of the black: for there are two sorts of it.
He wrote of the extensive and heavy taxation that fed the Shah’ s extravagant wealth, adding, ‘He farms out also the Fishing of the Rivers, the Baths, and Stoves, the places of publick Prostitution, and the Springs of Nefte.’48
In 1684 Engelbert Kämpfer, secretary to the Swedish delegation at the Persian court, wrote an account of the continuing thriving oil trade that he witnessed near Baku:
The work of drawing off the liquid is carried out manually by means of leather bottles lowered from above either by hand or by a quite simple winch. Only one particularly rich cavity has a rather large closed shed built over it. It was deeper and wider than the others, and the naphtha owing forth audibly in a erce torrent, was drawn off with the aid of a contrivance built over it and set in motion alternately by two horses moving in a circle . . . The naphtha was transported in sheepskin containers to the towns of Schamachi and Baku, thence by canal to the whole of Media, and from there on by sea to Hyrcania, Usbek, Circassia, and Dagestan. It is all used as a lamp-oil and as a fuel for torches being capable of illumination which surpasses all expectations!49
In the same year Leonty Kislyansky, appointed by Russia’s Siberia
Of ce as the chief administrator of Irkutsk, reported the existence of hot petroleum seeps nearby, and he envisioned extracting the oil on a signi cant scale, hoping, ‘God willing, there will be no trouble from the unfriendly Mongols and Chinese, and . . . I will dig and earn a living in all solicitude.’ However, nothing came of his plans.50
In 1694 Pierre Pomet, a prominent French pharmacist, found that bitumen from the Dead Sea was still being used as in ancient times:
Judean bitumen or Asphaltum is a bitumen found oating on the surface of the lake which now covers the former cities of Sodom and Gomorrha . . . [T]he inhabitants of this place, who are Arabs, derive great bene t from it, as they use it to caulk their boats, in the same way as the Northerners and ourselves use pitch.51
John Fryer, a physician working for the East India Company, published in 1698 an account of his travels, including through Persia’s Fars province, in which he wrote of the continuing royal use of the bitumen source near Darab:
On the right hand of the King’s Highway, between Siras [Shiraz] and Gerom [Jahrum], at Derab, on the side of a Mountain, issues the Pissasphaltum of Dioscorides, or Natural Mummy, into a large Stone Tank or Storehouse, sealed with the King’s Seal, and that of the [mayors], and all the Noblemen of that City, and kept with a constant Watch, till at a stated Time of the Year they all repair thither, to open it for the King’s Use, to prevent its being stole: Which notwithstanding,
though it be Death if discovered, yet many Shepherds following their Flocks on these Mountains, by chance light on great Portions of the same Balsam, and offer it to Passengers to Sale, and sometimes play the Cheat in adulterating it.52
During the early eighteenth century Tsar Peter the Great endeavoured to facilitate the mining of minerals across the Russian Empire. He was well aware of the high cost of importing petroleum from Baku and was covetous of the signi cant revenue that its oil trade earned for the Persian government; and during a period of political upheaval in Persia, the Tsar sent his army into the southern Caucasus, taking over Baku in 1723.53 However, by 1743, when an agent for the Muscovy Company, Jonas Hanway, went to assess the trading potential of Persia and the Caspian region, Baku had returned to Persian sovereignty under a treaty agreement with Russia. In his account of his travels Hanway gave a description of a Zoroastrian re temple near Baku and of the area’s oil resources:
[T]here is a little temple, in which the Indians now worship: near the altar about 3 feet high is a large hollow cane, from the end of which issues a blue ame, in colour and gentleness not unlike a lamp that burns with spirits, but seemingly more pure. These Indians af rm, that this ame has continued since the ood, and they believe it will last to the end of the world; that if it was resisted or suppressed in that place, it would rise in some other . . .
If a cane or tube, even of paper, be set about 2 inches in the ground, con ned and closed with earth below, and the top of it touched with a live coal, and blown upon, immediately a ame issues without hurting either the cane or paper, provided the edges be covered with clay; and this method they use for light in their houses, which have only earth for the oor: three or four of these lighted canes will boil water in a pot . . .
Near this place brimstone is dug, and naptha springs are found.
The chief place for the black or dark-grey naptha is the small island Wetoy [Sviatoi, Holy Island], now uninhabited, except for at such times as they take naptha from thence. The Persians load it in bulk in their wretched vessels; so that sometimes the sea is covered with it for leagues together. When the weather is thick and hazy, the springs boil up the higher; and the naptha often takes re on the surface of the earth, and runs in a ame into
the sea, in great quantities, to a distance almost incredible. In clear weather the springs do not boil up above two or three feet: in boiling over, this oily substance makes so strong a consistency as by degrees almost to close the mouth of the spring; sometimes it is quite closed, and forms hillocks that look as black as pitch; but the spring, which is resisted in one place, breaks out in another. Some of the springs, which have not been long open, form a mouth of eight or ten feet diameter.
The people carry the naptha by troughs into pits or reservoirs, drawing it off from one to another, leaving in the rst reservoir the water, or the heavier part with which it is mixed when it issues from the spring. It is unpleasant to the smell, and used mostly among the poorer sort of the Persians, and other neighbouring people, as we use oil in lamps, or to boil their victuals; but it communicates a disagreeable taste. They nd it burns best with a small mixture of ashes: as they nd it in great abundance, every family is well supplied. They keep it, at a small distance from their houses, in earthen vessels under ground, to prevent any accident by re, of which it is extremely susceptible.
There is also a white naptha on the peninsula of Apcheron, of a much thinner consistency; but this is found only in small quantities. The Russians drink it both as a cordial and medicine.54
In 1811 the East India Company’s Resident at Baghdad, Claudius Rich, visited the ruins of Babylon where he saw evidence of bitumen having been used as a mortar in stonework. In his account published several years later he wrote,
There are two places in the pashalick of Bagdad where bitumen is found: the rst is near Kerkouk . . . ; the next is at Heet, the Is of Herodotus, whence the Babylonians drew their supplies . . . The principal bitumen-pit [at Hit] has two sources, and is divided by a wall in the centre, on one side of which the bitumen bubbles up, and on the other oil of naphtha.55
John Kinneir, in 1813, published an extensive report for the East India Company on the commercial and strategic importance of Persia and Mesopotamia. He wrote of the ‘enormous’ quantities of oil collected from oil wells of Baku, which ‘are, in a certain degree, inexhaustible,
as they are no sooner emptied than they again begin to ll’.56 Of the resources of Persia and Mesopotamia, he wrote,
of all its natural productions, the naft, or naphta, is the most extraordinary, as well as the most useful. Of this mineral there are two kinds, the black and the white. The former, which is the bitumen so famous in the Babylonian history, and so often described by travellers, is, when taken from the pit, a thick liquid resembling pitch. To me it appeared to be similar, although of a ner quality, to the specimens which I had seen of the pitch taken from the lake in the Island of Trinidad. It is, undoubtedly, a most excellent substitute for pitch. The bottoms of most of the vessels which navigate the Euphrates and Tigris are covered with it; and it is also used in the lamps, instead of oil, by the natives. There are several fountains of this bitumen in Irak Arabi, and the lower Kurdistan. The most productive are those in the vicinity of Kerkook . . . Mendali, and Hit on the banks of the Euphrates. 57
Near Kirkuk, Kinneir wrote, there ‘. . . are a number of naptha pits, which yield an inexhaustible supply of that useful commodity . . . The naptha is here in a liquid state, and perfectly black: it is conveyed from the bottom to the top in leathern buckets, then put in earthen jars, and sent all over the neighbouring country.’58
In 1836 the surgeon to the British Residency at Baghdad, John Ross, travelled up the Tigris, and the following year Lieutenant H. Blosse Lynch of the Indian Navy surveyed the region. A map by Lynch, accompanying their detailed reports published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, indicated ‘Bitumen pits’ near the Tigris about forty miles south of Mosul and ‘Naptha Springs’ about ve miles northwest of Kirkuk. At Tikrit, Ross encountered ‘people going with skins (for rafts) to Járah, for the purpose of oating bitumen to Baghdád’; a few miles northeast of Baghdad itself he came across a place where ‘the remains of an ancient bridge’ had been dug up to be used for building a house in the city: ‘the bridge was built of bricks, with cuneiform inscriptions, exactly similar to those of Babylon, and cemented with bitumen’.59 As Ross was journeying up the Tigris, Major Sir Henry Rawlinson – soon to be appointed Britain’s political agent at Kandahar – was travelling through Persia from Zohab down to Khuzestan province near the head of the Persian Gulf. In his report,
published in the same issue of the geographical journal, he noted, ‘naphtha pits . . . are passed on the road from Shuster to Rám-Hormuz’, while on the plain of Kír Ab, twenty- ve miles north of Dezful, ‘The liquid bitumen is collected at the present day in the same way as is related by Herodotus: the ground is impregnated with this noxious matter, and the waters are most unwholesome.’60
In 1840 Austen Layard, the soon-to-be famous archaeologist, was exploring southwest Persia when he became involved in a dispute and had to ee from Shuster with a Bakhtiari chief to a remote ravine in the hills where the chief happened to own ‘some naphtha, or bitumen, springs’. 61 Layard explored Khuzestan province again in 1846, and his account of this journey includes descriptions of several oil springs in the region. There were ‘bitumen-pits’ south of the ruins of Masjid i Suleiman (Masjed Soleyman); to the east of Ram Hormuz was a range of hills ‘containing the celebrated white naphtha springs and the bitumen pits of Meï Dáwud’. Some valleys on the eastern side of the Zagros Mountains, he wrote, ‘. . . contain but few springs of fresh water, and abound with pools of naphtha or petroleum, bitumen, and sulphureous or brackish water, and frequently, as at the naphtha-springs near Ram Hormuz, have a burnt and volcanic appearance’.62 From Mesopotamia, Layard reported that boats plying the Tigris and Euphrates were waterproofed with bitumen,63 and at Mosul in 1853 he entertained some Yazidi leaders ‘. . . in an arched hall, open to the courtyard, which was lighted up at night with mashaals, or bundles of aming rags saturated with bitumen, and raised in iron baskets on high poles, casting a ood of rich red light’.64
On the evening of 28 January 1850 at Nimrud, on the Nineveh Plain twenty miles south of Mosul, Layard’s workers had nalized the preparations for removing a pair of huge statues of the Sumerian deity Lamasu, a human-headed, winged lion, now bound for the British Museum in London. On a foundation composed partly of an inch-thick layer of bitumen, the statues had stood guard at the entrance to the throne room of the northwest palace of Ashurnasirpal for over 2,500 years. Layard wrote, they were ready to be dragged to the river-bank . . . It seemed almost sacrilege to tear them from their old haunts to make them a mere wonder-stock to the busy crowd of a new world . . . I had sent a party
of Jebours to the bitumen springs, outside the walls to the east of the inclosure. The Arabs having lighted a small re with brushwood awaited our coming to throw the burning sticks upon the pitchy pools. A thick heavy smoke, such as rose from the jar on the sea shore when the sherman had broken the seal of Solomon, rolled upwards in curling volumes, hiding the light of the moon, and spreading wide over the sky. Tongues of ame and jets of gas, driven from the burning pit, shot through the murky canopy. As the re brightened, a thousand fantastic forms of light played amidst the smoke. To break the cindered crust, and to bring fresh slime to the surface, the Arabs threw large stones into the springs; a new volume of re then burst forth, throwing a deep red glare upon the gures and upon the landscape. The Jebours danced round the burning pools, like demons in some midnight orgie, shouting their war-cry, and brandishing their glittering arms. In an hour the bitumen was exhausted for the time, the dense smoke gradually died away, and the pale light of the moon again shone over the black slime pits.65
Africa
One of the few early indications of the existence of petroleum in Africa comes in the form of a report, in a mid-nineteenth-century of cial Portuguese publication, stating that in 1767 the then Governor of Portuguese-colonized Angola, Francisco Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho, had forty-nine barrels of petroleum shipped from Luanda to Lisbon. The oil was sourced from seeps at Libongo, near the mouth of the Dande River about thirty miles north of Luanda, and was used to caulk ships – an activity with a bleak signi cance: since the discovery of large gold deposits in Brazil in the late seventeenth century, followed by the growth of commodity plantation agriculture both there and, subsequently, in the Caribbean and the United States, Angola had become the largest single source of African slave labourers shipped to the Americas; the total number of captives shipped across the Atlantic from Angola would eventually reach almost 4.5 million. 66 In 1783 a Brazilian-born naturalist, Joaquim José da Silva, was posted from Lisbon to Angola to be the colony’s Government Secretary. Silva’s other task was to conduct investigations into the region’s
natural resources, and early in the following year he explored the area around the mouth of the Dande River. In his report to the Minister for Overseas Colonies on 17 March 1784, he wrote,
