Of his native land a Chilean poet sings that its bulwarks are the mighty Cordillera, its frontiers the sea—a romantically expressed conception of the position of Chile which is geographically correct.
A zone of territory three thousand miles in length and nowhere broader than two hundred miles, and, in general, only a hundred, confined between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean, the Republic has perhaps the most curious form of any country in the world. Under his own flag the Chilean may journey from the heat of the Tropics to the cold of the Antarctic by taking steamer up and down his coast or by a more or less arduous land journey along the littoral. Such is the topography of this interesting land—interspersed with burning deserts, fruitful valleys and with glimpses of delightful landscape, snowy mountains and profound forests.
To have opened a sketch of Chile with a reference to a poetical conception is not to argue that the Chileans are a dreamy and over-poetical folk. They are, on the contrary, practical, hardy, and courageous—courage which, in their conflicts with their neighbours in the past, and in their own internecine strife and revolution, has at times given way to cruelty and savagery—a condition, however, not confined to these more southern inhabitants of the South American Continent.
By reason of their more practical ideas and enterprise in commercial matters, their ability—which is largely absent from the Spanish American people as a rule—of forming successful joint-stock companies to exploit this or that field of industry or finance, their superior navy and seamanship, and for diverse reasons, the Chileans have been termed, or have liked to term themselves, the "English of South America" a soubriquet varied by the appellation of the "Americans or Yanquis (Yankees) of South America." The Chilean Navy was modelled after that of Britain; the army, however, after the German style.
The early history of Chile, if less picturesque than that of Peru, is full of incident—often dreadful—and doughty deeds. Bluff old Almagro it was who set his eyes upon Chile—Almagro, the partner of Francisco Pizarro, partners whose quarrels finally resulted in the death of both.
The Indians of Cuzco had told their conquerors of a land that lay beyond the desert and the mountains to the south, reaching no man knew whither; a land not a great empire, but one of many tribes, and so easily to be subdued, and, moreover, overflowing with gold and silver. This land they called Chile. Fiery spirits flocked to Almagro's standard from Panama for another of those "dare-devil heroic marches into the unknown world which only greed and faith could inspire." Almagro's band consisted of 600 white men and 15,000 Indians, and it left Cuzco in 1535.
"To have descended to the coast and thence march by the lowlands would have been the easiest way, but it was the longer, and the adventurers were as impatient to reach their goal as the Pizarros were to see them gone: so Almagro marched straight along the Inca road, past Lake Titicaca, across part of Bolivia and what is now Argentina, and then over the Andes. Daring and difficult as some of the Spanish marches had been, none hitherto had had to encounter the hardships that faced Almagro on his Andean progress. Cold, famine, and toilsome ways killed his followers by thousands, and to the frost and snow of the mountain sides succeeded hundreds of miles of arid deserts, where no living thing grew and no drop of water fell.
"At length, with but a small remnant of his host, Almagro found himself in a well-defined region, consisting roughly of a vast valley running north and south, the giant chain of the Andes enclosing it on the east with foothills and spurs projecting far into, and in some places almost intersecting, the narrow plain, and a lower range of mountains bordering it upon the west, and shutting it off from the sea, except here and there, where a break in the chain occurred. The valley was relatively narrow, so narrow that in many places the hills on either side were clearly visible, but the adventurers as yet knew not that this curious strip of broken plain between two mountain ranges extended with its immense line of coast for well-nigh 2,000 miles, and was destined to become, from its natural formation, the first maritime nation of South America.
"Almagro found the sturdy, skin-clad tribesmen of the mountain slopes and elevated plains far different foemen from the soft, mild slaves of the Incas in the tropical north. Their very name of Chile came from the word meaning cold; and their temperate climate had hardened them and made them robust. Gold and silver, it is true, they had in plenty, and held them in no very high esteem, but they fought with a fierceness of which the Spaniards had had no experience in America in defence of their liberty and right to live. This, it was clear, was to be no easy conquest, and Almagro, learning that the Peruvians of the north had risen in a mass against the Spanish oppression, abandoned Chile, and marched back to Peru to fish in troubled waters, and in due time to meet a felon's death at the hands of vengeful Pizarro.
