Basic facts bearing on Philippine gold mining

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Part of The American Chamber of Commerce Journal

Title: Basic facts bearing on Philippine gold mining
Language: English
Source: The American Chamber of Commerce Journal Volume XIII (No. 10) October 1933
Year: 1933
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Fulltext: 6 THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL October, 1933 Basic Facts Bearing on Philippine Gold Mining The definitely known mineralized belt extends north-south from the Pacific to the Celebes sea —richest sections little explored There is a good deal of curiosity in men’s minds as to why it is, if there is much gold in the Philippines, great gold-mining development has not occurred in the past; and why the boom comes now, delayed 33 years after the American occupation of the islands. The second of these natural queries is readily satisfied. The records amply substantiate what will be said. It is this: Campaigning in the Philippines, American soldiers found many evidences of gold deposits and rich placers. These soldiers were without funds, practically speaking—had no way of following up their discoveries. Those who found no lure in the hills, who settled down to trade in Manila and did well enough in that without being tempted to chase rainbows, needed their gains to expand their business. Few of these men could be induced to stake prospectors or to put money into gold schemes. Some projects were financed that did not pan out, this dis couraged the whole industry; and dredg ing was tried where proper mining would have been more the thing to do, as mining is now about to open up on the old Paracale dredge workings. Pros pectors who knew their claims were va luable often held them as long as they could, many dying of exposure, hardship and malaria from living on their claims in the vain hope .of finding financial backers to develop them. But some, as some at Baguio, stuck it out suc cessfully until the Benguet Consolidated and ltogon mines began making money and public interest in mining ventures began asserting itself. In this desperate way the old Acupan claims, now the Balatok mine, were held; and Tom Phillips, one of the original stakers of these claims, actually registered them on the last day he had in which to do so. He lives, though in bad health, to tell the story. Phillips came here with a dredging outfit from Australia. The first mine adequately financed and persistently de veloped was the Benguet Consolidated. As it is only now that the true re sources and real worth of this great mine are coming to be known, so it is only now that interest in mining has become general; and this inclination to venture in mining is enhanced by the depression that has knocked profit out of other en terprises. There has also, in 30 years, been much improvement of mining ma chinery and methods of making lowgrade ores pay for the milling of them, and adaptation of the diesel engine to needs of mines for power. Finally, gold regions have been made more acces sible by roads and trails; hardships of getting to them and camping in them are greatly lessened. The airplane helps too, and one mine 35 kilometers in the Compact Mineral Testing Kit Magnifying glass; knife with magnetized blade; gold pan, or copper vessel, probably only procurable in Manila—substitutes of hardwood are .made by native placer miners with a device for catching the smaller gold particles; steel mortar and pestle; blow pipe; candle; charcoal block; matchstick with short length of thin platinum wire twisted to one end;.cheesecloth screen on wire hoop, for sifting; glass test tubes; set of 50 mineral specimens, that is, pieces of gold ore, iron and other mineral rock aiding in identifying samples taken from prospects. These pieces are not absolutely necessary, but impart knowledge of ore rock quickly. These acids, in small quantities: Nitric acid, sulphuric acid, hydrochloric acid, ammonium hydroxide, cobalt nitrate, borax, and washing or baking soda. (These are all carried in small bottles). A steel drill, a forge for sharpening it, a prospector’s pick and dynamite are also often carried by amateur and professional prospectors. The above kit is specified by Popular Mechanics, September 1933. Compare your ore with your identifying samples. To test with blowpipe reduce some of your ore to powder in tne mortar and put a pinch of it, with 3 times as much soda and char coal, in a cavity scraped in the charcoal block. At proper heat, metal and perhaps an incrustation appear in the cavity. Gold is yellow and malleable, silver white and malleable, bismuth white and brittle, lead white and malleable, antimony white and brittle. Ileat your platinum loop in the candle flame, dip in borax and reheat, dip in powdered ore and heat again, until a bead of material forms in the loop. This is the color test, gold should show yellow, orange if iron is present. Some resort to geological textbooks will give any young fellow valuable light on how he may undertake prospecting, to which interesting pastime he may well devote his holidays. FIND GOLD SET mountains is being provided with an airfield to enable the owners to get men and supplies to it. This use of the airplane in mining is followed in J'Jew Guinea. It is practical. Now for the first query. Why, if there is probability or much gold in the Philippines, was gold mining not