I asked the Government for permission to investigate a source of bitumen rumoured to be in the vicinity of the Dande River, and which was in fact located slightly southeast of it, some three leagues from the sea, or from the mouth of the Lifune River to the North of this same Dande. From the enclosed samples, one can clearly see that the aforementioned source contains genuine Petroleum running forth in droplets from the ssures . . . ; I have seen that they are so rich in Petroleum that with a little more effort, the harvesting and transportation process would be very easy and without great expense . . . There are currently precious few barrels lled with this Petroleum, overseen by the Dembo Indoy who controls these lands, so much depends on force to gather this Petroleum for the use of the city’s Royal Arsenal.67
In his rst shipment of specimens that he sent back to Lisbon three days later – on a vessel also used to transport slaves to Brazil – Silva included ‘A little bottle of Dande oil’. He was eventually assigned to the Portuguese garrison at Ambaca, on the main slave route inland from Luanda along which were forced around 10,000 slaves per year.68
In the early 1850s Dr David Livingstone – the Scottish physician, missionary and erce critic of the barbarities of British imperialism – was beginning his famous explorations into central Africa, by which time European countries had formally abolished the slave trade, although planters in the United States found ways to skirt the ban. Dr Livingstone, referring to a map of the beginning of his route inland from Luanda, wrote,
To the N. of 2 and 3 [just east of Bengo], near the river Dande, petroleum is reported, and so it is said to occur southwards of 5 [Ambaca], from under the dark red sandstone which forms the crust of the country. The spot reported is on the banks of the Coanza [Kwanza], and near Cambambe . . . The government of the country may be described as a military one, and closely resembles that which Sir Harry Smith [Governor of the Cape Colony] endeavoured in vain to introduce among the Caffres [in the Eighth Xhosa War].69
Asia
In China, there are accounts of the shih yu, or ‘rock oil’, from natural petroleum seepages dating from at least the fth century. One described how
south of Yen-shou among mountain rocks there oozes a liquid looking like uncoagulated fat. When burnt it generates an intense brightness, but it cannot be consumed as food (or used for frying). The local people call it ‘mineral lacquer’.70
According to the Japanese chronicle Nihongi, during the seventhcentury reign of Tenji, ‘the province of Koshi presented to the Emperor burning earth and burning water’. The latter is presumed to have been petroleum from present-day Echigo province, where the oil was collected from excavated ditches. 71
The ninth-century Chinese scholar Duan Chengshi wrote in his Miscellanies of Youyang that petroleum was being used in Shensi (Shaanxi) province: ‘In the Weishui River of Gaonu County there is a greasy matter like paint owing on the water. Local people get it to grease their wagons and burn it for lighting.’72 By the tenth century, and perhaps earlier, the Chinese began to make use of the incendiary properties of petroleum in warfare and – quite likely inspired by the contemporary Roman Byzantine technology via Arab sea-traders to China – they soon developed their own ame-throwing weaponry.73 The eleventh-century scientist Shen Kua wrote in his Dream Pool Essays that the petroleum of Shensi and Kansu ‘can be easily burnt, but its smoke, which is very thick, makes the curtains all black’. He found that he could make high-quality ink from its soot and he anticipated that, as the forests were depleted, this ink would eventually replace that hitherto made with the soot of burned pine resin:
The black colour was as bright as lacquer and could not be matched by pinewood resin ink. So I made a lot of it and called it Yen-Chhuan Shih I (Yen River Stone Juice). I think that this invention of mine will be widely adopted. The petroleum is abundant, and more will be formed in the earth while supplies of pinewood may be exhausted. 74
Perhaps the rst Chinese account of the intentional digging and working of oil wells is in the early fourteenth-century records of the Yuan dynasty:
South of Yanchang district, at Yinghe, there is a stone oil well which has been cut open. Its oil can burn and also cures itches and ringworms of the six domestic animals. Annually, 110 jin [pounds] are handed in. Moreover, in Yongping village, 80 li northwest of Yanchuan district, there is another well, which annually procures 400 jin. 75
There are reports, from at least the third century, of ‘ re wells’ where natural gas appeared at the surface. By the late tenth century, brine (from which salt was derived by evaporation) was being drawn from the ground by the use of quite advanced techniques for drilling deep boreholes, and these would sometimes hit pockets of natural gas, a ‘poisonous mist’ that could overwhelm and kill labourers. According to one account, ‘If re is thrown into the well, there will be [a sound like] roaring thunder gushing out and the mist will burst upwards, splashing out mud and dissipating stones. This is [indeed] extremely dreadful.’76
From the sixteenth century it became increasingly common in the salt-production industry – particularly in Szechuan (Sichuan) province – for the gas from these wells to be distributed through bamboo pipes and burned for heating the salt pans, especially in places where the forests and coal deposits were becoming depleted. In the 1750s it was written that from one well there was ‘hot ether rising. People use ordinary re to ignite it, whereupon the ames arise. The light [of the ames] exhibits a blue-green colour.’77 As wells were bored to greater depths, more proli c ‘ re wells’ were struck – often also yielding liquid petroleum – so that by the nineteenth century a single well might supply gas to many hundreds of salt pans.78
In 1553 João de Barros, treasurer for the Portuguese Casa de India trading company, published the second volume of his history of the feats of the Portuguese in the Far East. He wrote of how in 1511, near an island in the Straits of Malacca, Sumatran sailors fended off an attack by a Portuguese ship by burning olio da terra [earth oil], found in great quantities near Pedir [in Aceh], where it ows forth from a fountain. The Moors call this oil
napta and doctors consider it remarkable and an excellent remedy for some illnesses. We obtained some and found it very useful for treating low temperatures and nervous tension.79
In 1596 the Dutch explorer Jan Huygen van Linschoten listed the many valuable commodities on Sumatra, adding, ‘and they saye there is a fountaine which runneth pure and simple Balsame’, in other words a naphtha spring.80 Manuel Godinho de Erédia, an explorer and cartographer for the King of Spain, reported in 1600,
Perlat [Perlak] is the place where they discovered the unceasing springs of Earth Oil; its situation lies on the Eastern coast of Sumatra in four degrees of North latitude, within the territorial limits of Achem [Aceh]. The soil in this area of Perlat is so ‘oliferous’ and full of oil that when it is raked or dug with mattocks, this Earth Oil called ‘Minsat Tanna’ wells up from underground in such quantities that several clay vessels or jars are lled daily, so that the whole of the Eastern coast to Jamboaer Point is supplied with oil for burning in the lamps at night.81
A French naval captain, Augustin de Beaulieu, wrote around 1620, in a memoir only published nearly fty years later, that in Deli (North Sumatra), there was ‘. . . a well of oil, which they consider inextinguishable, should this oil take ame and burn on the sea. The King of Achem used it to set a re two Portuguese galleons against which he waged war some eight or ten years ago in the Straits of Malacca.’82
In 1636 the Dutch East India Company ordered its representatives at the court of the Sultan of Aceh to obtain a few pots of this ‘oil from the earth’ for the company’s directors, who ‘esteemed it highly and used it with great bene t for their stiff limbs’.83 This Sumatran oil now began to be marketed in Europe alongside other supposedly medicinal petroleum oils. One of the company’s physicians, Jacobus Bontius, wrote, we have, brought from Sumatra, an excellent kind of naphtha, called, by the Indians, minjac tannah (oil of earth), which, like the naphtha known in Europe by the name of ol. petræ, springs out of the earth, or drills into lakes and rivers from the contiguous rocks. This oil is held in so much esteem by the barbarians, that the king of Achen, the most powerful prince in that island, has prohibited the exportation of it under capital punishment; so that when any foreign vessel takes shelter
on that coast in stormy weather, it is common for the inhabitants to bring of it secretly to the ship under night. This oil, when rubbed upon the parts affected by the Barbiers [a kind of paralysis], affords wonderful relief. 84
In 1755 Captain George Baker was exploring Burma (Myanmar) on behalf of the East India Company. When he reached Yenangyaung on the Irrawaddy River in the Kingdom of Ava, he made this brief mention of what seems to have been a well-established oil trade: ‘At this Place there are about 200 Families, who are chie y employed in getting Earth-Oil, out of Pitts, some ve Miles in the Country.’85 It was forty years later, in 1795, before another agent of the East India Company, Major Michael Symes, returned with a fuller account:
After passing various sands and villages, we got to Yaynangheoum, or Earth-oil (petroleum) Creek, about two hours past noon . . . We were informed that the celebrated wells of petroleum, which supply the whole empire, and many parts of India, with that useful product, were ve miles to the east of this place . . . The mouth of the creek was crowded with large boats, waiting to receive a lading of oil, and immense pyramids of earthen jars were raised within and around the village, disposed in the same manner as shot and shells are piled in an arsenal. This place is inhabited only by potters, who carry on an extensive manufactory, and nd full employment. The smell of the oil was extremely offensive; we saw several thousand jars lled with it ranged along the bank; some of these were continually breaking, and the contents, mingling with the sand, formed a very lthy consistence. Mr. Wood had the curiosity to walk to the wells, but though I felt the same desire, I thought it prudent to postpone visiting them until my return, when I was likely to have more leisure, and to be less the subject of observation.86
He subsequently wrote,
Doctor Buchanan partook of an early dinner with me; and when the sun had descended so low as to be no longer inconvenient, we mounted our horses to visit the celebrated wells that produce the oil, an article of universal use throughout the Birman empire . . . The evening being far advanced, we met but few carts; those we did observe were drawn each by a pair of oxen, and of a length disproportionate to the breadth
to allow space for the earthen pots that contained the oil. It was a matter of surprise to us, how they convey such brittle ware, with any degree of safety, over so rugged a road: each pot was packed in a separate basket, and laid on straw, notwithstanding which precaution, the ground all the way was strewn with the fragments of the vessels, and wet with oil; for no care can prevent the fracture of some in every journey . . . [I]t was nearly dark when we reached the [pits], and the labourers had retired from work. There seemed to be a great many pits within a small compass: walking to the nearest, we found the aperture about four feet square, and the sides, as far as we could see down, were lined with timber; the oil is drawn up in an iron pot, fastened to a rope passed over a wooden cylinder, which revolves on an axis supported by two upright posts. Then the pot is lled, two men take the rope by the end, and run down a declivity, which is cut in the ground, to a distance equivalent to the depth of the well; thus when they reach the end of their track, the pot is raised to its proper elevation, the contents, water and oil together, are then discharged into a cistern, and the water is afterwards drawn off through a hole at the bottom. Our guide . . . procured a well rope, by means of which we were enabled to measure the depth, and ascertained it to be thirty-seven fathom, but of the quantity of oil at the bottom we could not judge: the owner of the rope, who followed our guide, af rmed, that when a pit yielded as much as came up to the waist of a man, it was deemed tolerably productive; if it reached to his neck, it was abundant; but that which rose no higher than the knee, was accounted indifferent. When a well is exhausted, they restore the spring by cutting deeper into the rock, which is extremely hard in those places where the oil is produced. Government farm out the ground that supplies this useful commodity; and it is again let to adventurers who dig wells at their own hazard, by which they sometimes gain, and often lose, as the labour and expense of digging are considerable. The oil is sold on the spot for a mere tri e; I think two or three hundred pots for a tackal, or half-a-crown. The principal charge is incurred by the transportation and purchase of vessels. We had but half grati ed our curiosity when it grew dark, and our guide urged us not to remain any longer, as the road was said to be infested by tigers, that prowled at night among the rocky uninhabited ways, through which we had to pass. We followed his advice, and returned
with greater risk, as I thought, of breaking our necks from the badness of the road, than of being devoured by wild beasts.87
Two years later, the site was revisited by Captain Hiram Cox:
When a well grows dry, they deepen it. They say none are abandoned for barrenness. Even the death of a miner, from mephitic air, does not deter others from persisting in deepening them when dry. Two days before my arrival, a man was suffocated in one of the wells, yet they afterwards renewed their attempts, without further accident . . . The oil is drawn pure from the wells, in the liquid state as used, without variation, but in the cold season it congeals in the open air, and always loses something of its uidity; the temperature of the wells preserving it in a liquid state t to be drawn . . . The oil is of a dingey green and odorous; it is used for lamps, and boiled with a little dammer (a resin of the country), for paying the timbers of houses, and the bottoms of boats, &c. which it preserves from decay and vermin; its medicinal properties known to the natives is as a lotion in cutaneous eruptions, and as an embrocation in bruises and rheumatic affections . . .
