In 1679, at the Sillida mines on the west coast of Sumatra, a European miner was reckoning with his disappointments with the deep underground.[1] “I see a great difference between the mines here and those in Europe. From the work I have done with lead and copper: the deeper one goes, the better and thicker the veins are. But here the deeper the worse,” he wrote.[2] Employed by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to oversee its mining operations in Sumatra, the head miner’s frustration reveals how early modern European resource extraction was conceived and practiced to prioritize depth—one rooted in the mining cultures of Central Europe—and how it faltered in Sumatra’s unfamiliar terrains.
Depth, then and now, carries powerful associations: richer deposits, economic promise, technological mastery, and often the projection of European or western expertise. Scholars have pointed out how such “vertical consciousness,” embedded in and shaped by early mining industries, became a generative framework for modern science and an operative mode of colonial resource extraction.[3] Privileging depth, however, frequently came with the sidelining of surface-level, locally grounded knowledge as “shallow” or inferior.
When Europeans arrived in the Indonesian archipelago in the sixteenth century, they sought valuable commodities and resources, such as pepper and precious metals. Portuguese and Dutch accounts romanticized Sumatra as a land rich in gold.[4] In the second half of the seventeenth century, the VOC initiated an intensive mining venture in Sillida. Lacking mining expertise in the Netherlands, the Company recruited skilled miners mostly from German-speaking lands, while procuring enslaved laborers, primarily from Madagascar, to meet mining’s physical demands in this tropical environment.[5]
Mining in early modern Central Europe was mostly operated and imagined along a vertical axis. Contemporary depictions of mines frequently featured cross-sections, showing the magnificent shafts plunging into the earth, enabled by cutting-edge machinery and upheld as testaments to technological innovation and good governance. The subterranean realm was celebrated as a “new world” and a treasure trove, creating new spaces and possibilities for growth.[6]
But imposing such spatial logic onto the mining sites in western Sumatra did not always yield the anticipated returns. Rich with epithermal gold deposits, the island’s geological conditions required different means of extracting and processing minerals. Due to volcanic activities, in the deeper earth that the European practitioners were exploring, veins tended to be scattered, rocks harder, and the qualities of the ores varied greatly.[7]
The VOC’s large-scale and capital-intensive shaft mining operations differed significantly from the long-standing, small-scale gold-harvesting practices of the local Minangkabau communities that fit with the agricultural cycles.[8] Instead of excavating deep into the earth, the Minangkabau mostly practiced placer mining, a method of separating precious metals from alluvial sediments deposited by streams and rivers. As one mining inspector of the VOC at Sillida noted, “the further one proceeds down in the mine, (I confess against the common experience), the more variable and poorer the ores are … only God knows when one will encounter the regular vein again.”[9] Yet “gold here more often occurs as small grains and pieces in the rivers, sometimes from high in the mountains, carried down by the streams … and the locals are used to panning the gold out.”[10] In 1684, a member of the Dutch envoy travelling to the Minangkabau court similarly recorded that alluvial gold could be obtained easily, with local people using shallow wooden troughs that they floated or dipped into streams, and then swirled the water to separate gold from soil.[11]
The Minangkabau had been mining and trading gold in the Malay world for centuries before the arrival of the Europeans in Sumatra. Rulers in other parts of the archipelago also relied on the Minangkabau brought from Sumatra to prospect for gold in their territories.[12] Drawing on embodied forms of knowledge of nature, mixed with ritual and belief, they identified promising deposits by looking for the presence of particular plants, observing colors of earth, or listening to sounds of flowing water.[13]
While placer mining was noted around the world by Dutch commentators, it was perceived as distinctly non-Central European: an artisanal technique contrasted with the systematic, equipment-heavy shaft mining believed to offer greater consistency and more profitable returns. The portrayal of Indigenous communities engaged in gold panning also became a visual trope in European depictions of the New World and other lands.[14] In many contemporary accounts of the environment and mining practices around the world, such as passages from the Dutch writer Olfert Dapper (1636 –1689)’s Description of Africa (1668), gold recovered from rivers suggested untapped wealth or missed opportunities. They indicated rich mineral deposits in the surrounding areas, which lured European explorers. But the reliance of Indigenous communities on alluvial methods was usually framed as their lack of experience or expertise to undertake “proper” underground mining.[15]
Throughout the seventeenth century, Dutch trading companies searched eagerly for gold in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, often employing German mining experts.[16] Many of these ventures failed due to a combination of factors, such as labor shortages, high mortality rates, excessive costs, political instability, and unfamiliarity with the landscape—including the Sillida operation, which was paused several times and eventually abandoned in the 1730s. Nonetheless, poor yields were routinely blamed on the failure to dig deep enough.[17] Though Europeans increasingly sought to comprehend global geological variations and adapt their mining practices, the myth of subterranean abundance and the belief that European technology and capability could access hidden riches often endured in these early modern mining attempts.
