It may seem strange that a country of this shape, three thousand miles long, and with only three million three hundred thousand people, should be conspicuously homogeneous, united, and patriotic. When the difference between territorial Chile, the country of the map, and actual Chile dawns upon the traveller, his surprise disappears. There are in the republic three distinct regions. The northern, from latitude 18° south as far as Coquimbo in latitude 30° south, is arid desert; some of it profitable nitrate desert, most of it, like Atacama, useless desert. The south, from Puerto Montt in latitude 42° south down to latitude 54° south, is an archipelago of wooded isles with a narrow strip of wooded mountain on the mainland behind, both of them drenched by perpetual rains and inhabited only by a few wandering Indians, with here and there a trading post of white men. It is the central part alone that is compactly peopled, a narrow tract about seven hundred miles long, most of it mountainous, but the valleys generally fertile, and the climate excellent. This central part is the real Chile, the home of the nation.
To central Chile I shall return presently. Meantime a few pages may be given to the northern section, which, though a desert, has an enormous economic value, and is, indeed, one of the chief sources of natural wealth in the two American continents. It is the region which supplies the agriculturists of the whole world with their nitrates, and the nitrates are here because the country is absolutely rainless. Rains would have washed the precious mineral out of the soil long ago and swept it down into the Pacific.
One enters the nitrate fields in two or three hours after leaving the Bolivian plateau and passing through the Western Cordillera described in the last preceding chapter. They are unmitigated desert, a region of low stony hills, dry and barren, not a shrub, not a blade of grass. Sources of fertility to other countries, they remain themselves forever sterile. All the water is brought down in pipes from the upper course of the Loa, the stream which rises on the flanks of the volcano of San Pedro already mentioned. One can just descry in the far distance its snow-streaked summit. But the desert is all alive. Everywhere there are narrow-gauge lines of rails running hither and thither, with long rows of trucks passing down them, carrying lumps of rock. Groups of men are at work with pickaxes breaking the ground or loading the trucks. Puffs of smoke and dust are rising from places where the rock is being blasted with dynamite. Here and there buildings with machinery and tall iron pipes shew the oficinas where the rock is ground to powder, then washed and boiled, the liquid mass run off and drained and dried into a whitish powder, which is packed into sacks and sent down to the coast for shipment. The mineral occurs in a stratum which lies about a foot below the surface, and averages three feet in thickness. It is brownish grey in colour and very hard. There is a considerable by-product of iodine, which is separated and sent off for sale. The demand for it is said to be less than the supply.
Each oficina—that is the name given to the places for the reduction and preparation of the mineral—is the centre of a larger or smaller nitrate estate, and the larger and more modern ones are equipped with houses for the managers and workpeople, each being a sort of village where the company supplies everything to the workpeople, who are mostly Chilean rotos, sturdy peasants of half-Indian blood. In South America one sees plenty of isolated mining villages in deserts, but here a whole wide region unable to support human life is alive with an industrious population.
The air being dry and pure (except for the dust) at this considerable elevation, averaging from three to five thousand feet, the climate ought to be healthy. But it is impossible to imagine a more dismal place to inhabit, and those parts of the surface from which the mineral has been removed are at once forsaken.
These nitrate fields cover a very large area in the northern provinces of Chile, but some districts in which the mineral is believed to exist are still imperfectly explored, and many in which it does exist shew a comparatively poor stratum, so that it is not possible to estimate how much remains to be developed and the length of time it will take, at the present rate of production, to exhaust that amount. We were told, however, that, so far as can be conjectured, the fields might (at the present rate) last nearly two centuries, before the end of which period much may happen in the field of scientific agriculture. The export duty or royalty which the Chilean government levies produces a large annual revenue, and is, indeed, the mainstay of the finance of the republic, enabling taxation to be fixed at a low figure.[50] There are those who say that this is no unmixed benefit, because it reduces the motives for economical administration. The guano deposits of Peru proved to be the source of more evil than good, for by pouring into her treasury sums which excited the cupidity of military adventurers, they made revolutions more frequent. No such danger need be feared in Chile; yet there are always temptations incident to the possession of wealth which a man or a nation has not earned by effort. As the nitrates are part of the capital of the country which will some day come to an end, it would seem prudent to expend what they produce upon permanent improvements which will add to the nation's permanent wealth, such, for instance, as railroads and harbours. A good deal is, in fact, being spent on railroad construction, and a good deal on the creation of a naval stronghold and docks at Talcahuano.