The property of these wells is in the owners of the soil, natives of the country, and descends to the heirs general as a kind of entailed heriditament, with which it is said the government never interferes, and which no distress will induce them to alienate. One family perhaps will possess four or ve wells, I heard of none who had more, the generality have less, they are sunk by, and wrought for the proprietors; the cost of sinking a new well is 2,000 tecals owered silver of the country, or 2,500 sicca rupees; and the annual average net pro t 1,000 tecals, or 1,250 sicca rupees . . . Each well is worked by four men, and their wages is regulated by the average produce of six days labour, of which they have one-sixth . . . and lastly the king’s duty is a tenth of the production . . .
From the wells, the oil is carried, in small jars, by cooleys, or on carts, to the river; where it is delivered to the merchant exporter at two tecals per hundred viss, the value being enhanced three-eighths by the expense and risk of portage . . . There were between seventy and eighty boats average burthen sixty tons each, loading oil at several wharfs, and others constantly coming and going while I was there. A number of boats and men also nd constant employment in providing the pots, &c. for the oil . . .
To conclude, this oil is a genuine petroleum, possessing all the properties of coal tar, being in fact the self-same thing, the only difference is, that nature elaborates in the bowels of the earth, that for the Burmhas, for which the European nations are obliged to the ingenuity of Lord Dundonald [who had commercialized a process for distilling tar products from coal].88
Meanwhile, in 1795 the scholar Tachibana Nankei included in the ‘seven wonders’ of Japan’s Echigo (Niigata) province its oil and gas, used locally for heating and lighting, the oil being drawn from manually dug wells.89
During the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824–6, the Burmese used petroleum-laden re-rafts in defence against the Royal Navy’s ships. During a battle near Rangoon (Yangon), according to a report of 1824, the river above Kemmendine suddenly became illuminated by an immense mass of moving re, and it was a grand sight, as raft after raft came oating down towards us, blazing high and brilliantly . . . These re-rafts are made of large beams of timber and bamboos tied together loosely, so that if the mass came athwart a ship’s bows, it could swing round and encircle her. On this platform is placed every kind of combustible; re-wood, and petroleum or earth oil (which abounds in Burmah, and ignites almost as quickly as gunpowder and slightly explodes on being red) being the principal materials.90
Following the defeat of the Burmese forces – from which the British government gained large stretches of coastal territory and major concessions for its de facto subsidiary, the East India Company – Britain’s Resident at Singapore, John Crawfurd, was sent as an envoy to the royal Burmese court at Ava. He described in some detail the ourishing trade in ‘earth oil’ that he encountered during his travels through northern Burma:
The wells occupy altogether a space of about sixteen square miles . . . The surface gave no indication that we could detect of the existence of the petroleum. On the spot which we reached, there were eight or ten wells, and we examined one of the best. The shaft was of a square form, and its dimensions about four feet to a side. It was formed by sinking a frame of wood, composed of beams of the Mimosa catechu,
which affords a durable timber. Our conductor, the son of the Myosugi of the village, informed us that the wells were commonly from one hundred and forty to one hundred and sixty cubits deep, and that their greatest depth in any case was two hundred . . . A pot of the oil was taken up, and a good thermometer being immediately plunged into it, indicated a temperature of ninety degrees . . . We looked into one or two of the wells, and could discern the bottom. The liquid seemed as if boiling; but whether from the emission of gaseous uids, or simply from the escape of the oil itself from the ground, we had no means of determining . . . The proprietors store the oil in their houses at the village, and there vend it to the exporters. The price, according to the demand, varies from four ticals of owered silver, to six ticals per 1,000 viss; which is from ve-pence to seven-pence halfpenny per cwt. The carriage of so bulky a commodity, and the brokage to which the pots are so liable, enhance the price, in the most distant parts to which the article is transported, to fty ticals per 1,000 viss. Sesamum [sesame] oil will cost at the same place, not less than three hundred ticals for an equal weight; but it lasts longer, gives a better light, and is more agreeable than the petroleum, which in burning emits an immense quantity of black smoke, which soils every object near it. The cheapness, however, of this article is so great, that it must be considered as conducing much to the convenience and comfort of the Burmans.
Petroleum is used by the Burmans for the purpose of burning in lamps; and smearing timber, to protect it against insects, especially the white ant, which will not approach it. It is said that about two-thirds of it is used for burning; and that its consumption is universal, until its price reach that of sesamum oil, the only one which is used in the country for burning. Its consumption, therefore, is universal wherever there is water-carriage to convey it; that is, in all the country watered by the Irawadi, its tributary streams, and its branches. It includes Bassien, but excludes Martaban, Tavoy and Mergui, Aracan, Tongo, and all the northern and southern tributary states. The quantity exported to foreign parts is a mere tri e, not worth noticing . . .
The celebrated Petroleum wells afford, as I ascertained at Ava, a revenue to the King or his of cers. The wells are private property, and belong hereditarily to about thirty-two individuals. A duty of ve parts in one hundred is levied upon the petroleum as it comes from the wells,
and the amount realized upon it is said to be twenty- ve thousand ticals per annum. No less than twenty thousand of this goes to contractors, collectors, or public of cers; and the share of the state, or ve thousand, was assigned during our visit as a pension of one of the Queens . . .
From the more accurate information which I obtained at Ava, it appears that the produce of these may be estimated at the highest, in round numbers, at about twenty-two millions of viss, each of 365⁄100 pounds, avoirdupois. This estimate is formed from the report of the Myo-Thugyi, who rents the tax on the wells, which is ve in a hundred. His annual collection is 25,000 ticals; and he estimated, or conjectured, that he lost by smuggling about 8,000, making the total 33,000. The value of the whole produce, therefore, is 660,000 ticals.91
In 1828 a French Catholic missionary, Father Laurent Marie Joseph Imbert – who, ten years later, was beheaded in Korea during a period of anti-Christian violence – gave an account of the salt and gas wells at Ziliujing and Wutongqiao in China’s Szechuan province:
The air that issues from these wells is highly in ammable. If when the tube full of water is near the top you were to present a torch at the opening, a great ame twenty or thirty feet in height would be kindled, which would burn the shed with the rapidity and explosion of gunpowder. This does happen sometimes through the imprudence of workmen . . . There are some wells from which re only, and no salt, is obtained; they are called Ho-tsing, re wells . . .
When a salt well has been dug to the depth of a thousand feet, a bituminous oil is found in it, that burns in water. Sometimes as many as four or ve jars of a hundred pounds each are collected in a day. This oil is very fetid, but it is made use of to light the sheds in which are the wells and caldrons of salt. The Mandarins, by order of the Prince, sometimes buy thousands of jars of it . . .
In one valley there are four wells which yield re in terri c quantities, and no water . . . These wells at rst yielded salt water: and the water having dried up, about twelve years ago another well was dug to a depth of three thousand feet and more, in the expectation of nding water in abundance. This hope was vain, but suddenly there issued from it an enormous column of air, lled with blackish
particles. I saw it with my own eyes. It does not resemble smoke, but the vapor of a ery furnace, and it escapes with a frightful roaring sound, that is heard far off. It blows and respires continually, but never inspires . . .
The opening of the well is surrounded by a wall of freestone, six or seven feet high, to guard against the well being set on re by accident or malice, a misfortune which did really happen last August. The well is in the middle of an immense court, with large sheds in the centre, where the caldrons are placed for the boiling of the salt; and on that occasion, as soon as the re touched the surface of the well, there arose a terri c explosion, and a shock as of an earthquake, and at the same moment the whole surface of the court appeared in ames . . . Four men, with great self-devotion, went and rolled an enormous stone over the surface of the well, but it was thrown up again immediately into the air. Three of the men were killed; the fourth escaped; but neither water nor mud would extinguish the re. At length, after fteen days’ labor, a suf cient quantity of water was collected on a neighboring mountain, to form a large lake or reservoir, and this was let loose all at once upon the re, by which means it was extinguished; but at a cost of thirty thousand francs, a large sum for China.
At the depth of a foot below the ground, four enormous bamboo tubes are xed in the four sides of the well, and these conduct the in ammable air beneath the caldrons. More than three hundred are boiled by the re from a single well, each of them being furnished with a bamboo tube, or re conductor. On the top of the bamboo tube is one of clay, six inches long, with a hole in the centre six inches in diameter; this clay hinders the re from burning the bamboo. Other tubes, carried outside, light the large sheds and the streets. There is such a supply of re, that it cannot all be used; and the excess is carried by a tube, outside the inclosure of the salt-works, into three chimneys, out of the tops of which the ame leaps to a height of two feet.92
Meanwhile, an account of an exploration of the Indian province of Assam, undertaken by Lieutenant R. Wilcox in the late 1820s, was published in 1832, in which he described coal beds in the Burhi Dihing River at Supkong: ‘[T]he jungles are full of an odour of petroleum . . . In the middle, where bubbles of air are seen constantly rising to the
surface, the mud is nearly white, and this is a more liquid state – on the edges green petroleum is seen oating, but it is not put to any use.’93 In 1838 an agent to the regional governor reported that from a coal bed near the Disang River, ‘. . . several small springs of petroleum ow into the pools in the watercourse, and four or ve seers (10 lbs.) of this oil were collected by my servants from their surfaces in a few minutes.’94 Over the following decades, coal prospectors in northeast India reported petroleum also at Makum, and at Namchik in Arunachal Pradesh.95
In the Java War of 1826–30 the Dutch had defeated the popular resistance movement, incurring the deaths of around 200,000 Javanese.96 Subsequently, in the early 1850s chemists and mining engineers surveying for minerals in the Dutch East Indies encountered natural oil seeps, as P.J. Maier reported from Karawang, West Java, in 1850: ‘Usually the oil is spread as a thin layer over the water surface . . . There is one exception, a source located at the little Tjipanuan river, which produces a sizeable amount of oil.’
Of those on the island of Madura off the northeast coast of Java, Cornelis de Groot van Embden reported in 1852, ‘The oil occurring on Madura is of petroleum quality (impure naphtha) . . . In the dry season the total daily yield from 3 seeps is 0.3 Dutch pounds . . . The Madurese sell the oil for 15 ‘duiten’ (= c. 2 pennies) per bottle.’ F.C.H. Liebert, searching for coal and mercury in the residency of Semarang, reported in 1853 that near the small dessah of Kedongbotok . . . is a small brook, into which a fairly large amount of oil oozes. The local population collects this oil and burns it in their lamps . . . At [Kampong Lantong] I found oil in large amounts; it was collected and used as fuel . . . Oil is found in many other locations in the Department . . . When it reaches the surface, the oil has a brownish color. When exposed to the air it becomes darker, more viscous and nally a mountain-tar mass . . .
It is well-known that layers containing oil and bitumen develop hydrocarbon gas . . . This is the origin of the so-called ‘eternal res’. The ‘sacred re’ or ‘Mer-api’ near Gubuk in Demak is nothing but a ow of hydrocarbon gas which has been lighted . . . It can easily be extinguished . . .
It is regrettable that so little use is made of the petroleum which is to be found in great quantities in the Department of Semarang. If efforts were made to collect this product in a suitable manner, a good deal of pro t could undoubtedly be got out of it; for apart from its other uses, an oil can be prepared from it by distillation which, when burned in an Argan lamp, gives a seven-candle power light.97
In 1852 provocative actions by the Royal Navy triggered the Second Anglo-Burmese War in which Britain seized the southern province of Pegu, thereby incorporating Burma’s entire coastal region into British Lower Burma. Captain Henry Yule was then sent on a diplomatic mission north to Ava, from where he reported that the oil trade continued much as before:
A rude windlass mounted on the trunk of a tree, laid across two forked stems, is all the machinery used. An earthen pot is let down and lled, and then a man or woman walks down the slope of the hill with the rope . . .
The petroleum from these pits is very generally used as a lamp-oil all over Burma. It is also used largely on the woodwork and planking of houses, as a preservative from insects, and for several minor purposes, as a liniment, and even as a medicine taken internally . . . There is now a considerable export of the article from Rangoon to England, and one of the Rangoon houses had a European agent residing on the spot. The demand in England is, I believe, for use to some extent as a lubricating oil, but it is also employed by Price’s Company at Lambeth in the manufacture of patent candles, and has been found to yield several valuable products. It has sold in the London market at from 40l. to 45l. a ton . . .
The work of excavation becomes dangerous as the oily stratum is approached, and frequently the diggers become senseless from the exhalations. This also happens occasionally in wells that have been long worked. ‘If a man is brought up to the surface with his tongue hanging out,’ said one of our informants, ‘it is a hopeless case. If his tongue is not hanging out, he can be brought round by hand-rubbing and kneading his body all over.’ . . .
