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CHILE

TODAY AND TOMORROW

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS · ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

Lake Llanquihue, South Chile.

CHILE
TODAY AND TOMORROW

BY

L. E. ELLIOTT

AUTHOR OF “BRAZIL: TODAY AND TOMORROW,” “BLACK GOLD,” ETC.

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1922

All rights reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Copyright, 1922,

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Set up and printed. Published October, 1922.

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company

New York

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHILE

TODAY AND TOMORROW

CHAPTER I

Physical Characteristics.—North, South, and Central Chile.—Brilliant Hues.—Climate.—Wet and Dry Seasons.—Social Problems.—Far-flung Cities.—Formation of Character.—Animals and Plants.

Chile is a ribbon of a country, an emerald and gold strip stretched between the snow-crowned wall of the Andes and the blue waters of the Pacific.

This ribbon is up-tilted all along its western edge to form the coastal range defending the long central valley. It is lightly creased transversely where, from east to west, streams fed with snow-water drain down from the Andean peaks. Below the fortieth degree of south latitude the ribbon is twisted and ragged, with the tilted edge half sunk in stormy waters. Thirty times as long as it is wide, Chilean territory runs from the seventeenth to the fifty-sixth degree of south latitude, for, with a Pacific coast measuring nearly three thousand miles the average breadth is no more than ninety. It is a land of extreme contrasts; of great violence, of great serenity: but whether harsh or smiling, Chile is a stimulating, a promising land holding the mind and the heart. It is a breeder of men and women of forcible character.

To the north lie the tawny and burning deserts where not so much as a blade of grass grows without artificial help, where no rain falls, year after year, where every form of life is an alien thing. In the south are broken, rocky islands and inlets, matted forests of evergreen trees with their feet in eternal swamps, of furious gales and cruel seas, where turquoise glaciers creep into the dark fiords. Eastward stands the great barrier of the Andes, snow-covered for half the year, with proud peaks rising at least eight thousand feet higher than the head of Mont Blanc. To the west, Chile looks out upon a waste of waters, with New Zealand as the nearest great country.

Shut in or defended by these barriers from each point of the compass, it is plain that Chile has had no sisters closely pressing upon her threshold. One might reasonably expect to find here a race possessing characteristics in common with island folk, a homogeneous people with a distinct nationality. Today, when all natural barriers have been overthrown by mechanical transport, no nation escapes exterior influence, but the Chilean does certainly retain the islander’s self-contained habit, physical hardihood, and power of assimilating rather than yielding to aliens. I do not think that the modern Chilean owes his traits so much to inheritance from the Araucanian as to the fact that he has been nurtured in the same cradle, for, without doubt, here is a personality and attitude of mind that distinguishes the man of Chile from his continental brothers.

Between the forbidding lands of the extreme north and far south and the frontiers of mountain and sea, lies fertile Chile—fruitful, gentle, brisk, well-watered. Nitrate and copper have their great populated camps, but they are artificial towns; the Magellanic city of Punta Arenas has a firmer root, but both north and south are new, and have received rather than produced. The Central Valley of Chile is the great garden of South America, one of the most enchantingly lovely, the most frankly friendly, regions in all the world.

It seems as though nature had deliberately tried to compensate here for the arid and the stormy end of the belt by showering beauty upon the intervening strip. There is none of that strange illusory quality, the sense of living in a mirage, that attends upon tropical regions. Central Chile is fresh, dewy-bright, with the familiar sweetness of the temperate zones of western Europe. Here are fine cattle, sheep and horses, pleasant orchards of pears and plums and apples; olive groves and grapevines; the long green lines of wheat fields, the spires of the poplars, the blackberry hedges edged with gorse and bracken and purple-headed thistles, are all familiar. The stock of the farms, every kind of crop—except those invaluable American contributions to the world’s list of foods, maize and potatoes—were introduced from overseas, but they have long been absorbed into the economic life of Chile. If the visitor is lulled into forgetfulness of his real milieu by the sight of neat wooden fences, by the bramble-bordered and fern-edged lane, he is recalled by the sudden glimpse of a shining white cone suspended in the transparent air, the snowy head of a far volcano. Or he may see in the thicket beside the road a trail of copihue with its bright rosy bell, or note that the farmer, ruddy-cheeked and bright-eyed, riding a fine horse along a deep muddy road, wears a gay poncho and a pair of enormous silver spurs.

It is the Chilean south that has brought to the Pacific Coast its fame as a land of beautiful pictures. Before Puerto Montt is reached, the edge of Lake Llanquihue is skirted by the railway, and the sight of this splendid sheet of water is an introduction to the wild and lovely scenery that was still unknown fifty years ago. The mountain and lake regions of Chile have even yet not been thoroughly explored, and that so much of this magnificent territory has been charted is partly due to the ancient uncertainty of exact boundary limits with Argentina, and, after long negotiations, the surveying work of Holdich at the head of the commission of 1898, reporting to King Edward VII as arbitrator. Between Chile and Argentina lies a series of exquisite lakes, many lying in old volcano cups. There is no more lovely body of fresh water in the world than Todos los Santos, with emerald heights rising clear from the mirror of the water; Rupanco, Riñihue, Ranco, and Viedma are beads upon a splendid chain of fine waters.

Chile is a land of brilliant hues. The dark waters, shouldered by tree-clothed mountains, of the Strait of Magellan, reflect yellow and russet leaf-changes as bright as in the maple woods of Canada. Blue glaciers, pure snow heads and the delicate green of fern brakes are contrasted with the crimson of wild fuchsias and the mass of glorious bloom of apple and cherry orchards. Farther north, where poplars stand like tall flames against the background of the hills in the Chilean autumn, and the willows line the rivers with gold, all is soft and glowing; but beyond the northern limits of vegetation where nothing meets the eye but masses of orange mountains that seem like glowing draperies hung against the unchanging blue sky, there is an extraordinary clarity of line and tint.

When the sun descends, quick flushes of pink and yellow, sheets of pale green and violet, flood the burning desert and the deeply scored heights; there is no movement, no sound, and yet the wide scene appears instinct with life, to move beneath the waves of pure light.

Lake Todos los Santos.

Every smallest thread of water is here edged with a lush growth of bright emerald plants, every bush is a mass of orange or purple flowers. And in the settled spots there is grace in every tree, a picturesque quality in each little thatched hut by the wayside, an insouciance that lends charm to ’dobe walls and maize patches. The beauty and the kindliness of Chile are, in fact, apt to destroy one’s critical faculties.

The weather in Chile may be called extremely obvious. It is impossible to ignore it, as in some other countries, despite the situation of the greater part of Chilean territory within the temperate zone. The remarkable topographical conditions of this strip force each barometrical change upon the attention.

In the rainless north, modifications are chiefly confined to the effects of the curious sea-mist, the camanchaca, spreading over some parts of the pampas to fifty miles inland; appearing about six in the evening, these fogs screen the coast and promptly lower the temperature, so, that, scorching at midday, one shivers under blankets at night. In the extreme south, among the islands and channels of the Magellanic region, boisterous seas and violent winds, cold and rain, made it the terror of sailors for three hundred years. The prevailing weather displays traits almost as unvarying as in the sharply contrasted north. Fine and calm days are rarities, although the climate is certainly not unhealthy, as Punta Arenas demonstrates.

But it is in the central region lying between Coquimbo and Valdivia that changes of weather have the most spectacular effect. In the valleys of the Aconcagua, the Mapocho, the Maule and the Bio-Bio we have perhaps the most striking results when the rainy season begins, usually towards the end of April. In the lowlands a blinding deluge descends that promptly clears town streets of pedestrians and frequently reduces cabs and street cars to temporary inactivity, while every country path and highway is transformed by a few hours’ rain into a deep morass. But whenever it rains in the central Chilean valleys snow is falling upon the Andean heights, and presently the eyes that for months have glanced with the indifference of custom at the far-distant, blue-shrouded, tawny mountains are astonished with a vision of giant peaks and shoulders that seem to have made an immense stride forward to the edge of the next field, their serene magnificence covered with shining white.

The effect upon the foothills is no less striking. During the last months of the dry season—enduring in the vineyard regions for some eight months—every inch of ground that is not artificially irrigated has taken on a uniform sandy hue. The whole earth is parched and the roads are a foot deep in dust. But within a week of the first rain a shimmering veil of light green tinges the land; in ten days every knoll and hillside has its carpet of young grass, and in a month the whole face of the country is changed, awakened, brilliant, bursting out with sturdy fertility. Such rivers as the Aconcagua and the Mapocho, dwindled to rippling threads among the wide stone-strewn beds, are changed in a night to raging torrents, fed from the sides of the mountains. More than once these silver streams have swept from their shallow banks, torn down protecting barriers, and done serious material damage, besides changing their courses—a matter of great import in regions where water-rights are the chief causes of quarrel among farmers.

Balmaceda Glacier.

With the setting in of the definite dry season at the beginning of September, the upper part of Central Chile thenceforth forgets the sound of rain for over half a year. Bright blue skies and unrelenting midday heat are almost unchanged; the watered country is a series of orchards, and the famous big black grapes, the peaches and plums and apples of Central Chile, succeed the strawberry crops. Chile in the early part of the dry season is a garden of flowers, and the fruitripening at the end of the year fills the valleys with busy scenes. There are thousands of workers in the orchards, grain fields and vineyards, and the heavywheeled ox-carts send up swirling masses of dust in every lane. Before the New Year the snow has melted under the summer sun from almost every part of the Cordilleras, although I have seen it linger in deep folds of Aconcagua and Tupungato until late February. Down south in Magellanic territory the permanent snow line comes down to a couple of thousand feet above sea level, and cold weather is the rule. The squalls of the Strait are generally rain-laden.

Aconcagua, highest peak of South America, is not actually a Chilean mountain, lying just across the Argentine frontier; but it is so familiar a feature of Central Chile that it is constantly annexed in thought. Mercedario, another magnificent height, also just escapes the boundary line. Beautiful Tupungato, 21,300 ft., is outclassed among Chilean peaks, as regards altitude, by Tocorpuri and Llullaico farther north, and is closely rivalled by a number of less famous mountains—Socompa, Baya, San Pedro and San Pablo, Peña Blanco, San Francisco, Muerto, Solo, Salado, Tres Cruces and Toro; below Central Chile the average height of the crests of the great volcanic wall drops from fifteen to nine thousand feet, but even such comparatively modest peaks as Osorno, Llaima, Calbuco, Lonquimay, Villa Rica, and the most southerly Paine, Burney, Balmaceda and Sarmiento, are striking and dignified with their snow crowns.

The long dry season of Mid Chile, and the violence of rains in the wet months, render the construction of permanent roads a task necessitating immense outlay. Chile has 35,000 kilometres of highroads, but reckons only a few thousand kilometres in first-class condition: a recent Road Law aims at a reform of vital importance to the Chilean farmer. But if roads are scarce, Chile has an excellent system of railways, serving the main length of her territory, connecting with all exporting points along the coast, and linking Valparaiso to Buenos Aires. The adequate equipment of ports—of which there are sixty, important or embryo—has always presented difficulties, owing to the shallow character of almost every indentation, with the notable exception of Talcahuano, and the prevalence of heavy ground swells and strong gales from the north and the southwest.

The social problems of Chile are no more and no less than the problems of any other country of the temperate zone inhabited by a progressive white population. The difficulties of adequate transport to serve her growing industrial and farming regions; questions regarding a large working population crowded into great mining camps; political and educational problems, are all hers: but she is aided towards solution by the homogeneity of her hardy race.

Chile has no “black” or “yellow” population. There are in the country only four African Negroes, and the foreigners resident are mainly Western Europeans and the nationals of sister states. Peruvians, prior to the friction of 1920, formed 20 per cent of the foreign population; Bolivians number 22,000 or 16 per cent; there are 20,000 Spaniards, about 13 per cent; Germans, 11,000, or 8 per cent; French, 10,000; British, 10,000; Italians, 13,000; Swiss, 2000; North Americans, 1000; Chinese, 2000; Argentines, 7000.

Volcano San Pablo, on the Bolivian Border of Chile.

In Northern Antofagasta Province.

Desert in Atacama Province.

The River Loa in the Dry Season.

The various foreign elements are lost among Chile’s four million native-born, and the majority of all newcomers remain in the country and are presently added to the Chilean stock. There has never been, fortunately for the country, any influx of unassimilable races; and while there is plenty of room for a large population, increase is more certain when it is from the inside rather than superimposed.

Chile has, in fact, enjoyed all the advantages of being known as a poor country for many generations; there have been no periods of delirious boom or extravagance, she has been comparatively little exploited, owes comparatively little to the outside world, and has developed her soul with a certain leisure.

Politically, she has been equally lucky. Most of her rulers have been wise and cultivated men of high probity. The unhappy Balmaceda, against whom was fomented the solitary revolt in Chile since she settled down to work after Independence, bears a name that is today revered throughout the country, with no accusation affecting his integrity. No Governor or President of Chile has been assassinated during the whole history of the country, before or since the close of the Spanish colonial régime.

The genuine exercise of the vote, and the temperamental cheerfulness and sanity of the Chilean, have saved the country from many miseries suffered by less unified lands.

Two special causes of the general level-headedness and sobriety of the Chilean are, first, the strong position of women in family life, and next the high standard of education. Education provides a channel through which youth can flow, and here, where state elementary schools are spread throughout the country to the number of 3000, with 1000 private and secondary schools, every boy and girl has a chance. The Chilean Government has long followed a policy of sending a number of the brightest students of the high schools and universities abroad for final courses in languages and science, and for this reason is less dependent than the majority of young countries upon the exterior world for engineers, chemists and teachers.

The fine prosperous cities of Chile possess, of course, all the equipment, all the luxury and grace, of modern cities all over the world. If one were to shut out the background of snow-crowned mountains, and happened to be out of sight of such streets as retain Spanish balconies and tiled roofs, one might imagine many a district of Santiago to be a part of a first-class French or English city. The tramways, the common use of motor cars and electricity, the good paving and good shops, the beauty and fashion of the Chilean women, the beautifully built and equipped houses, the good restaurants, the plentiful supply of newspapers, the appearance and avocations of the people, render Valparaiso and the Chilean capital among the front-rank cities of the world.

But Chilean cities vary greatly. In the central region is the great group of centres of Spanish foundation, those of the extreme north showing faces, for the most part, as youthful as those of Western Patagonia or Punta Arenas on the Strait of Magellan. Temuco, built after the final breaking-down of the Araucanian frontier, dates as a modern town only from 1881. Old Tarata, in the still disputed Province of Tacna, dreaming with its back to the hills and face to the desert, is a link with the past, for although it is away from the traffic stream today it was once a stopping-place on the direct Inca route between Potosí and Arica on the Pacific; Tacna owes its modern existence to its little railway; but Arica is newly alive, a busy port in a bower of gay flowers, a garden on the edge of a waste.

In the Strait of Magellan.

South of Arica lies a fringe of new nitrate towns along the sea-border of the pampas salitreras; Pisagua, Junin, Iquique (not long ago the greatest exporter of nitrate, but yielding pride of place to Antofagasta), Caleta Buena, Tocopilla, Mejillones, also overshadowed today by her younger sister, big, well-served, thriving Antofagasta; Coloso, Paposo, Taltal—all lie baking in the bright aridity of the rainless belt, precariously supplied with food and water from afar. Inland there are no populations more permanent than those of the nitrate oficinas, save here and there along the beds of snow-fed streams. Next in order from north to south comes the string of copper ports, with interior towns beginning to appear as the edge of the permanently fertile lands is reached. Chañaral, Caldera, Carrizal, points where the famous “Chile bars” of copper were smelted and shipped overseas; inland Copiapó, dependent for wealth upon copper and silver mines, but clothed with all the charm of a cloveredged oasis in the desert; the houses are built low for fear of earthquakes, roofed with red tiles and washed pink and blue; the gardens are full of scented flowers. Another oasis is Vallenar, set in the Atacama desert beside its violet-shadowed ravine and surrounded with a little ring of jade fields.

Still farther south, Coquimbo, a newer, busy little city, sweetly placed upon its beautiful curving bay a mile or two from its Spanish-built, slumbering elder sister La Serena. From this point southward the towns lie closer together, and eastward along each fertile valley are clusters of fine fruit farms with dependent villages, filling the railway cars with figs and peaches, grapes and apricots; but where water fails, scrub and cactus deny a living. Here is old Combarbalá, there Illapel with its town-long avenue of orange trees hung with golden globes; Santa Rosa de los Andes, highroad to the chief mountain crossing; and a number of centres of the lovely grape country, younger sisters of San Felipe. Santiago, spread beneath her two famous hills, Santa Lucia and San Cristobal; Valparaiso, risen from the earthquake of 1906, solidly built on its narrow stretch of sand beneath the thousand-foot cliffs, crowned with new dwellings and reached by electric lifts, an energetic and wealthy port with its brilliant suburb, Viña del Mar. Beyond these great twin centres of movement lies all the fast-developing agricultural and manufacturing south—Talca, a rapid and promising growth; dusty Rancagua, looking towards the big interior copper camp; Chillán, head of a great fruit region; Concepción, most agreeable of cities, nestled beside the bright Bio-Bio in a bower of woods, with its fine port, Talcahuano; the coal-mining sea-border towns, Coronel, Lota, Arauco, Lebu; Temuco, one of the most prosperous of all the vigorous young southern towns, placed in wonderfully productive country; handsome Valdivia, facing a factory-covered island on the fine river flowing to Corral port, justly proud of its equipment and buildings; Osorno, a rising centre of industry; Puerto Montt, still in its youth but with good reasons for sturdy growth. And last of all, Punta Arenas, the visibly growing city, fine buildings shouldering little shacks, looking away from the beech-covered hills of Brunswick Peninsula towards the pearly distance of the Polar seas; Punta Arenas is not only a new city of Yugo-Slav and Scots millionaires, of the tributary sheep-raising country: it is the commercial key of Chile’s Far South.

Santa Lucia Hill, Santiago.

Parque Forestal, Santiago.

Municipal Offices, Santiago.

