Pirate’s Booty Corrects a Myth About West African GoldCenturies-old European tales about Gold Coast traders adulterating precious metals hundreds of years ago are challenged by the famous Whydah Gally shipwreck.[Introductory paragraphs] Sometimes all that glitters is, in fact, real gold. But it would have been difficult to sell that idea to the many European traders who journeyed along the coast of West Africa during the age of exploration.As their vessels plied what was known as the Gold Coast, records of the era show that the English, Dutch, Swedish and other Europeans often viewed their trading partners with suspicion. There was a longstanding belief that people in that part of Africa were intentionally mixing their gold with lesser metals like silver or copper, or even with bits of glass.“It’s a recurring theme that they’re stretching the gold,” said Tobias Skowronek, a geochemist who studies archaeology at the University of Bonn in Germany.But a recent study of artifacts recovered from the wreck of a pirate ship suggests that the West African traders were not passing off adulterated gold....[Deep down at paragraph 15] The researchers found that the 27 artifacts ranged from 70 to 100 percent gold by weight.When an artifact wasn’t pure gold, the most common metals present were silver, copper, iron and lead.While it’s true that some objects were far from pure gold, these results don’t imply that West African traders were being deceitful, the team concluded.
So, in other words, the European traders were precisely right all along. The study only concludes that the admixture was probably due to a lack of skill in separating the ores, which occur together naturally in that part of Africa.