The national currency fluctuates considerably from day to day and is the most serious drawback to commercial prosperity in Chile. During my stay in Santiago it fluctuated so violently that some of the prominent business men were very evidently less interested in their legitimate business than in speculating in currency. The unit of value is the peso, worth, while we were there, about twenty-five cents. It has gone as low as fifteen cents, and as high as forty cents. All current accounts in the large importing houses are carried in pounds sterling.
British commercial houses have a very strong hold on Valparaiso. So important are the dealings with Great Britain that English is actually the language of commerce. This is the more noticeable because, although no educated South American would for a moment admit that he could not read and speak French, outside of the larger cities very few South Americans can even understand English. Nor do I remember to have met more than one or two, outside of Chile, who pretended to any knowledge of German. A knowledge of English is generally limited to those who have been in the United States or England and to those who have had large business dealings with British commercial houses. At the same time, English is taught in many of the schools in Chile and we repeatedly met young Chileans who were anxious to practice it on us.
Great Britain has always favored Chile ever since her merchantmen, headed by the gallant Admiral Thomas Cochran, Earl of Dundonald, created the Chilean navy which swept the West Coast clean of Spanish ships in the Wars of Independence. It was the Chilean navy that enabled San Martin’s troops to reach Peru and strike at the last stronghold of Spain in South America. In those days, most of the vessels were commanded by English and Scottish officers. The tendencies of the navy are still British, and this extends even to the uniform of both officers and cadets. In a word, the navy is as English as the army is German. Furthermore, it has long maintained its preëminence among the navies of South America. When Brazil gets the dreadnoughts for which she has contracted, this supremacy will temporarily disappear.
When we boarded the Chilean steamer Limarí, we found among our fellow passengers quite a number of pleasant-faced little naval cadets bound for some point up the coast where they were to join their training-ship. They smoked too many cigarettes, and their manners on board were not particularly good, although they were probably no worse than a similar group of American schoolboys would have been under the circumstances. Certainly our fellow passengers were not as bad as those cadets whom Hugh de Bonelli encountered in his journey from Panama to Lima in 1850 and describes in his entertaining “Travels in Bolivia.” In one corner of the saloon on his steamer “sat an elderly gentleman and a maiden lady, brother and sister, surrounded by parrots, a monkey, two cats, and three ugly little dogs, all of whom they alternately kissed and hugged. Two young cadets of sixteen, in uniform, who, without a figure of speech, may be said to have smoked themselves away—for they were scarcely perceptible behind the volumes of smoke they emitted,—got into disgrace with these worthy people. One of these young sparks threw down, on the sly, a lighted cigar upon the monkey, who had been watching him. The animal seized it, and put the lighted end of it into his mouth; then screamed, chattered, and cried—jumped upon the head of the old lady, who was so frightened that she fainted away; then upon that of the old man, from which he fell to the ground with the old gentleman’s wig firmly held between his jaws!”
We found the Limarí well crowded with passengers, most of them Chileans bound for Coquimbo, Antofagasta, and Iquique. The absence of a railway makes the semi-weekly steamers the only means of communication on this desert coast. Yet it was not until we had experienced the decided inconveniences of overcrowding and felt the relief caused by the heavy disembarkation at the northern Chilean ports that we fully realized how dependent the Chileans are on the control of sea-power. They are now planning to construct a longitudinal railway that shall run parallel to the shore line, and make them less dependent on naval predominance.
The next day after leaving Valparaiso, we reached Coquimbo. The cable had been used to warn the authorities that there were distinguished passengers on board, and the leading citizens of the town came out to invite the delegados ashore and took us for a delightful drive along the beach from Coquimbo to the old Spanish settlement of La Serena. At the latter place we were entertained at the Club where an informal reception was held, with the aid of the usual cocktails and champagne.
At Caldera we were spared from official recognition and spent our time catching lizards on the sandy hills back of the town.
The third day brought us to Antofagasta where several of the delegation left to take the railroad to Bolivia over the route by which I had come out a month ago. The sea-lions and the diving birds were playing about the harbor in the same fascinating manner as when I first saw this port. But the effect, after living for several weeks amid the green parks of Santiago and enjoying several days of blue ocean, was far less striking than when we came from the bleak brown deserts of the Bolivian plateau.
The morning of the fourth day saw us at Iquique, once the centre of Peru’s nitrate industry, now rivaling Valparaiso as the scene of Chilean commercial activity. Numbers of sailing-vessels were lying in the roadstead waiting for cargoes of the precious fertilizers. It was a pleasure to see several of the vessels actually flying the American flag! The West Coast depends largely on Oregon and Puget Sound for its lumber-supply and these three-masted American schooners find a profitable trade in bringing lumber and returning with nitrates. The Limarí’s cargo consisted largely of merchandise which had come from Europe and America through the Straits of Magellan. While this was being discharged we had time to see the city, where a few months before an angry mob of strikers from the nitrate works, had been mown down by well-trained government troops.
We were entertained here by Mr. Rea Hanna, the enthusiastic American Consul, who has a difficult rôle to play in a town where Chileans are in control but where the Peruvian Club is the centre of aristocratic society. That he is universally liked speaks volumes.