Chile today and tomorrow

by L. E. Elliott Joyce

In Smyth Channel, heading North from Magellan Strait.

Six days later they passed the Second Narrows, and the First Narrows on Feb. 23, coming out of the Strait on the next day; they reached Spain, after a number of adventures, on August 15. Here Sarmiento reported to the King of Spain, and it was determined that a well-provisioned fleet should be sent to the Strait, with stores, building materials, guns, and 100 married and single colonists, the former taking their families with them. Two forts were to be constructed in the First Narrows, each garrisoned with 200 soldiers. With the expedition also went the new Governor of Chile, Alonso de Sotomayor, taking 600 married and single men as settlers. Twenty-three vessels, carrying 3000 people, comprised the imposing fleet that sailed from San Lucar on Sept. 25, 1581. Sarmiento himself went as Governor and Captain-general of the Strait, with command over the forts and settlements; but until they arrived the chief authority lay with Diego Flores de Valdes, commanding the fleet, an unfortunate choice on the part of the Crown, for Flores would not work with Sarmiento, and seems to have been a coward. The ruin of the expedition was certainly attributable in part to his actions.

Ill luck dogged them from the start. A storm assailed the fleet outside San Lucar, and five ships, with 800 men, were lost; of these, 171 were settlers, out of 357 who set out for the Strait. Another frigate was lost as they left Cadiz on December 9, and on the voyage to Rio de Janeiro, where they were to winter, 150 people died. During the fleet’s stay in Rio, from March to November, 1582, another 150 died, and others deserted; an unseaworthy ship had to be sunk here, 16 vessels eventually sailing south, in poor condition. A few days later a large ship, the Arriola, sank with 350 people and quantities of stores, and the Santa Marta followed her; and from this time Diego Flores almost openly tried to impede a farther voyage southwards. He insisted on leaving three ships, with soldiers, settlers and stores, behind at Santa Catalina Island; another vessel was lost on leaving the port; and the next loss of help was occasioned by Alonso de Sotomayor’s decision to disembark at the River Plate and march overland to Chile, instead of aiding with erection of forts and settlements in the Strait. He took three ships and many of the diminishing stores intended for the new colony; and when the Strait’s entrance was reached at last there were left only five vessels of the twenty-three that sailed from San Lucar. When strong winds and currents were encountered, Diego Flores put his ship about and frankly fled, signalling to the other ships to follow him back to Brazil. Arrived in S. Vicente (Santos) they found two of the three ships that had been left at Catalina Island, the Begoña having been sunk by English pirates, while the officials were openly selling the Straits stores in the town and the wretched intended settlers were bartering their clothes for food. Sarmiento saved what he could, was rejoiced to find four vessels fresh from Spain with new provisions for the Straits, and, after Diego Flores had definitely refused to go south again (sailing north with a large quantity of provisions and all the men he could induce to desert), Sarmiento left Rio on Dec. 2, 1583, with five vessels, and again set his course for the Strait. He reached the entrance on Feb. 1, 1584, met with fierce winds and currents, lost anchors and many cables, and was driven out of the Strait again. The Indians of the mainland “made such a smoke that it concealed sea and land.” Nothing daunted, Sarmiento went ashore as soon as he could anchor under the low land of the Virgins Cape, on February 5, taking a cross which they planted on a “large plain clothed with odoriferous and consoling herbs.” Soldiers, settlers and stores were landed, tents set up, 300 people housed; five springs of water were found three-quarters of a mile away, and the colonists began to search for food, having little but mandioca flour from Brazil and a small amount of biscuit. They found “roots sweet and well-tasting, like turnips” and others as pleasant as conserved pine nuts; and quantities of small black berries, probably the fruit of the berberry (Empetrum rubrum) or the myrtle (Myrtus nummularia) that still abound on the mainland and islands of the region. The ephemeral settlement was bravely named the “City of the Name of Jesus,” with due ceremonies of sod-turning, and the burial of coins and witnessed documents; an altar was set up and the litany sung by a procession. Streets and plazas were marked out by Sarmiento, and huts of grass and poles, earth-covered, built; beans, vines, fruit trees and seeds from Spain were planted near the sweet springs. Meanwhile the settlers had to subsist partly on the inadequate fish they could catch. The ships lying at the mouth of the Strait were a constant anxiety, driven out repeatedly by gales, and at last the Trinidad ran ashore and was lost. Alarmed, the admiral, Diego de la Ribera, took three of the remaining four vessels and fled north, carrying the remainder of the provisions, and many settlers. Ribera made no farewells and did not wait for the formal despatches of Sarmiento for the King; it was a mean desertion of gallant countrymen.

Sarmiento rescued the stores from the Trinidad, put the colony into a fair state of defence, with a rampart, arquebuses and guns, against the audacious natives who frequently attacked with arrows, and then sent the remaining ship, the Maria, into the Strait with instructions to make for Cape Santa Ana, while he took a part of 100 soldiers by land to the same spot in order to found a second settlement.

They set out on March 4; two weeks later their track was to be followed by a party of thirty or forty others. It was a hard journey through utter wilderness, and Sarmiento remarks that in forty leagues they saw neither a human being nor signs of fire, although when he had traversed the Strait on his voyage from Peru the plains were full of smoke. They saw deer, skunks, and vultures, found berries, and at the coast obtained shell-fish and edible sea-weed, but were short of fresh water, as the streams flow under the sands when approaching the Strait; at the First Narrow Sarmiento found a suitable spot for a fort, with nearby pasture land “very pleasant to behold, with grass suitable for sheep” an observation which was proved correct three hundred years later. They noticed whales’ bones in a bay beyond the first Narrow, and quantities of large, nourishing mussels.

