Almagro set out with over 500 Spaniards and 15,000 Peruvian Indians, after spending 500,000 pesos on equipment. He marched south from Cuzco, crossed the Andes and went by Titicaca Lake, following the Inca route; perhaps as a guide and a means of securing the loyal service of the Peruvians, who would never desert a member of their ruling clan, the Spanish leader took with him an Inca priest and the young Paullu Tupac Yupanqui, son of the Huayna Ccapac and brother of the Inca Manco. The latter had been crowned in Cuzco in early 1534 by Pizarro, probably with the double object of quieting Peru and to obviate charges made by his personal enemies in Spain. Both Charles V and the Pope emphasised their possession of tender consciences with regard to native American rulers. This young scion of the Incas survived the expedition into Chile, and was with Almagro’s son at the battle of Chupas.
Terrible sufferings were experienced by the expedition in the bitterly cold Andes, where deep snow and cruel winds killed the Peruvians by thousands. Many of the Spanish soldiers too were frozen to death, and food supplies failed. When at last they turned west an advance party of horsemen went ahead to bring food, cheerfully yielded by the settled natives, to their starving and exhausted comrades. Arriving in the green Copiapó valley, Almagro was well received at first, but pressing his search for gold to extremes, quarrels arose, the natives were “punished,” and Almagro moved on, after receiving reinforcements brought by Orgoñez. A strong party was sent forward to report on southerly conditions, and marched as far as the Rio Claro (tributary of the Maule) where savage Indians confronted the outposts of the old Inca empire. When Almagro heard this report, and realised that neither treasures of gold nor rich cities existed, he decided to return to Cuzco, making his way back by the coastal road and traversing the scorching, waterless deserts of Atacama and Tarapacá. At his arrival in Arequipa at the end of 1536 he had lost 10,000 Indians and 156 Spaniards. The rest of Almagro’s story—the news of the Peruvian revolt, his seizure of Cuzco, and his execution at the age of seventy-five by Hernando Pizarro, when fortune finally deserted him—belongs to the history of Peru. The fact that a man had made the Chilean journey with Almagro was considered, later on, as a claim upon royal consideration. The petition of Diego de Pantoja, in 1561, makes this point, while that of Encinas, 1558, is even more emphatic in speaking of the sufferings of the soldiers; he went south, he says, with Captain Gomez de Alvarado, fighting Indians of the “Picones, Pomamaucaes, Maule and Itata” and traversing painfully “snow and water, swamps, creeks, crossing rivers by swimming or on rafts” and with no food but wild herbs. For the moment the efforts of the Europeans were without result; during another two years Chile remained in the hands of her native rulers.
Spanish Colonial Period
There was no actual conquest of Chile by the Spaniards. Those native tribes which had submitted to the Inca régime accepted the Europeans: they who had defied the Inca continued to defy the Spanish.
There were angry outbursts on the part of certain northern and central tribes when the Spaniards returned in force in 1540, but when these had been overcome and peace made, the Indians remained consistently loyal. The “Changos” of the coastal border took up a permanent position as friends just as the Mapuches (“Araucanians”) took up a permanent position as enemies. The Spanish settled Chile, organised a social system, built cities and defences, cultivated the ground, brought in blood and culture, created a nation; but South Chile was never a conquered country in the same sense that Mexico and Peru were conquered countries.
The next attempt to plant the Spanish flag in Chile following the abortive expedition of Almagro was well planned and successful. Captain Pedro de Valdivia, thirty-five years old, a campmaster of Hernando Pizarro, and a man of formed and resolute character, wanted to increase his fortune, consisting of an estate near Cuzco. He obtained without difficulty from Francisco Pizarro a commission to open up Chile, a land of poor repute since the return of Almagro; his appointment was that of Lieutenant Governor. His chief difficulty was in raising men, for as he says in a letter written in 1545 to Charles V, those who turned most from the project were the soldiers who had accompanied Almagro on the first unfortunate journey, when 1,500,000 pesos were spent “with, as the only fruit, the redoubled defiance of the Indians.”