The majority of these towns are more than convenient centres for crowding populations; they owe their existence to special and widely divergent causes that have also formed the character of the people. To certain circumstances in Chilean history can be ascribed a powerful part in making the Chilean—the disappearance of the Indian as a worker, and consequent self-dependence; the great rise of the nitrate industry, and the creation of national wealth and great private fortunes; and the enlargement of the national horizon by war. But the effect of different regions and their calls upon resources have been and are still equally important. Much of the spirit of the Chilean is due to the independent life of the mineral-hunter of the north, solitary, even-tempered, enduring, deeply attached to the soil. The day of this class of miner has departed almost as definitely as that of the cunning craftsmen who, in colonial days, fashioned in copper or silver all domestic utensils of Chilean homes: but his influence lives. Marked also is the influence of the skilled horseman, the woodsman, the man of the camp who knows how to kill and cook his food, how to cross mountain passes or trackless forest or unbridged stream; the far-flung Chilean cities bear the stamp of the Chilean character created by these special circumstances, and generalisations must be made and received with this fact in mind.

The Santiaguino, occupied in finance, law, politics or trade, is addicted to cheery club life, is a country and garden lover, and has a keen understanding and affection for horses; his characteristics bring him readily into sympathetic touch with the British, allied by many blood-ties. He is famed as a charming host, a genial welcomer of the stranger, and there is no city in the world where the visitor will be more agreeably interviewed by an acute press, more quickly and spontaneously greeted and made at home than by the frank and kindly Chilean family.

The dweller in Santiago and Valparaiso possesses a marked characteristic rare in any part of Latin America: he is a born speculator and financier, and is an active attendant and operator upon the local Bolsa (Stock Exchange). In some of the smaller and less developed states of Spanish America the Stock Exchange is non-existent or negligible: but in Chile the Bolsa is thronged daily, and the operations are active, eager, and dictated by a highly intelligent appreciation of the market conditions of the world. The cables are incessantly used in this connection, and many a Chilean fortune has been made and lost by the follower of exchange fluctuations. The Chilean understands and is accustomed to investment, and is not alarmed as are many American nations at the prospect of investing his money abroad. He has gone afield for a century, and, operating in Antofagasta and Tarapacá long before they were Chilean de facto, has since their acquisition ranged farther into the mining districts of central Bolivia. Chilean capital and technical skill are responsible for half the mines operated in that sister state. Operations in Bolivian mining shares—such as the famous and spectacular Llallaguas—form a considerable item in the work of the Chilean Bolsa.

Behind the bright social life of the Chilean cities lie the great farming and mining areas, with their dependence upon that hardy Chilean worker nicknamed the roto—originally, the “out at elbows” class. Today the term has lost its depreciatory meaning, and the workman in general is a roto. He has fine qualities of hardihood, loyalty and endurance; and although he has sometimes had a repute for free use of the corvo, the deadly curved knife in whose use he has an extraordinary facility, it is only upon too-festive occasions or during jealous quarrels that he is apt to give way to passion. The measures taken by the Government and by large employers of workmen in industries or mines to stop the traffic in the worst forms of liquor, and to substitute the light and innocuous Chilean wines, has lessened these troubles during recent years, and it is true of Chile as of most parts of South America that there is no organised crime. Cases of theft are common, but are ascribed mainly to the lower class of South European who comes to Chile for work and forms a part of the shifting population moving from camp to camp. Chile’s Ley de Residencia, by which criminals are deported from the scene of discovered ill-deeds to another part of the coast, means very often that the north and south exchange ne’er-do-wells.

It is partly due to this perhaps too kindly system that Chile has suffered considerably from strikes during the past few years. The entry of malcontents bringing the flag and doctrines of the I. W. W. created trouble in the coal mines of the south, the copper camps and the nitrate fields of the north, and the ingenuous character of the native-born lends itself to the ready acceptance of specious theories. I have seen the flag of the Californian-bred Industrial Workers of the World paraded in Santiago, while such “red” periodicals as El Socialista of Antofagasta spread a hash-up of violent and hysterical propaganda, a medley of Marxian and Bolshevik ideas, amongst railway and port workmen. The women, always an element to be reckoned with in Chile, were brought into the Antofagasta railway strike in 1919, and when the first strike-breaking train was run out of the port, the wives of the strikers laid themselves down on the tracks in a theatrical attempt obviously instigated by the practised foreign agitator.

The radical administration of Señor Arturo Alessandri, with its avowed sympathy with the workers, was able to counteract the pernicious influence of the exterior trouble-maker as, perhaps, a more conservative government could not; and the firmness with which, in late 1921, the President dealt with an attempted tie-up of Valparaiso port, declaring his intention of redressing any genuine grievances but at the same time making clear his determination that the work of the port should not be interfered with, has been salutary. The powerful Workman’s Federation (Federación de Obreros) of Chile has done much good work, and is likely to do more if it is purged of foreign interference and retains the sympathies of the middle class Chilean.

The best cure for red socialism in South America is the pleasant tonic sport. No better sign of the real healthfulness of the Chilean race is to be found than the enthusiasm with which football, cricket and the recent introduction of American baseball have been taken up. All Chilean newspapers have their page of Deportes, with much space devoted to futbolismo, and the horse races at Viña del Mar and Santiago are eagerly attended by the peasant as well as by the Chilean millionaire.

Such sports as river fishing and boating are denied to the dweller in north, and most of central Chile, by the scarcity of streams, but there are plenty of coarse, if few sporting, fish in all rivers of constant flow. To the south, trout and salmon have been introduced with marked success and the angler’s art has developed. Bull-fighting was never a Chilean pastime; a fine breed of game-cocks was introduced about the middle of last century (through the gifts of the celebrated Lord Derby, who responded to the petition of a sporting Chilean priest) and has had a marked effect upon country strains, but in its most popular day cock-fighting was never to Chile what it is to Cuba. The whole national tendency is towards out-of-door games and sport: the Chilean is a wonderful rider, has bred an extremely fine type of small horses, is a good polo player, and owes much of his sturdy health to the national habit of horsemanship.

Chile has no noxious insects, with the exception of one venomous spider; and she has no poisonous snakes or reptiles. But she is rich in strange and beautiful birds, many singing with exquisite sweetness.

Large animals indigenous to the country are rare, although all European domesticated animals, as horses, cattle, hogs and sheep, thrive splendidly; a few forest deer are still found; the guanaco lives in the more remote uplands and cold south, and there are jaguars in the woodland.

Among plants, Chile’s special gift to the world has been the potato, invaluable to millions of households today. Different varieties of Solanum tuberosum are found wild on the West Coast of South America all the way from South Chile to Colombia, growing in Chile from Magallanes to Arica, both near the seashore and in the foothills of the Andes. The potato has a wide native habitat, and it was and is as useful to the indigenous folk of Chile, Bolivia and Peru as to Western Europe today. Of other foods, the mealy, chestnut-like kernel of the Araucaria Chiliensis is eaten only in the country, as in the case of its cousin, the kernel of Araucaria Brasilensis. The strawberry, Fragaria Chiloensis, appears to be wild in south Chile, with a number of small sweet berries of the myrtle and berberis tribes.

Quantities of beautiful flowers and plants, herbs and shrubs, are native to Chile and found wild only in this belt. Of them, none is more striking and lovely than the Copihue, the rosy bell of a slim vine clinging to trees in the southern woodland; the flaming Tropœolum speciosa is a bright mantle of the hedgerows, the brilliant blue crocus (Tecophilea) lies in sheets on Andean foothills, the turquoise and golden Puyas are striking features of many a Chilean landscape, and the lovely Eucryphias are shrubs as beautiful as the Fire Bush (Embothrium coccineum).

But of all Chilean offerings, none has been of more importance to the world, apart from the potato, than that strange naturally produced chemical of the northern rainless regions, nitrate of soda. Nitrate has brought millions of exhausted or semi-productive acres into rich fertility, employs a hundred thousand people in its production and transport, and is today a necessity of the farmer. Artificial production is unlikely to rival the natural deposits in the markets of the world, owing to the cost of manufacture, and the Chilean fields, immense and practically inexhaustible, form a natural treasure of prime industrial importance. Other nations besides Chile are fortunate in possessing copper, coal, iron and silver: in the possession of nitrate the West Coast is without a competitor.

The only cloud upon the Chilean political horizon, remaining since the War of the Pacific, is the problem of the two provinces now combined as Tacna, with the city of Tacna as capital. That the future of this little region troubles the West Coast is a striking illustration of the result of leaving territorial questions unsettled, for no equal shadow is cast by the provinces definitely added to Chilean soil, the valuable Tarapacá and Antofagasta.

Viña del Mar, Valparaiso’s Residential Suburb.

Race Course, Viña del Mar.

Valparaiso Street, Viña del Mar.

Mira-Mar Beach, Viña del Mar.

Not only Chile and Peru are involved in the Tacna dispute: the question of renewed access to the sea by Bolivia lends that country a lively interest in settlement, and, in addition, every South American country is concerned in the amicable resolution of a domestic problem affecting the present credit and future peace of the continent. Nor can the nationals of overseas countries investing in or trading with the West Coast remain indifferent; when, in 1922, discussions were opened in Washington between the representatives of Chile and Peru, all friends of South America hoped for a happy result from these new and direct conversations, in a region far removed from the acute feeling of the Pacific Coast.

The whole story of the Tacna question is discussed in detail in other pages.[^[1]]

[1]. Chapter VI.

CHAPTER II
CHILEAN HISTORY

Inca Rule and Native Chiefs.—Spanish Colonial Period.—The Fight for Independence.—Republican Chile.

Neither in her deep woodlands nor upon her open plains does Chile possess monuments of ancient civilisation. The foundations of her flourishing cities date back no farther than 400 years at the most; the arts and crafts of daily life are based upon imported concepts, owning no native origin. As a settled, built, cultivated country, Chile is for the main part genuinely new.

The old races of the south, whether nomad hunters of the interior or fisherfolk of the coast and Magellanic waterways, built no towns, constructed and carved nothing that serves today as a memorial; bones hidden in caves, chipped spear and arrow heads, harpoons and fish-hooks, remain as the only evidence of the life of past generations, the only witnesses by which the condition of their present descendants can be measured. Farther north, where Inca culture penetrated, are such ruins of dwellings as those of Calama, with their burial sites. Traces of the Inca highways are yet to be found as far south as the Atacama desert and Copiapó. But in contrast with the archæological wealth of Bolivia and Peru, of Central America and Mexico, Chile has not a single pre-Spanish temple nor the rudest monolith to show. The north and central valley of Chile as far as the present Talca were under Inca control for about one hundred years before the Spanish conquest, Peruvian records yielding the only historical accounts of events in Chile prior to Almagro’s expedition.

A friendly connection between the Peruvian empire and the settled tribes of the Chilean north seems to have been of old standing, a tradition confirmed by the evidence of burial grounds. Upon the authority of the historian Montesinos, the Inca Yahuar Huaccac gave a daughter and a niece in marriage to two chiefs of Chile; these two princesses came later, with their children, to visit Peru, their uncle Viracocha being then Inca. A revolt took place during their absence, and the family was only reinstated by the might of the Inca, and under his tutelage. It was, however, the Inca Pachacuti who began the definite explorations and conquests that, continued by his son Tupac Yupanqui and his grandson Huayna Ccapac, increased the Inca dominion to a great empire extending from the Ancasmayu River, north of Quito, to the banks of the Maule in Chile.

Tupac Yupanqui (1439–75) conquered the Antis,[^[2]] people of the Collao, and from Charcas decided to go farther south. He entered Chile, defeated the powerful Sinchi (chieftain) Michimalongo and later Tangalongo, the latter ruling country down to the Maule. Here the same fierce tribes who afterwards resisted the finest Spanish troops opposed him, and after setting up frontier columns, or walls, as a mark of conquest on the river banks, the Inca returned to Cuzco via Coquimbo. From this time Chile was officially organised. Quechua-speaking colonists (mitimaes) were sent here as throughout all the rest of the thousand leagues of Inca territory, registering the population and imposing tributes of country produce. Curacas were instituted as tribal leaders in lieu of the Sinchis, who were in old Chile obeyed only in wartime. Extension of this definite organisation was energetically carried on by the great Inca, Huayna Ccapac, and it was during this period that the Peruvians constructed the great roads that so astonished, and aided, the Spaniards. The effective transport system and the success of the Inca rulers in pacifying districts by the simple method of transporting the original population where disaffection was suspected, replacing them with settlers from a distance, the whole meticulous paternalism of the Inca system, regulating every part of the social frame from the cradle to the grave so thoroughly that initiative was stifled, rendered easy the task of the invading European. He did no more than step into Inca shoes, and the Inca’s subjects received the change of masters almost with apathy.

[2]. From which name the word Andes, in whose lower folds the Antis dwelt, was probably derived.

That careful observer Cieza de Leon, in Peru from 1532–50, leaves a precise account of the Inca roads that ran south from Cuzco both along the sierras and also throughout the coastal border. The highways were made, he says, fifteen feet wide in the valleys, with a strong wall on either side, the whole space being paved with cement and shaded with trees. “These trees, in many places, spread their branches, laden with fruit, over the road and many birds fluttered among the leaves.” Resthouses containing provisions for the Inca officials and troops were built at regular intervals, and it was strictly forbidden that Peruvians should interfere with the property of natives in nearby fields or houses.

In deserts where the sand drifted high, and paving was useless, huge posts were driven in to mark the way. Zarate, who gives the width of the roads as 40 feet, says that “broad embankments were made on either side,” and all early travellers in Inca territory agree that these lost highways were extremely well made. He adds that the posts in the desert were connected with stout cords, but that even in his day the Spaniards had destroyed many of the posts, using them for making fires. The road of the coast, like that of the sierra, was 1500 miles long; and of Chilean traces any traveller through the Atacama copper regions may see a survival at the station of “Camino del Inca,” where the modern railway cuts across the ancient road.

Along the Sierra highway came, in 1535, the first Spaniard to set foot in Chile, Diego de Almagro. He was not the first European to explore Chilean territory, for the Portuguese Fernão de Magalhães had discovered the Strait bearing his name in 1520; but he was the pioneer explorer by land. The name Chile is a native word which was probably the appellation of a (pre-Spanish) local chief; it was the name by which the Incas designated that part of the country under their control, and it persisted in spite of Valdivia’s later attempt to call it “Nueva Estramadura,” just as “Mejico” and “Cuba” survived and “Nueva España” and “Española” faded out. It has been frequently but mistakenly said that the word Chile actually does mean “chilly” in the Quechua tongue; as a matter of fact the Quechua word meaning “cold” is chiri. In early Spanish times the name Chile applied only to part of the central valley with “Copayapu” in the extreme north, “Coquimpu” just below it, and the central region partly ascribed to “Canconicagua.” But the name Chile was simple and was so quickly adopted that Almagro’s adherents were soon politically grouped as “los de Chile”—the men of Chile, and when the country was definitely colonised the name was extended to denote all the settled country south of Peru, that is, between Copiapó and Chiloé Island.

The original spur to conquest of Chile was rivalry between the Pizarro brothers and their fellow conquistador, the old Adelantado Diego de Almagro. The Pizarros wanted to retain rich Cuzco, and Almagro was an inconvenient claimant; the magnificent city of the Incas, today a grievous sight with its shabby modern buildings superimposed upon the stately stone walls of the Incas, was already a smashed and looted ruin; but it had yielded so much treasure that it was probably impossible for the conquistadores to give up search for other golden cities. Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, and the Chibcha Kingdom, had followed in rapid succession, and it is not surprising that when Indians spoke of the riches of the south, Almagro, over seventy years old, should be ready to march into Chile. Almagro had a commission from Charles V to conquer and rule over 200 leagues of land south of Francisco Pizarro’s territory (New Castille); it was to be called Nueva Toledo. At about the same time, 1534, a grant was given to the ill-fated Alcazaba of 300 leagues of land, commencing at the southern boundary of Almagro’s territory, under the name of Nueva Leon.

Almagro set out with over 500 Spaniards and 15,000 Peruvian Indians, after spending 500,000 pesos on equipment. He marched south from Cuzco, crossed the Andes and went by Titicaca Lake, following the Inca route; perhaps as a guide and a means of securing the loyal service of the Peruvians, who would never desert a member of their ruling clan, the Spanish leader took with him an Inca priest and the young Paullu Tupac Yupanqui, son of the Huayna Ccapac and brother of the Inca Manco. The latter had been crowned in Cuzco in early 1534 by Pizarro, probably with the double object of quieting Peru and to obviate charges made by his personal enemies in Spain. Both Charles V and the Pope emphasised their possession of tender consciences with regard to native American rulers. This young scion of the Incas survived the expedition into Chile, and was with Almagro’s son at the battle of Chupas.

Terrible sufferings were experienced by the expedition in the bitterly cold Andes, where deep snow and cruel winds killed the Peruvians by thousands. Many of the Spanish soldiers too were frozen to death, and food supplies failed. When at last they turned west an advance party of horsemen went ahead to bring food, cheerfully yielded by the settled natives, to their starving and exhausted comrades. Arriving in the green Copiapó valley, Almagro was well received at first, but pressing his search for gold to extremes, quarrels arose, the natives were “punished,” and Almagro moved on, after receiving reinforcements brought by Orgoñez. A strong party was sent forward to report on southerly conditions, and marched as far as the Rio Claro (tributary of the Maule) where savage Indians confronted the outposts of the old Inca empire. When Almagro heard this report, and realised that neither treasures of gold nor rich cities existed, he decided to return to Cuzco, making his way back by the coastal road and traversing the scorching, waterless deserts of Atacama and Tarapacá. At his arrival in Arequipa at the end of 1536 he had lost 10,000 Indians and 156 Spaniards. The rest of Almagro’s story—the news of the Peruvian revolt, his seizure of Cuzco, and his execution at the age of seventy-five by Hernando Pizarro, when fortune finally deserted him—belongs to the history of Peru. The fact that a man had made the Chilean journey with Almagro was considered, later on, as a claim upon royal consideration. The petition of Diego de Pantoja, in 1561, makes this point, while that of Encinas, 1558, is even more emphatic in speaking of the sufferings of the soldiers; he went south, he says, with Captain Gomez de Alvarado, fighting Indians of the “Picones, Pomamaucaes, Maule and Itata” and traversing painfully “snow and water, swamps, creeks, crossing rivers by swimming or on rafts” and with no food but wild herbs. For the moment the efforts of the Europeans were without result; during another two years Chile remained in the hands of her native rulers.

Spanish Colonial Period

There was no actual conquest of Chile by the Spaniards. Those native tribes which had submitted to the Inca régime accepted the Europeans: they who had defied the Inca continued to defy the Spanish.