Tall natives, naked, armed with bows and arrows and accompanied by fighting dogs, met them near Gregory Cape, pretended friendship, but later tried to ambush the Spaniards. Several Spaniards were wounded, and one killed, but Sarmiento killed the Chief with a sword thrust and the attackers fled. After seventy leagues’ marching they reached the wooded country, where the “small people” lived. But the expedition suffered from hunger and fatigue, and several men, discouraged, ran away to the woods and were never seen again. On March 24 the limping, half-starved party reached Santa Ana and met the Maria’s boat, sent to look for them. The ship’s company were camped in a nearby bay. Here they found large deer, plenty of shell-fish that they stewed with “wild cinnamon” (Winter’s Bark), and saw flocks of green parroquets. It was decided to found the second settlement at this spot, and on March 25, 1584, the formalities were carried out, the “tree of justice” was erected and the municipality was traced out, and named the City of the King Don Felipe. A church was built; next, the royal storehouse, large enough to hold 500 men, and the precious provisions secured; they had but 50 casks of flour, 12 of biscuit, 4 of beans, and a little salt meat, dried fish and bacon. At the end of April, clay-coated huts were ready for the approaching storms of winter; vegetable seeds had been planted, the city palisaded and defended by 6 guns, mounted on platforms. On May 25 Sarmiento embarked in the Maria with thirty men, arrived outside the City of the Name of Jesus on the same night, sent to and received messengers from it, but was driven out to sea by a furious twenty-day storm before which he was forced to run north. He could not return, and reached Santos on June 25, with all food long exhausted and the starving men, some of whom were blind and frostbitten, gnawing their sandals and the leather of the pumps.

He left for Rio on July 3, got help from Governor Salvador Correa and sent a ship laden with flour to the Strait; went to Pernambuco and Bahia, where his ship was wrecked and he got ashore on a couple of planks. The Governor received him kindly, gave him a ship of 160 tons, and a load of mandioca flour, cloth and provisions for the settlement. With this ship he sailed to Espirito Santo (Victoria Port), got dried beef and cotton cloth, and proceeded south in mid-January, 1585, to visit his settlements. But in 33 degrees of south latitude a frightful gale burst upon them, most of the sheep, flour, etc., had to be thrown overboard, and the battered vessel made her way back to Rio after fifty-one ruinous days, finding here, as a final blow, the ship despatched to the Strait with flour in December, put back on account of terrible weather. At the end of his resources, and unable to get further help from the well-disposed Portuguese Governor, Sarmiento determined to go to Spain to report; but on his way he was captured (August, 1586) by the little fleet of Sir Richard Grenville returning from Virginia, and taken to England. Here he was received by Queen Elizabeth, who conversed with him in Latin for two hours and a half, with Lord Burleigh, and was specially well treated by Lord Howard and Sir Walter Raleigh, who gave the old sailor a present of 1000 escudos and helped him to obtain a passport. He was, in fact, used most kindly, and probably carried conciliatory messages to Philip II. But his ill-luck followed him relentlessly; while crossing France in December, 1586, he was imprisoned, and a big ransom demanded. Sarmiento was compelled to appeal to the King of Spain, and when the 6000 ducats and four select horses had been provided he was released, in October, 1589, grey-haired and crippled, after nearly three years’ confinement in fetid dungeons “in infernal darkness, accompanied by the music of toads and rats.” His first act was to make his report to the Crown, begging for help to be sent to the settlements in the Strait.

The City of Philip

But, long before Sarmiento was released from the French prison, none but ghosts walked in the City of Philip. Their fate would be wrapped in darkness had it not chanced that in the year 1586 an English captain named Thomas Cavendish threaded the Strait, was hailed from the shore by a half-naked band of eighteen people, of whom three were women, and picked up one Tomé Hernandez. This man afterwards made a deposition before the Viceroy of Peru, but this did not occur until the year 1620, when all chance of rescue had long passed. The statement of Hernandez, then sixty-two years old, displays no feeling; it is a matter-of-fact narrative, and it is remarkable that none of the interrogatories put to him denote the least concern regarding the fate of the settlers, but bore solely upon topographical points, questions of winds and currents, products of the regions, etc. But reading between the lines of the declaration, the tale is heart-rending. It was made by order of Don Francisco de Borja, Prince of Esquilache, the son of a canonised father, and himself a poet, scholar, and excellent Viceroy, the founder of a college for noble Indians.

Hernandez gave an ingenuous and straightforward account, from the soldier’s viewpoint, of the objects and fortunes of the expedition, of the founding of the City of Philip and the departure of Sarmiento to fetch the colonists of the first settlement, an attempt from which, so far as the settlers of the second city were concerned, “he never more returned,” as Hernandez simply said. Two months after Sarmiento had gone, the people from Nombre de Jesus came to join the City of Philip. It was then August, and they told of the storm that blew Sarmiento’s ship out to sea. Andres de Viedma was now in charge, and he tried to provide for the hunger of the settlers by organising 200 soldiers into a band of shell-fish-hunters.