He set out at the beginning of 1540, however, with nearly 200 Spaniards and 1000 Peruvian Indians, and avoiding the Andes traversed the coastal deserts, arriving in the valley of the Mapocho at the end of the same year. On the eve of departure a blow to his hopes threatened in the arrival of Sanchez de la Hoz, armed with a royal commission for the settlement of Chile; but Valdivia, equal to the occasion, induced his rival to provide a couple of ships, equip a force with fifty horses, supplies, arms, etc., and agreed to meet him at a small port just north of the Atacama desert. The appointment was kept, but as soon as the new arrival went ashore Valdivia arrested him, made him sign a renunciation of his claims to leadership and henceforth obliged him to serve as a common soldier. Eventually Sanchez de la Hoz joined a conspiracy against Valdivia, was discovered, and was beheaded in Santiago de Chile.
In February, 1541, Valdivia founded Santiago “de Nueva Estremadura,” Valdivia naming his province after Estremadura in Spain, where he was born in the town of La Serena. The colony had a hard struggle for existence, the Indians attacking the fortifications of Santa Lucia hill, where the settlers built the first houses of wood and thatched grass; in the letter mentioned above Valdivia says that the third year of the colony was not so difficult, but that during the first two years they had passed through great necessities. They ate roots, having no meat, and the man who obtained fifty grains of maize each day counted himself fortunate. He says also that they got a little gold, and gives Chile the first praises, so often repeated subsequently, for its enchanting climate. For people who want to settle permanently, there is no better land in the world than Chile, he declares; there is good level land, very healthy and pleasing, and the winter lasts but four months. In summer the climate is delicious, and men are able to walk without danger in the sunshine. The fields give abundant returns, and cattle thrive.
Live stock, in fact, throve so well that within twenty-five years of the settlement the Indians of the south possessed flocks and herds, and, learning from the Europeans, went mounted on horseback into battle.
Needing men and supplies, early in 1543 Valdivia sent six Spaniards by land to Peru. Captured by Copiapó Indians, the Captain Monroy and a soldier named Miranda escaped by an act of treachery against a friendly Indian woman, and arrived safely in Cuzco after a terrible journey through the deserts. But, to cajole Peru into giving help, Valdivia had sent them with stirrups and bits made of gold, a display so successful that by the end of the year sixty new settlers and a ship with stores reached Chile, followed by captains Villagra and Escobar with 300 more men. Valdivia was determined to overcome the south, and set out with 200 men by land while a ship followed along the coast. The Indians rose behind him, burnt his embryo shipbuilding yard at Concon (mouth of the Aconcagua River), trapped and killed his gold-miners at Quillota, and besieged the little settlement of Santiago. It was here that Inez Suarez, who had followed Valdivia from Cuzco, rendered her name immortal by her active defence of the fort; tradition says that she cut off with her own hands the heads of six Indian chieftain prisoners and threw them over the palisades to intimidate the attackers. Valdivia returned, from the Maule, where he had received a check, and re-established his colony. He had founded La Serena as a check on the northern Indians and a post on the road to Cuzco, in 1544, but saw that stronger assistance was needed to colonise and hold Chile, and returned to Peru for more help in 1547. The country was in civil war, with Gonzalo Pizarro ranged against Gasca, President of the Audience of Peru. Valdivia adopted the royal appointee’s side, was an invaluable aid with his experience of Indian wars, and helped turn the scale, taking the old Pizarro supporter, Carbajal, prisoner. He got his reward when he received formal appointment as Governor of Chile, in 1548. With a large force of well-equipped men he started out anew, was stopped on the Atacama border with orders to return to stand a trial on certain technical charges, was acquitted, set out again, and reached Santiago in April, 1549. He found that the Serena settlement had been destroyed, rebuilt it, and made an agreement of peace with the northern Indians that was never again broken.