There were angry outbursts on the part of certain northern and central tribes when the Spaniards returned in force in 1540, but when these had been overcome and peace made, the Indians remained consistently loyal. The “Changos” of the coastal border took up a permanent position as friends just as the Mapuches (“Araucanians”) took up a permanent position as enemies. The Spanish settled Chile, organised a social system, built cities and defences, cultivated the ground, brought in blood and culture, created a nation; but South Chile was never a conquered country in the same sense that Mexico and Peru were conquered countries.

The next attempt to plant the Spanish flag in Chile following the abortive expedition of Almagro was well planned and successful. Captain Pedro de Valdivia, thirty-five years old, a campmaster of Hernando Pizarro, and a man of formed and resolute character, wanted to increase his fortune, consisting of an estate near Cuzco. He obtained without difficulty from Francisco Pizarro a commission to open up Chile, a land of poor repute since the return of Almagro; his appointment was that of Lieutenant Governor. His chief difficulty was in raising men, for as he says in a letter written in 1545 to Charles V, those who turned most from the project were the soldiers who had accompanied Almagro on the first unfortunate journey, when 1,500,000 pesos were spent “with, as the only fruit, the redoubled defiance of the Indians.”

He set out at the beginning of 1540, however, with nearly 200 Spaniards and 1000 Peruvian Indians, and avoiding the Andes traversed the coastal deserts, arriving in the valley of the Mapocho at the end of the same year. On the eve of departure a blow to his hopes threatened in the arrival of Sanchez de la Hoz, armed with a royal commission for the settlement of Chile; but Valdivia, equal to the occasion, induced his rival to provide a couple of ships, equip a force with fifty horses, supplies, arms, etc., and agreed to meet him at a small port just north of the Atacama desert. The appointment was kept, but as soon as the new arrival went ashore Valdivia arrested him, made him sign a renunciation of his claims to leadership and henceforth obliged him to serve as a common soldier. Eventually Sanchez de la Hoz joined a conspiracy against Valdivia, was discovered, and was beheaded in Santiago de Chile.

In February, 1541, Valdivia founded Santiago “de Nueva Estremadura,” Valdivia naming his province after Estremadura in Spain, where he was born in the town of La Serena. The colony had a hard struggle for existence, the Indians attacking the fortifications of Santa Lucia hill, where the settlers built the first houses of wood and thatched grass; in the letter mentioned above Valdivia says that the third year of the colony was not so difficult, but that during the first two years they had passed through great necessities. They ate roots, having no meat, and the man who obtained fifty grains of maize each day counted himself fortunate. He says also that they got a little gold, and gives Chile the first praises, so often repeated subsequently, for its enchanting climate. For people who want to settle permanently, there is no better land in the world than Chile, he declares; there is good level land, very healthy and pleasing, and the winter lasts but four months. In summer the climate is delicious, and men are able to walk without danger in the sunshine. The fields give abundant returns, and cattle thrive.

Live stock, in fact, throve so well that within twenty-five years of the settlement the Indians of the south possessed flocks and herds, and, learning from the Europeans, went mounted on horseback into battle.

Needing men and supplies, early in 1543 Valdivia sent six Spaniards by land to Peru. Captured by Copiapó Indians, the Captain Monroy and a soldier named Miranda escaped by an act of treachery against a friendly Indian woman, and arrived safely in Cuzco after a terrible journey through the deserts. But, to cajole Peru into giving help, Valdivia had sent them with stirrups and bits made of gold, a display so successful that by the end of the year sixty new settlers and a ship with stores reached Chile, followed by captains Villagra and Escobar with 300 more men. Valdivia was determined to overcome the south, and set out with 200 men by land while a ship followed along the coast. The Indians rose behind him, burnt his embryo shipbuilding yard at Concon (mouth of the Aconcagua River), trapped and killed his gold-miners at Quillota, and besieged the little settlement of Santiago. It was here that Inez Suarez, who had followed Valdivia from Cuzco, rendered her name immortal by her active defence of the fort; tradition says that she cut off with her own hands the heads of six Indian chieftain prisoners and threw them over the palisades to intimidate the attackers. Valdivia returned, from the Maule, where he had received a check, and re-established his colony. He had founded La Serena as a check on the northern Indians and a post on the road to Cuzco, in 1544, but saw that stronger assistance was needed to colonise and hold Chile, and returned to Peru for more help in 1547. The country was in civil war, with Gonzalo Pizarro ranged against Gasca, President of the Audience of Peru. Valdivia adopted the royal appointee’s side, was an invaluable aid with his experience of Indian wars, and helped turn the scale, taking the old Pizarro supporter, Carbajal, prisoner. He got his reward when he received formal appointment as Governor of Chile, in 1548. With a large force of well-equipped men he started out anew, was stopped on the Atacama border with orders to return to stand a trial on certain technical charges, was acquitted, set out again, and reached Santiago in April, 1549. He found that the Serena settlement had been destroyed, rebuilt it, and made an agreement of peace with the northern Indians that was never again broken.

With the central and northern colonies secure, Valdivia turned his face south again, prepared a strong expedition and set out in January, 1550. He was checked at the Bio-Bio River, fought for a year in that region, attempting a settlement at Talcahuano, and built a constantly attacked fort at Concepción, where the present Penco stands on a beautiful curve of coast. In February, 1551, he went on, leaving fifty men in Penco; founded Imperial, leaving forty men in a fort, and in early 1552 reached the banks of the Callacalla River and founded Valdivia City, 1552. His next step was to create a chain of forts—Arauco, on the sea; Villarica, on the edge of Lake Lauquen; Osorno, opposite Chiloé Island some eighty miles inland; Tucapel, Puren, and Angol, “la Ciudad de los Infantes de Chile,” between Tucapel and the sea.

The fierce Araucanian Indians determined to destroy every settlement of the invader, and, themselves hardy nomads, were well fitted for the work of continual attack. The leaders Caupolican and the young Lautaro—the latter trained in Spanish ways and speech during some years of service as a groom of Valdivia’s—rose up, organised their people, adopting certain Spanish military methods, and began a series of relentless and systematic raids of destruction. Upon both sides, savage cruelties were practised, and from this time began to date the deliberate seizure of white women and children by the Indians. The courage with which many Spanish wives accompanied their husbands did not save them from the huts of the wild natives, and the children borne in course of time of Indian fathers by European mothers were so numerous that certain tribes became noted for their fair skins, pink cheeks and blue eyes.

In 1553, in attempting to stem the tide of Araucanian attacks on the frail forts, of which Tucapel and Arauco had already fallen, Pedro de Valdivia’s forces were overwhelmed by Lautaro and the Governor was made prisoner and barbarously executed. He was then fifty-six years of age. His policy in trying to establish settlements in the heart of Araucanian territory was not justified by the necessities of his colonists, who had more land than they could use in the fine central region. But he was impelled by false stories of gold to be found in the south, by hope of extending the territory under his jurisdiction for the Spanish crown, and no doubt also held the belief, based upon former experiences, that definite submission of the South American natives could be commanded by vigorous action. This idea had been proved correct with regard to all settled districts, but it did not apply to the elusive Mapuches. Nevertheless it was persisted in for a long time, costing a river of Spanish blood and an immense treasure in Spanish gold.

Flushed with success after the death of Valdivia, the Indians attacked all the forts simultaneously; Concepción was twice ruined and restored, in 1554 and 1555, and again smashed when Francisco de Villagra, successor of Valdivia temporarily, was trapped on the seashore after crossing the Bio-Bio and badly defeated. He redeemed his lost prestige when he broke the armies of Lautaro and killed this leader at Santiago soon afterwards, the Araucanians, emboldened, having ranged outside their own territory to attack the invading Europeans.

In 1557 there came to Chile as Governor the young Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza, son of the Marquis de Cañete, Viceroy of Peru. He brought from Spain a well-equipped force of 600 Spaniards, and, arriving at Concepción from the sea, rebuilt the stronghold, mounted guns for the first time, restored all the southerly forts, and in the course of fierce battles in 1558 took prisoner and killed Caupolican.

When Garcia Hurtado left Chile in 1560 the Indians took heart and renewed attacks, and the anxious rule of Quiroga, with another interval of Villagra’s control, was concerned almost exclusively with Indian troubles. Quiroga, a determined man, was the first Spaniard to take possession of Chiloé, founding the town of Castro; he carried war into Araucanian territory relentlessly, shipping every able-bodied Indian he could catch to the mines of Peru. But his experience, and that of his successors, was that the natives were never more than momentarily beaten, that they rose behind him when his troops passed from one region to another, and that almost any fort could be overwhelmed by the extraordinary numbers that the savage chiefs brought into the field. The tactics of the Araucanians upon the battlefield, of attacking in great numbers, but keeping back enormous quantities of men who came forward when the first army was rolled back by Spanish guns, were disheartening; every settlement remained in a constant state of siege, perpetually harassed.

In 1567 Philip II of Spain authorized the establishment of a Royal Audience in Concepción; it endured until 1574, but was then suppressed owing to the insecurity of the colony. A year later the struggling settlements were further discouraged by a terrible earthquake and tidal wave that devastated the coast from Santiago to Valdivia, and in 1579 all western Spanish America was thrown into a state of consternation by the amazing news that Drake had rounded the toe of South America and had begun raiding the Pacific coast.

The enforcement of the “New Laws”—signed by Charles V in 1542, but suspended or ignored by the various Audiences as long as was possible—forbidding Spaniards to make the Indians work against their will, infuriated the colonists of Chile, who saw no other way of cultivating land or operating mines but by driving the natives to these tasks; a few Negroes were sent on from Panama or Buenos Aires, but transportation was expensive and farmers could not afford to import many slaves. Chile never yielded a large quantity of gold; it was pre-eminently an agricultural and stock-raising country, and therefore a poor one compared with such regions as Peru with its golden treasure or Charcas (Alto Peru) with its tremendous production of silver from the wonderful mines of Potosí. That in the face of all hardships and difficulties the colonisation of Central Chile steadily extended is a standing tribute to the courage of the settlers, as well as to the attractions of an exhilarating climate.

In 1583 came Alonso de Sotomayor, Marques de Villa Hermosa, setting out with Sarmiento and a splendid Spanish fleet of twenty-three ships; the original intention to pass through the Strait of Magellan was abandoned, and Sotomayor with a strong army marched overland from Buenos Aires. He too wasted lives and treasure in attempting to subdue the south, but inevitably the Indians rose behind his forces, burning forts and destroying the guard ships he placed upon the Bio-Bio River. By the time that Martin Garcia Oñez de Loyola succeeded to the Governorship in 1592 the endless wars with the Araucanians had become bitterly unpopular; the Indians had gathered new audacity under the toqui (leader in war) Paillamacu, and with him Oñez tried to make a treaty. Hope was also placed in the pacifying influence of Jesuits, who entered in 1593, but these first missionaries were killed, and an armed force sent south in 1598 was wiped out, the Governor Oñez being amongst the slain. Paillamacu, jubilant, besieged all the forts at once, and Spanish rule was further threatened by the appearance in the Pacific of Dutch corsairs. The Cordes expedition of 1600 landed on Chiloé, sacked and held Castro. A Spanish force under Ocampo took back the town, but Spanish prestige suffered by the Indians’ realisation of quarrels among white men. Ocampo also raised the siege of Angol and Imperial, but carried away settlers and abandoned these places. Forts upon the sea border, although safer than inland points, were not impregnable, and the Araucanians had grown so bold that more than once when Spanish vessels visiting the seaports ran aground the Indians swam out, killed the crew and looted the ships in plain view of the settlers.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, with Ramon as Governor, it was practically decided to restrict Spanish occupation of the territory south of the Bio-Bio River to seaports, and to maintain a line of forts upon the frontier. For about 100 years 2000 Spanish troops were maintained for defensive purposes, chiefly distributed throughout fourteen frontier strongholds, of which the chief were Arauco, Santa Juana, Puren, Los Angeles, Tucapel and Yumbel, and in Concepción and Valdivia. Chilean revenues were insufficient for these army expenses, and Lima contributed 100,000 pesos, for Valparaiso, Concepción and the frontier, half in specie and half in clothes and stores; about 8000 pesos of this sum was used in repairing forts and in giving presents or paying compensation to the Indians. Valdivia, with Osorno and Chiloé, received an additional 70,000 pesos from the royal treasury of Lima, and these points were governed and supplied direct from the viceregal capital.

Determination upon none but defensive fighting was due largely to Jesuit influence in Spain, under Philip II, III and IV; Father Luis de Valdivia in 1612 brought a new band of missionaries, and the south was left to them and their prospective converts. The Audience was restored, in Santiago, in 1609, and the Governor of Chile, while subordinate to the Lima Viceroyalty, was President of the Audience of Santiago as well as Captain-General of the province, his jurisdiction including the territory from the desert of Atacama, where Peru ended, to all the southern country he could control (the Taitao peninsula was explored in 1618) and also the province of Cuyo, extending across the Andes and embracing the city of Mendoza on the post-road to Buenos Aires.

Pirates harassed the authorities in 1616, when Le Maire found the small strait bearing his name; in 1623, when L’Hermite, with thirteen ships and 1600 men, troubled the coasts; and notably by the Dutchman Brouwer in 1644, when Valdivia was seized and three strong forts built by the invaders. The death of Brouwer, three months after his arrival, disheartened the strong force of Dutch under his control; the region was also discovered to be less promising of easy wealth than had been imagined and the place was given up. The Spanish returned in 1645, occupying and completing the excellent fortifications of the Dutch.

A terrible battle with Indians near Chillan ending with the defeat of a new Araucanian leader, Putapichion, with great slaughter, the then Governor of Chile, Francisco de Zuñiga, Marques de Baides, attempted to make a definite peace, holding the celebrated first “Parliament of Quillin” in 1641; the second Parliament of Quillin was held in 1647, with reiterated understanding that the Araucanians were to be recognised as owners of independent territory south of the Bio-Bio, but not to invade territory to the north. A third peace meeting was held in 1650 and thenceforth it became customary for each new Governor of Chile to call a meeting at the Bio-Bio border, where he repaired in state, met thousands of Araucanians, feasted them for several days and gave presents, with mutual compliments and speech-making. None of these friendly conclaves, however, prevented the Spaniards from raiding in Araucanian territory on occasion, or gave pause to Indian chiefs who saw an opportunity. In the middle of the century a disastrous rising of all the Indians, supposedly converted and friendly, took place between the Maule and Bio-Bio Rivers; 400 farms were burnt, Concepción besieged, and enormous quantities of cattle, women and children taken to Araucania.

Nevertheless, outside the troubled zone Chile prospered; the Spanish colony grew from 1700 (with 8600 Indians and 300 Negroes) in 1613 to 30,000 in 1670. Vineyards and olive groves were planted, the wine of Chile becoming so famous that it was shipped all the way to Panama, Mexico and Central America, to Paraguay and Argentina. The Governor Juan Henriquez, a native of Lima, was responsible for much of this agricultural encouragement, and for construction of a bridge over the Mapocho River and of a canal bringing spring water to Santiago. It was this same governor who shipped hundreds of Araucanians as slaves to Peru, and sent to Lima for execution the young Englishmen of Narborough’s scientific expedition, treacherously captured at Corral in December, 1670. By this time the coast forts had been rebuilt, partly on account of anxiety regarding the activities of adventuring ships of rival nations, which, forbidden lawful trade, ranged the Pacific as corsairs and smugglers. The famous Captain Bartholomew Sharp, with one ship and 146 men, terrorised the coast in 1680; he sacked Arica and burnt Coquimbo among his exploits. After the day of the pirate Davis, raiding about 1686, it was decided to render the fertile islands off the coast less useful as rendezvous; Mocha was depopulated and an attempt made to kill all the goats that thrived on Juan Fernandez.

Many times during the seventeenth century the Chilean colonies were almost ruined by earthquakes; the live volcanos of the Andean backbone broke out from time to time, and in many cases the overthrow of dwellings by temblores and terremotos was accompanied at the unfortunate coastal settlements by furious onslaughts of tidal waves, when numbers of people were drowned. Santiago was badly damaged by the earthquake of 1642, but suffered worse in 1647; ten years later a terrible earthquake and tidal wave destroyed Concepción on its original site where Penco village stands today, and the city was later moved to its present situation on the north of the green-wooded, silver Bio-Bio, with its banks of black volcanic sand.

In 1700 the Spanish were able to regard the danger of active aggression on the part of the Dutch without alarm. Spain had preserved the integrity of her enormous American colonies in the teeth of an array of energetic rivals, sea-adventuring people with vigorous populations lacking space for new settlements, sharing the most jealously guarded regions of South America with but one country, Portugal. For sixty years, indeed, after the tragic death of Sebastião at El Kebir in 1578, Spain held Portugal and Portugal’s splendid colonies abroad, including Brazil; until 1640 the Kings of Spain were absolute masters of South America. The long-continued struggle with England and its constant threat to the colonies was one reason why Spain reluctantly made concessions from time to time in her dealings with Holland, a country openly displaying a keen desire to share in American profits. The formation of the Dutch West Indian Company, with comprehensive plans for settlement as well as for trade, received strong government backing, and the forcible occupation of the Brazilian coast region of Pernambuco between 1624 and 1654 caused great anxiety to Spain. Nevertheless, a commercial agreement for the supply of indispensable Negro slaves, brought from the Portuguese colonies of West Africa, endured until Holland’s sea power was definitely affected by reverses at the hands of the English.

A sign of change of influence which had a significant and lasting effect upon the South American Pacific Coast was displayed when early in the eighteenth century Louis XIV of France induced Philip V of Spain to give to French traders the right to supply slaves to the American colonies in place of the Dutch. A certain amount of general commerce could not be denied to vessels bringing slaves, and presently limited agreements were made by which two French companies were allowed to do business with South America. The monopolist companies of Seville and Cadiz, crying ruin, protested vainly, for viceroys and governors as well as settlers found the visits of the French ships convenient and profitable; the corsairs of England too were being transformed by economic circumstances into smugglers whose operations were welcome in many quarters. France did not limit her interest in South America to commerce: we find from about 1705 onwards an increasing number of French scientists and writers visiting the West Coast—as Feuillée, the Jesuit Father and careful botanist, who published the first account of Chilean plant life; and Frezier, the distinguished engineer, who left a descriptive volume of perennial interest. It was this most observant writer who first noted the use of the Quechua word maté as applied to the small gourd, often beautifully carved and silver-mounted, from which it was and is usual to drink an infusion of the “herb of Paraguay,” in Chile and Peru. Sidelights of great value are also presented by the letters of French Jesuit priests who came to the West Coast about this time, and many of whom, like the devoted Father Nyel, thought that the supreme reward for a laborious life spent among wild natives was to be killed—“meriting reception of the crown of martyrdom as the worthy recompense of apostolic work.” Father Nyel wrote, in 1705, when he was planning the establishment of a mission among the Araucanians, that in spite of having murdered the noble Father Nicolas Mascardi thirty years previously the Indians begged for Jesuits to enter their land again to instruct them. But in order to succeed with these people it was necessary to have “a strong constitution, complete indifference to all the comforts of life, a persuasive gentleness, strength, courage, and determination in spite of insurmountable difficulties encountered amidst a barbarous people.”

