During all the winter and the following summer they waited, hoping for help, and with no food but the wild berries and such sea-food as they could secure. Then they built two boats, and the survivors, fifty men and five women, started out towards the eastern end of the Strait. But, no sailors, they could not navigate well, and one boat ran ashore and was lost; the surviving boat could not carry all the people, so some returned to the City of Philip and the rest scattered along the shore to pick up shell-fish to preserve their lives during the winter.
When summer came, Viedma assembled the survivors, fifteen men, and, astonishing witness to mental and physical endurance, three women. “All the rest had died of hunger and sickness.” They agreed to return to the first settlement, as nearer possible rescue, and began to make their way by land, finding many dead bodies of their comrades by the way. Twelve miles beyond Cape Geronimo they saw four ships, which they thought were Spanish, but which were actually the boats of Cavendish. A boat came off to the beach, and the settlers were told the nationality of the ships and offered a passage to Peru; the men on shore replied that they were afraid of being thrown overboard, getting the response that they might well embark, as those on the ships “were better Christians than we were.” After some parleying Hernandez was taken aboard, to Cavendish himself, who, upon hearing that these folk were survivors of the settlement, said he would take them all in his vessels. But this, in the end, he did not do, taking advantage of the rare good weather in the Strait to go to Penguin Island for birds, which he salted down in casks. He sailed thence to the abandoned City of Philip, stayed there four days taking on wood and water, and brought away the six pieces of artillery that Sarmiento had placed there for the colony’s defence. Storms met the ships at the western end, Valparaiso was missed in the fog, and when a landing was made at the port of Quintero, the rescued Hernandez was sent ashore to pretend to the Spanish that the ships were from Spain. But Hernandez gave secret warning to his kinsfolk, and next day when the English went ashore they were ambushed, some being killed and others taken prisoner. The latter were sent to Lima and there hanged.
Cavendish has been blamed for leaving the survivors of Sarmiento’s ill-fated colony in the Strait, but if any excuse were needed besides the fact that he did not know their desperate plight, it exists in the ungrateful conduct of the one man he took away, whose thanks took the form of sending a number of his helpers to the scaffold.
Of the fate of these last members of the large band of settlers who had set out from Spain with such high hopes, we know only that in 1590 one man signalled to the Delight of Bristol, was taken on board, and died on the way to Europe, without leaving his name or story. But whether they died of starvation or were taken into the roving camps of Indians, their blood was lost, although traces may have been mingled with that of the natives, who were not invariably hostile. Hernandez, answering his questioners in Lima, stated that for three months a Spanish woman, captured on the seashore by the Indians, was kept by them, but that then she was sent back. Savage nomads, perpetually short of food, the Indians of the Straits had nothing with which to hold nor help the unfortunate Europeans.
Port Famine and Punta Arenas
A brief side-light is thrown upon the settlement by the records of Cavendish’s expedition. He was in “King Philip’s Citie” on January 9, 1586, and gave it the name of “Port Famine” by which the spot was ever afterwards known. The town was full of dead people, the bodies lying clothed in the houses, and the explorations of his sailors resulted in finding only “muskles and lympits” for food, with a few small deer. In 1600 the Dutchman, Oliver Noort, came this way and saw Port Famine, but Purchas’ account says that “heere they found no footprints of the late Philip-Citie, now liker a heap of stones.”
Yet today, a few miles to the northward, stands the prosperous city of Punta Arenas. Its sturdy existence justifies, after three and a half centuries, Sarmiento’s belief that this stormy region was neither unhealthy nor unproductive, and that a colony of white men could live there securely were it properly supported.
CHAPTER VI
THE TACNA QUESTION
The Storm Centre.—Indeterminate Position of Tacna.—Peru and Chile.—Boundary Problem.—Guano and Nitrate.—The War of 1879.—Treaties.—Appeal to the League of Nations.—Discussions at Washington.
Tacna is the political storm centre of the Pacific Coast of South America. It is a little province consisting chiefly of sun-bleached desert scored by a few extraordinarily fertile valleys, lying north of the great nitrate area of Tarapacá. It is tilted to the sea, the coast range diminishing to a tawny cliff’s edge, and rises to long interior plains that merge into Andean spurs, with the Bolivian province of Oruro just across the snow-crowned mountain wall. The area is 23,000 square kilometres; the population was estimated in 1919 at 40,000, and counted as a thousand less in 1920, a diminution probably due to the departure of Peruvians.