The ordinary price of the article used to be one tikal the hundred viss, or about sixteen shillings a ton. Lately, in consequence of the demand
earth oil from Rangoon, it has risen to about thirty- ve shillings a ton. As to the amount of revenue derived by the king from the petroleum we found it dif cult to get de nite information. One intelligent proprietor, who was myo-ok of the town, stated, that out of 27,000 viss, which formed the whole monthly yield of his wells, 9,000 went in payment to the workpeople, 1,000 to the king, and 1,000 to the lord of the district.98
A British chemist had recently begun working with Price’s Patent Candle Co. to develop a process for re ning paraf n wax from Burmese crude, reporting that he had procured ‘several tons of Rangoon tar, which was carefully collected at the source, and transmitted to Europe in well-secured vessels’.99 Price’s contracted for 2,000 barrels per month to be shipped to its Battersea factory – a ve-month, 12,000-mile journey via the Cape of Good Hope – but the operation was a nancial failure due the high shipping costs, the low yield of paraf n wax that could be extracted from the crude, and the reluctance of customers to adopt the new types of solvents, lubricants and lamp oil derived from this mineral source.100
Exploration for minerals in the Dutch East Indies continued to reveal more petroleum seeps. Mining engineer R. Everwijn, looking for coal in the Department of Pelambang in Sumatra in 1858, travelled down the Musi River and up the Manju-Assin River. Reaching Bali-Bukit, he found ‘. . . a small valley where a few oil seeps or tar seeps occur . . . The soil around the basins appears to be soaked with oil to a depth of about one foot, over an area of about 500m2 . . . The local population concentrates the oil with long bamboo-poles, and then collects it.’ Travelling along the Lematang River he looked for coal near Lahat and Muara Enim; near the Lalang tributary he found several oil seeps, and ‘according to the local people the most proli c one yields some 3 liters of oil per day’.101
Europe
Evidence of one of the earliest uses of bitumen has been found in a cave in the Southern Carpathian mountain range in Romania near Râşnov in Braşov county where, about 30,000 years ago during the
Upper Palaeolithic era, Neanderthals appear to have used bitumen as an adhesive in tool-making.102 Evidence for this use of bitumen has also been found in Italy from the Neolithic era.103
In about 450 BC , Herodotus witnessed oil springs on the Ionian island of Zakynthos (Zante):
With my own eyes . . . I once saw pitch being brought to the surface of a lake in Zakynthos. There are quite a number of pools there, the largest of which is 70 feet across in every direction, and 2 fathoms deep. Into this same pool, someone will lower a pole with myrtle tied to the tip, and then, when it is brought back up, the myrtle will be coated in pitch. This, although it reeks like bitumen, is otherwise of much better quality than Pierian pitch. It is poured into a pit that has been excavated beside the lake, and then, when a substantial amount has been collected, they scoop it out of the pit and into jars.104
Vitruvius mentioned the oil of Zakynthos, as well as that of Apollonia in modern-day Albania, northeast of the port of Vlorë.105 The latter was subsequently described by Strabo, by Dioscorides in about 60 AD, and by Pliny the Elder; indeed, there is evidence that as early as the Bronze Age asphalt was being exported across the Adriatic Sea to Italy.106 Dioscorides wrote that ‘there is something called pitchasphalt, produced in Apollonia, near Epidamnos; it is carried down from the Ceraunian Mountains by the rush of the river and it is cast on the shores in condensed lumps.’107 He described oil found on Sicily, followed by Pliny, who also mentioned oil from Zakynthos and from mainland Italy. According to Dioscorides, ‘Up and down the land of the Agrigentes of Sicily, a liquid oats on wells which people use in their lamps instead of [olive] oil and which they call incorrectly Sicilian oil, for it is a type of liquid asphalt.’108
The Romans sourced asphalt from several locations along the Via Tiburtina road and the Pescara River, in the modern-day province of Pescara in Italy, from where it was transported to the coast for caulking boats and for export.109 Passing through Italy in about 1170, Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela wrote that at Pozzuoli, ‘A spring issues forth from beneath the ground containing the oil which is called petroleum. People collect it from the surface of the water and use it medicinally.’110
In 1198 the mayor of Rouen registered with the Norman exchequer
the purchase, among other items, of an ounce of petroleum;111 by the fourteenth century the Florentine banker Francesco Pegolotti was listing asphalt and bitumen as articles of Mediterranean trade;112 and in the fteenth century oil from Tocco da Casauria, in Pescara province, was being gathered for its medical properties by German and Hungarian travellers.113 It was from this period that Oil of St Catherine, from the province of Modena in northern Italy, became famed for its many medicinal powers, taken either externally or internally. One midsixteenth-century pamphlet extolled ‘The virtue of the noble oil which is most useful and bene cial for several in rmities of the body . . . It is called balsam by several people on account of its great and outstanding virtue.’114 It could apparently be used to heal wounds, burns, sores, bruises, bites, eye pain, broken bones, bladder complaints, constipation and gallstones, and to induce labour. The owners of the mountain from which this oil exuded, wrote Pierre Pomet in 1694, had channels or copper pipes prepared and placed directly so as to catch the oil coming out of the rock, and by means of these pipes the oil drops into . . . copper boilers from which it is collected . . . The white naphtha which we normally call white petroleum oil . . . [is] highly volatile and liable to catch re, a fact that should serve as a warning to those who sell it and make them distrust it as though it were gunpowder.115
By the seventeenth century, bitumen and naphtha were being gathered from a number of locations in Italy. For example, from 1691 in the province of Piacenza to the northeast of Modena, Count Morando Morandi owned a pro table business selling the high-quality, light naphtha extracted from oil wells dug at Rallio di Montechiaro. After the owner of neighbouring land claimed that his mining interests were being impaired by these oil wells, a legal feud between them ran until 1715 when the count, and all his male heirs, were given exclusive rights to prospect for and extract oil in the whole of Piacenza. Petroleum continued to be gathered in Piacenza, Parma, Modena and Pescara into the nineteenth century.116 In about 1800 naphtha from a spring at Amiano in Parma was adopted for lighting the streets of Genoa, in a specially designed oil lamp. ‘By these means,’ it was reported, ‘the same quantity of light is obtained as with olive oil, and at a fourth of the
expense, as the petroleum costs only two Genoese sous per pound, (which is less than a penny English).’117
In 1815 the royal physician and travel writer Sir Henry Holland visited the region around the Ionian Sea, at that time part of the Ottoman Empire. He reported that pitch from the mines of Selenitza (Selenicë) was one of the main exports being shipped from Vlorë, and that pitch from oil pools on Zakynthos was being used in signi cant quantities, mainly for caulking boats.118
A region straddling the modern-day German-Austrian border was, from the fourteenth century, the source of two medicinal petroleum oils promoted for their healing powers: Oil of St Quirinus from Tegernsee in Bavaria, and Blood of Thyrsus from Seefeld in Tyrol; however, neither gained the fame or widespread use of Modena Oil.119 In the mid-sixteenth century the German mineralogist Georgius Agricola described how, to the east of Hanover, oil was collected from natural seeps, boiled, and put to use:
Liquid bitumen sometimes oats in large quantities on the surface of wells, brooks and rivers and is collected with buckets or pots. Small quantities are collected by means of feathers, linen towels and the like. The bitumen easily adheres to these objects . . .
[I]n Lower Saxony the peasants not only use the oil in lamps but also make marriage torches by dipping dry stems of the great mullein in it, besides lubricating their carts with it. They use it also to paint wooden posts to protect them from the effects of rain.120
By the eighteenth century the oil was being drawn from more actively maintained pits, reported the physician Johann Taube, who wrote of the oil’s healing properties. By the early nineteenth century some shafts were over 100 feet deep, and in the mid-nineteenth century a dozen or more oil wells of this depth were drilled.121
In the south of France, at Gabian to the west of Montpellier, from the seventeenth century oil was collected for medicinal uses. Pomet wrote,
This oil was formerly so abundant and copious that it was not highly valued, and a fairly large amount could be collected every day, but nowadays it is collected only on Mondays, and the place where it accumulates is surrounded by walls and guarded. I was assured at Gabian
that the Bishop of Béziers obtained a large income from it, though not so large as it used to be.122
In the Alsace region of northeast France oil seeps were reported from at least the fteenth century, and by the seventeenth century the oil was being distilled into fractions and used for lubrication, as a wood preservative, for illumination, and as a treatment for a range of ailments.123
From 1712 Eyrini d’Eyrinis, a doctor and teacher, began experimenting with asphalt found a few hundred miles to the south, in the Neuchâtel region of Switzerland, and he publicized its potential as being ‘more suitable than any other material for joining together and tarring all manner of structures’.124 While these deposits were commercialized initially on a small scale, mainly for distilled oil that was sold as a medicine, from 1745 the Alsace oil sands around Pechelbronn began to be mined and processed on a signi cant industrial scale. In the early nineteenth century bitumen deposits further south began to be exploited, near Seyssel in the Rhône valley, while oil shale deposits at Autun in Saône-et-Loire began to be distilled into products including lamp oil. As asphalt became used more widely as a mastic and for surfacing pavements and roads, the deposits of Neuchâtel similarly began to be commercially exploited.125
Following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, Scienti c American would run a report arguing that ‘The value of Alsace to Germany and the consequent extent of the loss to France, commercially considered, are alike enhanced by the probable development of a large petroleum industry in that celebrated province.’126
A late sixteenth-century encyclopedia of the geography of Great Britain described how near Wigan, Lancashire, there was a well – that became known as ‘Camden’s cooker’ – from which
breaks out a sulphurous vapour, which makes the water bubble up as if it boyl’d. When a Candle is put to it, it presently takes re, and burns like brandy. The ames, in a calm season, will continue sometimes a whole day; by the heat whereof they can boyl eggs, meat &c. tho’ the water itself be cold.127
In 1694 Martin Eele took out a patent, in the names of himself and his associates, for a method they had devised for manufacturing pitch at Broseley, just south of Ironbridge in Shropshire. It stated ‘that he, after
much paines and expences, hath certainely found out “A Way to Extract and Make great Quantityes of Pitch, Tarr, and Oyle out of a sort of Stone,” of which there is suf cient plenty within our Dominions of England and Wales.’128 By distilling local tar sands, they produced an oily substance that could be turned into pitch for waterproo ng ships, which, following improved distillation techniques, was claimed to be a serviceable substitute for Swedish pine tar. However, a more lucrative product of Shropshire tar sands was ‘Betton’s British Oil’, sold as a cure-all.129 An account of 1764 described how at Broseley there was also ‘a Well exhaling a sulphurous Vapour, which when contracted to one Vent by Means of an Iron Cover with a circular Hole, and set on Fire by a Candle, burns like the Spirit of Wine or Brandy, with a Heat that will even boil a large Piece of Beef in two Hours’.