The most distinguished of the scientists who were, perhaps somewhat grudgingly, given leave to enter the Spanish colonies were the French Academicians, headed by La Condamine, who came to Ecuador in 1735 to measure an arc of the meridian upon the Equator, and whose Spanish associates, sent by Madrid, made a detailed, frank and brilliant report of the condition of Peru, Ecuador and Chile. The Noticias Secretas handed to the King upon their return are extremely illuminating, especially in the light of the events of eighty years later, when the irritation which they observed between “creoles” (native-born Americans of European blood) and Spaniards from the Peninsula came to a head. The voyage of Juan and Ulloa, the accounts of Frezier, Feuillée and the Jesuits, were as eagerly read in Europe as the biographies of the corsairs, for whatever official reports were made by Spanish officials from Spanish America never saw daylight, strangers were forbidden to enter, and in consequence South America had the magic of the unknown.

By the middle of the eighteenth century Chile was still a small country, settled chiefly between Coquimbo and Concepción, yielding a little gold and silver from surface veins, but with her greatest activity in connection with agriculture; she was spared the feverish excitements and reactions of wealthier countries. Most of her trade was conducted by land, over the Andes into Argentina, with a brisk exchange of Chilean woollen ponchos, honey, hams and lard for yerba maté from Paraguay and European goods imported at Buenos Aires; to Peru was shipped wheat and wine and beef or pork fat (grasa), exchanged for cargoes of aji (red pepper) from Arica and silver from Potosí.

Commerce with the Araucanians, eager buyers of hardware, metal implements and ornaments in exchange for guanaco skins and cattle, went on in spite of the mistrust engendered by the events of 1723, when a general rising of the Indians took place, the settled villages of converts created by the Jesuit missionaries were deserted, and a new war commenced. The Araucanians themselves sued for peace on this occasion, a new Parliament was held with fresh agreements that the country below the Bio-Bio should be intact to the Indians, and the Governor agreed to withdraw the Spanish officials who had been posted in the villages of Christian Indians.

Castro, on Chiloé Island, traded its famous bacon and lard and planks of hardwoods (chiefly alerce) for manufactured goods, and maintained a sturdy if isolated existence; Osorno was little but a fort; Valdivia, with its port of Corral, was carefully guarded, since it was considered as the key to the South Sea, and five or six forts covered the bay and the waterway to the city. In 1720 there were a couple of thousand people here, chiefly convicts of Peru and Chile sent south during their period of punishment, and the garrisons were maintained by Spanish and Peruvian Indian soldiers. Concepción was not only a Spanish stronghold, but a genuine agricultural colony, its splendid soil and enchanting climate, bright, balmy and temperate, bringing the settler who forms the backbone of Chilean society. Valparaiso was nothing but a shabby port, lacking a customhouse, all goods being shipped by mule-back to Santiago, ninety miles inland, or rather, 120 miles by the Zapata pass and Pudahuel, the only road then existing. It was fairly well defended by upper and lower forts overlooking the curve on the bay’s south where the houses of Valparaiso lay along a narrow strip of beach. Santiago was a well-built city, the centre of a fortunate agricultural and pastoral region; northwards lay but one settlement of note, La Serena (Coquimbo), with Copiapó, a prosperous silver mining centre, farther north.

The changes affecting Spanish America were not limited to the entry of the French. Philip V, to induce Queen Anne of England to sign the Peace of Utrecht, agreed to give the right of supplying slaves (asiento) to the South Sea Company, for thirty years, from 1713 to 1743; by this agreement 4800 Negroes were to be annually taken to the Plate, and as a further and extraordinary concession the company was allowed to send one ship each year to the Porto Bello fair (below Panama, on the Atlantic coast). At the same time a peremptory stop was put to the overseas commerce of the French, who had been allowed by Louis XIV during the War of the Spanish Succession to trade from St. Malo to the American colonies of Spain, herself too much involved to aid them with supplies.

The war of 1739 between England and Spain put an end to the English traffic for nine years, but the terms of peace included an indemnity to be paid to the South Sea Company for their trading rights, a British merchant in Buenos Aires carrying on for a few years (until 1752) the transportation of African slaves; after this time a group of Spanish merchants took up this traffic. It was in 1748 that Spain, finding her commerce with the colonies greatly reduced by home troubles, and the more or less legitimate efforts of other nations, from the 15,000 or even 25,000 tons of shipping formerly sent each year under convoy across the Atlantic, stopped the yearly visits of the famous galleons and the protecting warships. This fleet had sailed annually for 200 years. A system of unguarded merchant boats was licensed, ships sailing for the Plate six times a year.

In 1774 the rules forbidding the Spanish American colonies to trade with each other were relaxed by Charles III, and the effect of this is illustrated by the figures of Spanish merchant shipping sailing for the Americas in 1778, the year of the erection of a Viceroyalty in Buenos Aires, the fourth of Spanish America; no less than 170 vessels sailed, as against twelve to fifteen in the days of the yearly fleet of jealously licensed vessels.

In 1785 there was further relaxation, all the ports of Spain and all the ports of Spanish America being allowed to trade mutually, and as other proof of liberal ideas there came, in 1788, the appointment of Ambrose O’Higgins as Governor of Chile. This excellent organiser was born in Ireland, in County Sligo, and spent part of his barefoot youth in running errands for the great folk of his native village; he went as a youth to Spain, enlisting in the Spanish army, as many adventurous Irish did about this time, and later made his way to the Spanish American colonies. He distinguished himself in the Araucanian wars, was made a colonel, and in 1788 was nominated to the Chilean captain-generalship by Teodoro de Croix, the Viceroy of Peru, a native of Lille. The name of Ambrose O’Higgins is as much respected in Chile today as that of his son, Bernardo, born in Chillan, who became Supreme Director during the early days of Chilean independence.

Reproductions from Gay’s “History of Chile” (1854)

Más a Tierra (Juan Fernández Group) in the 18th Century.

O’Higgins’ Parliament with the Araucanian Indians, March, 1793.

Capturing Condors in the Chilean Andes.

Guanacos on the Edge of Laja Lake.

Governor O’Higgins called the Parliament of Negrete with the Araucanians, and set about the improvement of Chile; found and rebuilt the ruins of Osorno fort, and made a road from Osorno to Valdivia; another highway from Valparaiso to Santiago; and a third from Santiago to Mendoza. He constructed bridges, notably over the turbulent Mapocho River, and his good Chilean work only ceased when he was created Viceroy of Peru, with the title of Marquis of Osorno. He remained in that post until his death in 1801. A spurt in town foundation during the eighteenth century also bears witness to the growing prosperity of Chile. Between 1736 and 1746 the courtly and wideawake governor Don José Manso de Velasco, Conde de Superunda, founded San Felipe, Melipilla, Rancagua and Cauquenes; the same official encouraged the operation of mines, making cannon for the defence of one of the Concepción forts from local copper, and reopening gold mines at Tiltil (between Santiago and Valparaiso) and developing the copper works of Coquimbo and of Copiapó. His successor, Don Domingo Ortiz, founded Huasco and Curicó, built the University of Santiago and began the Mint, completed during the régime of Don Luis Muñoz between 1802 and 1807. The plans, tradition says, were mixed with those for Lima, and by mistake Chile received authority for a much more splendid building than was intended for her, La Moneda still serving as Government offices in Santiago.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Europe had undergone violent spiritual as well as material changes that could not fail to affect the world and inevitably produced reactions in the Americas. The independence of the United States had less effect upon South American thought than the French Revolution, for with North America the South was not in touch. There was little commerce, and the language difficulty was a bar, while French literature and French movements were extremely influential. The ideas of the Encyclopedists fell upon fertile soil.

When Napoleon conquered Spain, putting his brother Joseph Buonaparte upon the royal throne of the Bourbons and driving Ferdinand VII into exile, there was little thought upon the West Coast of this misfortune as an opportune time for seizing freedom. Even when the action of Mexico and Buenos Aires pointed the road of independence, Peru and Chile demurred from disloyalty and declared their intention of returning to the king when he should be again upon the Spanish throne. The grievances against Spain of which so much was afterwards heard were not realised by the majority of the populace, and in fact the creoles were well aware that from narrow trading policies, the dictation of officials, sumptuary laws, and the still-existent although waning burden of the Inquisition, Spain suffered even more acutely than her overseas dominions. The rights of mayorazgo, that is the preservation, intact for generation after generation, of enormous estates which could not be broken up among a number of heirs, or divided for sale, were a source of definite complaint; but it was an inheritance from the land tenure laws of Spain, also inelastic, to which they were inured by custom. The most fertile ground for the growth of animosity between the colonies and the mother country seems to have been the tangible annoyance of the stream from the Peninsula, both of officials and merchants or adventurers. Don Antonio Ulloa, writing the “Noticias Secretas” for the King’s eye in 1735, noted that the big towns were “theatres of discord between Spanish and creoles.... It is enough for a man to be a European or chapeton to be at once opposed to the creoles, and sufficient to have been born in the Indies to hate Europeans. This ill-will is raised to so high a grade that in some respects it exceeds the open hatred with which two nations at war abuse and insult each other.” He thought the feeling tended to increase rather than to diminish, and notes that it was more bitter in the interior and mountainous regions, because the coast people were bent to a more liberal spirit by their dependence upon commerce with strangers, had more work to do and something else to think about. He gave as reasons for the mutual dislike, first, the “vanity and presumption” of the creoles; and next, the wretched condition in which many poor Europeans usually arrived in the Indies. The native-born were lazy, thought the Spanish officer, and envied the industrious and intelligent Spaniard the fortune which he presently made. The succession of Peninsular officials to many posts in the colonies was not without its influence in providing grievances also, but as a matter of fact a number of minor berths were frequently filled by the native-born, who also became Inquisitors and clerics, the list of viceroys and governors also providing a few colonial names, and a large number of American-born receiving good positions in Spain. But on the whole the colonies were necessarily still dependent upon Spain for blood, ideas, intercourse with the world, and, but for Napoleon, independence would have been long delayed.

The Fight for Independence

In many parts of Spanish America people had to be almost cudgelled into rebellion, and would never have stirred had they lacked a leader inoculated with a grandiose vision.

But here again the quite accidental figure of Napoleon intervened. It happened that both San Martín and Bolívar, the two most powerful instruments of the South American Revolution, were actual witnesses of triumphal ceremonies of the Napoleonic armies. The day when Simón Bolívar saw the Corsican enter Paris at the head of magnificent conquering troops, greeted with all the hysteric adulation due to a second Alexander, the immediate fate of Spain’s South American colonies was sealed. It is easy to understand that such young men as San Martín and Bolívar, intelligent, trained to arms, well aware of the golden opportunity awaiting in their own countries overseas, and of the force behind the slogan of freedom, beheld themselves with rosy imagination in the same kingly rôle. Statues of these leaders stand all over Latin America, and it is but just that tributes should be paid. But the day of blind homage is past. Critics have dared to arise, and the skies have not fallen upon their blasphemy.

The formation of the “Gran Reunion Americana,” with definite aims towards self-government of the Spanish American colonies, was one result. Inaugurated in Buenos Aires, it spread “lodges” all over South America, following freemasonry in its terminology. One of the most influential of these branches was “Lautaro Lodge,” at Concepción, with Bernardo O’Higgins as a member. The illegitimate son of the brilliant Ambrose O’Higgins by a native woman, Bernardo, born in Chillan in 1778, was sent to England for education and returned to Chile upon the death of his father. Imbued with liberal ideas, candid and open-hearted, the young O’Higgins stood inevitably upon the side of emancipation, and served as one of the revolutionaries’ most valuable assets. The stars worked together for the success of the extremists, for a motive far removed from any idea of revolutionary merits brought them the powerful aid of the Roman Catholic Church. Napoleon the “antichrist” was anathema: the colonists were therefore encouraged to refuse obedience to his puppet kings, and we find the clerics of the Americas hand in glove with the members of the Reunion Americana.

The colonists were by no means inclined in every region throughout South America to commit themselves unreservedly to the apostles of liberty; here and there the feeling of revolt was genuinely national, a spontaneous movement from the inside; in other regions the native-born only after some years, and when separation was practically forced upon them from the exterior, disavowed Spain. Confusion was introduced, that made it difficult for the most loyal to discover where allegiance lay, by the several claimants overseas. To Joseph Buonaparte no one wished to submit, and the French emissaries were coldly received; Seville setting up a Junta (Council) loyal to the deposed Ferdinand, asked and received the adhesion of the Viceroys in the Americas, but when this body was overthrown a new Junta established in Galicia sent out a new set of Viceroys. Next came the Central Junta, also obeyed until the French occupation of Andalusia dissolved it, and later a new authority of Spanish royalists, a Regency of three members, was announced in an edict sent out by the Archbishop of Laodicea.

Confronted with these various claims, and taking breath after the English occupation of the Plate, Buenos Aires decided to form her own provincial Junta, in the name of Ferdinand, action supported if not suggested by the Viceroy Baltazar Cisneros.

In the middle of 1810, with Abascal, Marques de la Concordia, as Viceroy of Peru and General Carrasco Governor of Chile, there arrived to the West Coast the request of exiled Ferdinand that his American colonies should obey Napoleon. This bombshell was received with disgust by Carrasco, who wished to work with the Junta of Buenos Aires, but he did his official duty and read the document aloud to the populace of Santiago. This was in June. A tremendous public uproar followed, Carrasco and the rest of the Audience were turned out, and by popular acclaim an Assembly of Notables was formed, headed by Mateo de Toro Zambrano y Urueta, Conde de la Conquista, a highly respected old aristocrat who had been Governor of Chile in 1772. This body ruled on the understanding that Chile would refuse French control and would remain wholeheartedly Ferdinand’s.

The Conde de la Conquista died in November, 1810, was replaced by Dr. Juan Martinez de Rosas, and elections for a popular congress were held in April, 1811, giving the signal for open strife between the different parties evolved by the confused political atmosphere. The first blood shed in Chile on account of independence was not a struggle with the mother country, but the result of dissensions among adherents of the Spanish or Argentine Juntas, “old Spaniards,” groups desiring complete independence, the church party, and foreign interests. It was during this fight that the young José Miguel Carrera came first into military prominence; he was the son of a Chilean landowner, Ignacio Carrera, secretary of the Junta.

Congress held its first meeting in Santiago, in July, 1811, the deputy from Chillan being Bernardo O’Higgins, educated in England and endowed with the prestige of his father’s name. It was not long before O’Higgins, then but thirty-five years old, was regarded as the leader of the “Penquistos” (southerners of Penco or Concepción, who wanted to see that pleasant city restored to her ancient pride as capital of Chile), in opposition to the rich central group, with Santiago as their stronghold and the Carreras as one of the most ambitious families. In common with many another new clique, the Carreras were growing rich upon the property which was now eagerly confiscated from the “old Spaniards” and from the wealthy religious orders, whose accumulated lands and long ascendancy had engendered such bitter enmity that, during the long war of Spain with England, Juan and Ulloa reported, many people said openly that it would be a good thing if England took possession of the Pacific Coast, so that they would be free from the oppression of the clerics. The Carreras, however, wanted more than money: their determination to seize political power was demonstrated when, in December, 1811, a military coup put the three sons of Ignacio into complete control of all the newly recruited Chilean land forces, with José Miguel as the commander-in-chief.

This young man dispersed the national congress by force, proclaimed himself President of a new Junta, and banished Dr. Martinez to Mendoza: all this still in the name of Ferdinand. But the confiscation of property, removal of Spanish officers from the army, declaration of free trade (a tacit invitation promptly accepted by many foreigners), abolition of slavery and collection of church income, spelt practical independence from Spain, and strong exception was taken in more than one quarter. Valdivia and Concepción set up juntas independent of Santiago, and over a year of disruption followed, until the viceroy of Peru sent reinforcements to the Spanish commander in Chiloé Island, General Antonio Pareja, and the latter sailed north, landing at the mouth of the Maule with 2000 royalist troops for the disciplining of Chile.

José Miguel Carrera marched a Chilean army southwards, falling in with the Spaniards at Yerbas Buenas, fifteen miles from Talca; the ability of O’Higgins, commanding the forces in the field, brought about the defeat of Pareja, who was driven to Chillan—the extreme south remaining pro-Spanish and, in one spot or another, subject to Spanish influence until late in the year 1824.

A strange accident now turned the political tide against the Carreras. The central provinces, determined to endure no longer a rule of loot and tyranny worse than that imposed by Spain, deposed José Miguel in his absence by a vote of the Junta, and gave complete control of the army to Bernardo O’Higgins; the Carreras hurried north to watch their interests, were caught by a Spanish patrol and sent to Chillan. The Spaniards were presently reinforced by troops under Gainza, took Talca, and became strong enough by May, 1814, to arrange the Convenio de Lircay with the new political leader of Chile, Henriquez Lastra, Governor of Valparaiso. By this agreement the Spanish troops were to retire to Lima, on the assurance that Chile remained faithful to Ferdinand VII; its execution was guaranteed by Captain Hillier of the British man-of-war Phoebe.

But before the Convenio could be ratified, two events happened to prevent this solution of complications. The Carreras escaped and collected an army opposed to the agreement; the Viceroy Abascal received strong reinforcements from Spain, changed his mind about signing, and sent, instead of his signature, 5000 troops under General Mariano Osorio.

The parties of Carrera and O’Higgins composed their differences in the face of this aggression, marched to the encounter at Rancagua, and were there signally defeated, in October, 1814. The overthrow was so complete that the Chileans who had opposed Spain felt certain that no mercy was to be expected, and, with their wives and families, began an extraordinary exodus from the country over the Andes to Mendoza. The weather was cold, with deep snow and bitter winds; without proper baggage or sufficient food thousands of unhappy refugees crowded the mountain paths and passes for days.