Between the nitrate fields and the sea there lies a strip of wholly unprofitable desert, traversed by that range of hills which rises from the coast all the way along the west side of Chile and Peru. Its scenery is bold and in places striking, but the utter bareness and brownness deprive it of all charm except that which the morning and evening sunlight gives, bringing out delicate tints on distant slopes. Here the railway line forks, sending one branch to the port of Antofagasta, and the other to the smaller town but better sheltered roadstead of Megillones. We went to the latter. Local interests of a selfish kind have here, as elsewhere along the coast, caused the selection of Antofagasta as the principal terminus of the line; and though it is now admitted that Megillones would have been a fitter spot, so much capital has been sunk in buildings at the former that it is deemed too late to make a change. The bay of Megillones, guarded by a lofty promontory on the south, and commanding a view of ridge after ridge of mountains stretching out to the north, has a beautiful sweep, and is enlivened by the abundance of seals and sea-lions, who wallow and bark to one another in the long, slow rollers of the Pacific. The beach is excellent for bathing, but the water so cold that only in the hotter part of the year do the Englishmen, who manage the railway and its machine works and who retain here the national love of salt water, find it suitable for anything more than a plunge in and out again. Though rain is extremely rare, one may conclude from the gullies in the hills down which torrents seem to have swept either that violent storms come occasionally or that the climate has altered since hills and valleys took their present form.
Antofagasta, where we landed on the southward voyage down the coast, is a much busier place than Megillones, but a less attractive one, for it has no such sweep of sand and space of level ground behind, being crushed in between the dreary, dusty hills and the rocky shore. Landing in the surf is often difficult and sometimes dangerous, but as the chief port of the southern nitrate country it receives a good deal of shipping, and has a pleasant little native society, besides an English and a German colony.
Nearly five hundred miles further south are the towns of La Serena and Coquimbo, the former a quiet old Spanish city, placed back from the coast to be out of the way of the English and Dutch marauders, who were frequent and formidable visitors in these seas, after Sir Francis Drake had led the way in his famous voyage in 1578, when he sailed up and down the coast plundering towns and capturing ships. Coquimbo is a newer place, with a fairly good harbour, and thrives on the trade which the mines in its neighbourhood assure to it. It is an arid land, yet here there begins to be some rain, and here, therefore, we felt that we were bidding farewell to the desert, which we had first struck at Payta, fifteen hundred miles further north. Nevertheless there was little green upon the hills until we reached, next day, a far more important port, the commercial capital not only of Chile, but of all western South America, and now the terminus of the trans-continental railway to Buenos Aires.
This is Valparaiso, where the wanderer who has been musing among prehistoric ruins and Bolivian volcanoes finds himself again in the busy modern world. The harbour is full of vessels from all quarters,—coasting steamers that ply to Callao and Panama, sailing ships as well as steamers from San Francisco and others from Australia, mostly with cargoes of coal, besides vessels that have come from Europe round Cape Horn or through the Straits of Magellan. The so-called harbour is really an open roadstead, for there is no shelter to the north, and when, as often happens, the dreaded gale from that quarter breaks, vessels that have not had time to run out under steam are in danger of drifting ashore, for the water deepens so quickly from the land that they cannot anchor far out. Why not build a breakwater? Because the water is so deep that the cost of a breakwater long enough to give effective protection would be enormous. There is a more sheltered haven some miles to the north, but as all the business offices and warehouses are here, not to speak of the labouring population and their houses, the idea of moving the city and railway terminus has not been seriously considered.