About ten miles away, at Pitchford, there was ‘a Well where a Liquid Bitumen oats, which the Inhabitants skim off, and use instead of Pitch; some think it good against the Falling Sickness and Wounds’.130
In 1786, at Coalport near Broseley, a canal tunnel dug into the side of the Severn Gorge struck natural bitumen seeps from which hundreds of gallons of bitumen were gathered per day.131 The following year, a visiting Italian aristocrat described the scene inside the tunnel:
At length we arrived at the rock whence emerges the pitchy torrent in such copiousness that ve or six barrels are lled with it every day. The workmen who gather it, as well as they who dig out the solid pitch, are, of a truth, like the imps described by Dante in his Inferno as gathering with a hook the souls of the damned into a lake of pitch – so horribly dis gured and begrimed are they.132
According to a wealthy Welsh naturalist writing in 1778, the coal miners of Flintshire were familiar with ‘petroleum, or rock oil, [which] is esteemed serviceable in rheumatic cases, if rubbed in the parts affected. The miners call it Ymenyn tylwyth têg, or fairies butter.’133
In 1781 Lord Archibald Cochrane, 9th Earl of Dundonald, took out a patent for a commercial process for distilling coal tar from bituminous coal, having experimented with that mined on his Culross estate in Fife, Scotland. He formed the British Tar Co. in 1782 and by the late 1780s he had ten tar works in Scotland and England producing mainly tars and varnishes for preserving wood – particularly the hulls and
other parts of wooden ships – as well as various other by-products. The business was pro table for some years but ran into trouble in the early nineteenth century, partly because the Royal Navy declined to regularize the use of his tar products, committing instead to copper sheathing to protect its ships’ hulls. Lord Cochrane and his son, the future admiral Thomas Cochrane, also took out patents for distilling lamp oil from coal and for new designs of oil lamps.134
In 1847 a coal seam being dug at Riddings, Derbyshire, began to ood with brine which was discharged into the nearby canal. After locals found that the surface of the canal could catch re, it was realized that there was petroleum in the mine water, and a Scottish chemist, James Young, came to investigate. He discovered that this crude oil could be re ned into lamp oil, paraf n wax for making candles, and lubricating oil, which he produced and sold commercially for a while until his interest turned to the distillation of oil from coal.135
In the mid-nineteenth century, shale-oil works were established in Dorset in England, in Flintshire in Wales, and in West Lothian and the surrounding regions of Scotland, but only the Scottish shale-oil industry achieved lasting commercial viability.136
Back in 1530 a Polish aristocrat, the head of the Biecz district of southeastern Poland, attempted to nd gold at the foot of Mount Chełm, just west of Ropa (Polish for ‘oil’); but when the excavations became ooded with oil, fellow attendants of the royal court joked, ‘He looked for gold in Ropa only to be doused in pitch.’137 Four years later Stefan Falimierz, explaining that ‘petroleum is an oil coming from rock’, was the rst of several Polish physicians of the sixteenth century to write of the healing properties of the surface oil found across this region: the northern fringes of the Carpathian Mountains, extending across the present-day Polish-Ukrainian border. At many places, from Gorlice and Krosno, to Borysław and Drohobycz, pits were dug for the oil which was used as an axle lubricant, as a roof sealant, for treating leather, and for lighting. From the early seventeenth century, Polish naturalists began to write about the geology of the region and to discuss distillation techniques, and by 1772, when the Habsburg monarchy annexed the region – now named Galicia – this small-scale oil industry was well established and well known.138
During the early nineteenth century, as the Habsburg government began to formalize its control over the petroleum deposits of Galicia, some attempts were made to distil the oil commercially for lighting or heating. However, it was only after Abraham Gesner in Canada, and James Young in Britain, managed to distil effective lamp oils from coal and asphalt in the late 1840s that, in 1853, a Polish pharmacist in Lviv (in present-day western Ukraine), Jan Zeh, and his apprentice Ignacy Łukasiewicz, succeeded in distilling the rst commercially viable lamp oil from crude Galician petroleum, for which a local tinsmith designed lamps that could burn the oil effectively, with a reasonably clean, bright ame. This development sparked an oil rush: hundreds more oil wells were now dug and many small re neries were established across the region. It particularly drew in the local Jewish population who had struggled for decades under discriminatory employment restrictions imposed by the Habsburg authorities. By the late 1850s the Lviv General Hospital and some of the larger stations of the Emperor Ferdinand Northern Railway had turned to kerosene lamps for illumination.139
Whereas in western Galicia some wealthy landowners invested in somewhat larger-scale crude extraction, the very small-scale extraction methods practised in eastern Galicia made it dif cult for re ners there to manufacture lamp oil in large quantities. One re ner described how he urged a peasant, whose oil seep yielded only three barrels of crude per week, to increase his production by digging deeper and using a bellows to dispel the toxic gases that would otherwise prevent him from working in his pit. However, in order to meet the increasing demand for lamp oil these re ners sourced additional crude from Russia and Romania.140
In Romania a mid- fteenth-century report of petroleum seeps in the Bacău region of Moldavia was soon followed by accounts of its extraction both there and from south of Râşnov in the Prahova region of Wallachia. From the late eighteenth century, Romanian crude oil was exported via the Danube to Turkey and Austria; and a rudimentary oil re nery operating in Lucăceşti, Bacău, from 1840 was the rst of several set up to produce lamp oil. In 1857 Bucharest became the rst city to adopt kerosene on a large scale for street lighting, supplied from a re nery in Râfov, near Ploesti, Prahova. In one authoritative compilation of oil production statistics, the rst registered national
oil production was that of Romania: 275 tons in 1857 and 495 tons in 1858. 141
In southwestern Russia two sources of petroleum in the vicinity of the Black Sea were mentioned by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII in about 950: on the Taman Peninsula, and in the region between Maikop and Sochi.142 In northwestern Russia, according to the fteenth-century Dvina Chronicle, people living near the Ukhta River, in the Timan-Pechora basin in the present-day Komi Republic, used oil that could be found oating on the river’s surface; this was also mentioned by the Dutch diplomat Nicholas Witsen in his 1692 book on the region. 143 In 1718 Tsar Peter the Great looked into the potential for sourcing oil from the Terek-Sunzha region around Grozny in the north Caucasus – oil that was used at the time to lubricate cart axles – as it was costly to import from Baku which was then under Persian rule. His Mining Board also studied the prospects of obtaining oil from near the Ukhta River.144 Eventually, in association with the Mining Board, a rudimentary oil works was set up on the Ukhta River in 1746 by an entrepreneur, Feydor Pryadunov, from which some of the re ned oil was sent to Hamburg, where it was assessed to be comparable to Oil of Modena as a remedy for a range of ailments. The enterprise continued operating on a small scale under various owners for several decades, while the Mining Board investigated oil that was also found in the Volga-Urals region.145 Studies of the north Caucasus, Volga and Ukhta oil regions continued throughout the reign of Catherine the Great and into the early nineteenth century. In 1792 Catherine granted her Cossack forces extensive land rights on the Taman Peninsula and around the Kuban River, in return for maintaining her imperial control over the region; they began to exploit the local oil resources commercially, and supplied oil products to the Black Sea eet.146
On the Crimean Peninsula – progressively annexed by Russia from the Ottoman Empire in the late eighteenth century – a Russian geological survey of 1823 recorded several surface oil seeps. A French national, who became a lieutenant in Russia’s Engineering Corps, saw the oil seeps on the Crimean Kerch Peninsula while he was involved in building Black Sea coastal forti cations, and in 1838 he was inspired by the sight of the asphalt streets of Paris to try to nd a domestic Russian source of asphalt. Later that year, the regional governor provided
him with the means to set up a distillation plant at Kerch that soon produced asphalt for surfacing the streets of that city and of Odessa.147
By the early 1840s Baku had been under Russian sovereignty for thirty years, and here mining engineer Nikolai Voskoboinikov, of the Bakinskii Corps of Mining Engineers, began promoting the use of drilling technology – long employed for water and brine wells – as a more effective method than digging oil wells. In 1845 the viceroy of the Caucasus, Mikhail Vorontsov, provided 1,000 roubles for the endeavour and in 1848, at Baku, the Mining Corps sunk what was perhaps the rst drilled oil well, using a manually powered cable tool, or percussion drilling, rig.148
Latin America and the Caribbean
From about 1200 BC , people of the Olmec civilization – centred on what are now the Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco – painted bitumen, or chapopote, onto pottery artefacts and stored it in pottery vessels, and there is evidence that it was used as a sealant in stonebuilt troughs.149 According to reports by the missionary Bernardino de Sahagún and by other conquistadors of Aztec- and colonial-era Mexico, native people used bitumen in many ways, for example as an adhesive, for ceremonial purposes, to chew and to scent tobacco.150 Employing the native Nahuatl language, Sahagún wrote,
Bitumen . . . comes from the ocean, from the sea . . . The waves cast it forth . . . When it comes forth [it is] like a mat, wide, thick. Those of the seashore, those of the coast lands gather it there . . . they pick it up from the sand . . . The pleasing scent of the tobacco with bitumen spreads over the whole land. As its second use, it is used by women; they chew the bitumen. And what they chew [is] named chicle.151
Bitumen was strongly associated with women in Aztec culture, and the archetypal feminine goddess Tlazolteotl was represented with a ring of chapopote around her mouth: She was called the ‘ lth eater’ for eating people’s sins to absolve them just before death.152
In 1526 the Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, who took part in the colonization of the Caribbean and directed
the Crown’s gold-smelting operations, wrote that, on the island of Fernandina (Cuba),
not far from the sea there ows from a mountain a liquid or bitumenlike pitch. It is suf cient in quantity and of good enough quality to tar ships. Since great quantities of this substance constantly ow into the sea, numerous rafts or patches of it oat on the water from one place to another as moved by the wind or the currents along that coast.153
According to the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, in 1508 Sebastian de Ocampo, the rst sailor to circumnavigate Cuba, had used its bitumen to careen his ships, naming the bay Puerto de Carenas, now known as Havana.154 Oviedo continued, ‘This pitch is found . . . also in New Spain, recently discovered there in the province of Pánuco’ (in modernday Mexico).155 In 1535 Oviedo published the rst part of his much longer General and Natural History of the Indies, in which he wrote of a further ve reported sources of petroleum in the Americas. There were two sources on the tip of the Santa Elena peninsula (in modernday Ecuador), one of which ‘looks like perfect turpentine’; there was a ‘lake of bitumen in the province of Veneçuela’, along with ‘another form of bitumen’ on the island of Cubagua, just off the Venezuelan coast; and, fthly, there was ‘another well of bitumen in the new kingdom of Granada, in the land of the wild Indians called Panches’ (in present-day Colombia, west of Bogota).156 If the natives here were ‘wild’, it was generally because although, initially, they had typically greeted the newcomers with gifts, the Europeans soon plundered their gold, massacred and tortured them, or enslaved them to work exploiting the Cubagua pearl oyster beds ultimately to extinction.157
Oviedo wrote that he had been told by the Governor of Cuba and by a number of sailors that the bitumen found on the coast at Puerto del Prínçipe, ‘when mixed with a lot of tallow or oil, can be used to x or caulk the ships . . . A bit of such pitch was given to me by Diego Velazquez, and I took it to Spain in 1523, to show it there.’158 The bitumen on the island of Cubagua was ‘in the form of a natural liquor, which some call petroleum, and others call stercus demonis [devil’s excrement]; the Indians give it other names.’159
In the second volume of his treatise, published in 1557, Oviedo provided two more detailed reports of petroleum in Venezuela and
Colombia. Since the formal establishment of Venezuela in 1528 – initially on lease to an enterprise of German colonists – plundering expeditions had been sent southwards around Lake Maracaibo. Oviedo wrote,
All these people who live around the lagoon are poor people, warlike on the water and skilful with their arrows. There are in that province some wells or springs of bitumen, as a pitch or melted pitch, which the Indians call mene. In particular there are wells that originate on a hill, high up in the savanna, and many of them form ponds of more than a quarter of a league in perimeter. And from Maracaybo to these springs is twenty- ve leagues.
