Dear Musick: I'll bet they had calluses as thick as my moccasin soles. In English mines they often had the shafts
sufficiently vertical to use a hoist, in the beginning with horses as motive power. That's why autos are rated by horsepower.(550 foot pounds per second) So the Indians were lifting
about a third of a horsepower. I figure that the mines in Chile just didn't have a vertical shaft, so a hoist couldn't be used.