developed long before the Americans came here? Or, what is the basis for the belief that there is much gold here? Geologists have long known of the very extensive mineralized zone in the Philippines, perhaps no less than 1,200 miles long, and in many places 10 miles wide, beginning north at a point on the Pacific ocean midway between Bangui and Claveria and running south through Davao to the Celebes sea. In a past geological age, the Philippines broke in two along this zone. This is what created the zone. Water boiling from earth’s depths gurgled up through the faults along the break, spread through them and dropped, as it cooled, the minerals it held in solution while hot. So the whole zone was mineralized. Among the minerals are iron, copper, silver, chromite, gold and at least some platinum. Thus if you find gold at Ba guio, it is not unreasonable that you find it at Ipo, Salacot, Balete, down through the Bikol peninsula, over in Masbate, Samar, and Leyte, and on into Surigao and Davao. This is a huge region and requires vast exploration before much can be known about it. Reliable mining men who have gone pretty well over the field are of the opinion, from the surface indications, that the richest portion of the whole zone is the one in Surigao and Davao, the portion that has been least explored —where gold is indeed known to exist but where no mines exist and very little placering is done. Take Masbate, for example. On the gold belt around Aroroy gulf in Masbate are 2 flourishing mines, Paniqui and IXL. Both yield low-grade ore, Paniqui Mines, Inc., having bought a few years ago the old Syndicate property. Net profit from millheads is about 1 peso a ton, and the Paniqui mines mill 250 tons a day. Ben Berkenkotter, who formerly worked for the Syndicate company, is practi cally sole owner of Paniqui Mines, Inc. Six miners together own the IXL. There seems to be no limit to the ore at the disposal of these mines, now profitable to mill because of the highly improved and economical methods that may be applied to the business. Here, then, are just 2 little bits of the poten tial goldfields of Masbate. Arthur Bridle, who has mined in Mas bate for many years and is a very prac(, Pl ease turn to page 13) October, 1933 THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL 13 Some Considerations . . . (Continued from page 5) president^of the United States) equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the state may be entitled in the con gress. . . . The electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for two persons. . . . And they shall make a list of all persons voted for and of the number of votes for each. . .. The president of the senate shall, in the presence of the senate and house oi repre sentatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted. The person having the greatest n umbel* of votes shall be the pres ident, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed. . . . After the choice of president the person having the greatest number of votes shall be the vice-president. This quotation from the constitution as to the manner in which presidents shall be chosen exposes the artificiality of the method that has become fixed practice under the system of formal political parties and their nominating conven tions. Industry being wholly reorganized, as to its administration, and formally chartered, in the United States, natural conjecture is that the conventions interposed between the people and their choice for president will be relegated to desuetude: they, the last props, will be knock ed from under the oldtime state, city and national basses with only such bland tricks in their bag as callow sectionalism and prejudices even worse. For it may not be supposed that men occupied all the time with frequent conferences actually deciding affairs of their own interest, in their own industry, in associated industries, in their state or their industrial region and at Wash ington, will possibly turn aside from all this to tolerate and share the pretenses of party con ventions and soil their hands concocting partisan platforms. No, but as in Italy, American industries, now all coming under charter and therefore amalga mating into guilds, will of course coalesce into associations representative of their common interests. Without platforms at all they will choose electors. The intention of the Founders, that the country be served in the presidency nonpartisanly, as under Roosevelt it is now served, will be realized. And where will the country be then? Why, reassure yourself, it will be back in the competent hands of its people, of its lofig forgotten men and women who have just achieved a revolution as trans cendental as if a million lives had been given in internecine conflict for it. Or, in other words, it will be where it was when John Quincy Adams, a Whig, could negotiate a treaty with England for James Madison, a Democrat (then called Republican!; and where it was when Adams, having been president (and before that, state secretary for Monroe, for whom he wrote the Monroe doctrine—just as Republicans serve Roosevelt this very day), told his neighbors who wanted to send him to congress, if he deemed it not beneath the dignity of a man who had been president, that if they wanted him to be town councilman it wouldn't be beneath his dignity to serve as a councilman, and he would do it. There is no escaping return to politics in America