The annual amount of nitrate which the fifty-one establishments proposed to be bought by the Government are capable of producing, may be set down at 14,000,000 cwts.
These establishments do not exhaust the whole of the nitrate deposits. There are several large 'Oficinas,' as they are called, which have, for their own reasons, refused to sell their properties to the State.
The region of these deposits is a wild, barren pampa, 3000 feet above the level of the sea, and contains not less than 150 square miles of land, which will yield on the safest calculation more than 70,000,000 tons of nitrate.
Why these establishments for the manufacture of this important substance are called 'oficinas' it may not be difficult to say: it is doubtless for the same reason that a cottage orné at Chorrillos, the Brighton of Lima, is called a rancho. Twenty years ago Chorrillos was to Lima what the Clyde and its neighbouring waters were to the manufacturing capital of Scotland. What Dunoon and its competitors on the Scotch coast now are, such has Chorrillos become,—the fashionable resort of rich people who have robbed nature of her simplicity and beauty by embellishing her, as they call it, with art. All that remains of the straw-thatched rancho of Chorrillos, with its unglazed windows, its mud floors, its hammocks, and its freedom, is its name. An oficina twenty or thirty years ago, was no doubt a mere office made of wood, hammered together hastily, as an extemporary protection from the sun by day, and the cold dews and airs of the night: in appearance resembling nothing else but an Australian outhouse. An oficina of to-day is a very different thing. Its appearance, and all that pertains to it, is as difficult to describe as a great ironworks, or chemical works, or any other works where the ramifications are not only numerous, but novel. The first oficina whose acquaintance I had the honour and trouble to make, was that of the Tarapaca Nitrate Company, situated near the terminus of the Iquique and La Noria Railway, in the midst of a windy plain 3000 feet above the sea, and beneath a far hotter sun than that which beats on the pyramids of Egypt.
If you take a seat in the wide balcony of the house, where the manager and the clerks of the establishment reside, and live not uncomfortably, you look down almost at your feet on what appears to be an uncountable number of vast iron tanks containing coloured liquids, a tall chimney, a chemical laboratory, an iodine extracting house, a steam-pump, innumerable connecting pipes, stretching and twisting about the vast premises as if they were the bowels of some scientifically formed stomach of vast proportions for the purpose of digesting poisons and producing the elements of gunpowder, a blacksmith's forge, an iron foundry, a lathe shop, complicated scaffolding, tramways, men making boilers, men attending on waggons, bending iron plates, stoking fires, breaking up caliche, wheeling out refuse, putting nitrate into sacks, and other miscellaneous labour, requiring great intelligence to direct and great endurance to carry on; and all beneath the fierce heat of a sun, unscreened by trees or clouds, the glare of which on the white substance which is in process of being turned over, broken, and carried from one point to another, is as painful as looking into a blast furnace. Beyond the great and busy area where all these varied operations are carried on the eye stretches across a desert of brown earth, which is terminated by soft rolling hills of the same fast colour. The appearance of this desert is that of a vast number of ant-hills in shape; and in size of the heaps of refuse which give character to the Black Country in Mid Staffordshire. Perhaps the first impression which this repulsive desert makes on the mind of a man who has seen and observed much is that of a battlefield of barbarian armies, where the slain still lie in the heaps in which they were clubbed down by their foes; or it may be likened to an illimitable number of dust-hills jumbled together by an earthquake. All this is the result of digging for caliche, and blasting it out of the sandy bed in which it has lain God only knows how long.
As the breeze springs up, and clouds of fine white dust follow the mule carts and rise under the hoofs of galloping horses, the idea of the battlefield with the use of gunpowder comes back on the memory, and is perhaps the nearest simile that can be used. And this is an oficina! one of the silliest and most inadequate of words ever used to denote what is one of the newest, and may be the largest, as it is certainly the most novel, of all modern industrial establishments.
The manufacture of caliche into nitrate of soda is not without its dangers to human life, though these are fewer than they were when men frequently fell into vats of boiling liquors, or broke their limbs in falling from high scaffolding: the latter form of danger still exists, and is almost impossible to guard against. I am free to say, however, that if the guard were possible I do not believe it would be used. There are some trades and processes which not only brutalise the labourers on whom rests the toil of carrying them on, but which no less degrade the mind of those who direct them; and the nitrate manufacture is one of these. 'Joe,' one of the house dogs, fell into one of the heated tanks of the oficina where I was staying, and his quick but dreadful death made more impression on some than did the untimely death of a man who was killed the day before at the same place. Another item in the agitated landscape which stretches from the balcony where I sat is a spacious burying-ground, walled in as a protection from dogs and carts; but these are not its only or its chief desecrators. The sky furnishes many more. This great oficina contains 1682 estacas; can produce 900,000 quintals of nitrate a year, and was 'sold' to the Government for 1,250,000 dols.
An estaca is a certain amount of ground 'staked out,' as we might say, and contains about one hundred square yards of available land.
There are other oficinas of still greater value than the one mentioned above; as, for instance, those of Gildemeister and Co., and which the Government acquired on the same terms for the same sum.
The markets for this new substance are England, Germany, the United States, California, Chile, and other countries. It is as a cultivator a formidable competitor of the guano, and is esteemed by scientific men to be much more valuable. Its price is set down at £19 the ton, although £12 and £12 10s. is its present market value. The acquisition by the Peruvian Government of this industry was patriotic, even if it were not wise. It was done with the intention of paying the foreign creditors of the Republic. Since then Peruvian patriotism has assumed another form and complexion, and what was done in an honest enthusiasm of haste is already being repented of in a leisure largely occupied with the contemplation of a patriotic repudiation of national duty and debt.