Meanwhile, General Osorio marched north and entered the capital in triumph, welcomed enthusiastically not only by those citizens who remained royalist but by thousands who were tired of the partisan intrigues and condition of civil war to which the Carreras had reduced the country for over two years. A new Spanish Governor, Francisco Casimiro Marco del Pont, was inaugurated, about one hundred citizens prominent in the growing independence of Chile were deported to Juan Fernandez island, and for another twenty-eight months Spain resumed the rule of Chile, as she still retained control of Lower and Upper Peru and Ecuador. A fierce struggle between the Spanish and the northern patriots under Simón Bolívar had begun in 1811 and continued with tremendous reversals of fortune; Venezuela and Colombia (New Granada) were drenched in blood. Over the Andes, Buenos Aires had been actually independent since the middle of 1810, although the Spanish authorities held out with peninsular troops in part of the northwest of Argentina, holding the roads into N. W. South America. Pueyrredon, the Supreme Director of Buenos Aires, seeing that Chile with comparatively facile mountain passes was the key to the West, decided to bring her to the fold of independence, raised an army, and put José de San Martín at its head. While the eldest of the Carrera brothers, with whom San Martín was upon hostile terms, went to the United States to try to get help in the Chilean struggle, a strong force of 4000 men was collected in Mendoza, the celebrated “Army of the Andes.” By this time events had put Spain and the South American colonies into the position of furious opponents; the Peruvian Viceroy’s actions forced Chileans to see patriotism as hostility to Spain. For the plain citizen, lover of his country with a desire to live in peace and to give and take fairly, it must have been difficult to choose sides as regards the authorities to whom he gave recognition and paid taxes; but for such revolutionaries as San Martín the vision was simpler. He hung his own portrait on the wall beside that of the Corsican; the memory of that superhuman conqueror infected his blood and filled his landscape.

The Spaniards in Chile, aware of the situation of the Army of the Andes, were tricked into believing that the main body intended to descend into the central valley by the southerly Planchon Pass. But early in February when the army was ready to set out, most of the troops were marched by the Putaendo and the Cumbre, emerging near the plain of Chacabuco on the 12th. The Spanish troops sent hurriedly to the encounter were scattered like chaff by the hardy South Americans, inured to wild country and able to march for days with sun-dried meat and a handful of toasted maize as their only food. The battle of Chacabuco was a rout so decisive that the Spanish leaders did not even attempt to enter and hold Santiago: they fled hastily to Valparaiso, and, accompanied by scores of their panic-stricken sympathisers, filled nine ships and sailed away to Peru.

In the Chilean Andes.

A Chilean Glacier, Central Region.

Rio Blanco Valley, above Los Andes.

Bernardo O’Higgins, to whose energy this success was chiefly due, was made Supreme Director of Chile, openly independent now, with no more talk of Ferdinand, although the actual proclamation was delayed until February 12, 1818, upon the anniversary of Chacabuco. In the same year Osorio came back, with 5000 Spanish troops, and in March San Martín was surprised and his army badly defeated at Cancha Rayada; it was followed by a repetition of the exodus over the Andes as after the Rancagua defeat, but in better weather. Nor did the exile of the patriots last so long, for on April 5, before the Spaniards could take possession of Santiago, the Chileans attacked again and won the final victory of Maipu. Only about 200 Spaniards escaped to take ship for Peru, all the rest falling upon the Maipu plain or being taken prisoner.

Three days later, in Mendoza, the two younger sons of Ignacio Carrera were shot upon a frivolous charge, an event generally regarded with regret in Chile and always ascribed to the revengeful spirit of San Martín. These young men had been refused permission to join the Army of the Andes, were on parole in Buenos Aires and were still in that city when José Miguel returned from the United States. Here he had obtained means to fit out an expedition, promising to pay the debt with funds obtained from Chilean import duties later on; he chartered five ships, took on arms and ammunition sufficient for several thousand men, and received as volunteers a number of technical workmen, and over a hundred military officers, including seventy French and British.

But when Carrera in his first ship entered Buenos Aires on the way to the Horn, the vessel was seized and he was placed under arrest on board a brig, from which he escaped into the Argentine interior. The remaining vessels of his fleet put back to North America. His two brothers also fled in disguise, but were captured, sent in chains to Mendoza, and there executed by the order of San Martín’s secretary.

The place of the Carreras in history is not great, but they were Chileans of energy and courage deserving a better fate: the story of their youth and good looks, and the tale of Juan José’s beautiful wife who shared his miserable prison until his execution, are still remembered. The fate of the elder brother was no more fortunate: during three years he allied himself with various guerilla revolutionaries in the heart of South America, but was eventually caught and identified, sent to Mendoza, and shot, in 1821.

Chile, now upon her own feet, was still not given up by the Viceroy of Peru, now General Pezuela, and since a land attack could not be again contemplated for a time, the Frigate Esmeralda was sent with the brig Pezuela to blockade Valparaiso. These vessels were driven off by the brilliant action of the Lautaro, a vessel recently bought and armed by the Chilean government and commanded by a young British naval officer, Lieutenant O’Brien, killed at the moment of boarding the Spanish ship. This was Chile’s first naval victory, herald of almost unbroken success upon the sea; she was heartened to the immediate strengthening of this service, and set about the acquisition of vessels while also sending abroad for naval leaders. Chileans had up to that time, of course, no experience in this arm of a nation’s defence: the first Chilean-born admiral, Blanco Encalada, had had no experience but that of a midshipman in the Spanish navy for a few years in his youth. Chile was wise in looking overseas for technical skill. It happened that many British soldiers and sailors, fresh from the Napoleonic wars, were in England when the Chilean envoys came to seek help: hundreds of men took service, partly no doubt for the sake of adventure but also from a genuine sympathy with the gallant fight put up by a little country ranged against the ancient enemy Spain. Among the naval officers who came was Lord Cochrane, with a most distinguished naval career to his credit, the hero of a score of daring deeds at sea and an extremely competent organiser; no personality of Independence is more revered in Chile today than that of Cochrane, and he who said that republics are notoriously ungrateful could never make such a charge against Chile.

But before Cochrane arrived a new success had cheered the embryo navy. Serious danger threatened with news of the coming of a formidable Spanish naval force: a courier brought the story hotfoot from Buenos Aires, where the squadron had put in. Nine ships convoyed by the Maria Isabella of 50 guns set sail from Spain with two thousand troops, but one ship mutinied off the Argentine coast and joined the new Republic; another transport disappeared in the Pacific; seven, with the fine frigate, arrived in Talcahuano Bay in October, 1818, in a wretched state, over 500 men having died on the way. Chile’s new little navy by this time consisted of five vessels: the San Martin, carrying 1000 men, was formerly the British East Indiaman Cumberland, which entered Valparaiso in August, laden with coal, commanded by a Briton named Wilkinson, and went out as a vessel of war of Chile, under the same command. The Lautaro was now commanded by Captain Worcester, an American merchant skipper; the Chacabuco, by Captain Francisco Diaz, an “old Spaniard” who sided with the cause of Independence; the Pueyrredon, Captain Vasquez; and the Araucana, commanded by another Briton, Captain Morris. This force set sail southwards on October 9, and ten days later found the enemy ensconced under the forts of Talcahuano, a town which with Valdivia and Chiloé remained in the hands of the Spanish. In the spirited action which followed the Maria Isabella was run aground, but was seized and got off safely by the Chileans, while the seven Spanish transports were all taken, in the bay or later at sea.

Returning in triumph in November, the fleet was almost at once taken in hand by Cochrane, just arrived from England, and plans made for attacking Callao, where a Spanish squadron had its base. Neither the Chilean nor the Argentine patriots had any quarrel with Peru, but here was the stronghold of Spain on the West Coast; the Pacific could only be rendered safe for enfranchised Chile by its reduction.

In January, 1819, Cochrane sailed north in command of the fleet, consisting then of his flagship, the O’Higgins (formerly the Spanish Maria Isabella), the Lautaro, San Martin and Chacabuco. He took a provision ship and a gunboat of Spain, blockaded Callao successfully from early February till the beginning of May, although Callao was defended by fourteen ships of war and powerful batteries; he found time also to take several small ports up and down the Peruvian coast, as well as prizes carrying loads of cocoa, useful stores, and 200,000 pesos in money. Most of the coast towns were quite ready to embrace independence, but were alternately punished by royalists and patriots for compliance with demands for supplies.

When Admiral Blanco and Cochrane returned to Chile another vessel had just been added to the little navy, the Independencia, purchased in the United States. Two vessels had in fact been bought, but when they arrived in Buenos Aires the agents of Chile had not sufficient specie to complete the payments for both, and had to see the second sail away to Rio, where she was sold to the Brazilian government, although Chile had paid half her price. The relations between the United States and Chile were peculiar at this juncture; the bulk of the population were certainly not unsympathetic, and a number of American individuals were doing a brisk commerce with the young country, but a certain small jealousy seems to have been shown towards Cochrane, and comparatively little help was given to the patriotic cause. But the United States Government quickly recognised the new Chilean government and had appointed a consul during the days of Carrera’s régime.

Before Cochrane refitted his ships for new expeditions, the patriot armies had gained ground in the south, and the outlook had considerably improved. In September, 1819, the Chilean navy returned to Callao with seven ships, chased the Spanish frigate Prueba into the Guayas River, sailed up 40 miles to Guayaquil and seized two armed prizes, the Aguila and the Bigoña. At Puna island, where Spain built most of the vessels used in the Pacific between West Coast ports, Cochrane loaded his prizes with the famous hardwoods of the Guayaquil region, sailed out and took the Potrillo, a provision ship, and sent her to Valparaiso with news while he turned towards Talcahuano with the object of aiding in the obstinate southern struggle.

General Freire, in command of the Chilean army, lent him 250 men, and Cochrane proceeded in a small schooner to reconnoitre the entrance to Valdivia. Here he landed, at sunset on February 2, 1820, led his force of about 350 to the fort “del Inglez,” attacked and took it, went on and stormed Corral fortress, and before the night was over the Chileans had taken possession of the four other main batteries of the south side. With the dawn came the O’Higgins, and realizing the uselessness of further fighting, the Spanish troops abandoned the northern forts and fled up river to Valdivia. The defenders numbered 2000, and the forts were provided with plenty of excellent guns: success was due to the daring of this stroke of Cochrane, a resourceful sea-fighter who well knew the value of a surprise.

“At first it was my intention to have destroyed the fortifications and to have taken the artillery and stores on board,” wrote the Admiral to Zenteno, the Chilean Minister of War and Marine a few days later, “but I could not resolve to leave without defence the safest and most beautiful harbour I have seen in the Pacific, and whose fortifications must doubtless have cost more than a million dollars.” He left a small force, and sailed farther south to try to take the last Spanish stronghold in Chiloé, where the gallant Colonel Quintanilla maintained a plucky and hopeless stand—and was destined to maintain it for nearly five more years. Cochrane landed in the bay of San Carlos on February 17, took the outer forts, but lost the way in woods and boggy roads during a black night, and thus gave the Spaniards time to assemble a force too strong for the Chilean attackers. They withdrew, and a body of 100 men was sent to take Osorno; this town was taken without resistance on February 26, and thenceforth Spanish military work on the mainland was limited to guerilla disturbances in the forestal interior. Many Spaniards took refuge among the Indians, and the tragi-comedy was enacted, for several years, of both the new Chilean parties and the Spaniards flattering and bullying the Araucanians into taking sides. To political divergences the native must have been profoundly indifferent; despite the fact that his frontier still stood at the Bio-Bio River and his southerly lands were intact, his spirit had been warped by the steady pressure of three centuries, and perhaps most seriously changed by the civilised habits he had learnt from the white man. He had taken to cultivation, to the use of European foods and a few implements; as a result, he had needs hindering his ancient freedom and he could be cajoled by their satisfaction. “I have distributed to each cacique on taking leave,” wrote Beauchef to Cochrane after the taking of Osorno, “a little indigo, tobacco, ribbon and other trifles.” And also with ribbon, tobacco and “trifles” the Spanish survivors, or the recalcitrant Benavides (wavering first on one side and then the other and finally to outlawry in the woods), and the patriots of Chile, bought the Indian, giving him short shrift when territory or villages changed hands. Eventually, in 1822, a Chilean punitive force was sent to the south, the Indian country inland from Valdivia was reduced, and the Spaniards troubling that region gave up. The diary of Dr. Thomas Leighton, an English surgeon acting as medical officer of the expedition, as quoted by Miers, is extremely illuminating.

With Valdivia in their hands, the Chileans were able to contemplate a bold stroke. It was decided to clear Spain once and for all from the Pacific by bringing Peru into the camp of independence: the return of Cochrane from the south was the signal for completion of plans for a combined naval and military attack upon the last great stronghold of Spain. The “Ejercito Libertador” (liberating army) was prepared with immense enthusiasm, embarking from Valparaiso in August, 1820, preceded by proclamations from O’Higgins, who declared the wish of Chile to contribute to the freedom and happiness of the Peruvians, who would “frame your own government and be your own legislators.” “No influence,” he stated, “civil or military, direct or indirect, shall be exercised by these your brothers over your social institutions. You shall send away the armed force that comes to protect you whenever you wish; and no pretext of your danger or your security shall serve to maintain it against your consent. No military division shall occupy a free town except at the invitation of the legal authorities; and the Peninsular groups and ideas prevailing before the time of Independence shall not be punished by us or with our consent.” O’Higgins was undoubtedly sincere; Cochrane was free from any trace of selfish or ulterior motives; but San Martín’s objects were less simple. His position was peculiar; sent originally into Chile at the instance of Pueyrredon, he had practically disavowed his party in the Argentine, where no political laurels seemed likely to offer, and taken service with Chile. But here he had to share popular affection with the beloved O’Higgins and the applauded Cochrane; in Peru he might have the field to himself, and to this end he forthwith worked.

The Chilean fleet spent 50 days in Pisco, while the Chilean Colonel Arenales marched upon and took a number of other small Peruvian towns on or tributary to the coast, with Ica, Nasca and Arica among them; from the latter port he marched inland and seized Tacna. Meanwhile San Martín was negotiating with the Peruvian Viceroy, Pezuela, but the “truce of Miraflores” split upon two rocks—the Viceroy refused demands that he should acknowledge the independence of the South American colonies: San Martín could not sign acknowledgment of even nominal submission to the Spanish Crown. The Liberating Army eventually set sail again on September 28, and passed on to Callao, where on November 5 Cochrane, with 240 volunteers, performed the exploit, never forgotten in the annals of the Pacific, of cutting out the Spanish frigate Esmeralda. This fine ship had 40 guns and 350 men, lay inside a strong boom and a line of old vessels, was surrounded by 27 gunboats and protected by 300 guns of the forts on shore. But Cochrane boarded and took her, and with a couple of other Spanish gunboats sent her outside to an anchorage beyond the reach of the Peruvian cannon. Renamed the Valdivia, she afterwards served as a unit of the Chilean fleet.

San Martín, now at Ancon with his forces, delayed the projected attack upon Lima, sent out sheaves of grandiloquent proclamations, and watched with anxiety affairs farther north, where the now triumphant Bolívar was occupying Quito and might push forward to Guayaquil—a rich province also coveted by San Martín and to which he now sent envoys with suggestions that Bolívar should be kept out. For the next seven months San Martín’s forces remained idle, although a part of the force under the British Colonel Miller and the able General Arenales continued to range the coast; Cochrane maintained a close blockade of Callao, and at last, unable to get supplies and alarmed by the insecurity of their position in Lima, the Spanish authorities evacuated the city and went to Cuzco. This was on July 6, 1821, and for about a week order was kept in Lima by Captain Basil Hall of H. M. S. Conway with a handful of marines. San Martín then sailed to Callao and took possession of Lima, where Independence was proclaimed on July 28.

On August 4, San Martín declared himself Protector of Peru, proclaiming his absolute authority and naming three associates as the cabinet ministers. Requested by Cochrane to pay the wages and bounty promised to the fleet on the fall of Lima, San Martín answered that he could not, as Protector of Peru, pay Chile’s debts, said that he could only find the money if the squadron were sold to Peru for his use, and presently had the effrontery to invite Cochrane to leave the service of Chile and become Admiral of Peru.

Cochrane’s indignant replies are historical; he sailed away after repeated attempts to obtain the sailors’ wages, and, learning that San Martín had shipped a considerable treasure to Ancon (upon the advance on Callao of the still undefeated Spaniards), went there and took possession of the gold and silver. One can imagine the grim smile of the experienced old sailor as he made this haul.

San Martín assented with reluctance eventually to its use as part payment of the sums due, but there was no possibility of further friendly intercourse. Cochrane sailed north, on October 6, with the Chilean fleet in a wretched state, ill equipped and almost unseaworthy. He went up the Guayas to Guayaquil, received with rejoicing by the now emancipated town, refitted, and put to sea again in the first week of December. Fonseca Bay was visited on December 28, Tehuantepec on January 6, Acapulco three weeks later, in the hunt for two Spanish ships, the Prueba and the Venganza; the latter was chased and followed into Guayaquil, the former into Callao, where Cochrane himself reappeared in April. Here San Martín sent his ministers to wait upon the sailor, making new propositions, including the post of admiral of the joint squadrons of Chile and Peru. Cochrane answered bluntly that he would have no dealings with a government founded upon a breach of faith toward the Peruvians, supported by tyranny and the violation of all laws; that no flag but that of Chile would be hoisted upon his ships; and he refused to set foot ashore. He brought the fleet back to Valparaiso on June 2, 1822, after two and a half years of ceaseless effort in the service of Chile. The Pacific no longer showed a Spanish flag upon ship or fortress: his work was done. When Cochrane left Chile in January, 1823, the independence of the country was definitely assured.

Spanish rule in the Americas had endured for three hundred years, but at the end of that period it cannot be said that the profit of her conquest and colonisation was on the side of Spain. The amazing courage of the conquistadores forms a record without parallel, not upon the part of such great figures as Cortes and Pizarro only, but scores of less known pioneers. “In a period of seventy years,” Cieza de Leon has written, “they have overcome and opened up another world than that of which we had knowledge, without bringing with them waggons of provision, nor great store of baggage, nor tents in which to rest, nor anything but a sword and a shield and a small bag in which they carried their food.”

