Of the nitrate ports, Antofagasta is today the most lively and agreeable, although Iquique is still a rival in quantities of the chemical exported. Just north of Antofagasta lies Mejillones, the old port established in colonial days, but its equipment was found to be inadequate after the acquisition of this territory by Chile, and the creation of modern facilities and a modern city was decided upon. People who live in Antofagasta are proud of the place with excellent reason. The approach by train from the south is through ramshackle, happy-go-lucky fringes that have tacked themselves on, but the city itself is well equipped. Streets are wide, clean and well paved; shops are filled with merchandise from London, Paris and New York, and are not extravagant in price. Office buildings, many of which house the representatives of nitrate railways, nitrate and iodine companies, agencies of copper and borax companies, of shipping lines, brokers and several foreign and native banks, are spacious and well equipped; the telephone service compares well with that of many cities of ten times the size of Antofagasta, with its 70,000 inhabitants. Hotels are comfortable, service courteous, and tariffs less than one might expect in a city with not a single meadow or orchard within hundreds of miles, deriving all that it consumes from the Chilean farming lands farther south, from the packing-houses of Magellanes territory and wheat fields of the centre and south, or from the sugar and fruit regions of Peru or markets overseas.
The public park is an object of admiration of every visitor coming from the barren coast farther north or from the Atacama copper country to the south; it has been sedulously nursed into greenness that is the more remarkable since Antofagasta’s water supply is piped from the foothills 200 miles away—through lands so arid that more than once a fox of the deserts, driven with thirst, has followed the pipe-line across the pampas right into the city. The great pride of hospitable and cheery Antofagasta is in the country club to which the visitor is always motored along the sweep of the bay; here is a cool building with a fine dancing floor and a good cook. But its chief claim to admiration is the little garden, no more than a few feet square, tended so devotedly that all the year round it glows with gay flowers.
All the chief towns of the nitrate pampas, besides possessing rail transport to the Pacific, are connected by the main line of the “Red Central Norte” to Santiago, and thence to the farming regions of the Chilean south; there is through railway connection, thus, between such towns as Iquique and Antofagasta and the newly-operating packing-house of Puerto Montt. Agricultural Chile has no better markets than those offered by the thronged and busy nitrate pampas and ports of her own north, and from Llanquihue to Coquimbo, the last outpost of farming country in northern Chile, foodstuffs are sent by rail or sea to supply the great region of desert camps.
Antofagasta. The Nitrate Wharves.
Copper
The future of copper mining in Chile is wrapped in uncertainty. The industry has already undergone a not unfamiliar transformation, with a deeply marked effect upon the Chilean population engaged in this work, for, commencing as a series of individual enterprises on the part of the native-born, it has become a large scientifically organised business operated chiefly by foreigners,[[5]] with the Chileans reduced to the position of wage-earners.
[5]. The most recent foreign entry into the Chilean copper field is that of the Japanese, with interests in three large deposits in Bio-Bio Province.
Under the old haphazard system, when a man would frequently go out into the desert alone, or with a single companion, hunting for rich veins of copper ore, a good living at least was the rule; when the discovery of a considerable deposit warranted the introduction of simple machinery, a few employés, transport animals, etc., many little and big fortunes were made. The buyers and smelters of last century also earned satisfactory returns. But, curiously enough, the huge organisations utilising immense masses of lower-grade ores, employing thousands of men and most modern machinery, with smelters at the mining camp, are generally stated to be run at a loss. There are reasons why such statements should be accepted with reserve, but looking at the matter purely from a Chilean angle it is at least questionable whether an industry which yields nothing to the national treasury in the way of export dues upon the mineral shipped out, and which draws many thousands of men from agricultural zones to an isolated and entirely artificial life under conditions tending to lower the standard of citizenship, has a sound raison d’être. Possession of the large Chilean copper deposits, whether operated at all, or operated without profit, does however enable a group of powerful interests controlling copper in North America to control also the copper markets of the world: for after North America, Chile is the scene of the greatest identified copper areas, the two series of mines together producing over 60 per cent of the total international output.
At the present time, that is to say, at the end of 1921, the situation in Chile with respect to copper is briefly this: there still exists, throughout the copper-sown regions of Coquimbo and Atacama provinces, a diminishing number of small mines following rich veins of the ore. Some of these are little more than holes in the ground, others are worked by organised companies with good machinery, housing several hundred workers and owning their own system of transport, as the Dulcinea mine in Copiapó. But almost everywhere the rich lodes, containing anything from 8 per cent of copper upwards, are disappearing; they have been hunted for centuries, and although scientific examination of these immense regions would no doubt reveal many unsuspected rich deposits, the accessible mines have been worked out to a considerable degree.