Determination upon none but defensive fighting was due largely to Jesuit influence in Spain, under Philip II, III and IV; Father Luis de Valdivia in 1612 brought a new band of missionaries, and the south was left to them and their prospective converts. The Audience was restored, in Santiago, in 1609, and the Governor of Chile, while subordinate to the Lima Viceroyalty, was President of the Audience of Santiago as well as Captain-General of the province, his jurisdiction including the territory from the desert of Atacama, where Peru ended, to all the southern country he could control (the Taitao peninsula was explored in 1618) and also the province of Cuyo, extending across the Andes and embracing the city of Mendoza on the post-road to Buenos Aires.
Pirates harassed the authorities in 1616, when Le Maire found the small strait bearing his name; in 1623, when L’Hermite, with thirteen ships and 1600 men, troubled the coasts; and notably by the Dutchman Brouwer in 1644, when Valdivia was seized and three strong forts built by the invaders. The death of Brouwer, three months after his arrival, disheartened the strong force of Dutch under his control; the region was also discovered to be less promising of easy wealth than had been imagined and the place was given up. The Spanish returned in 1645, occupying and completing the excellent fortifications of the Dutch.
A terrible battle with Indians near Chillan ending with the defeat of a new Araucanian leader, Putapichion, with great slaughter, the then Governor of Chile, Francisco de Zuñiga, Marques de Baides, attempted to make a definite peace, holding the celebrated first “Parliament of Quillin” in 1641; the second Parliament of Quillin was held in 1647, with reiterated understanding that the Araucanians were to be recognised as owners of independent territory south of the Bio-Bio, but not to invade territory to the north. A third peace meeting was held in 1650 and thenceforth it became customary for each new Governor of Chile to call a meeting at the Bio-Bio border, where he repaired in state, met thousands of Araucanians, feasted them for several days and gave presents, with mutual compliments and speech-making. None of these friendly conclaves, however, prevented the Spaniards from raiding in Araucanian territory on occasion, or gave pause to Indian chiefs who saw an opportunity. In the middle of the century a disastrous rising of all the Indians, supposedly converted and friendly, took place between the Maule and Bio-Bio Rivers; 400 farms were burnt, Concepción besieged, and enormous quantities of cattle, women and children taken to Araucania.
Nevertheless, outside the troubled zone Chile prospered; the Spanish colony grew from 1700 (with 8600 Indians and 300 Negroes) in 1613 to 30,000 in 1670. Vineyards and olive groves were planted, the wine of Chile becoming so famous that it was shipped all the way to Panama, Mexico and Central America, to Paraguay and Argentina. The Governor Juan Henriquez, a native of Lima, was responsible for much of this agricultural encouragement, and for construction of a bridge over the Mapocho River and of a canal bringing spring water to Santiago. It was this same governor who shipped hundreds of Araucanians as slaves to Peru, and sent to Lima for execution the young Englishmen of Narborough’s scientific expedition, treacherously captured at Corral in December, 1670. By this time the coast forts had been rebuilt, partly on account of anxiety regarding the activities of adventuring ships of rival nations, which, forbidden lawful trade, ranged the Pacific as corsairs and smugglers. The famous Captain Bartholomew Sharp, with one ship and 146 men, terrorised the coast in 1680; he sacked Arica and burnt Coquimbo among his exploits. After the day of the pirate Davis, raiding about 1686, it was decided to render the fertile islands off the coast less useful as rendezvous; Mocha was depopulated and an attempt made to kill all the goats that thrived on Juan Fernandez.
Many times during the seventeenth century the Chilean colonies were almost ruined by earthquakes; the live volcanos of the Andean backbone broke out from time to time, and in many cases the overthrow of dwellings by temblores and terremotos was accompanied at the unfortunate coastal settlements by furious onslaughts of tidal waves, when numbers of people were drowned. Santiago was badly damaged by the earthquake of 1642, but suffered worse in 1647; ten years later a terrible earthquake and tidal wave destroyed Concepción on its original site where Penco village stands today, and the city was later moved to its present situation on the north of the green-wooded, silver Bio-Bio, with its banks of black volcanic sand.