The discourse surrounding depth persisted into colonial mining in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Robyn d’Avignon has shown in the context of West Africa, depth was employed as a defining category by colonial authorities to create a vertical segregation of claims to knowledge and mineral wealth. Their hierarchy devalued orpaillage, or artisanal mining practices that explore near-surface deposits, and distinguished Indigenous techniques from European industrial extraction of lode ores buried deep in the earth. Yet this very distinction was later reclaimed by the orpailleur to assert their surface knowledge and entitlement to mineral rights.[18]
Invocations of depth have long served to justify the extraction of value, the appropriation of territory, and the assertion of scientific authority in European’s search for mineral wealth globally. The spatial logic has often worked to enclose not just land and resources but also systems of knowledge, marginalizing alternative ways of knowing and working with the natural world. The challenges faced by the VOC miners in finding gold call into question the entrenched binaries between surface and underground, artisanal and industrial.
[1] The area is also known as Salido, Salida, or Sallida.
[2] F. de Haan (ed.), Dagh-register gehouden int Casteel Batavia … anno 1679 (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij & ’s Hage:Martinus Nijhoff, 1909), 590.
[3] Patrick Anthony, “Mining as the Working World of Alexander von Humboldt’s Plant Geography and Vertical Cartography,” Isis 109, no. 1 (2018): 28–55.
[4] Mary Somers Heidhues, “Johann Wilhelm Vogel and the Sumatran Gold Mines: One Man’s Fortune,” Archipel 71 (2006): 221–222.
[5] Denys Lombard, “Un ‘expert’ saxon dans les mines d’or de Sumatra au XVIIème s.,” Archipel 2 (1971): 234, 237.
[6] Andreas Friedolin Lingg, “Creating Space: Capitalism, Mining, and the Evolution of Central European Economic Thought,” History of Political Economy 55, no. 4 (2023): 715–53.
[7] Patricia Rueb, “Une mine d’or à Sumatra. Technologie saxonne et méthodes indigènes au XVIIe siècle,” Archipel 41 (1991): 24.
[8] Christine Dobbin, Islamic Revivalism in a Changing Peasant Economy: Central Sumatra, 1784-1847 (Curzon Press, 1983), 27.
[9] National Archives of The Netherlands, NL-HaNA 1.04.02, Inv. Nr. 1350, fol. 1562.
[10] National Archives of The Netherlands, NL-HaNA 1.04.02, Inv. Nr. 1350, fol. 1507.
[11] Timothy Y. Barnard, “Thomas Dias’ Journey to Central Sumatra in 1684,” in Harta Karun: Hidden Treasures on Indonesian and Asian-European History from the VOC Archives in Jakarta, document 1 (Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, 2013), 30 (accessed April 30, 2025).
[12] Leonard Y. Andaya, Leaves of the Same Tree: Trade and Ethnicity in the Straits of Melaka (University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 95.
[13] Rusli Amran, Sumatra Barat hingga Plakat Panjang (Sinar Harapan, 1981), 224.
[14] Sunghoon Lee, “Oro en el río: Placer Mining, Abundance, and Sustainability in Early Modern Art and Thought,” Oxford Art Journal 46 (2023): 23–28.
[15] Olfert Dapper, Naukeurige beschrijvinge der Afrikaensche gewesten (1668), 466-468.
[16] Wim Klooster, The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Cornell University Press, 2016), 148–152.
[17] An example is the mining venture in Ceará by the Dutch West India Company. See Rita Krommen, Mathias Beck und die Westindische Kompagnie: Zur Herrschaft der Niederländer im kolonialen Ceará (Universität zu Köln, 2001), 105–107, 126.
[18] Robyn d’Avignon, A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa (Duke University Press, 2022), 89-91, 154–155, 164–166.
*Cover Image: An illustration depicting the Sillida gold mines in Sumatra. In Elias Hesse et al., translated by Simon de Vries, Drie seer aenmercklijcke reysen nae en door veelerley gewesten in Oost-Indien (1694). Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
[Cover Image Description: Mine shafts and workers in the mountains of Sumatra.]
Edited by Nina Foster; reviewed by Evelyn Ramiel