With the strength of the sun this bitumen or liquor seems to boil, emerging and running for a distance along the ground. It is quite soft and sticky during the day, but at night it cools with the nocturnal freshness and the absence of sunlight. In the morning you can walk on it without sinking or even sticking your feet, but when the sun is up, it is very sticky; and whoever passes by, on foot or on horseback, gets bogged down like someone trying to pass through slime or mud, and it can only be traversed with great dif culty. During the rst incursion that Governor Ambrosio made inland, they took this route during the daytime, and they found a deer stuck in some wells and springs of this bitumen like a bird caught in a trap, and they took it as the animal could not escape. It is a very viscous substance, such that when it is found in the form described, after two or three hours exposed to the sun, it is like a pitch to caulk ships. Thus, from this incident with the deer they realized that they could kill many others, as they are innumerable in that territory – they would encircle them and force them to go through those deposits, where they are trapped and then they can be taken very easily; it is a very pleasurable hunting experience.160
In 1540 Jerónimo Lebrón led one of a number of expeditions up the Magdalena River to plunder gold and other valuables and to conquer and Christianize native people. The following year, two captains who had been among a 300-strong expeditionary force – which included native allies and West African slaves – told Oviedo what they had seen, over 200 miles inland from the mouth of the Magdalena, near the native village of La Tora (present-day Barrancabermeja, Colombia):
Among other peculiarities they testi ed that one day ahead of the village of La Tora, where the brigs disembark, there is a small source of bitumen that boils and runs out on the ground, and in the foothills of the mountains it exists in great quantity in the form of a thick liquor. And the Indians bring it to their homes and smear themselves with this bitumen, because they nd it good to remove fatigue and strengthen the legs: and it is this black liquor, with a smell of pitch or worse, which Christians use to caulk the brigs.161
In his text of 1535 Oviedo concluded,
Thus, at present we know of seven sources or springs of bitumen in our Indies; each very different from each other. All our Spaniards, or most of them, have taken advantage of it to caulk ships, although according to what it is possible to know from the Indians, such liquors are appropriated for many sufferings, and they are medicinal . . . [A]nd I have no doubt that others will be found, because the Continent is another half of the world.162
A quantity of petroleum was sent to Spain the following year at the request of Queen Juana of Castile, who wrote to her of cials at the port of Nueva Cádiz on Cubagua: ‘Some people have brought to these Kingdoms a petroleum oil from a spring on said island and because here it has appeared to be of value, I command that all ships sailing from that island send me as much as possible.’163
In 1555 a Spanish of cial wrote, in his History of the Discovery and Conquest of Peru, that ‘at a cape called Santa Elena by the Spaniards, there are some out ows of pitch or tar used by the natives to mend their boats’.164 Father José de Acosta wrote in 1590 that here there was ‘a spring or fountaine of pitch, which at Peru, they call Coppey . . . The Mariners use [it] to pitch their ropes and tackling.’165
Five years later the Florentine merchant and explorer Francesco Carletti reported from here that ‘A huge quantity of this bitumen is taken out, thus making a pro t for the owners of the land that generates it’.166 Meanwhile, a map of Tabasco province, Mexico, produced in 1579 by Melchor de Alfaro Santa Cruz noted ‘springs of a kind of water which coagulates in the sun and forms a dark resin which can be used as pitch. It also occurs in other parts of this province.’167
In 1595 Sir Walter Raleigh – one of Queen Elizabeth I’s raiders of
Spanish gold-carrying ships – had his ships treated with pitch on the coast of Trinidad. He wrote,
At . . . Tierra de Brea, or Piche, there is that abundance of stone pitch, that all the ships of the world may therewith be laden from thence, and we made trial of it in trimming our ships to be most excellent good, and melteth not with the sun as the pitch of Norway, and therefore for ships trading the south parts very pro table.168
Raleigh revisited the location in 1617, recording,
This Terra de Bri is a piece of land of some 2 leagues long and a league broad, all of stone pitch or bitumen, which riseth out of the ground in little springs or fountains, and so running a little way, it hardeneth in the air and covereth all the plain . . . Here rode at anchor, and trimmed our boats . . .169
From the late 1500s Father Alvaro Alonso Barba had lived in Peru, and from 1624 he was based in Potosí (in present-day Bolivia), the economic capital of the huge Spanish silver-mining boom. The priest doubled as a metallurgist, and in 1637 he presented to the local authorities a report on the mining and chemical processing of the region’s minerals. His treatise, published by the Spanish Crown in 1640, included a chapter on Betunes, or mineral ‘pitches’, which included ‘asphalt’, ‘bitumen’ and ‘petroleum’. He reported that as the Spanish colonists had been occupied in the search for the wealth of Silver and Gold, but little attention has been paid to this and many other Curiosities. Nevertheless, an abundance of pitch-bearing materials exists in the Cordillera of Chiriguanes, on the frontier of Lemina. There is but little communication with this Place, because it is among the war-like Indians.170
In 1676 an English explorer, William Dampier, was sailing with pirates raiding Spanish possessions along the Tabasco coast; after a skirmish with a Spanish ship, he wrote, they searched the Bays for Munjack to carry with us for the Ship’s use, as we had done before for the use both of Ships and Canoes. Munjack is a sort of Pitch or Bitumen, which we nd in Lumps, from three or four Pounds to thirty Pounds in a Lump; washed up by the Sea, and left dry on all the Sandy-Bays on all this Coast: It is in Substance
earth oil like Pitch, but blacker; it melts by the Heat of the Sun, and runs abroad as Pitch would do if exposed, as this is, on the Bays: The smell of it is not so pleasant as Pitch, neither does it stick so rmly as Pitch, but it is apt to peel off from the Seams of Ships Bottoms; however we nd it very useful here where we want Pitch; and because it is commonly mixed with Sand by lying on the Bays, we melt it and re ne it very well before we use it; and commonly temper it with Oyl or Tallow to correct it; for though it melts by the Heat of the Sun, yet it is of a harsher Nature than Pitch. I did never nd the like in any other Part of the World, neither can I tell from whence it comes.171
Eight years later, while on another raiding expedition, Dampier corroborated Spanish accounts of the bitumen seeps on the coast of Elena Peninsula, in modern-day Ecuador:
[C]lose by the Sea, about 5 paces from high-water mark, there is a sort of bitumenous matter boils out of a little hole in the Earth; it is like thin Tar: the Spaniards call it Algatrane. By much boiling it becomes hard like Pitch. It is frequently used by the Spaniards instead of Pitch; and the Indians that inhabit here save it in Jars. It boils up most at high Water; and then the Indians are ready to receive it . . . Their chief subsistence is Maiz, most of which they get from ships that come hither for Algatrane.172
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, during the later period of Spanish rule, royal monopolies were sometimes granted to the colonial owners of land in northern Peru, between Tumbes and Talara, for the exploitation of natural bitumen seeps, most notably at Amotape. The Spanish conquest had devastated the native Inca population with European diseases and through warfare, so the colonists used slaves from West Africa to work the bitumen pits. Following independence from Spain, the government of Simón Bolívar took ownership of these properties, but in 1826, under the pressure of war debt repayments, it sold them off to private citizens. However, since under Spanish law the state could sell land to individuals but retained the rights to subsoil minerals, it was now unclear who owned the petroleum resources of the Mancora and La Brea y Pariñas haciendas.173 This basic tenet of Latin American petroleum law had been established in 1783 when King Carlos III issued a Mining Ordinance stating that under Spanish
law the sovereign was the ultimate owner of all subsoil minerals, including what it termed ‘bitumens and juices of the earth’.174
In the early seventeenth century one of the rst English colonists of North America, John Smith, found on the island of Barbados ‘a spring neer the middest of the Ile of Bitume, which is a liquid mixture like Tarre, that by the great raines falls from the tops of the mountaines, it oats upon the water in such abundance, that drying up, it remaines like great rocks of pitch, and as good as pitch for any use’.175 From the mid-eighteenth century, Barbados oil became a popular treatment for a wide variety of ailments. According to one writer, this green Tar . . . is of so in ammable a Nature, that it serves to burn in Lamps. As to its medicinal Qualities, it is chie y made use of with great Success in paralytic and nervous Disorders, as well as in curing cutaneous Eruptions . . . There is likewise another Species of Bitumen, of a solid Substance, here called Munjack. Where the liquid Kinds are thrown out of the Earth, the Surface of the Ground is one Continued Quagmire, bearing very little, if any Grass; and where the more solid is dug out, if the Veins are upon, or very near the Surface, scare any Vegetable grows upon it. If by Accident any of these Veins take Fire, they continue to burn a long time, tho’ in a dull slow manner.176
Nearly a century later, the British medical journal The Lancet carried an endorsement of the healing properties of ‘Barbadoes tar’.177
In 1789 a Scottish doctor and botanist, Alexander Anderson, published his account of how ‘A most remarkable production of nature in the island of Trinidad, is a bituminous lake, or rather plain, known by the name of Tar Lake; by the French called La Bray, from the resemblance to, and answering the intention of, ship pitch.’178 A geologist described Trinidad’s Pitch Lake in 1811:
This vast collection of bitumen might in all probability afford an inexhaustible supply of an essential article of naval stores, and being situated in the margin of the sea could be wrought and shipped with little inconvenience or expense . . . I have frequently seen it used to pay the bottoms of small vessels, for which it is particularly well adapted, as it preserves them from the numerous tribe of worms so abundant in tropical countries. There seems indeed no reason why it should not when duly prepared and
attenuated be applicable to all the purposes of the petroleum of Zante, a well-known article of commerce in the Adriatic, or that of the district in Burmah, where 400,000 hogsheads are said to be collected annually.179
Sir Alexander Cochrane – brother of Lord Cochrane, 9th Earl of Dundonald, the Scottish coal tar manufacturer – while stationed in the Leeward Islands as a Royal Navy admiral, had tried to persuade the Navy to use this Trinidadian pitch for caulking its ships. ‘But,’ the geologist continued, ‘whether it has arisen from certain perverse occurrences or from the prejudice of the mechanical superintendents of the Colonial Dock Yards, or really, as some have pretended, from an absolute un tness of the substance in question, the views of the gallant admiral have I believe been invariably thwarted.’180
In 1828 Captain George Lyon, commissioner for two British mining companies operating in Mexico, published an account of his travels in the country in which he wrote of his journey up the Pánuco River from Tampico, in the southeast of the state of Tamaulipas:
Passing for some time the banks of San Pedro, we came to the Estero de Chila, another extensive rancho . . . On this estate, at about three or four miles from the river, is a large lake, from whence I understand that the petroleum which is brought in great quantities to Tampico is collected. It is here called Chapopote, and is said to bubble from the bottom of the lake and oat in great quantities on the surface. That which I saw at different times was hard and of good appearance, and was used as a varnish, or for the covering of the bottom of canoes; the general price was four reals (half a dollar) for a quintal (100 pounds).181
An 1842–3 survey of Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec, conducted by an Italian engineer for a proposed canal and rail link between the Gulf of Mexico and the Paci c, mentioned reports of petroleum at Sayultepec in the state of Oaxaca and at Moloacán in the state of Veracruz.182 The prevalence of natural oil seeps south of Moloacán was corroborated in 1844 when Dr Federico Hechler alerted the government to a possibly imminent volcanic eruption in the vicinity, from a mountain surrounded by natural salt caverns belching sulphurous fumes. ‘In my opinion the shell of the mountain is salt, and the interior consists of liquid chapopote that burns like spirits,’ he wrote.183 Forwarding this report to the
central government, the secretary of the local government of Veracruz wrote, ‘The whole terrain surrounding these natural excavations is chapopote, hardened in many places; in others, in an oily liquid state; but in such quantities that, in the hyperbole of the conveyor of this report, the world will end before this substance is exhausted.’184 The government sent two eminent founding members of the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics to investigate; they wrote,
The tar or asphalt (which is already widely used in Tlacotalpam and other points of that coast to caulk the canoes, instead of tar) is already in great use in Europe for a variety of purposes; and without doubt, it being found in the abundance described and being so easy to extract means that it can be obtained here at a low price, and can be used for roo ng, pavements, varnishes and in other no less pro table ways.185
The natural oil seeps near Moloacán were encountered during a subsequent survey of 1851–2, commissioned by the Tehuantepec Railroad Co. of New Orleans for a projected trans-isthmian rail connection. The surveying team began by way of the mouth of the Coatzacoalcos River, where in 1522 one of Hernan Cortés’ of cers had taken over the major Nahuas Aztec town of Coatzacoalcos to serve as a bridgehead in the Spanish conquest of Chiapas.186 A short distance to the south, about ten miles east of Minatitlán not far from the Uxpanapa River, the surveyors found ‘an extensive spring of petroleum, which covers an area of several acres. Of the value of this spontaneous product it is unnecessary to speak. No dif culty exists in the way of its transportation to the river; and the supply is said to be inexhaustible.’187 Residents of Macuspana, Tabasco, collaborated in 1857 to invest in a metal tank to store oil from a local spring, which they were able to sell quite widely as an illuminant.188
Meanwhile, it had been reported from Cuba in 1837 that ‘petroleum springs’ at Guanabacoa ‘have been known for centuries’, and that ‘Round a great portion of the bay of Havana, asphalt is still collected at low water, under the name of Chapapote, and is employed in the manner of tar, for paying vessels’.189
In 1850 Lord Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald and Admiral of the North American and West Indian Fleet of the Royal Navy, was patrolling the British colonies in the region. Cochrane had
pioneered the steam-powered warship after being made commander of the Chilean Navy in 1818 during its war of independence from Spain, and his family had long been involved in commercializing various products of coal tar.190 In early 1850 he wrote in his diary that his patrol ship
returned through the Dragon’s Mouth, shaping our course for the great natural curiosity of Trinidad, the Pitch Lake, which I hoped might be rendered useful for fuel in our steam-ships – so important in the event of war – as fuel is only obtained at present from Europe. The United States and Nova Scotia are never resorted to; hence, could this pitch be rendered applicable as fuel, our vessels would be supplied when an enemy would be almost deprived of the use of steam in these seas.191
The following year Cochrane acquired a twenty-year lease on land at La Brea that included twenty-six acres of Pitch Lake. He consulted with the pioneering Canadian ‘coal-oil’ chemist Abraham Gesner and appointed a German immigrant to Trinidad, Conrad Stollmeyer, to commercialize his asphalt concession.192 Trinidad’s sugar re neries and the region’s steamships burned imported British coal which, Cochrane and Stollmeyer hoped, the island’s much cheaper asphalt might replace, or at least augment. This was already being practised in a crude manner nearby, according to an American scientist travelling the region in search of mining opportunities: ‘It has been employed to advantage as fuel by the American steamers plying on the Orinoco. It is thrown in the furnaces among the wood, fusing too readily to be used alone.’ He continued,
With ten per cent of rosin oil it forms an excellent pitch for vessels.
