Chile today and tomorrow

by L. E. Elliott Joyce

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.