Between 1519 and 1811 the Spaniards smashed three established and at least one embryo civilization in the Americas; but on the other side of the ledger they gave the contact with West European speech, thought, crafts and aims that brought immense American regions into line with the rest of the modern world. It is true that vast stores of precious metals were taken away: but in return were given two things more valuable, ideas and blood.

Spain herself materially suffered in the long run. Her best youth was drained overseas, or lost in the wars in Europe to which her gold tempted her. In 1800 the commerce, agriculture, wealth and industry of Spain were “almost nothing, compared to what they were when she conquered America,” says Torrijos. The population had been cut in half. Spain has been correctly charged with narrowness of policy in regard to her colonies; it is frequently forgotten that all rules of commerce and colonization were narrow during the same period—examples are still to be found of nations surrounding themselves with a sky-high tariff wall; and if Spain forbade the American colonies to cultivate Spanish products, in turn Spaniards were not permitted to grow the crops peculiarly American. As a matter of fact this rule was much more rigidly insisted upon within the small compass of Spain, since in the Americas it was to the interest and convenience of officials to shut their eyes to breaches of the rule. Spain’s decree forbidding cultivation of the vine in Chile, for example, was practically a dead letter, a show being only occasionally made of attempts to carry out the law.

Chile, free and young, faced many problems, but was able to look upon the future with confidence, secure at least in the active sympathy of the greater part of the world. Spain, her power broken and her armies destroyed, stood alone. Her wounds were long in healing.

Republican Chile

Accounts of the naval or military affairs of one particular nation often read as if those events had occurred in a heavily screened vacuum. But the march of affairs in the Pacific during the struggle for independence were not only watched breathlessly by other American nations—particularly Mexico, Central America, Colombia and the United States—but also by Europe, immensely affected by the success or failure of Spain to reassert her possession of the colonies. Vessels of war of the United States and Britain ranged up and down the coast, their position as neutrals complicated by the fact that many of their own nationals were interested, either openly and quite un-neutrally, in promoting the success of the revolting South Americans, or in commercial transactions which were frequently perfectly legitimate and straightforward, but which were sometimes kaleidoscopic. Fluid and irregular trade conditions had prevailed upon the coast for a century: Spain had been forced during her long wars to give an increased number of trading licences, and much commerce was performed under cover of Spanish names by foreign merchants. During Cochrane’s efforts to stop the smuggling and underhand traffic that went on, particularly in the series of small ports (headed by Pisco and Arica) in South Peru, he found himself more than once at loggerheads with the merchants, and with the British and other foreign squadrons watching affairs. Duties ran high, sometimes up to 60 per cent ad valorem, and in consequence along this “Entremedios” region a tremendous amount of smuggling flourished; many of these little villages formed on occasion markets for the interior of such size that the coast was glutted with European goods and merchandise among the sand-hills was as cheap as at a bargain sale.

Banks did not exist, and there was no adequate exchange of South American products; cash was paid and had to be shipped overseas. A custom grew up among the British traders of sending such payments home by naval vessels, and as a percentage was paid upon these sums for safe-carriage to the captains of men-of-war, a direct interest was created in commercial prosperity. When Cochrane, on behalf of the Chilean government, suggested a new customs rate of 18 per cent, taking on board and guarding a quantity of disputed goods, there were international and loud objections to his “floating customhouse.” With the establishment of the young countries was closely entangled a number of commercial interests with wide ramifications.

While the movement of affairs in Lower and Upper Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, filled public attention, the new Chile struggled to secure stability as a self-governed country. The steps towards this end were not all easy. The country had never been wealthy—in fact, scarcely self-supporting, for the shipments of agricultural and mineral products to Peru and Spain did not pay the costs of government and defence against the Indians—and she was now nearly bankrupt. A terrible burden of expense had been incurred for the military and naval campaigns in her own south and in Peru, and the confiscated property of “old Spaniards” and the religious orders was not an inexhaustible treasure. A loan raised in London in 1822 gave no more than temporary relief, and heavier taxes were imposed than in the days of Spanish control. The exhilaration of new hopes, the realization of the inner strength of the Chilean nation, did not suffice to save the country from a period of dissatisfaction and unrest.

Bernardo O’Higgins never lost his personal popularity, but murmurs against his minister of finance, Rodriguez, imperilled his position. The national congress called in July, 1822, sat until October to frame a new tariff (commercial regulations) and a new constitution to supersede the tentative proclamation of 1818. But illiberal restrictions created by the new decrees closed all the minor ports to foreign vessels, and every Andean pass but one; prohibitory duties were placed on many articles of foreign manufacture.

San Juan Bautista, Village of Cumberland Bay, Más a Tierra Island (Juan Fernández Group), 400 Miles West of Valparaiso.

The Plain of Calavera, Chilean Andes.

The composition of Senate and Chamber of Deputies was outlined, the Senate’s and Director’s term of office fixed at six years, while the deputies, from whom a property qualification was required, were to be elected annually, one for every 15,000 people. The Director was made head of the army and navy, with powers to create foreign treaties and to make peace and war. The treasury and all ecclesiastical appointments were in his hands, as well as the naming of ambassadors, judges, ministers and secretaries of state. In the middle of October, 1822, General San Martín suddenly reappeared in Valparaiso, in the character of a private citizen whose health required a sojourn at the medicinal baths of Cauquenes. He told a tale of voluntary renunciation of Peruvian dignities that received little credence; as a matter of fact, the luck that for a period had made him appear a master of men had failed him at last.

From the time when he made himself Protector in Lima (August, 1821) the Peruvians had taken exception to his arrogance, his oppressive treatment of leading citizens, the extortions of his ministers, and complained of the want of stability in the country. In the interior Spanish forces still maintained themselves, while San Martín kept idle an army of 8000 men, a burden upon the populace. Early in April, 1822, the royalist General Canterac marched quickly upon the coast and inflicted a severe defeat upon the forces of the Protector, near Ica. San Martín, alarmed, decided to ask aid from Bolívar, fresh from victories in the Ecuadorian interior, and sailed to Guayaquil. He was received by Bolívar on July 26, but with such hostility that, fearing for his personal safety, he left hurriedly on July 28, and sailed back to Callao. He found that Peru had undergone a coup d’état. Upon his departure leading citizens held a meeting, insisted upon the resignation of his unpopular minister, Monteagudo, and deported him. San Martín accepted the warning and waited only until the convocation of congress to offer his resignation and to leave the country. If he had any dream of returning to take a part in public affairs in Chile or Argentina, it was speedily dissipated, and presently he retired to an estate at Mendoza, now a part of his native Argentina. His arrival and the fears of Chile that he contemplated some disturbing stroke probably hastened the irruption of feeling against the heads of the Chilean Government, by whom San Martín was received with extreme friendliness. No hostility was expressed against O’Higgins, whose memory agreeably survives in Chile, but the detested Rodriguez was increasingly blamed for the blighting commercial decrees and the general depression of the country.

In November, 1822, Chile experienced one of the most disastrous earthquakes of the century: a month later another upheaval occurred, with armed insurrections both in the north and south. The division of the “Penquistos” from Santiago was newly emphasized by violent dissatisfaction with laws against grain exports, and the cause of the south was championed by General Ramon Freire, military governor of Concepción, and echoed by Coquimbo, also angered by the heavy export dues placed upon copper, collected in the north but spent in Santiago.

While the troops of Freire crossed the Maule, his northern supporters under Benevente marched south; by the end of January they had reached Aconcagua and had secured the adhesion of Quillota. On the 28th a group of leading citizens visited O’Higgins and induced him to resign his authority into the hands of a junta of three, until the national congress could be again summoned. But the arrival of Freire in Valparaiso Bay with three warships and 1500 men put a different complexion upon governmental plans. Freire camped his men outside Santiago, declared his lack of personal ambition, but presently accepted the offer of the Directorship from the Junta. A new constitution was evolved at the end of 1823, which does not concern history since it was abrogated a year later in the face of new danger from Spain, speedily dispelled, when Freire needed larger powers.

From this period Chile slowly fought her way to social solidarity, her true wealth in agriculture developing steadily as the population increased. It is true that from a political standpoint there were few outstanding figures during the last eighty years of the nineteenth century, but whether from the outside or the inside the men appeared who brought the country to economic strength and gave her all that she lacked as regards markets, means of communication and development of her almost unsuspected resources.

In 1830 internal disturbances took place, chiefly as the result of the reaction of the pelucones (the Conservative-Church-aristocratic group) against the Government party of pipiolas (Liberals). The victory of the Army of the South at Lircay (April 17, ’31) resulted in the election of the successful general, Prieto, as President, and during his term of office (1831–41) the brilliant minister, Diego Portales, advanced the country’s progress materially and framed the Constitution which is still in force. Portales was assassinated upon the eve of Chile’s expedition to free Peru from the domination of a foreign dictator, in 1837. The occasion of this war was the rise of the aggressive Bolivian general, Santa Cruz, and his invasion and reduction of Peru. Chile regarded this forced Confederation as a challenge, sent armies to the north, took Lima, and defeated Santa Cruz at the battle of Yungay (January, 1839), when the Confederation fell apart.

The victor of Yungay, General Bulnes, ruled Chile for another ten years (1841–51), a prosperous and quiet period marking a tremendous stride forward in the country’s advance. Manuel Montt, the next President, served for another ten-year period, but was troubled first with a rebellion under General de la Cruz, crushed at the battle of Loncomilla at the end of 1851; by a revolt of the Atacama miners, put down at Cerro Grande in April, 1859; and a serious affray at Valparaiso late in the same year. During the succeeding government of José Perez occurred Spain’s last hostile act against her former colonies, when in 1865 a naval squadron sailed into the Pacific, seized the Chincha islands off Peru and demanded the payment of the old Peruvian colonial debt. Chile made the cause hers, and mobilized her fleet, brought upon herself the bombardment of Valparaiso on March 31, 1866, but seized the Peruvian gunboat Covadonga off Papudo port.

In 1879, during the administration of Anibal Pinto, war broke out between Chile and Bolivia, afterwards joined by Peru, with the result, after the cessation of hostilities in 1883, of the acquisition by Chile of practically all the nitrate fields of South America.

A little later, Chile’s internal peace was curiously disturbed by the recurrence of old trouble concerning church privileges. The Chilean government claimed the right of nomination of church dignitaries, and the question was brought to a head when the Pope refused to appoint a candidate to the Archbishopric of Santiago chosen by the administration of Santa Maria (1881–86). A governmental decree rendering civil marriages legal in the eye of Chile, and another insisting upon the right to bury non-Roman Catholics in city cemeteries, roused a great deal of popular passion and clerical objection.

Unrest culminated during the administration of Balmaceda, when quarrels broke out between the President and Congress, and his attempts to govern the country without that body ended in a mutiny of the fleet. Sailing to the north, the insurgents prepared their plans for eight months, training an army, until it was brought south in August, 1891, and Balmaceda was defeated at the battles of Concon and Placilla. When the president shot himself in September of the same year, the mantle fell upon one of the insurrecto leaders, Admiral Jorge Montt, son of Manuel. Another of the Montt family, Pedro, occupied the presidential chair from 1906 to 1910, a period marked by great energy in the construction of ports, highways and railroads.

Since the Balmaceda revolt Chile has enjoyed complete internal and external peace, the administration of the country remaining in civilian hands and following the normal course of electoral changes.

CHAPTER III
STRANGERS ON THE PACIFIC COAST

Drake and the “Golden Hind.”—Thomas Cavendish.—The Narborough Expedition.—Sharp and Dampier.—Captain Betagh.—The Loss of the “Wager.”—Juan and Ulloa.—Resident Foreigners.—Strangers and Independence.

From the time when she planted her first colonies on the West Coast of South America Spain did her utmost to keep strangers from those shores or from any knowledge of them. A veil of mystery hung over the Pacific, torn aside roughly when Drake’s little vessel weathered the furies of the Magellanic Strait and the resounding tale was published broadcast throughout Europe.

There is no reason to doubt the historic truth of Drake’s words as repeated by the gallant Captain John Oxenham—that, viewing the Pacific from a hill on the Isthmus of Panama during his famous raid upon Nombre de Dios in 1572, Drake “besought Almighty God of His goodness to give him life and leave to sail once in an English ship in that sea.” The Devonshire sailor undoubtedly urged repeatedly in England, after that time, that reprisals for Spanish injuries inflicted upon England could be best made by direct attack, and as he told Queen Elizabeth, small good could be done by attempts on Spain herself, but that as all Philip’s wealth was drawn from overseas “the only way to annoy him was by his Indyes.” The Queen, however, did not consent to such strokes until after Philip had tried to raise a rebellion in Ireland and actually landed forces there; both she and her envoys had in mind, not only a blow at Spanish prestige, and “some of their silver and gold which they got out of the earth and sent to Spain to trouble all the world,” but the extension of the Protestant faith and the glory of England by the conquest and settlement of wild lands. The evidence of Oxenham and Butler before the Inquisition in Lima in 1579 proves that Drake intended to colonise if he could, “because in England there are many inhabitants and but little land.” When, on leaving the coasts of Mexico, he sailed farther north, landed after entering the Golden Gate and claimed “Nova Albion” for the Queen, he felt completely justified because “the Spaniards never had any dealing, or so much as set a foot, in this country, only to many degrees southward of this place.” San Francisco stands today on the spot where Drake’s chaplain held service; the map, still extant, of Drake’s correction, show that he foresaw the time when English-speaking colonies would dispute with Spain, France and Portugal possession of the Americas.

Armed with Elizabeth’s formal commission, her own sword, and the title of Captain-General, Drake sailed from Plymouth on November 15, 1577, with five ships, of which the largest was the Pelican, of only 100 tons, but very strongly built. Officers and crew totalled about 164, and among them was his cousin John Drake, then a clever lad of fourteen years. A storm compelled them to put into Falmouth, and after repairs they sailed again on December 13. Land was first touched at Cape Mogador; thence the little fleet sailed to Cape Blanco, where they took a Portuguese ship with a store of fish and biscuit; to Cape Verde, where a Spanish merchantman’s load of cloth was seized; next to the river Plate, for water and wood, on April 27, 1578, and on to Port San Julian, where Magellan had executed mutineers, and where, for the same crime of mutiny, Drake beheaded Thomas Doughty. The master-gunner Oliver was killed here by Patagonians, and during the two-months’ stay the Portuguese prize, the Maria, as well as the Christopher and the Swan were broken up. The weather was cold and the expedition was sorely in need of firewood.

Sailing south, they sighted the entrance of the Strait on August 17, naming one of the three islands off the south shore “Elizabeth Island.” The Strait was actually entered on the twenty-first of August, with winter well advanced. They saw no Indians at first, but quantities of the smoke from the innumerable fires that gave the great island on the south its original name of “Land of Smoke.” At Penguin Island they stopped to kill and salt a supply of birds, the Purchas account of the voyage stating: “This Strait is extreme cold with Frost and Snow continually: the Trees seeme to stoope with the burthen of the Weather and yet are greene continually; and many good and sweet Herbes doe very plentifully grow and increase under them.”

At the passage’s western end the weather was so furious that the Marigold sank with all hands. The captain of the Elizabeth put his ship about and deserted, fleeing back through the Strait for England, where he was promptly sent to prison. With the loss of a pinnace, whose one survivor, Peter Carder, a Cornishman, eventually made his way back to England in 1586, after terrible sufferings in Patagonia and Brazil, Drake had only his own flagship, the Pelican, whose name he now changed to the Golden Hind. About 80 men remained, half of the number who had set out from Plymouth.

Driven down to the sixty-sixth degree of south latitude, 14 degrees south of the western opening of the Strait, Drake put about as soon as the terrible gales permitted and ran north outside the channels and archipelagos of South Chile. They saw Valdivia, or rather, Corral, but did not enter, anchoring first at the island of Mocha, in about 38 degrees, almost opposite the present Traiguen. Here a party went ashore to get water, but were fiercely assailed by well-armed Indians, who wounded every man of the English company, some receiving over twenty arrows. Returning hastily, the party left two men behind, and three others died of their wounds on board.

Sailing farther north in search of Valparaiso, they overshot the entrance, but discovered their mistake when they anchored in the bay of Quintero, 18 miles to the north, and found an intelligent Indian, who told them of a Spanish ship then lying off Valparaiso. Him they took as a guide, and returning boldly sailed into and anchored in the bay at high noon of December 5, 1578. At anchor also they saw La Capitana (“the flagship”) in which Pedro Sarmiento had a few years previously made his famous voyage of discovery to the Solomons. The Spaniards aboard the Capitana, never dreaming that a vessel in the Pacific could be other than Spanish, hailed and welcomed them. Drake sent a boarding party, which rudely awakened their hosts when one Thomas Moon began to lay about him, struck a Spaniard and said to him (says the Purchas account) “Abaxo Perro, that is in English, Goe downe Dogge.” The Spaniards were put under hatches, a prize crew sent aboard, and going ashore and breaking open the warehouse Drake added 1700 jars of wine, and stores of salt pork and flour, to the treasure he had found in the Capitana, amounting to 24,000 pesos of the “very fine and pure gold of Baldivia,” due for shipment to Peru. One Spanish sailor pluckily swam ashore and warned the inhabitants of the settlement; there were but nine households, and the people abandoned the place to the English, who found little to loot but the silver ornaments from the chapel. Two days later they weighed anchor and returned to Quintero, where the friendly Indian was set ashore with gifts, and Drake set his course for more northerly ports, using the sea-chart of the Capitana’s pilot.

At Tongoy Bay, where they put in next, they found no water, and went on to the beautiful Herradura just above it, a few miles south of Coquimbo Bay with its little Spanish stronghold of La Serena. Twelve men went ashore here to get water, but were attacked by a number of Spanish horsemen. Thomas Minivy, leader of the shore party, got his men into the boat, but was attacked, and, defending their embarkation with arquebus and sword, was killed. Drake now went on to Salada Bay, where he stayed for over a month to careen the Golden Hind, to bring up from the hold and place in position his artillery, and to build, on board the Capitana, a pinnace with planks brought from England. She was launched on January 9, 1579. Several times during his stay Spaniards came from Coquimbo to look at him, but did not attack, according to the statement made later to Captain Sarmiento by Juan Griego, the boatswain of the Capitana taken along the coast by Drake, and corroborated by the log-book and Nuño da Silva the pilot.

