Birdseye Views of Far Lands

by James T. Nichols

Of course, the people who do the work in these deserts or in the little ports along the shore have a hard life. No green lawns or trees adorn their villages. The dust is irritable and the people are a hard-looking class. In one of these towns which I saw, Antofagasta by name, the water the people use is brought nearly two hundred miles. The people used to drink champagne mostly for it was cheaper than water.

Not far from Antofagasta are the great salt plains, said to be large enough to supply the whole world with this commodity for generations. The real nitrate beds are from fifteen to fifty miles from the ocean and at least three thousand feet above sea level. The largest beds are from four to five hundred miles in length so the supply is practically inexhaustible. When the nitrates are richest they are mixed with rock—about half and half. It is blasted out with dynamite, loaded on carts and dumped into great machines that grind it to a coarse powder, then thrown into immense tanks of boiling water where it forms in crystals on the sides and bottom. The water is then drawn off, the white sparkling stuff shoveled onto drying boards and when thoroughly dry is sacked and shipped.

The liquid that is drawn off from these vats is made into iodine, which is so valuable that a cask of it is worth several hundred dollars. Chile owns about all the nitrate deposits yet discovered. She exports millions of tons of it annually, levies a tax on every ton of it and thus the government receives an immense income each year from this one industry.

In addition to the nitrate industry, Chile has immense stores of copper, tin and other metals. At one port where the ship stopped a small boat brought out a few sacks of copper ore. It took but a few minutes to put it on board but one of the officers said it was worth thirteen thousand dollars. At another Chilean port six hundred tons of tin were added to our cargo. Chile is about the only country in South America where coal is found in anything like large quantities.

Of course such a mountainous region is volcanic. There are many earthquakes but they seldom do much harm. My first night in Chile was spent in Los Andes and I had not been in bed five minutes until an earthquake shock made it tremble like a leaf. But the people are so used to it that they pay no attention whatever to these minor quakes. At the time San Francisco was ruined, Valparaiso was all but destroyed but you would never know it by a visit to the city now.

Chile includes a large part of the island of Tierra del Fuego. At the very southern tip of this is Cape Horn. This is a gigantic rock fourteen hundred feet high that juts out into the ocean and the great waves that continually lash against it make it perhaps the most dreaded spot by sailors in all the trade routes of the world. On all sides are wrecked vessels and this rock has been named the Giant Headstone in the Sailor's Graveyard.

It was the famous Magellan who discovered the water passage above Cape Horn and it is called the Strait of Magellan. While safer than the route around Cape Horn, yet many are the stories of shipwreck, hunger and suffering told by those who went this way during the earlier days. Here are some of the names of places along the Strait: "Fury Island," "Famine Reach," "Desolation Harbor," "Fatal Bay," "Hope Inlet," and "Last Wreck Point."

No one lives down at this point but tribes of Indians. It was the signals and campfires of these Indians that caused Magellan to call the island "Tierra del Fuego." The name means "Land of Fire." These Indians are said to be one of the lowest classes of human beings in existence today. Although the weather is very cold these savages wear but little clothing—in fact, they wore none until of later years they began getting cast off garments from wrecks and are now making some of their own clothing from the skins of animals.

On this strait is located Punta Arenas, which is the southernmost town in the world. It is directly south of Boston and farther south of the equator than Winnipeg is north of it. Only about a thousand people live here. Many of them are rough characters and live hard and comfortless lives. This town is the only port within a thousand miles.