The Chilean vessel sent of recent years on the trip is the training ship Baquedano, a corvette fitted with auxiliary engines.
Visits of the British company’s boat are rare, and the representatives at Mataveri are cut off from the outside world for long periods. During the early months of the war five vessels of the German fleet appeared in Cook’s Bay: the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Leipzig, Nurnberg and Dresden; they used the island as a naval base for six days, gave out the first news, considerably garbled, of the war, and went away, first to sink the Good Hope and Monmouth off Coronel and later to meet their fate at the Falklands. The Prinz Eitel Friedrich also entered on December 23, went out and captured a French barque, and sunk her inside the three-mile limit in Cook’s Bay, after landing her crew and that of a British sailing ship taken off Cape Horn.
CHAPTER XVIII
A NOTE UPON VITAL STATISTICS
Today Chile calculates her area at over 300,000 square miles, with a population not far exceeding four millions. There is plenty of room for at least twenty million people, although one must rule out from possible settlement certain areas of the rugged south, and of the arid north, where, however, scientific irrigation may bring unsuspected regions into the realm of cultivated and settled country.
The growth of population in Chile has not kept pace with that of some other of the South American nations, partly because definite efforts to invite immigration have long been discontinued. Numerical success has not always been accompanied by peaceful assimilation, and Chile, with no great untouched areas to fill, prefers to wait for the natural increase of her people. Since 1820, when the total Chilean inhabitants did not reach one million, the number has quadrupled, a few hundred thousand persons of foreign blood adding, during the century, to the stock; today the foreign-born residing in the country are calculated at 135,000, of whom 100,000 are men.
A brief examination of the population figures of Chile shows some illuminating details, and nothing is clearer than that the apparently rapid growth of certain regions is not due entirely or even chiefly to an influx from outside Chile, or to natural increase, but to a shifting of the workers from one point to another in response to industrial demand. Antofagasta city, which did not figure at all in the census of 1875 counted 8000 people ten years later, and 70,000 in 1919. This concentration is of course a result of the magnificent rise of the nitrate industry, and while a proportion of the employés are Bolivian and Peruvian, most are drawn from more southerly Chilean districts. Valparaiso, always a prosperous city, despite recurrent earthquakes, shows a progressive rise during the last half century from 70,000 to 220,000 people, its lovely residential suburb, Viña del Mar, counting 35,000 more; Santiago also has made strides in accord with her political, social and financial status, the population numbering 425,000, as against 116,000 in 1865 and 333,000 in 1907. Concepción is another city showing legitimate and steady increases—75,000 people today as compared with 14,000 fifty years ago. Iquique, another of the new nitrate towns, has about 50,000 people, appearing in statistics, like Antofagasta, only twenty-five years ago.
Agricultural and industrial Chillán, in the south, has over 40,000 people; Temuco, opened to the general population of Chile only after “the Frontier” was broken down in 1882, made its first appearance in the census of 1885, and has now 35,000 people. Valdivia, with but 3000 people in 1865, now has 30,000.
But Copiapó, with diminished mining, has a few thousand people less than she counted in 1865; Lebu has lost half its people since 1875, and has now less than 3000; Tomé has been practically stationary for fifty years, for similar industrial reasons.
Two new agricultural and pastoral centres in the south show sustained activity, Puerto Montt and Punta Arenas. Puerto Montt, like Valdivia, drew a strong part of its population from Germany and has today 8000 people; Punta Arenas, with less than two hundred inhabitants in 1865, has 25,000 people. Forty per cent of these are calculated to be foreigners, chiefly Scots, or Falkland Islanders of Scots blood, and Yugo-Slavs; the only other city showing so large a proportion of foreign-born residents is Tarapacá, while Antofagasta has 16 per cent of non-Chileans.
Vital statistics in Chile are carefully kept and promptly published; they do not always give satisfaction. A storm of protest was roused, for example, in the Santiaguino press, led by the outspoken and admirably edited Mercurio, when Santiago’s figures for the first four months of 1920 were issued. Infant mortality was shown to be extremely high in that period,—5237 deaths to 4777 births,—a fact which called for investigation by the health authorities, while stress was laid upon the listing of 2402 of the births as illegitimate. “If on the one hand our population does not increase in the normal proportion, while on the other the race is debilitated in the manner revealed by the figures, it is useless for us to claim proudly that we are a well-defined and homogeneous nationality,” declared the Mercurio, and a cloud of articles appeared to account and to suggest remedies for the conditions shown by the official figures.