By the year 1884 a French-Swiss colony had been established at Quechereguas, and another at Traiguen, fifteen miles distant. In the same region, at Victoria, were Germans and Swiss; French settlements had been made at Quina, Angol and San Bernardo, while in the Temuco region were more Swiss colonies, as also at Quillen, Puren, Galvarino, Contulmo and Ercilla. Between 1881 and 1887 the European newcomers had invested 8000 francs (the Chilean peso being then worth five francs) in land, and the colonists in Araucania numbered about 4000.
Their early life had its difficulties. When railways began construction through the long-secluded territory the Indians became infuriated, and the unfortunate colonists suffered from repeated raids. Property was destroyed and settlers attacked and killed when the Angol-Traiguen section of the line was commenced, and eventually a special police force was established to protect the new settlements. The Swiss Government made investigations through their consulate in Valparaiso, raising certain points in connection with the well-being of the Swiss immigrants, their physical security, and delay in obtaining land titles, and, although the Chilean authorities did their best to ameliorate conditions, a check to the invitation extended was felt for a time. However, the young towns began to prosper, the Chilean Government planned and began more railways, and before the end of the century the whole territory had been tentatively opened. Cultivated fields spread over the face of the old Indian reserve, joining eventually with the Valdivia and Llanquihue lands settled thirty years previously.
Two small specialised groups of immigrants are to be seen in the south in addition to the German and Swiss wave. After the last Boer War, a number of farmers came from South Africa with their families, and settled upon the Island of Chiloé. Here the fair-haired children of the Boer folk thrive, the farms are neat and well kept, and the properties, many of them extending to the sea’s edge, appear to flourish. The other transplantation is that of a group of Canary Islanders, a hardy folk who have acquired land on the beautiful Budi Lagoon, on the coast of Cautín Province. In the southern provinces below the Bio-Bio, however, the long existence of the Spanish outposts next door to Indian populations had its effect upon both groups. The Indians learned quickly to adopt the European habit of keeping domestic animals—they are said to have owned 50,000 sheep by 1567—and to till the soil; the Spaniards or their descendants of mixed blood learned to live contentedly in houses of mud bricks, to eat Indian food and to prepare it in the Indian manner. The southern tribes had no domestic cooking vessels: holes in the soil, beaten hard and lined with stones, were heated with wood fires, and the food, thickly wrapped in leaves, was placed in a red-hot cavity and covered down with branches: all kinds of food together—shell-fish, birds, green vegetables, potatoes—were put in, the whole coming out as an appetising, steaming mass. This curanto was adopted by the mestizos, and still survives in certain localities as a favourite dish, exactly as the old Peruvian locro, the potato stew of Inca days, is still an indispensable item of the menu of upland West Coast towns today.
Neither coffee nor tea were to be had in the south in early days; the former in fact had not yet come into general European use, while the import of tea was forbidden under the Spanish colonial régime; the mestizos took to a drink made of ground and parched maize mixed with water, or chicha, or the infusion of yerba maté, imported overland from Paraguay. The latter custom still survives in country regions, while the colonists from Central Europe of last century filled their need for coffee with a decoction of dried, burnt and ground figs. The use of the woollen poncho, a garment excellently adapted to the climate, has long been general amongst the farming classes or any others spending much time out of doors and, especially, in the saddle.
Captain Allen Gardiner, in Chile between 1814 and 1838, observed that in the south a spade was used by the Chilenos which was a copy of the Indian implement, made of a horse’s blade-bone lashed to a four-foot-long pole; that thread was spun by hand without a wheel, and cloth woven upon the “very rudest description of a loom”; and that the descendants of both races built their ranchos of an oval shape, with mud floors, wattled sides, no windows, an interior row of supporting posts, and a roof with openings at each end of a raised ridge-coping; the fire was built in the middle of the floor.
Material comforts brought by contact with the world, and prosperity resulting from access to markets, transformed the mode of life after the arrival of colonists, the advent of the railway, and the commencement of steamship services. When flowers began to be seen in the window-spaces of southern houses in place of iron grilles, as Vicente Perez Rosales says, it was the signal of a new standard.
Formal colonisation in Chile is today little needed, but there is a constant informal inflow of white foreigners of good standing who in a considerable proportion marry the charming Chilean women and are added to the permanent population. No great wide spaces are undeveloped, and the natural increase of a healthy land will suffice for industrial needs.
CHAPTER XV
CHILEAN LITERATURE
Conditions of Authorship.—Historians.—Politicians, Engineers and Novelists.—The Society Novel.—Realistic School.—Poets.
Conditions of authorship in Chile are not altogether encouraging to the writer of books. The journalist has a fair chance, for in this as in almost every Latin-American country where prosperity is at least recurrent, there is a large output of daily and weekly papers; if the publishers are unable to offer any great financial reward to talent, they are keenly sympathetic, and the writer of light or learned essays is eagerly welcomed and rapidly renowned. But publishers of books, as developed in Europe, are unknown in the Americas south of the Rio Grande. Therefore the author of distinction or wealth frequently takes his manuscripts to Paris or Madrid, where he seeks a professional publisher to issue his work, and although he may share in the expenses of publication he is consoled by the assurance of expert distribution.