In 1700 the Spanish were able to regard the danger of active aggression on the part of the Dutch without alarm. Spain had preserved the integrity of her enormous American colonies in the teeth of an array of energetic rivals, sea-adventuring people with vigorous populations lacking space for new settlements, sharing the most jealously guarded regions of South America with but one country, Portugal. For sixty years, indeed, after the tragic death of Sebastião at El Kebir in 1578, Spain held Portugal and Portugal’s splendid colonies abroad, including Brazil; until 1640 the Kings of Spain were absolute masters of South America. The long-continued struggle with England and its constant threat to the colonies was one reason why Spain reluctantly made concessions from time to time in her dealings with Holland, a country openly displaying a keen desire to share in American profits. The formation of the Dutch West Indian Company, with comprehensive plans for settlement as well as for trade, received strong government backing, and the forcible occupation of the Brazilian coast region of Pernambuco between 1624 and 1654 caused great anxiety to Spain. Nevertheless, a commercial agreement for the supply of indispensable Negro slaves, brought from the Portuguese colonies of West Africa, endured until Holland’s sea power was definitely affected by reverses at the hands of the English.
A sign of change of influence which had a significant and lasting effect upon the South American Pacific Coast was displayed when early in the eighteenth century Louis XIV of France induced Philip V of Spain to give to French traders the right to supply slaves to the American colonies in place of the Dutch. A certain amount of general commerce could not be denied to vessels bringing slaves, and presently limited agreements were made by which two French companies were allowed to do business with South America. The monopolist companies of Seville and Cadiz, crying ruin, protested vainly, for viceroys and governors as well as settlers found the visits of the French ships convenient and profitable; the corsairs of England too were being transformed by economic circumstances into smugglers whose operations were welcome in many quarters. France did not limit her interest in South America to commerce: we find from about 1705 onwards an increasing number of French scientists and writers visiting the West Coast—as Feuillée, the Jesuit Father and careful botanist, who published the first account of Chilean plant life; and Frezier, the distinguished engineer, who left a descriptive volume of perennial interest. It was this most observant writer who first noted the use of the Quechua word maté as applied to the small gourd, often beautifully carved and silver-mounted, from which it was and is usual to drink an infusion of the “herb of Paraguay,” in Chile and Peru. Sidelights of great value are also presented by the letters of French Jesuit priests who came to the West Coast about this time, and many of whom, like the devoted Father Nyel, thought that the supreme reward for a laborious life spent among wild natives was to be killed—“meriting reception of the crown of martyrdom as the worthy recompense of apostolic work.” Father Nyel wrote, in 1705, when he was planning the establishment of a mission among the Araucanians, that in spite of having murdered the noble Father Nicolas Mascardi thirty years previously the Indians begged for Jesuits to enter their land again to instruct them. But in order to succeed with these people it was necessary to have “a strong constitution, complete indifference to all the comforts of life, a persuasive gentleness, strength, courage, and determination in spite of insurmountable difficulties encountered amidst a barbarous people.”
The most distinguished of the scientists who were, perhaps somewhat grudgingly, given leave to enter the Spanish colonies were the French Academicians, headed by La Condamine, who came to Ecuador in 1735 to measure an arc of the meridian upon the Equator, and whose Spanish associates, sent by Madrid, made a detailed, frank and brilliant report of the condition of Peru, Ecuador and Chile. The Noticias Secretas handed to the King upon their return are extremely illuminating, especially in the light of the events of eighty years later, when the irritation which they observed between “creoles” (native-born Americans of European blood) and Spaniards from the Peninsula came to a head. The voyage of Juan and Ulloa, the accounts of Frezier, Feuillée and the Jesuits, were as eagerly read in Europe as the biographies of the corsairs, for whatever official reports were made by Spanish officials from Spanish America never saw daylight, strangers were forbidden to enter, and in consequence South America had the magic of the unknown.
By the middle of the eighteenth century Chile was still a small country, settled chiefly between Coquimbo and Concepción, yielding a little gold and silver from surface veins, but with her greatest activity in connection with agriculture; she was spared the feverish excitements and reactions of wealthier countries. Most of her trade was conducted by land, over the Andes into Argentina, with a brisk exchange of Chilean woollen ponchos, honey, hams and lard for yerba maté from Paraguay and European goods imported at Buenos Aires; to Peru was shipped wheat and wine and beef or pork fat (grasa), exchanged for cargoes of aji (red pepper) from Arica and silver from Potosí.
Commerce with the Araucanians, eager buyers of hardware, metal implements and ornaments in exchange for guanaco skins and cattle, went on in spite of the mistrust engendered by the events of 1723, when a general rising of the Indians took place, the settled villages of converts created by the Jesuit missionaries were deserted, and a new war commenced. The Araucanians themselves sued for peace on this occasion, a new Parliament was held with fresh agreements that the country below the Bio-Bio should be intact to the Indians, and the Governor agreed to withdraw the Spanish officials who had been posted in the villages of Christian Indians.