The Earl . . . has instituted various experiments with the view of substituting the bitumen for India rubber and Gutta percha in the manufacture of water proof [sic] fabrics, covering of telegraph wires, &c. Judging from the specimens . . . which were shown me by his agent at Port au Spain (Mr. C.F. Stollmeyer), these efforts bid fair to be quite successful.
It seems only necessary that the required amount of intelligent enterprise should be directed to the subject in order to render this wonderful reservoir of bitumen a source of great individual pro t and of essential service to mankind.193
In 1853 Stollmeyer wrote several articles for the weekly Trinidadian, of which he was the editor, promoting a new economic miracle based around Pitch Lake, and praising Lord Cochrane for ‘the establishment of this new branch of industry [that] will become the most important event in the history of our island’. He envisaged the ‘thousands and thousands who will be employed in the different manufactures to which our mineral treasure is susceptible’, and he suggested a scheme for settling freed slaves from the United States in Trinidad, giving them ‘a home . . . where in a short time they may be able by their industry, and assisted by the productiveness of our soil, to acquire a position for themselves’. Ultimately, Stollmeyer asked his readers, ‘May we not then cherish the hope that from this accumulation of wealth a radical change will take place throughout the civilized world towards the amelioration of suffering humanity . . . ?’194
In March 1856 Lord Cochrane’s son Arthur, a Royal Navy captain, issued a prospectus in London for the Trinidad Bituminous Fuel Co. on the basis of trials, in collaboration with an engineer sent by the Admiralty, with the steamer Lady of the Lake in which, it was claimed, a boiler could effectively burn equal proportions of coal and blocks of pitch mixed with wood shavings.195 However, nothing seems to have come of this enterprise, nor of the Merrimac Oil Co. from the United States that, according to some reports, may have sunk a well near Pitch Lake in 1857 and struck oil. However, a few small companies such as the informally organized Trinidad Petroleum Co. began exporting small amounts of asphalt to the US and France.196 Stollmeyer, writing to Lord Cochrane, entertained hopes that a Boston coal-oil manufacturer might purchase Trinidadian pitch as a raw material and that ‘the in uence of Americans and their ways would soon change La Brea into a second Newcastle’.197
North America
There is archaeological evidence of bitumen being put to use from about 8,000 years ago, during the Early Holocene period, on the Californian coastal region of what would become the United States.198 The rst European reports of petroleum came from the Hernando de
Soto expedition in 1543 when, forced ashore by the weather onto the coast of Texas near Sabine Pass, they found oil oating on the sea and used it for caulking their boats.199 Contemporaneous archaeological nds indicate that the Chumash Indians of southern California were processing bitumen before putting it to a number of uses, including waterproo ng water containers – and it has been speculated that this may have had a negative impact on their health.200
Over a century later, several expeditions of French Jesuit missionaries to North America came across petroleum springs just south of the Great Lakes. In 1657, Fathers Paul Le Jeune and Jean de Quen were travelling through country inhabited by the Erie tribe, which they called the ‘Cat Nation’:
As one approaches nearer to the country of the Cats, one nds heavy and thick water, which ignites like brandy, and boils up in bubbles of ame when re is applied to it. It is, moreover, so oily, that all our Savages use it to anoint and grease their heads and their bodies . . .
In the Lakes . . . they spear [ sh] with a trident by the light of a bituminous re, which they maintain in the bows of their canoes.201
In 1670 a team of French explorers, including two Jesuit priests, were again traversing this region in order to nd strategic routes to facilitate French imperial ambitions. While they were in the vicinity of present-day Bristol, New York state, they encountered a ‘bitumen spring’ and one of the priests, René de Bréhant de Galinée, recorded,
I went with M. de la Salle under the guidance of two Indians . . . to see an extraordinary spring . . . The water is very clear, but has a bad odor . . . He put a torch in it, and immediately the water took re as brandy does, and it does not go out until rain comes. This ame is, amongst the Indians, a sign of abundance, or of scarcity when it has the opposite qualities.202
Further north, in Canada, the Hudson’s Bay Company was engaged in fur trading, and on 27 June 1715 James Knight, governor of the company’s York Factory – situated on the southern coast of Hudson Bay – made notes of that day’s meeting with a group of Chipewyan Indians: ‘Before they went I had some Discourse abt the Great River it runs into the Sea on the Back of this Country & they tell us there is
a Certain Gum or pitch that runs down the river in Such abundance that they cannot land but at certain places.’203 Four years later, a Cree Indian brought to the new governor, Henry Kelsey, a sample ‘of that Gum or pitch that ows out of the Banks of the River’, which was almost certainly the Athabasca River in present-day Alberta.204
During the mid-eighteenth century the French extended their presence northwards up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers and southwards from Lake Erie, while the British simultaneously expanded westwards from the East Coast. Consequently, the Ohio Valley and the region south of the Great Lakes was becoming a region of geopolitical collision. In 1720–2 a French Jesuit priest, Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, was sent to explore North America on behalf of the French Crown, and while he was in the area around the Allegheny River he spent some time with Captain Louis Thomas de Joncaire, who was, also in the name of France, operating a trading post in Seneca (Onödowá’ga:’) Indian country. At a place called Ganos (present-day Cuba, New York state), Charlevoix wrote that this ‘Of cer worthy of Credit . . . assured me that he had seen a Fountain, the Water of which is like Oil, and has the Taste of Iron. He said also, that a little further there is another Fountain exactly like it, and that the Savages make Use of its Water to appease all Manner of Pains.’205
In 1755 the explorer and cartographer Lewis Evans published his ground-breaking A General Map of the Middle British Colonies, in America, which was reproduced in many editions – with only minor modi cations – for sixty years as a standard reference to the region. The map indicated ‘Petroleum’ in two locations over a hundred miles apart: the rst, about fty miles south of the eastern end of Lake Erie near the Allegheny River, about ten miles upriver from Fort Venango (close to modern-day Franklin, Pennsylvania), near where French Creek ows into the Allegheny; the second location, to the southeast of the rst, near the Ohio River, just upriver from modern-day Wheeling, West Virginia. The map was reproduced to accompany, for example, the 1771 English edition of Travels into North America by the Swedish-Finnish explorer Peter (Pehr) Kalm.206
David Zeisberger, a Moravian missionary, gave the rst substantial account of the oil springs of the Allegheny River region in his journal of a trip there in 1767–8:
Of oil wells I have seen three kinds, (1) wells that have an outlet; (2) wells that have no outlet, but are stagnant pools; (3) wells in creeks and even in the Ohio at two different points, one hundred and fty miles from one another.
In the wells which have an outlet, oil and water together exude from the earth and where these ow grass and soil become oily. When there is no means of discharge one sees nothing more than oil welling up, which, if none has been taken off for some time, oats an inch or more in depth on the water. In the creeks it is possible to see some of the places where the oil ows, others not, for often the current carries the oil with it at such rate that you see the oil over all the surface of the water . . . Such places are usually revealed by the strong odor. Even though the water of a river keeps carrying away the oil, one may smell it at a distance of a quarter of a mile from the well. The soil near an oil well is poor, either a cold, clayey ground, or if it is near a creek, a poor quality of sand at the top. Neither good grass or wood will grow nearby, hardly anything more than a few stunted oak trees. If the Indians wish to collect oil, which they prefer to do where the well has no discharge, as it is there most easily secured, they rst throw away the old oil oating on top, as it has a stronger odor than that which wells up fresh from the earth . . . [T]hey scoop it into kettles, and, as it is impossible to avoid getting some water, boil it and preserve it for use. They use it as a medicine in all sorts of cases for external application, thus for tooth-ache, head-ache, swelling, rheumatism, strained joints. Some also take it internally and it appears to have hurt no one in this way . . . It is brownish in color and may be used in lamps, for it burns well.207
A fellow missionary reported that ‘One of the most favorite medicines used by the Indians is the Fossil oil (petrolium) exuding from the earth . . . Many [oil springs] have been found both in the country of the Delawares and the Iroquois . . . The Indians sometimes sell it to the white people at four guineas a quart.’208
In 1768 the Spanish Crown sent several expeditions of troops and Franciscan missionaries to Alta California (modern-day California) in order to consolidate Spain’s long-standing claims to the region against the possible encroachments of other European powers. In the initial expedition, under Gaspar de Portolá, Father Juan Crespí was a
member of the rst group of Europeans to reach San Francisco Bay. Crespí recorded in his compendious diary a number of natural petroleum seeps along the Californian coast, inhabited by indigenous peoples such as the Chumash and Tongva. In August 1769 he wrote, from a location near present-day Los Angeles City Hall,
Our Captain and the scouts . . . came upon volcanoes of pitch coming out of the ground like springs of water. It boils up molten and the water runs off one way and the pitch another. They reported having come across a great many of these springs and seeing very large swamplands of it, enough they said to have caulked many ships with . . . We christened them los volcanes de brea de la Porciúncula, the pitch volcanoes of the Porciuncula.209
Crespí thought these ‘pitch volcanoes’ to be the cause of the earthquakes they frequently experienced.210 Two weeks later, just before passing by a village at the location of present-day Carpinteria, he recorded, ‘We saw, . . . at a small ravine about a dozen paces from the sea, springs of pitch that had become solidi ed, half smoking.’211 By early September they had reached present-day Pismo Beach – ‘pismu’ being a native word for bitumen – near which ‘one comes upon a middling-sized, very swelling knoll some two hundred yards long that consists entirely of tar springs issuing molten out of the ground’.212 They saw bitumen further along the coast at present-day El Capitán Beach, ‘with the rocks in some spots as black and tarry as though large amounts of the tar had been poured over them’.213
A commander on the expedition, Lieutenant Pedro Fages, diverted from ghting Seri Indian resistance in Sonora to join the Portolá explorers, would soon become governor of Alta California. He recorded how the local Chumash Indians used liquid bitumen from seeps further inland to waterproof their plank boats, or tomol, and seal their water containers:
[A]t a distance of two leagues from [the San Luis Obispo] mission there are as many as eight springs of a bitumen of thick black resin which they call chapopote ; it is used chie y by these natives for calking their small water-craft, and to pitch the vases and pitchers which the women make for holding water.214
Meanwhile, on the Atlantic coast a secessionist movement was afoot. George Washington and other men of wealth were challenging Britain’s policy of limiting land claims beyond the Appalachian mountain range, designed to avoid provoking further con ict with native Americans. Washington was hoping to secure more land beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains in southern Ohio Country, and in 1774 – in one of a series of provocative acts that would lead to war with the local Shawnee and Cherokee Indians – his surveying team was working on a tract near Elk River, seven miles above where it meets the Kanawha River, near present-day Charleston, West Virginia. A member of the surveying party, Thomas Hanson, made note there of a gas spring:
[T]he Burning Springs . . . is one of the wonders of the world. Put a blaze of pine within 3 or 4 inches of the water and immediately the water will be in ames and continues so until it is put out by the force of the wind. The springs are small and boil continually like a pot on the re; the water is black and has a taste of nitre.215
At the end of the American Revolution, in 1783 Benjamin Lincoln, one of Washington’s most valued generals and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, gave an account of the oil and gas seeps of the war-torn regions of Pennsylvania and Virginia:
In the northern parts of Pennsylvania, there is a creek, called Oil-Creek, which empties itself into the Alleghana-river, issuing from a spring, on the top of which oates an oil, similar to what is called Barbadoes tar, and from which may be collected, by one man, several gallons in a day. The troops, in marching that way, halted at the spring, collected the oil, and bathed their joints with it. This gave them great relief, and freed them immediately from the rheumatic complaints with which many of them were affected. The troops drank freely of the waters: they operated as a gentle purge.