"But the tales of the rich and fertile land of the south had whetted the greed of the victor, and when old Almagro was finally disposed of, Pizarro set about adding Chile to his own vast domain, held for Charles the Emperor and King of Spain, with the sanction of Holy Mother Church. The news of Almagro's formal annexation of Chile to the Spanish Crown, as usual in such cases, set the hungry courtiers of Madrid clamouring for a share of the spoil and glory, and an incompetent nonentity called Pedro Sanchez de la Hoz was sent out from Spain to complete the conquest of the new domain in the name of the Emperor. Pizarro knew well how to deal with such folk, and whilst appearing to respect the imperial orders, really stultified them. What he needed to do his work were iron soldiers, dour Estremenians, like himself; who knew neither ruth nor fear, and one he found after his own heart in Pedro de Valdivia, who in the five years since he had joined the chief in Peru, had proved that he possessed all the qualities for repeating in Chile the success of Pizarro in the empire of the Incas. Sanchez de la Hoz, nominally the leader, promptly became the cipher that nature had intended him to be, and Valdivia took the lead.
"This time, in 1540, the safer way by the coast desert was taken, and with a mere handful of 150 Spanish soldiers, but accompanied by a great host of Indians, Valdivia marched through the interminable valley, carrying with him rapine and oppression for the gold he coveted. A great pitched battle for a time, early in 1541, decided the supremacy of the white men, and Valdivia, with superhuman energy and cruelty unexampled, set tens of thousands of Indians to work washing auriferous sand, delving in mines, cutting roads that still exist, and clearing the way for the advance of the Spaniards southward. In a lovely, fertile, elevated plain, with the eternal snow-capped Andes looking down upon it, Valdivia founded the capital of his new domain, the city of Santiago, on the morrow of his victory in February 1541, and from the height of St. Lucia above, upon the spot where the conqueror overlooked the building of his city, his gallant figure in bronze still dominates the fair scene of his prowess.
"Fighting almost constantly for years, Valdivia, with ever-growing forces, pushed farther south. Valparaiso was founded in 1544 as the main seaport for the capital, and two years afterwards the conqueror crossed the Biobio River and entered the fertile agricultural and pastoral country of the Araucanians. Refined and cultivated as the Incas of the north had been, these stalwart Indians of the temperate south surpassed them in the sterner virtues and in the arts of war. Tales of their lofty stature and mighty strength grew with the telling, and the Spaniards acknowledged that at last they had met in America a people who were more than their match. Concepcion, Talcahuano, Imperial, Valdivia, one city after the other rose in this land of forests and fighters, to be destroyed again and again, only to be rebuilt. Gold in abundance, surpassing the visions even of the Spaniards, was to be had for the digging or washing, but the Indians would only dig or wash the metal whilst a white man with a harquebus stood over them, and not always then. Poison and treachery were common to both sides, and cruelty surpassed itself. In one battle Valdivia cut off the hands and noses of hundreds of Indian prisoners and sent them back as an object lesson, and the Araucanians, with devilish irony, killed the Spaniards by pouring molten gold down their throats.
"The lands through which the Spaniards passed were teeming with fertility, and tilled like a garden, and the sands of the frequent rivers abounded in gold; but the people were hard to enslave, and the leader that at last aroused them for a final successful stand was Valdivia's own Araucanian serf, Lautaro. The Christian chief fell into an ambush led by him in 1553, and though Valdivia begged and bribed hard for his life, vengeance sated itself upon him. His heart was cut out, and the Indian arrows soaked in his blood, the heart itself, divided into morsels, being afterwards eaten by the braves, whilst his bones were turned into fifes to hearten the tribesmen to resist the invaders.
"For well-nigh a hundred years the fight went on in the country extending from the Biobio to the archipelago of Chiloé, and it ended at last in the formal recognition of the independence of this splendid race, who had withstood in turn the Inca and the white man. Even then the struggle was not over, for the Spaniards could ill brook the presence of an independent Indian people in their midst as civilization and population grew in South America. But what force and warfare could never compass, time, intermarriage and culture have gradually effected, and in our own times the Araucanians have become Chilean citizens."[17]
Chile threw off the yoke of Spain in 1810. The yoke upon the Indies was really falling off itself. Spain was too weak to coerce her colonies much longer. But in 1814 Spain tried again. A half-Irish Chilean patriot was the hero of this struggle, a patriot who, his ammunition giving out, charged his guns with coin in lieu of grapeshot and cut his way to Santiago, and he on land and the Englishman Cochrane on the sea caused Chile to become one of the foremost factors in the final liberation.
Many travellers have rendered homage to the beauty of the Chilean landscape. "The appearance of the Andes from the Central Valley is always imposing, grandiose and magnificent. They are unique: it is worth crossing half the world to see them. The dry, stimulating air and the beautiful cloudless sky in themselves provoke enthusiasm."[18]
Elsewhere I have spoken of "the beautiful Andes and the death-dealing Andes." Almagro's terrible march across the Chilean Andes, as described elsewhere, shows these characteristics of the Cordillera vividly.