Setting sail, they missed the mouth of the Copiapó River, and had an anxious search for water along the arid coasts of Tarapacá. Entering at length the mouth of the Pisagua River they had a stroke of luck, for there on the bank lay a Spaniard, fast asleep, in charge of a train of llamas laden with silver bars from Potosí and a quantity of charqui (dried meat). Taking him as a guide, and seizing his cargo, they sailed for the port of Arica, a village of only 20 houses, but at that time the chief point of embarkation of the silver from the interior mines. Brought from the mountains by Indians and llamas, the precious bars were sea-borne from Arica to Peru (Callao, for Lima) to await the yearly despatch of treasure to Panama City, and overland by Cruces to Porto Bello. Of these arrangements and their usual date Drake well knew, for but six years previously he had lain in wait for and captured the train load of mules carrying silver ingots along the cobble-paved pathway through the Isthmian forest.

Proceeding to Arica, the Golden Hind surprised and took two ships, one containing 33 bars of silver; but hearing that a ship laden with a richer treasure was in the port of Chule (about five miles north of Ilo) he hurried on. However, before his arrival warning had reached the captain, who disembarked and buried the silver bars, and Drake’s only satisfaction was to take the ship along and set her adrift, himself sailing on to Callao. Strangely enough, no news had reached Lima of the long sojourn and repeated raids of Drake upon the coast, and he was able to enter the bay without rousing suspicion on the part of the vessels anchored there. At this time (February 13, 1579), John Oxenham was still alive, in the prison of the Inquisition in Lima, with two or three of his crew; Drake knew it, and although he could not risk the ruin of his expedition by any such attempt as an attack on Lima, he hoped to seize Spaniards of sufficient importance to exchange for the English prisoners. When John Drake was examined before the Inquisition in Lima in 1587 he said that “Captain Francis ... in the boat, with six or seven men, accompanied by the pinnace carrying twenty or thirty men, went to the other vessels anchored there and cut their cables.... This was done so that, having been cut loose, the wind would carry these ships out of port, where he could seize them and hold them for ransom, so that in exchange they would give him the Englishman who was said to be a prisoner in Lima.” The plan did not succeed. A calm fell, and an attack by the pinnace on a ship from Panama was repulsed with the loss of a man; she was afterwards taken when her crew abandoned her. At night the tide carried them outside the port, and when in the morning three or four vessels came out against the Golden Hind Drake ran before the wind, sailing north until Paita was reached. A ship was taken here and another farther north, but it was not until the first day of March that young John Drake won the chain of gold that had been promised to the first person sighting the coveted treasure ship of San Juan de Anton. Two days later Drake transferred from the captured ship an immense treasure, including much gold and fourteen chests of silver, letting her go on March 6.

Thence his exploits do not greatly concern the Pacific coast; he took vessels off Nicaragua, plundered the Port of Guatulco in Mexico, sailed to the Californian coast, and when he met ice shaped his course southwest, making for the Moluccas, the Cape of Good Hope, and so back to Plymouth, arriving with the greatest treasure that was ever carried in one little sailing vessel and the undying record of an extraordinarily bold feat in the circumnavigation of the globe.

It is the effect of Drake’s exploit upon the West Coast which concerns these pages chiefly, but it is only fair to the memory of a gallant man and fine sailor to say that not only was he beloved at home, but that the noble Spaniards with whom he came in contact did justice to his qualities. Not unnaturally, the ports that he raided feared and hated his name; but such a man as Don Francisco de Zarate taken prisoner by Drake off Acajutla (El Salvador) in April, 1579, called him “one of the greatest mariners that sails the seas, both as a navigator and as a commander.” A remark of Zarate’s that follows sheds a bright light on Drake: “Nine or ten cavaliers, cadets of noble English families, form part of the council which he calls together for the most trifling matter, although he takes advice from no one. But he enjoys hearing what they say, and afterwards issues his orders.” Zarate was shown, and apparently accepted the propriety of, Elizabeth’s commission to Drake, and informs the Viceroy of Mexico that “I managed to find out whether the General was liked, and they (the crew of the Golden Hind) all said that they adored him.”

Thomas Cavendish

The effect of Drake’s feat upon the New World was electric. The Viceroys of New Spain and Peru, the Audiencia of Panama, Governors of every province, hastened to strengthen weak ports with troops and artillery; ships changed their routes, scores of reports and letters went home to Spain. Philip II, who through his clever Ambassador at the court of Elizabeth knew of the expedition before it sailed, wrote discreetly on the margin of one such letter, “Before the Corsair reaches England it is not expedient to speak to the Queen. When he arrives, yes. Investigate whether it would be well to erect a fort in the Port of Magellan.”

But noisy as was the repute of the exploit in the Pacific and in Spain, it had no less effect upon the imagination of Europeans desiring a share in exploration and its rewards. Spain’s tragic effort to found a settlement in the Strait was almost blotted out when Thomas Cavendish passed through in 1586.

Cavendish was a native of Trimley in Suffolk, a good mariner; he sailed across the Atlantic with three ships, the largest of 120 tons, entered the Strait in January, 1586, and passed out into the Pacific on February 24. Sailing north to the island of St. Mary, he found stores of good wheat and barley, and potato roots “very good to eat.” Hogs and hens, introduced by the Spaniards, were thriving, and although the Indian small farmers were so much in subjection to the Spaniards that they dared not eat a hog nor hen themselves, in compensation for these restrictions all had been made Christians.

Running north, Cavendish anchored near Concepción; in the bay of Quintero they had an encounter with Spaniards on horseback, and the captain himself, who travelled eight miles inland, declared the valley country to be “very fruitful, with fair fresh rivers.” Off Arica the raiders took a ship, and went on north, raiding the coastal vessels; eventually they burnt Paita, raided Puna Island at the mouth of the Guayas River, and lost men there.

Cavendish took two years and two months to complete the round of the globe, and the Pacific had hardly settled down again after the trouble caused by this corsair when, in early 1594, Richard Hawkins, son and grandson of fine mariners, came through the Strait. An acute observer, he noted the handsome Winter’s Bark trees of the southern channels, finding the seeds like good pepper and the bark “very stomachic and medicinal.” On the West Coast Hawkins was unlucky, encountering a strong Spanish fleet which captured him in June, 1594. He was taken to Lima, sent prisoner to Spain, and after eight years of captivity was released to return to his Devon home.

In 1598 the Dutch appeared, in the person of Captain Oliver Noort, piloted by one Melis, an Englishman who had sailed with Cavendish. Noort traversed the Strait, sailed north to Mocha Island, where he drank chicha for the first time and found it “somewhat sourish,” and nearby seized a Spanish ship. Off Arica his ships encountered terrible “arenales” (sand-laden winds) and two strayed from touch with the flagship. Bad weather persisted until June 13, when “the Spanish pilot was for ill demeanures, by publike sentence, cast overboard. A prosperous wind happily succeeded.”

The exploit of Noort brought many of his countrymen into the Pacific, and from the beginning of the seventeenth century Holland sent out scores of fine navigators. Spilbergen came through the Strait in 1615, and it was a Dutchman, Willem Cornelius Schouten of Hoorn, sailing here in the same year, with Jacob Le Maire of Amsterdam, who found and named many islands south of Tierra del Fuego, as Staten, Maurice, Barnvelt, as they also named Cape Hoorn and Le Maire’s Strait. The famous Jacques l’Hermite came through and up the coast in 1623–4; and by these southerly passages also came five ships of a Dutch expedition in 1642–3, of which Hendrick Brouwer or “Brewer” left an account.

The Narborough Expedition

In 1669 it occurred to the English Crown that better information concerning Patagonia and Chile was desirable, and the experienced Sir John Narborough was sent out with two ships in 1669. The Sweepstakes, of 300 tons, had 36 pieces of artillery; the Batchellor, pink of 70 tons, had four pieces; the crew totalled one hundred. They were well provisioned and carried plenty of beads, hatchets, etc., to trade with the natives of the southerly channels, the design of the voyage, which was at the king’s private cost, being “to make a discovery both of the seas and coasts of that part of the world, and to lay the foundation of a trade there.” Narborough was enjoined not to go ashore before he got south of the Plate River, and not to interfere with any Spanish settlements; Port Desire he considered beyond Spain’s jurisdiction, formally taking possession in the name of Charles II. He thought better of Patagonia than Darwin, nearly two hundred years later, for he recorded that the soil was marly and good, that in his opinion it might be made excellent corn-ground, being ready to till, and that “tis very like the land on Newmarket Heath.” He noted that the Indians seen in this region had dogs with them, with grey coats and painted red in spots.

Reaching the eastern entrance of the Strait on October 22, he anchored just outside the first Narrow at night, and passed the white cliff of Cape Gregory next morning; when he went ashore at Elizabeth Island natives came to him, but did not recognise the gold and copper he showed; and although “my Lieutenant Peckett danced with them hand in hand” and obligingly exchanged his red coat for one of their skin-coverings, while Narborough showed them “all the courteous respect I could,” shortly afterwards he had reason to suspect them of planning to sink his skiff. They too had dogs, but no other domestic animal, and the sailor decided that they were but brutish, and gave up hope of friendship or trade. He passed “Sandpoint,” named Freshwater Bay, and six leagues to the south reached “Port Famen,” where driftwood lay as thick as in a carpenter’s yard.

“A little within land from the waterside grow brave green woods, and up in the valleys large timber-trees, two foot throughout and some upwards of 40 feet long, much like our Beech-timber in England; the leaves of the trees are like green birch-tree leaves, curiously sweet ... there are several clear places in the woods, and grass growing like fenced fields in England.” He caught plenty of fish, noticed the spicy Winter’s Bark and used it to stew with his food, but could find no traces of minerals in the soil. The Indians here took the knives and looking-glasses Narborough gave them “to gain their loves,” but, he records, refused brandy. Sounding and taking careful observations as he went along, he named Desolation Island, passed out by Cape Pillar, and noted the Four Evangelists (calling them the “Islands of Direction”) as guides for the western end of the Strait.

On November 26 he lay off the island of Socorro, in 45° south latitude, and on the 30th found and named Narborough’s Island, taking possession “for his Majesty and his Heirs.” By this time all the ship’s store of bread was exhausted, everyone eating pease; they proceeded to No Man’s Land, a small island at the south of Chiloé, and by December 15 anchored at the entrance to Valdivia Bay. Here they sent a Spaniard of the crew ashore, with bells, tobacco, rings and jew’s-harps to trade with the natives, and an undertaking to burn a fire at night as a signal. No fire was seen and apparently Narborough was never able to discover what became of him. The lieutenant gathered green apples from the thick woods close to the water’s edge. Next morning the lieutenant in his boat, rowing by the shore, came suddenly upon the Spaniards’ small fort of St. James, was invited to land by the Spanish soldiery, and noted that the fort was strongly palisaded against Indian raids, and that the Spaniards used “very ordinary” match-lock musquetoons. The officers received the English sailors courteously, sitting “on chairs and benches placed about a table, under the shade, for the sun shone very warm, it being a very fair day,” the captain calling for wine in a silver bowl and firing five of his guns in salute. He asked for news of wars in Europe, said they had much trouble with the valiant and barbarous Indians, who fought on horseback and infested the camp so closely that the Spaniards never entered the thick woods nor went more than a musket-shot’s distance from the palisades. A fine dinner was served upon silver dishes, and it was suggested that four Spaniards should go back to the English ship with the lieutenant, and pilot her into the port. But Narborough remembered the old tale of “treacherous dealings with Captain (John) Hawkins at St. Juan de Ulloa,” and although he listened attentively while they talked of the gold they found here and troubles with the natives, and the great trade the Pacific coast had with the Chinese by way of the Philippines, he declined to take his ship in, and said he only wanted wood and fresh water. On December 17 he sent eighteen men ashore to barter merchandise with the Spaniards, many courtesies being exchanged. Four of the Spaniards’ wives, “very proper white women born in the kingdom of Peru of Spanish parents,” who had never been in Europe, insisted on sitting down in the ship’s boat, “to say that they had been in a boat that came from Europe.” Other Spaniards had Indian wives, all being finely dressed in silks, with gold chains and jewelled earrings. The English were then asked to go to Fort St. Peter, two miles inside the bay, where the Governor of Valdivia received Lieutenant Armiger and his companions politely, accepting their presents and offering them wine; but when they asked for a cask of water he sent soldiers and seized the boat, also taking the Englishmen prisoners, saying he had orders from the Captain General of Chile. A letter from Armiger to Narborough, sent next day, stated that “myself and Mr. Fortescue are kept here as prisoners, but for what cause I cannot tell; but they still pretend friendship and say that if you will bring the ship into the harbour you shall have all the accommodation that may be. Sir, I need not advise you further.” This was the last we hear of him, for Narborough could not obtain his release and sailed away a few days later. Three men were with Armiger—John Fortescue, Hugh Cooe the trumpeter, and Thomas Highway, a Moor of Barbary, who spoke good Spanish. Returning through the Strait, the expedition reached home in the middle of 1671, sighting the Lizard on June 10.

Narborough’s careful and seamanlike observations, his sailing directions, record of soundings, etc., as well as his acute notes upon South Chile, were the first explicit details published in England of the condition of this region in the seventeenth century; the book was the manual used seventy years later by the crew of the Wager’s longboat.

Narborough thought that advantageous trade might be made in South Chile if “leave were granted by the King of Spain for the English to trade freely in all their ports and coasts; for the people which inhabit there are very desirous of a trade: but the Governors durst not permit it without orders, unless ships were to go thither and trade per force and not take notice of the Governors.” And as Spain continued to follow the policy of exclusion, and open hostilities recurred, this was what happened, until before another fifty years had passed the authorities were either taking part in the smuggling that went on or trying to shut their eyes to it.

Sharp and Dampier

The next English stranger upon Chilean coasts was the pirate Captain Bartholomew Sharp, raiding up and down all the West Coast in 1680 in boats that he built in Panama, and sailing southwards “as far in a fortnight as the Spaniards usually do in three months,” says Basil Ringrose. They made for the “vastly rich town of Arica,” took a couple of vessels on the way, but finding Arica roused and the country in arms against them, took Ilo, and proceeded south to plunder Coquimbo. Hence they sailed for Juan Fernandez Island. The crew deposed Sharp and elected Watling as the commander, and presently sailed back to Iquique with minds still fixed upon the riches of Arica. On a second attempt at this port Watling was killed; Sharp was reappointed, and the buccaneers went to Huasco for provisions (“for fruits this place is not inferior to Coquimbo”), and after raiding off the Central American and Mexican coast, returned to England. They intended to traverse Magellan Strait, but must have rounded the Horn, for to their surprise no land was encountered until they found themselves in the West Indies. Their story encouraged Davis to the plundering of Coquimbo in 1686.

Between this time and the arrival of Anson, one of the most interesting of the raiders in the South Seas was Dampier, who was an adventurer of great experience and resource. The sailing-master in one of the vessels of Dampier’s expedition of 1703 was Alexander Selkirk. This Scot had a quarrel with Captain Stradling, and was put ashore at Juan Fernandez, where the corsairs usually assembled to get fresh water and to repair their vessels. It is said that before the ship left he asked to be readmitted, but was refused. He lived alone on the island for a period of four years and four months, and was eventually rescued by Woodes Rogers, captain of the Duke privateer, on February 12, 1709. Dampier, curiously enough, was then acting as Rogers’ pilot, and must have been interested in the adventures of the original of Robinson Crusoe.

Captain Betagh

A narrative of uncommon interest is that of Captain Betagh, an Irishman with an observant eye and a lively pen, who, raiding in the company of Captains Clipperton and Shelvocke upon the West Coast in the year 1720, recorded his adventures in a racy tale.

The Success and the Speedwell carried King George’s commission, a state of war existing between Spain and England, and the legality of their privateering was so far recognised that when a number of the British, including Betagh, were caught and sent prisoner to Lima, no charge against them regarding attacks upon coastal towns was made, and the only serious accusation was that, early in their cruise, a Portuguese and therefore friendly vessel had been seized and a quantity of money taken. The two vessels, of which the larger did not exceed 170 tons burden, sailed south down the Eastern Coast of South America late in 1719, encountering such bad weather off Tierra del Fuego that they were greatly delayed. Many of the crew died and the rest were reduced to eating mussels and wild celery found on the forbidding shore. The vessels missed a rendezvous at Juan Fernandez, and Captains Clipperton and Shelvocke raided separately up and down the West Coast in an extraordinary series of adventures. Three Spanish men-of-war came out after them, as well as after the French “interlopers,” but the seas were wide and the little privateers besides being fast were manned by hardy British sailors, while most of the Spanish vessels were obliged to carry Indian or Negro crews. A number of small vessels were taken, but one prize brought misfortune; the prize crew put aboard was overpowered by the original crew, the ship run aground, and the handful of British sent prisoners to Lima. Not long after, Betagh was sent to cruise in the Mercury, a little fruit bark seized off Paita. In this unlikely vessel he actually succeeded in taking two prizes, exchanging into the second, an old English-built pink full of peddler’s goods running between Panama and Peru. But the pink was chased by the Spanish warship Brilliant and overtaken, luck, however, remaining with Betagh when the Admiral proved to be Don Pedro Miranda, who had been a former prisoner of Sir Charles Wager and so well treated by him that not only did the Spaniard treat his English prisoners kindly, but brought Betagh to his own table and toasted the gallant Wager at every meal.

Reversals of fortune of this kind were not unusual, and no doubt bred tolerance; another example was occurring in the Pacific at almost the same time. Clipperton, taking the Prince Eugene, found aboard the Marquis de Villa Roca with his wife and child. On a previous voyage Clipperton had been taken before this official in Panama, and the terms now arranged were not made harsher by resentment. The antagonists recognised the fortune of war.

Betagh, with a surgeon and sergeant of marines, was set ashore at Paita, whence they were sent by the usual route of the coast peddlers to Piura, and later to Lima. Here the venerable Archbishop Diego Morsillo, the Viceroy, refused to proceed harshly against the prisoners in the matter of the Portuguese moidores, and “would sign no order for the shedding of innocent blood.” Betagh was permitted to live with one Captain Fitzgerald, a native of St. Malo, who offered agreeable hospitality. Another group of Clipperton’s men, taken and also brought to Lima not long after, yielded to suggestion and became converts to Roman Catholicism, with merchants of Lima standing as godfathers. Apparently the Limeños were not disposed to severity towards these brands wrested from the burning, for when an assortment met at a public house kept by one John Bell to confirm their baptism with a bowl of punch, and became so dimmed of vision that they knocked down and smashed the image of a saint in mistake for an aggressor, the Inquisition released them after a five days’ cooling of their heads. Nor was the action of the authorities anything but strangely lenient when the same precious converts were caught out in a more serious business. Headed by one Sprake, they formed an audacious plot to seize a ship at Callao, and, to get money for firearms, had the effrontery to beg for alms in the Lima streets as “poor English newly baptised.” Discovered, they were all jailed for a time, but presently released with the exception of the ringleader, with whom the Government was “greatly provoked.”