of this high sort, the chartering of industries is inevitably the occasion bringing back to the country such high leadership. But it is possibly objected that the new legis lation is specifically limited io 2 years’ duration. Yes. But were it not so limited, because that is the life of a congress and no congress may bind its successor, 2 centuries might as well have been specified. . in elfect, revolutionary legisla tion such as this paper tries to suggest the pur port of is never repealed. The rule everywhere verified in history is that men Mart to remodel a bit, find they have to rebuild from the ground up, end in building from foundations up. But in the I'nitcd St ites the constitution is still a substantial foundation, only artificialities of an outworn regime need be cast aside. Adjust ment, mostly, is all the president attempts; self-sustaining forthright intranationalism is all the new legislation implies; but it carries with it, of course, new and broader conceptions of self-interest for both capital and labor, and of course the means of dissolution of spurious partisanship. Summing up, it is easy to see, with new land coming into settlement all the time, then world trade expanding, how the United States gjt along awkwardly well with a loose policy of individualism; and too, for at least the pad, decade, it has been quite as easy to see that such a policy is no longer adequate or fitting. The one disturbing thought is that the coalition administration, which Roosevelt’s is, needs time in which to consolidate its position. The corner toward renewed and permanent prosperity will not be definitely turned until chartered industry has worked long enough to show it really has all the merits it presently displays. Besides, men have to find themselves under the new order of things. Values have to fix themselves. Paradoxically, the present is a period of doubt as well as of confidence. Men take up new tools, means of carrying on under the charter codes, but are unskilled to them and a bit re luctant to test them to full capacity. This dubiety affects us all, guides us in everything: in what we invest, what we save, how we con sciously hold bacK, uncertain of the future where our old familiar world has suddenly failed us, then been turned upside down. Yet the word must be,. Ou with the president. —IP. R. Bearing on Philippine Gold ... (Continued from page 6) tical miner by common repute, says there are at least 6 other regions of Masbate equally as promising for gold as the Aroroy region, by the surface indications. In other words, all the mining that has been done in Masbate has not, as Bridle expresses it, scratched CHARTERED BANK OF INADJAD•CXRALIA Capital and Reserve Fund..........................................£6,000,000 Reserve Liability of Proprietors............................... 3,000.000 MANILA BRANCH ESTABLISHED 1872 SUB-BRANCHES AT CEBU, ILOILO AND ZAMBOANGA Every description of banking business transacted. Branches in every important town throughout India, China, Japan, Java, Straits Settlements, Federated Malay States. French Indo-China, Siam, and Borneo; also in New York. Head Office: 38 Bishopsgate, London, E. C. C. E. STEWART. Manager, Berger and Gurley Engineering Instruments Mountain and Mining Transits Brunton Pocket Mine Transits Wye and Dumpy Levels Geologist Compasses Surveyor’s Pocket Compasses Abney Hand Levels Locke’s Hand Levels Chains, etc. H. E. HEACOCK CO. MANILA CEBU — ILOILO — DAVAO the surface. He says the 3 M’s, Masbate, Mindoro, Mindanao, have not even been super ficially explored for gold; and he believes, from what he knows of these islands from look ing them over with a keen miner’s eye, they will all be great gold-bearing islands in the future. The conclusion is, not much has been done in the Philippine goldfields because there has been so very much to do and so very little with which to do it—little cash and few experienced men. By the way, the supposition that the name Mindoro derives from the Spanish Mina de Oro, or Mine of Gold, is in error and may be misleading. Mindoro does not lie in the gold zone, strictly; the name is of native origin and has no reference to gold. While the metal is known to exist on Mindoro, that it is extensive there does not follow. Geologists, of course, because their explora tions have been altogether inadequate to inform them, do not know now extensive gold deposits in the major mineralized zone of the Philippines are, or just where they lie, except as mining knowledge brings this to light. Streams tell most about this, and so many streams have been explored, and have yielded gold from their sands, that it is a good bet now that gold depo sits are practically coextensive with the mineral zone itself. It is also a betting deduction that at thousands of points on this zone gold exists in ore rich enough to be profitably mined and milled by the modern methods now in use at the mines already paying dividends. This is a bold assertion. Its import is tremendous, nothing else than that the Philippines are prob ably the greatest goldfield yet discovered in the world. It stands because the practical and scientific developments are to be carefully watch ed by this journal itself, and independently judged, and on the occasion for the least modifi cation of it, that modification will be made. IN RESPONDING TO ADVERTISEMENTS PLEASE MENTION THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL