Two days after the closing banquet, we rose early and hurried down to the station to take the morning express for Valparaiso. Notwithstanding the unseasonableness of the hour and the fatigue of recent entertainments, a large number of the hospitable folk of Santiago were on hand to bid us “Godspeed” on our journey. It is an extremely pleasant custom, this taking the trouble to welcome the coming and speed the parting guest by going out of your way to greet him at the railway station, or if in the country, to saddle your horse and ride out of town for a mile or two to accompany him. It takes time, to be sure, and time that, according to American standards, might be more profitably expended on attending to the business of adding up dollars and cents. Yet it does increase the store of friendly feelings in the world. The casual visitor to the United States too often has occasion to feel that we are so wrapped up in money-making that we have no time to be polite. As a recent British visitor said in comparing us with Mexico, “when one crosses the Rio Grande, the brisk and selfish American atmosphere is left behind.”

After an uneventful journey of four hours in a parlor car, we reached the water-front of Valparaiso.

Before going on board the steamer we had a few hours to give to sight-seeing and the purchase of furs brought here from the Straits of Magellan and the Andean highlands. We had time also to feel something of the excitement caused by the rapid fluctuation in the value of the paper dollar on the floor of the Valparaiso Stock Exchange.

The national currency fluctuates considerably from day to day and is the most serious drawback to commercial prosperity in Chile. During my stay in Santiago it fluctuated so violently that some of the prominent business men were very evidently less interested in their legitimate business than in speculating in currency. The unit of value is the peso, worth, while we were there, about twenty-five cents. It has gone as low as fifteen cents, and as high as forty cents. All current accounts in the large importing houses are carried in pounds sterling.

British commercial houses have a very strong hold on Valparaiso. So important are the dealings with Great Britain that English is actually the language of commerce. This is the more noticeable because, although no educated South American would for a moment admit that he could not read and speak French, outside of the larger cities very few South Americans can even understand English. Nor do I remember to have met more than one or two, outside of Chile, who pretended to any knowledge of German. A knowledge of English is generally limited to those who have been in the United States or England and to those who have had large business dealings with British commercial houses. At the same time, English is taught in many of the schools in Chile and we repeatedly met young Chileans who were anxious to practice it on us.

Great Britain has always favored Chile ever since her merchantmen, headed by the gallant Admiral Thomas Cochran, Earl of Dundonald, created the Chilean navy which swept the West Coast clean of Spanish ships in the Wars of Independence. It was the Chilean navy that enabled San Martin’s troops to reach Peru and strike at the last stronghold of Spain in South America. In those days, most of the vessels were commanded by English and Scottish officers. The tendencies of the navy are still British, and this extends even to the uniform of both officers and cadets. In a word, the navy is as English as the army is German. Furthermore, it has long maintained its preËminence among the navies of South America. When Brazil gets the dreadnoughts for which she has contracted, this supremacy will temporarily disappear.

When we boarded the Chilean steamer LimarÍ, we found among our fellow passengers quite a number of pleasant-faced little naval cadets bound for some point up the coast where they were to join their training-ship. They smoked too many cigarettes, and their manners on board were not particularly good, although they were probably no worse than a similar group of American schoolboys would have been under the circumstances. Certainly our fellow passengers were not as bad as those cadets whom Hugh de Bonelli encountered in his journey from Panama to Lima in 1850 and describes in his entertaining “Travels in Bolivia.” In one corner of the saloon on his steamer “sat an elderly gentleman and a maiden lady, brother and sister, surrounded by parrots, a monkey, two cats, and three ugly little dogs, all of whom they alternately kissed and hugged. Two young cadets of sixteen, in uniform, who, without a figure of speech, may be said to have smoked themselves away—for they were scarcely perceptible behind the volumes of smoke they emitted,—got into disgrace with these worthy people. One of these young sparks threw down, on the sly, a lighted cigar upon the monkey, who had been watching him. The animal seized it, and put the lighted end of it into his mouth; then screamed, chattered, and cried—jumped upon the head of the old lady, who was so frightened that she fainted away; then upon that of the old man, from which he fell to the ground with the old gentleman’s wig firmly held between his jaws!”

We found the LimarÍ well crowded with passengers, most of them Chileans bound for Coquimbo, Antofagasta, and Iquique. The absence of a railway makes the semi-weekly steamers the only means of communication on this desert coast. Yet it was not until we had experienced the decided inconveniences of overcrowding and felt the relief caused by the heavy disembarkation at the northern Chilean ports that we fully realized how dependent the Chileans are on the control of sea-power. They are now planning to construct a longitudinal railway that shall run parallel to the shore line, and make them less dependent on naval predominance.

The next day after leaving Valparaiso, we reached Coquimbo. The cable had been used to warn the authorities that there were distinguished passengers on board, and the leading citizens of the town came out to invite the delegados ashore and took us for a delightful drive along the beach from Coquimbo to the old Spanish settlement of La Serena. At the latter place we were entertained at the Club where an informal reception was held, with the aid of the usual cocktails and champagne.

At Caldera we were spared from official recognition and spent our time catching lizards on the sandy hills back of the town.

The third day brought us to Antofagasta where several of the delegation left to take the railroad to Bolivia over the route by which I had come out a month ago. The sea-lions and the diving birds were playing about the harbor in the same fascinating manner as when I first saw this port. But the effect, after living for several weeks amid the green parks of Santiago and enjoying several days of blue ocean, was far less striking than when we came from the bleak brown deserts of the Bolivian plateau.

The morning of the fourth day saw us at Iquique, once the centre of Peru’s nitrate industry, now rivaling Valparaiso as the scene of Chilean commercial activity. Numbers of sailing-vessels were lying in the roadstead waiting for cargoes of the precious fertilizers. It was a pleasure to see several of the vessels actually flying the American flag! The West Coast depends largely on Oregon and Puget Sound for its lumber-supply and these three-masted American schooners find a profitable trade in bringing lumber and returning with nitrates. The LimarÍ’s cargo consisted largely of merchandise which had come from Europe and America through the Straits of Magellan. While this was being discharged we had time to see the city, where a few months before an angry mob of strikers from the nitrate works, had been mown down by well-trained government troops.

We were entertained here by Mr. Rea Hanna, the enthusiastic American Consul, who has a difficult rÔle to play in a town where Chileans are in control but where the Peruvian Club is the centre of aristocratic society. That he is universally liked speaks volumes.

At the southern end of the town there is good bathing; and in addition, pavilions and beer gardens to entice the weary clerk from the nitrate offices. The well-arranged grounds of the Jockey Club afford opportunity for social intercourse, polo, and tennis. But the most interesting place in Iquique is what is known as the Combination, the central office of the Nitrate Association, where the different companies, mostly English, unite to arrange scales of prices and quantity of output and maintain an efficient Bureau of Propaganda.

People frequently confuse Chilean nitrates with guano. One is a mineral, the other an animal product. Whether the nitrate fields were not originally guano deposits is a moot point, but I believe this idea has been abandoned. There is, however, considerable difference of opinion as to the actual origin of the great nitrate desert.

As there is a heavy export duty on the nitrates, Chile has been, and will continue to be, as long as the supply holds out, in the very enviable position of making foreigners pay the bulk of her taxes. How long this exceptional state of affairs will last is a problem for the geologists to settle. As there is undoubtedly enough material in sight to satisfy the demands of the present generation and the next, no one has any very stringent reason for husbanding the output or for investing the national income from the export duties in such a way as to provide for the exigencies of future tax-payers. The natural result of this easy method of securing a revenue is a tendency towards extravagance in the Chilean budget and an absence of careful supervision. Few people care whether the money is spent for the best interests of the country. Political scientists say that when the voter has a very light burden of taxes to bear, he does not mind seeing the government’s money wasted or his favorite politicians grow wealthy. Doubtless in time such a condition of affairs will have a serious influence for evil on Chilean character. As yet the whole industry is too young to have produced any marked effect. Fortunately for the race, the nitrate fields will probably become exhausted before any lasting harm is done. Nevertheless Chile would do well to take warning from the experience of Peru, whose revenue for many years depended almost exclusively on the yield of guano from the Chincha Islands. The exhaustion of that valuable product left the country in a far worse state than she was before her easily acquired income had commenced to corrupt her politicians and financiers.

We left Iquique late that night and arrived early the next morning at Pisagua, the northern limit of the nitrate country. Like all the other ports at which we had touched since leaving Valparaiso, it is the terminus of a little railway that goes back a few miles into the interior and brings down minerals of one sort or another; sometimes copper ore, generally nitrate, more rarely tin and silver.

In the course of the afternoon we reached Arica. The southern side of the bay is guarded by a picturesque cliff, not unlike Gibraltar, which is celebrated in Peruvian history as the site of a memorable battle in the war with Chile. At its crisis the commandant of the Peruvian garrison, rather than fall into the hands of the victorious Chileans, spurred his horse over the summit and was dashed to pieces among the rocks and waves at the base of the cliff. To the Anglo-Saxon mind, he would have died more creditably had he killed as many Chileans as possible first, and fallen face to the front. But the more spectacular death that he chose appeals strongly to the Latin temperament.

Yet this trick of committing suicide instead of fighting to the last breath is not a characteristic of Spanish heroes generally. It is not easy to say whether the gallant soldier was influenced or not by any Quichua ancestor that he may have had. Readers of Prescott’s “Conquest of Peru” will remember that in the attack on Cuzco, made by one of the Pizarros, a Quichua noble who had greatly distinguished himself in the Inca army, seeing that his cause was irretrievably lost, jumped over the precipice on the south side of the Sacsahuaman hill, and preferred to be dashed to pieces rather than to see how many Spaniards he could kill first. He in turn may have inherited the tendency from remote ancestors in the Pacific Ocean. On the Island of Kusaie there is a picturesque waterfall where, according to tradition, two young chiefs, defeated in battle, ended their lives by casting themselves from the precipice into the boiling pool below. The habit of jumping over a precipice in preference to being killed in battle by one’s enemies is not uncommon in the history of the Pacific races, both in the Carolines and in the Hawaiian Islands.

Arica is particularly interesting to Americans because it was here that the U. S. S. Wateree was carried inland by the great tidal wave of 1868. Not only has the port been devastated by earthquakes and tidal waves but also by fire. At present it has a very squalid appearance. Before the completion in 1871 of the Southern Peruvian railway from Mollendo to Puno, Arica was an important port of entry for Bolivia. When the Chileans finish the railway which they are building to connect this port with La Paz by a line that shall cross the mountains back of Tacna, this importance will be restored.

At the close of the war between Chile and Peru the Treaty of Peace known as the Treaty of Ancon stipulated that the territory of the provinces of Tacna and Arica should remain in the possession of Chile for ten years from 1883 to 1893. The Treaty continues: “The term having expired, a plebiscite shall decide by popular vote if the territory of these provinces shall remain definitely under the dominion and sovereignty of Chile, or if they shall continue to form part of the territory of Peru. The Government of the country in whose favor the provinces of Tacna and Arica shall be annexed shall pay to the other ten millions of dollars Chilean silver money or Peruvian soles, of equal percentage of fine silver and of equal weight as the former. A special protocol, which shall be considered an integral part of the present treaty, shall establish the form in which the plebiscite shall take place, and the terms and conditions in which the ten millions of dollars shall be paid by the nation remaining in possession of Tacna and Arica.”

As is well known, the special protocol, establishing the form in which the plebiscite is to take place, has never been agreed upon. The principal obstacle is that since 1883 a large number of Chileans have settled, voluntarily or otherwise, in the provinces, enough to decide the vote of the plebiscite in favor of Chile. The Chilean government says all present residents should vote. The Peruvians maintain that the voters in the plebiscite should consist only of those who were residents of the provinces at the termination of the war. Naturally, the Chileans will not agree to this as there is no doubt but that the majority of such persons are of inherent Peruvian preferences.

It is now seventeen years since the plebiscite was due to take place and the question is still an open one. The fact, however, that in a recent treaty with Bolivia, Chile promised to construct, at her expense, a railway from Arica to La Paz, and has since granted a contract to a reliable company to build that railway, would seem to indicate that Chile considers the question settled although no plebiscite has been held. No nation voluntarily commits itself to spend millions of dollars in building a railway in a province which it considers in the slightest degree likely to become the property of a neighbor. The Peruvians have not overlooked the calm way in which the Chileans take it for granted that Tacna and Arica are to be permanently Chilean territory, but they are in no position to dispute such a conclusion. Their fighting strength is far below the Chilean standard and they know it.

The whole question was brought vividly to the fore just at the time of our visit by a little international episode known as the “Incident of La Corona.” Peru had erected a magnificent memorial to her soldiers that fell in the conflict with Chile. As was customary and proper, the representatives of the various foreign powers resident in Lima, requested permission to deposit formal wreaths at the base of the monument as an expression of the friendship of their governments. The Chilean diplomat was not behind the others, and his request was granted, only to be denied later on when his funeral wreath had been made ready for the exercises. At this he took great umbrage, demanded his passports, and sailed for home. His arrival in Santiago was the occasion of a popular outburst. There was a strong demand on the part of a portion of the public that the government resent the Peruvian “insult” in a very practical way, viz., by holding elections in the provinces of Tacna and Arica and summoning representatives to the National Congress in the same manner as from the other Chilean provinces. This would be taking the last step in formal annexation of the disputed territory and final recognition of it as a definite part of the national domain.

I was travelling in the interior of Peru at the time of these demonstrations and it may be imagined that the press reports in the Peruvian newspapers did not underestimate the gravity of the situation. The fact that the Chilean government did not take any active steps toward formally annexing Tacna and Arica in response to the popular demand was attributed by many Peruvians and not a few Chileans to the fact that in the harbor of Lima there happened to be at this time a powerful squadron of American battleships. The long-standing friendship between the United States and Peru, and the active hostility between the United States and Chile at the time of the fall of Balmaceda and the “Baltimore” episode, were regarded by the Peruvians as sufficient guaranty of an intention on the part of the United States to interfere in case trouble arose over an attempt on the part of Chile to terminate the territorial dispute in a high-handed manner.

Whether or not the government at Washington indicated its wishes in any way or expressed any opinion whatever; whether or not the presence of our battleship fleet in the waters of the West Coast at this time was intentional or purely accidental, are matters about which I know nothing and which do not affect the actual results. As it stands, the Peruvians having avoided trouble with Chile feel grateful toward the United States, and the Chileans feel correspondingly irritated that their government was apparently kept from an overt act by the influence of the Yankis. An enthusiastic Chilean, a vigorous “anti-American,” told me some time afterwards that he had endeavored, to the best of his ability, to find out from political friends in Valparaiso why nothing was done when it would have been so easy to settle the whole matter. The reply in every case was “fear of offending the United States.”

After leaving Arica our next stop was to be at Ilo, the southernmost harbor of Peru, a fact that was emphasized by the very marked depletion of our passenger list. Few Chileans care to go to Peru. Because we came from the “polluted” ports of a hated rival, the LimarÍ was subjected to a thorough-going fumigation, a process rendered the more unnecessary and offensive because nearly all of the Peruvian ports actually had cases of bubonic plague and smallpox while the Chilean ports were free from the pest.

We reached Mollendo on the afternoon of January 14th, just seven days after leaving Valparaiso.