Betagh himself was permitted to work his way home in the Spanish ship Flying Fish, and returned to London in October, 1721. His book, written soon after he returned, is a valuable companion picture to that of Byron: both were straightforward narrators of the experiences upon the West Coast of young naval officers engaged in their duty of “cruising upon and annoying the enemy” in the closed waters of the South Seas, at a time of extreme interest in world affairs. Betagh’s descriptions show that he had an eye for scenery, as when he said of Coquimbo that it “stands on a green rising ground about ten yards high, which nature has formed like a terrace, north and south in a direct line of more than a mile. The first street makes a delightful walk, having the prospect of the country round it and the bay before it. All this is sweetly placed in a valley ever green and watered with a river which having taken its rise from among the mountains, flows through the vales and meadows in a winding stream to the sea.”

The Loss of the “Wager”

Spain being again at war with England in 1740, Commodore Anson was sent to the Pacific, as Vernon to the Atlantic, colonies of Spain on exactly the same principle as had prevailed in Elizabeth’s day—to touch the enemy in one of his tenderest spots.

The authority under which they sailed was not questioned; the rule of conduct on both sides was that of the “gallant enemy.” Britain’s Caribbean possessions date from that series of raids.

Lord Anson sailed from England in September, 1740, with the flagship Centurion, and the warships Gloucester, Pearl, Severn, Tryal and Wager, with two store-ships. The mission of the fleet was to harry the Spaniards in the Pacific, and the route was round the Horn. But when Anson reached Juan Fernandez Island in June, 1741, but three vessels remained, and his available crew was reduced from 1000 to 335.

Nevertheless he harassed the coast, and captured Paita; but was forced to sink two unseaworthy vessels, collecting the remainder of the crew on the Centurion, and remained cruising about the Pacific until in June, 1744, he took one of the treasure-ships on her way from Mexico with enormous wealth on board, and sailed home with the spoils. He is said to have brought back more than a million pounds’ worth of gold, and to have entered port with a big golden Spanish candlestick tied to every yardarm of his ship.

Of the Wager’s fate Anson did not know for several years; this vessel was cast away on an island off South Chile, a number of the crew escaping in various ways. The loss of the Wager and the subsequent fate of her crew not only forms a moving and almost incredible story with which Chilean colonial life is interwoven, but had a lasting effect upon international maritime law. For, following the desertion of the captain by the insubordinate leaders in the Speedwell longboat, an act of Parliament was passed which made such conduct mutiny in the eyes of justice. Until that time the pay of a crew ceased when their ship was wrecked, and they then had no employers nor commanders and the officers, in consequence, were without technical authority, although in practice this control was almost invariably conceded.

The Wager was an old East Indiaman. She set sail deeply laden with repairing gear and stores for the squadron, and was in no condition to withstand the fierce buffeting of the South Seas. She lost a mast after passing Le Maire Strait, failed to regain touch with the squadron, and while hastening in the teeth of terrible weather to reach the rendezvous at Socorro Island, south of Valdivia, she was wrecked off a desolate island lying between 47 and 48 degrees of south latitude. The names of Wager and Byron Islands, in the south of the Gulf of Peñas, commemorate the shipwreck and struggle for life of the survivors, and the name of that single-hearted and clear-headed midshipman, young John Byron, who wrote an account of the affair forty years afterwards, when he had become a Commodore of George IV’s fleet.

The wreck occurred on May 14, 1741. About 140 men of the crew and marines, the captain and officers, got ashore, were able to save a certain amount of salt pork, flour, wine, etc., from the Wager, but found nothing on the island that could serve as food but wild celery, the shell-fish of the wave-battered rocks, and a few sea-birds. Indians who visited them occasionally, almost as badly off as themselves, bartered a few mangy dogs and, once, three sheep, for ship’s merchandise, but both shelter and food were insufficient; rains and violent weather were continual, and to make matters worse quarrels broke out, a party withdrawing themselves from the authority of the captain, who alienated many others when he shot a turbulent midshipman. Forty men were dead, from drowning or their sufferings on the island, before a means of escape was ready with the repair and lengthening of the Wager’s longboat. In this little vessel Captain Cheap proposed to make his way north until he could fall in with and seize a coasting ship of the Spaniards, a capture which would permit him to search for and rejoin Anson’s squadron. But the disaffected crew, led by the carpenter and gunner, who had borrowed and taken to heart the book of Voyages of Narborough, now declared their intention of going south and making for Magellan’s Strait. The captain objected, was made prisoner, and at the last moment was left behind, with a lieutenant of marines and the surgeon, when the ringleaders realised the scant accommodation of the Speedwell. Byron, who had gone on board believing that all the survivors were being taken off, returned to his captain, with a few other men, in the barge. They had nothing to eat but sea-weed, fried in the tallow of candles, and wild herbs; there were no more shell-fish, and all the party were extremely weak; but the captain decided to attempt a northward journey and the starving men began to mend as well as they could the barge and little yawl left to them. A number of the first deserters from the nearby lagoon now rejoined them, and a total of twenty finally embarked on December 15. Encountering rain, cold and adverse winds, they crawled along the rocky, wooded and broken coast, frequently being forced to lie upon their oars all night, since the heavy breakers prevented a landing for rest and shelter. The yawl was sunk when they tried to round the headland of Tres Montes Peninsula, and hereabouts they were forced, since the barge could carry no more, to leave on shore four marines, giving them arms and what other provisions they could; these plucky men stood to watch the barge out of sight, giving three cheers and calling out “God Save the King.” With that gesture they disappeared from history, for when the barge had to put back again, and search was made for the marines, no trace was found but a musket thrown upon the beach.

Now and then they found a seal, and feasted; or berries, and lived for days upon them; and after two months of incessant struggle were driven back to the scene of the wreck. Here they were in the utmost extremities, and all must have died of starvation had not an Indian chief from the Chonos Islands, in contact with the Spanish and bearing the wand of office, visited the place a fortnight later. To him they offered the barge if he would conduct them to a Spanish settlement, and a few days later the thirteen English and the Indian “Martin” with his servant embarked, steering north. Some days later six men took the barge and deserted, and thenceforth the party made their way in an Indian canoe, with frequent portages, through the broken and inhospitable Chonos country. Byron speaks warmly of the kindness shown by Indian women to him, and his notes upon the country and the customs of the wild folk are of great interest; but the journey was terrible, and the surgeon soon succumbed of starvation. The only person to whom the Indian men showed respect was Captain Cheap, whose nature had become “soured,” as the loyal but plain-spoken Byron permitted himself to remark, and who was careless of the misery of his companions. Starving and in rags, covered with vermin, and exhausted with the constant work of rowing, they arrived at length at an island ninety miles south of Chiloé, and traversed the final stretch of water in the crazy canoe. Once upon Chiloé their worst wretchedness was over: the Chilote Indians “vied with each other who should take the most care of us,” fed them well, laid sheepskin beds by a blazing fire and went out at midnight to kill a sheep for their food. Next day women came from far and near to see the shipwrecked strangers, each bringing “a pipkin in her hand, containing either fowls or mutton made into broth, potatos, eggs or other eatables,” and Byron says that they did nothing but eat for the best part of the day, and in fact, all the time they stayed upon the island. The Spanish corregidor at Castro sent for them, and a formidable escort of soldiers with drawn swords, led by four officers, solemnly conducted them to the town, where their appearance made a great sensation. They were imprisoned in a Jesuit college for a week, and then taken to the Governor, being treated with consistent goodwill; when, some time later, this official, a Chilean-born, made his usual tour of the island he took his English prisoners with him. During the second sojourn in Castro young Byron was offered the hand of the pretty and accomplished niece of a rich priest; but excused himself, although sorely tempted by an offer of a piece of new linen to be made up into clothes to replace his rags. On January 2, 1743, the party were embarked upon a Spanish vessel bound for Valparaiso; the ship was country-built, of 250 tons, and was 40 years old, carrying a Spanish captain and Indian seamen. At Valparaiso they were put into prison, and would have fared badly but for the native kindness of the Chileans, who brought them food and money, their jailer spending half his own daily allowance to buy wine and fruit for them.

Last Hope Inlet (Ultima Esperanza).

Channel in the Territory of Magellanes.

When the President of the Audience in Santiago, Don José Manso, sent for them to the capital, they went with a mule-train over the beautiful hills and plains, and, arriving in the city, the four officers (Captain Cheap, Hamilton, Campbell and Byron) were permitted to live in the house of a Scots physician, Patrick Gedd. Of the next twenty-four months Byron speaks with the appreciation of all travellers to whom Chileans have opened their hearts. Nor, indeed, were the Spanish officials unfriendly, for as it happened several Spaniards who had been taken prisoner by Anson in the Centurion, and set free, came to Santiago, and spoke warmly of the excellent treatment they had received.

Santiago, after the miseries of the Golfo de Peñas, appeared delightful to the young midshipman; he speaks of tertullias and bull-fights, country excursions, the fine fruit and agreeable women, and altogether he seems to have given and received such pleasant impressions that one must regard him as one of the first British diplomatic agents to Chile. The fact that the Wager had come on a hostile expedition, although the hostility was directed against Spain, perhaps added a shade of romance. When the party had been two years in Chile, the President gave them permission to embark in a French ship bound for Spain, and on December 20, 1744, Byron, Hamilton and Captain Cheap (Campbell electing to remain in Chile) set sail in the Lys frigate, the same vessel in which the distinguished Don Jorje Juan also travelled. Calling in at Concepción, or rather the port Talcahuano, they joined three other French vessels, the Louis Erasme, Marquis d’Antin and the Delivrance. The Lys now sprung a leak, returned for repairs to Valparaiso, while the three other vessels, proceeding, fell into the hands of English men-of-war.

The Lys put to sea again on March 1, 1745, after experiencing an earthquake in Valparaiso Bay, and rounded Cape Horn; was chased by English ships near Porto Rico, but got away to Santo Domingo. Thence they sailed again in August, sheltered by a French naval squadron of five ships, and finally reached Brest at the end of October. Here of course, with France and England now at war, the three Englishmen were prisoners, but were shortly allowed to cross to Dover. Byron’s money only allowed him to hire a horse for the London road; he had to ride hard through the turnpikes to escape payment and could afford no food. When he reached London the house of his family, of whom he had not heard a word for over five years, was shut, and it was only through remembering a nearby linen-draper that he got the address of his sister and hurried to her house in Soho Square, where the porter tried to shut the door upon his “half-French, half-Spanish figure.”

The narrative published in London in 1743 by John Bulkeley and John Cummins, respectively the gunner and carpenter of the Wager, tells the story of the longboat and cutter and of the eighty men who went south in those two craft. Bulkeley and Cummins seem to have been as bold and wordy a pair of sea-lawyers as ever trod a deck, and one cannot but sympathise with the lieutenant who represented them “in a very vile light” on their return home; but the relation has its place in history, carefully doctored as the journal of events appears to be.

Setting out on the morning of October 14, 1741, the longboat Speedwell carried fifty-nine men, the cutter twelve and the barge ten; the latter returned northward on the 22nd, and the cutter was destroyed among rocks early in November, with the loss of a seaman. The Speedwell was now alone, with seventy-two men in her, facing the cruel gales and the cold south as she crept with sail and oar towards Cape Pillar. On November 8, eleven men, exhausted with the struggle and seeing the boat overloaded, were set ashore at their own request, after Bulkeley had made them sign one of the documents which no dangers nor trials made him omit. On the 10th they believed that they identified the four Islands of Direction spoken of in Narborough’s book, by which they sailed, but lost their way when within the channels and suffered terribly from cold, rain and hunger, three men dying of starvation on November 30. In order to ascertain their true position they decided at length to return west to Cape Pillar, found it on December 5, and turned east once more. Now and again they found Indians who traded dogs to the starving crew, who thought the flesh “equal to the best mutton”; two more men died of want on the 8th and 9th and although droves of guanacos were sighted off the Narrows, they could not shoot any. A month later there were but fifteen men in reasonably good condition, but they had managed to row and sail the boat out of the Strait, were off the Patagonian coast, and were able to kill seals and get fresh water. On January 14 a party went ashore for food, and heavy seas drove the Speedwell from the coast, eight men being left behind; this was about 200 miles below Buenos Aires. On the 20th they were seen and given food by cattlemen on the Uruguayan coast, and reached Rio Grande (do Sul, in South Brazil) on the 28th. Several other men had died on the northward journey, and the survivors were starving when the hospitable people of Rio Grande opened their houses to them.

Here they remained until March 28, when Bulkeley, Cummins, and eleven others got a passage to Rio, while Lieutenant Beans tarried with the rest of the men for the next north-bound ship. From Rio the first party got on board a ship bound for Bahia and Lisbon, transhipping thence for England and arriving at Spithead on January 1, 1743. Before then, however, the Lieutenant and his men had reached home, on board an English vessel, and the Lords of the Admiralty awaited the sea-lawyers with a score of grim questions as to mutiny, desertion, etc., and with little regard for the romantic tale of the longboat. But as the record of a journey made in an open boat amongst the cruel rocks and currents of the Magellanic region, the story is probably unparalleled.

Juan and Ulloa

Amongst “Strangers on the Pacific Coast” during the eighteenth century should also be included the two Spanish naval officers, Don Antonio Ulloa and Don Jorje Juan, who left such valuable records in their “Voyage to South America” and in the highly illuminating “Secret Notices” presented to the King of Spain which were not published until many years later. Their place here is due to the fact, as they emphasised in the “Noticias Secretas,” that by this time Spain and her colonies had grown far apart in feeling. A native-born white population of “creoles,” as well as a large undercurrent of mestizos and some mulattos, had grown up, and the stream of Spanish-born who came to the country were frequently out of sympathetic touch. Spain felt this, and the commission of inspection and report which the King added to the two officers’ original duties shows how far the West Coast was still an unknown country.

Ulloa and Juan’s visit (1735–1745) was the result of the determination of the French Academy to settle the question of the shape of the earth by measuring two arcs, one upon the equator line and the other as far north as it was possible to travel. Asia and Africa offering no safe or conveniently approached region near the equator, the Academy applied to Spain for leave to enter the province of Ecuador for this object, while a second party went to Lapland. Consent was given, but with the proviso that Spanish officials should accompany the expedition, and eventually choice fell upon Captains Antonio Ulloa and Jorje Juan, naval officers already distinguished for their mathematical ability.

La Condamine had not completed his laborious task in the highlands of the equator when news of Anson’s naval plans reached Peru, and the Viceroy sent hastily to Quito for the two Spanish captains to aid in the defence of the coast. From late 1740 to December, 1743, these duties occupied Ulloa and Juan, when they returned to finish certain measurements above Quito. During the interval they travelled in Peru and Chile, and the observations they made shed much valuable light upon colonial conditions.

With scientific work at an end in 1744, the two officers prepared for return, embarking at Callao in separate ships—Juan in the Lys and Ulloa in the Delivrance—so that the chances were increased of one of them reaching Spain safely, war having broken out between France and England as well as continuing between England and Spain. The Delivrance, however, was caught by English men-of-war when she sailed into Louisburgh Bay, Canada, unaware that the port had fallen. Sent prisoner to England, Captain Ulloa arrived at the end of 1745, and in London received the greatest marks of respect from scientific men of the day, including the President of the Royal Society, of which body he was made a member.[^[3]] He was assisted to recover his impounded notes and scientific papers and was then permitted to return to Spain, in July, 1746. His brother officer had arrived, in the Lys, at the end of 1745.

[3]. Fellowship of the Royal Society was also extended to Captain Juan and both were elected members of the French Academy.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the time had passed when Spain could continue to exclude foreigners from South America. She had given way to demands for strictly limited trading, and the door could not again be shut.

Since the colonies of Spain wanted the blood and technical skill of young Europe, and young Europe constantly roamed the earth for wealth and adventure, no edicts or penalties could prevent a constant infiltration of adventuring persons upon the West Coast. Likely young white men have, indeed, seldom been denied a welcome in new countries and whatever the Spanish authorities might say the growing native-born populations of Chile continued to beckon.

Resident Foreigners

From time to time orders were issued that foreigners should be turned out of Chile; for instance, in April, 1769, the Town Council of La Serena (Coquimbo) promulgated a royal edict that foreigners were to leave the country within thirty days under penalty of the confiscation of their property. However, this applied only to persons engaged in trade, mining, or the legal profession, and to travellers, while such useful individuals as locksmiths and blacksmiths, tailors, bakers, cooks, mechanics, physicians and surgeons, were permitted to remain. Two Englishmen, Murphy and Denton, were among the persons told to leave the town, while a couple of Italians, a Frenchman and Portuguese also fell under the ban. It is doubtful whether the edicts were more than temporarily pressed or obeyed, for as a matter of fact many foreigners lived upon excellent terms with the local authorities, and, liking their surroundings, were equally well regarded. Thirty years before this particular edict was issued, and which applied to all important Chilean towns, there was living in Santiago a prosperous Scots physician, who was on sufficiently good terms with the Governor of Chile to obtain the keeping of the three English prisoners from the Wager.

Anglo-Saxon names in Chile, as a glance at any Chilean town directory shows, are too many for a satisfactory survey of their origin to be made in a few pages. But the result of this amicable invasion is strongly witnessed by the characteristics and qualities of the modern Chileno.

Some of the families have immense ramifications, and there are so many interlockings that a member of a good Anglo-Chilean family is likely to possess cousins throughout the republic, as well as in the United Kingdom and possibly also in North America. There are, for instance, the branches and connections of the Edwards family, descendants of that George Edwards who came to Coquimbo on a British ship in 1804, left it, and married the Señorita Isabel Osandon, whose father was of Irish descent. Agustin, one of the three sons of this marriage, founded the Banco de A. Edwards, whose original headoffices were in Copiapó, the once-splendid copper mining centre. The same Agustin Edwards promoted the Copiapó railway, married into the great Ross family, and was the father of the distinguished Chilean Minister at the Court of St. James, Don Agustin Edwards.