Possession of the great territory of Brazil by the Portuguese across the Andes, and cheek by jowl with some of the most cherished of the Jesuit Missions, was another thorn in the flesh of the Spanish and a constant cause of complaint by the Holy Office. Records of the Inquisition complain that the Portuguese were responsible for the decay of religious feeling in the Indies: they were tolerant to Jews, allowed many to enter American regions, and themselves took possession of the commerce of the Pacific coast. All the shops and businesses were in the hands of Portuguese or Portuguese Jews, says one complaint, declaring that these shopkeepers refused to sell goods on Saturdays. With all this trouble on account of outsiders, the Inquisition had its hands full with native-born offenders, and did not spare them. There is the case of Father Ulloa and his private sect; and that of two sisters of Santiago who accused their brother of Judaism, and ultimately, after a tremendous process, sent him to the stake. Vicuña Mackenna relates another story of the debt owing to one Manuel Perez, also of Santiago. This Perez was burnt alive at Lima in 1639, but before his death told the Inquisitors that Martinez Gago of Santiago, a merchant, owed him a few thousand pesos. The Inquisitors sent to demand the money, but, finding that the debtor was already dead, placed an embargo upon the goods of his father-in-law and proceeded against that unlucky man. Then arose a score of other creditors of Gago, among them many influential clergy, and the story proceeds in a tangle of processes, demands by the haughty Comisario of the Inquisition in Santiago and deportations to Lima.
But by the end of the seventeenth century the power and prestige of the Holy Office had begun to wane, a decay due partly to the increase in its ranks of the number of native-born or “creole” officials. Posts had for long been a matter of personal privilege or commerce; but when local men of ambition bought offices almost openly and proceeded to use them as instruments for amassing a fortune, the Inquisition was laid open not only to hatred and contempt but to attack. José Toribio Medina remarks in his Historia del Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisicion en Chile (Santiago, 1890) that as a result of the lowered prestige of the Holy Office, its members began to show “moderation,” even “humility,” as when the Commissioner in Chile, 1797, humbly asked Governor O’Higgins to help him to secure the person of an accused man, who, living in Chiloé, might find friends to resist the Inquisition. The cases brought before the Tribunal abated to mere charges of witchcraft, and although the Inquisitors formally objected, in 1786, to the scandal of the teaching of jurisprudence, history and chronology by Dr. José Lasterria, they had not been able to prevent the opening of a school of mathematics in Santiago, in 1759.
The last Commissioner of the Inquisition in Chile was Dr. José Antonio de Errázuriz y Madariaga, a native of Santiago; his Treasurer, Judás Tadeo de Reyes y Borda, was also a Santiaguino who held the additional post of Secretary to the Governor of Chile. The ground was cut from under their official feet when the Congress of 1811 voted that the funds and income of the Inquisition should be used for “other pious purposes,” this order being cemented, despite the energetic objection of the Treasurer, when the Spanish Cortes of 1813 abolished the Tribunal in Spain and her colonies. The estates belonging to the Inquisition in Chile were some of the finest of the Central Valley, and were calculated at a value of over one and a half millions of pesos.
Upon the restoration of that extraordinarily shortsighted monarch, Ferdinand VII, the Inquisition was re-erected in 1814, and under this authority Tadeo de Reyes collected about 1500 pesos in imposts, in 1815. This was the last purse of Chilean money handed to the Tribunal, whose final abolition by the Spanish Cortes of March, 1820, was the tombstone of a body that had long lacked any spark of real life.
The existence and acts of the Tribunal appear, in the light of today, grotesque as well as sinister; but it is well to remember that not only was the age in which it flourished a period when life was held cheap and religious passion ran high, but that even in the comparatively emancipated atmosphere of South America the Inquisition was not universally unpopular. On the contrary, the citizens of the Colonies in more than one region appealed to Spain to set up a branch, with a view to correction of the loose life of the ordinary clergy as well as to punish heresy in an untutored pioneer community. This work was undoubtedly performed with zeal: scores of the Chilean and Peruvian cases taken before the Tribunal had to do with the chastity of the priesthood, and irregular and coarse living on the part of residents. It cannot be said that the work of the Inquisition banished licentiousness from the Colonies, but the way of the sinner was made harder.
CHAPTER V
THE STRAIT OF MAGELLAN
The First Navigators: Magellan, Sebastian del Cano, Loaysa, Alcazaba.—Sarmiento.—The City of Philip.—Cavendish.—Port Famine and Punta Arenas.
Thinking of Chile, one sees a picture of southern orchards and wheat fields, of cattle pastures, of pine forests; of copper mines in the inhospitable heights of the mountains; or perhaps of the great, burning nitrate pampas of the north. Rarely is a thought given to the southernmost city in the world, Punta Arenas, with its tributary sheep-raising plains, its beech woods and fisheries, coal and gold mines, and its extraordinary rise from misery to immense wealth in the course of a few years.
Nobody, probably, could have wrested wealth from such a region but the people whose attention was drawn to it after the discovery that much-abused Patagonia was a fine sheep-raising region. It was the hardy Falkland Islander, hailing from the islands north and west of the Scottish coast, who made, and speculated on, this chance, invading the plains and grassy hills east of the Andes after he had staked out Western Patagonia, and adding Tierra del Fuego presently to his conquests. He was swiftly followed by energetic traders and by another sheep-herding mountaineer, the Jugo-Slav; between them they have done what the unfortunate Spanish settlers of Pedro de Sarmiento could not do: they have created a city in the wilderness, strongly-rooted, sturdy, with the spring of life from within.
The tale of settlement of the Straits of Magellan, today an accepted achievement, is built upon gallantry and tragedy. The thriving regions of Patagonia and Magellan Territory have been erected upon the ashes of the most cruel suffering.