There is another spring in the western parts of Virginia, as extraordinary in its kind as the one just mentioned, called the Burning-Spring. It was known a long time to the hunters . . . Some of them arrived late one night, and, after making a re, they took a brand to light them to the spring. On their coming to it, some re dropped from the brand, and, in an instant the water was in a ame, and so continued, over which they could roast
their meat as soon as by the greatest re. It was left in this situation, and continued burning for three months without intermission. The re was extinguished by excluding the air from it, or smothering it. The water taken from it into a vessel will not burn. This shews, that the re is occasioned by nothing more than a vapour that ascends from the waters . . . These accounts I have from the best authority. General Washington, from whom I had my information, as well as from others, owns the land around the Burning-Spring, which he bought for the sake of it.216
Some years after the Revolution, in 1787, Thomas Jefferson described this spring, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, as a hole in the earth of the capacity of 30 or 40 gallons, from which issues constantly a gaseous stream so strong as to give to the sand about its ori ce the motion which it has in a boiling spring. On presenting a lighted candle or torch within 18 inches of the hole, it ames up in a column of 18 inches diameter, and four or ve feet height, which sometimes burns out within 20 minutes, and at other times has been known to continue three days, and then has been left still burning. The ame is unsteady, of the density of that of burning spirits, and smells like burning pit coal. Water sometimes collects in the bason, which is remarkably cold, and is kept in ebullition by the gas escaping through it. If the gas be red in that state, the water soon becomes so warm that the hand cannot bear it, and evaporates wholly in a short time. This gaseous uid is probably in ammable air, the hydrogene of the new chemistry, which we know will kindle on mixing with the oxygenous portion of the atmospheric air, and the application of ame . . . The circumjacent lands are the property of General Washington and of General Lewis. There is a similar one on Sandy River, the ame of which is a column of about 12 inches diameter, and 3 feet high. General Clarke, who informs me of it, kindled the vapor, staid about an hour, and left it burning.217
When making provision for his land in his will of 9 July 1799, Washington wrote that this tract ‘was taken up by General Andrew Lewis and myself, for and on account of a bituminous spring which it contains, of so in ammable a nature as to burn as freely as spirits, and is nearly as dif cult to extinguish’.218
In a map included in his London edition of Notes on the State of
Virginia, Jefferson also followed the tradition of the popular Evans map of 1755 by indicating ‘Petroleum’ just upriver from Venango, near the Allegheny River in northern Ohio Country (see Fig. 1).219
Meanwhile, from 1778 fur trader Peter Pond began exploring the Athabasca Lake region – straddling the present-day Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan – a borderland between Cree and Chipewyan Indians, and in 1785 he presented a map of the area to the US Congress. To note number 20 on the map, immediately to the west of the ‘Arabosca River’, the accompanying text stated, ‘Along the banks of this river one nds Springs of Bitumen that ows on the ground.’220 Five years later, the Hudson’s Bay Company sent an expedition to the area where a team member, Peter Fidler, recorded, ‘Found great quantities of Bitumen a Kind of liquid tar oosing out of the Banks on both sides of the river, in many places which has a very sulphurous smell & quite black like real Tar, & in my opinion would be a very good substitute for that useful Mineral . . .’221
Between 1788 and 1793 Alexander Mackenzie explored Canada for the North West Company, another fur-trading enterprise. To the south of the ‘Lake of the Hills’ (Athabasca Lake) there was a fork where the ‘Pelican River’ (Clearwater River) met ‘Elk River’ (Athabasca River). Mackenzie recorded,
At about twenty-four miles from the Fork, are some bitumenous fountains, into which a pole of twenty feet long may be inserted without the least resistance. The bitumen is in a uid state, and when mixed with gum, or the resinous substance collected from the spruce r, serves to gum the canoes. In its heated state it emits a smell like that of sea-coal. The banks of the river, which are there very elevated, discover veins of the same bitumenous quality.222
In 1793 the rst Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada (Ontario), Lieutenant-Colonel John Graves Simcoe of the British Army, led an expedition from Niagara to Detroit via the southwestern tip of Ontario just north of Lake Erie to reconnoitre strategic areas along the Thames River for settlement by British immigrants and Loyalists who had fought on Britain’s side since the American Revolution. As they followed the river’s route southwest of London, they passed some Chippewa/Ojibwe Indian hunting parties and encampments
between Muncey and Moraviantown, and a member of Simcoe’s team wrote that here ‘the Indians discovered a spring of an oily nature, which upon examination proved to be a kind of petroleum’.223
In the same year, Captain George Vancouver was commanding a Royal Navy expedition sent to assert British fur-trading interests at Nootka Sound off the coast of Canada against Spanish claims. Sailing through the Santa Barbara Channel off the Californian coast he recorded the presence of oil, emanating from natural seabed oil seeps:
The surface of the sea, which was perfectly smooth and tranquil, was covered with a thick slimy substance, which when separated, or disturbed by any little agitation, became very luminous, whilst the light breeze that came principally from the shore, brought with it a very strong smell of burning tar, or of some such resinous substance. The next morning the sea had the appearance of dissolved tar oating upon its surface, which covered the ocean in all directions within the limits of our view.224
In Virginia in 1804 a newspaper reported on the imminent construction of a road from ‘Gennessee [Gennesee] country’ in New York state to Pittsburgh, and one consequence, it argued, would be easier access to the oil spring located in the former territory of the Seneca Indians – who had, until recently, occupied the region from central New York state to northwestern Pennsylvania:
Not far from the source of the principal fork of the Olean, is the Oil Spring, which produces the Seneca Oil; so esteemed by the Indians, that, in the sale of their territory, they reserved a square mile to include the spring. Dif culty of access to this spring, has hitherto opposed a scienti c examination of all its qualities. This obstacle will, in a great degree, be removed: the road from Gennessee and Angelica passing near the spring. Hence forward, the curious may indulge their laudable disposition for research, and perhaps by the result, confer a bene t on society.225
The following year, a Harvard librarian and author published an account of his travels west of the Allegheny Mountains in which he reported on the oil found near Pittsburgh:
The Seneca Indian Oil in so much repute here is Petroleum ; a liquid bitumen, which oozes through ssures of the rocks and coal in the mountains, and is found oating on the surface of the waters of several springs in this part of the country, whence it is skimmed off, and kept for use. From a strong vapour which arises from it when rst collected, it appears to combine with it sulphureous particles. It is very in ammable. In these parts it is used as a medicine; and, probably, in external applications with considerable success. For chilblains and rheumatism it is considered as an infallible speci c. I suppose it to be the bitumen which Pliny describes under the name of Naptha.226
An Irish writer travelling along the Ohio River in 1806 found that
Not far from Pittsburg is a well which has its surface covered with a bituminous matter resembling oil; and which the neighbouring inhabitants collect, and use in ointments and other medicinal preparations. The vapour rising from this well is in ammable . . . The medical men of Pittsburg profess to have analyzed this oil; and to have discovered in it a variety of virtues, if applied according to their advice.
Further downriver near Georgetown, he wrote, ‘a few yards from the shore, a spring rises from the bottom of the river, which produces an oil nearly similar to Seneca oil’. The town’s postmaster told him that ‘the well was much frequented by the Indians previously to their retreat to the back countries, and that the neighbouring whites used the oil as a friction when suffering with rheumatism, and as an unction when af icted with sores’.227
In 1809 another traveller passing the same spot wrote that ‘the virtues of the Seneca oil are similar to those of the British oil ’, referring to the medicinal Betton’s British Oil of the day, sourced from Shropshire, England: ‘Large quantities [are] collected on Oil Creek, a branch of the Allegheny River, and sold at from one dollar and a half to two dollars per gallon . . . [T]wenty or thirty gallons of pure oil can be obtained in two or three days by one man.’228 Indeed, Tobias Hirte of Philadelphia had been advertising and selling Seneca Oil as a cure-all, an early American ‘snake oil’, since at least 1792.229 It was from around this time that some Seneca Indians and settlers near Oil Creek began
to take the oil on horseback seventy- ve miles down to Pittsburgh, presumably then a cheaper round trip for an individual than by river.230
In the early nineteenth century, as Europeans settled west of the Allegheny Mountains in increasing numbers – many sending lumber, and later pig iron, downriver to Pittsburgh – they began to exploit the salt deposits of the headwaters of the Ohio River, eventually introducing well-boring techniques to drill brine wells. In 1808, near the mouth of Campbells Creek, a tributary of the Kanawha River in western Virginia, the brothers David and Joseph Ruffner drilled the rst successful brine well in the region, setting off a salt-drilling boom. The drilling was at rst powered by hand, but soon equipment was adopted that harnessed horse power for the work. Inconveniently, however, the drillers frequently struck gas or oil; a subsequent account described how,
In many wells, salt water and in ammable gas rise in company with a steady uniform ow. In others, the gas rises at intervals of ten or twelve hours, or perhaps as many days, in vast quantity and with overwhelming force, throwing the water from the well to the height of fty, or a hundred feet in the air, and again retiring within the bowels of the earth to acquire fresh power for a new effort. This phenomenon is called ‘blowing,’ and is very troublesome and vexatious to the manufacturer. The explosion is sometimes so powerful as to cause the copper tube which lines the upper part of the well to collapse, and to entirely misplace and derange the xtures about it. By constant use this dif culty is sometimes overcome, by the exhaustion of the gas, and in others the well has been abandoned as hopeless of amendment. A well on the Muskingum, ten miles above McConnelsville, at six hundred feet in depth, afforded such an immense quantity of gas, and in such a constant stream, that while they were digging, it several times took re, from the friction of the iron on the poles against the sides of the well, or from scintillations from the auger; driving the workmen away, and communicating the ame to the shed which covered the works. It spread itself along the surface of the earth, and ignited other combustible bodies at the distance of several rods. It became so troublesome and dif cult to extinguish, when once ignited, being in this respect a little like the ‘Greek re’.231
Of the many salt wells in the region that struck oil, one drilled in 1814 near Duck Creek, north of Marietta, Ohio, furnishes the greatest quantity of any in this region . . . The oil from this well is discharged periodically, at intervals of from two to four days, and from three to six hours duration at each period. Great quantities of gas accompany the discharges of oil, which for the rst few years, amounted to from thirty to sixty gallons at each eruption. The discharges at this time are less frequent, and diminished in amount, affording only about a barrel per week, which is worth at the well from fty to seventy- ve cents a gallon. A few years ago, when the oil was most abundant, a large quantity had been collected in a cistern holding thirty or forty barrels. At night, someone engaged about the works approached the well-head with a lighted candle. The gas instantly became ignited, and communicated the ame to the contents of the cistern, which giving way, suffered the oil to be discharged down a short declivity into the creek, whose waters pass with a rapid current close to the well. The oil still continued to burn most furiously; and spreading itself along the surface of the stream for half a mile in extent, shot its ames to the tops of the highest trees, exhibiting the novel, and perhaps never before witnessed spectacle of a river actually on re.232
DeWitt Clinton, future governor of New York state, delivered a lecture that year in which he mentioned how petroleum from Amiano was used for street lighting in Italy; and, he speculated, ‘It might be of considerable consequence to discover whether the petroleum of our springs might not be used for like bene cial purposes.’233 Newspapers reported in 1818 that a well sunk in Medina County, Ohio, twenty miles from Cleveland, was producing ‘from 5 to 10 gallons of Seneca oil per day’,234 while a salt well drilled near the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River in Kentucky, a few miles south of Rock Creek, encountered oil, which over owed into the river. The drillers decided to convey barrels of the oil downriver in order to sell it as a medicinal product, but after they twice lost their cargo in the rapids at Devil’s Jump, they took an overland route instead. Oil from the well continued to pollute the river for several years and some local women, who sold feathers from geese living on the river for use as down, took the drillers to court for damages.235
Comments made by Dr S.P. Hildreth in 1819 – though only
published in 1826 – extended Clinton’s speculation to this frequent by-product of the salt wells of Ohio. One such well in Washington County near Little Muskingum Creek, twelve miles from Dr Hildreth’s home town of Marietta,
discharges such vast quantities of petroleum, or, as it is vulgarly called ‘Seneka oil ’ . . . is subject to such tremendous explosions of gas, as to force out all the water, and afford nothing but gas for several days, that they make but little or no salt. Nevertheless, the petroleum affords considerable pro t, and is beginning to be in demand for lamps, in workshops and manufactories. It affords a clear brisk light, when burnt in this way, and will be a valuable article for lighting the street lamps in the future cities of Ohio.236
In 1820 Reverend Timothy Alden, the recent founder of Allegheny College at Meadville, reported that
On the ats of Oil Creek, twenty-eight miles southeasterly from Meadville, many long pits have been dug several feet deep, from the bottom of which the Seneca oil, or petrolium, oozes and oats on the surface of the water, with which they are partially lled . . . By extending the operation, this oil, called by the Senecas, au nūs ΄, might be collected so as to become a pro table article of commerce. Fifteen barrels were once taken, in one season from a single pit. It was formerly sold at two dollars a gallon. The common price is now one dollar fty cents . . . It burns well in lamps, and might be advantageously used in lighting streets. If, by some process, it could be rendered inodorous, it would become an important article for domestick illumination.237
Meanwhile, in 1819 a Royal Navy expedition, led by Captain John Franklin, was again hoping to discover and map a Northwest Passage through Canada. They revisited the region south of Athabasca Lake, near modern-day Fort McMurray, and on the map included in his account of the expedition Franklin labelled the area as containing ‘Petroleum & Slaggy mineral pitch’. The surgeon accompanying Franklin’s expedition saw
a peaty bog whose crevices are lled with petroleum. This mineral exists in great abundance in this district. We never observed it owing
