Except Egypt, there is not in the world a country so strangely formed as Chile. Egypt is seven hundred miles long and nowhere save in the Delta more than twelve miles wide. Chile is nearly three thousand miles in length, nowhere more than one hundred and thirty miles wide and for most of her length much narrower. Even Norway, whose shape and sea-front best resemble those of Chile, has but fifteen hundred miles of coast and has, in her south part, two hundred and fifty miles of width. Much of the Chilean territory is a barren desert; much that is not desert is in fact uninhabited. Over large tracts the population is extremely thin. Yet Chile is the most united and the most ardently national in sentiment among all the Spanish-American countries.
Nor is Chile any more singular in the shape of her territory than in her physical conditions also. On the east she is bounded all the way down to Magellan's Straits by the Cordillera of the Andes, the height of whose summits averages in the northern regions from fourteen to twenty thousand feet and in the southern from five to nine thousand, some few peaks exceeding these heights. Parallel to the Cordillera, and geologically much older, there runs along the coast a range averaging from two to three thousand feet, between the foot of which and the ocean there is practically no level ground. The space between this coast range and the Cordillera is a long depression from twenty to thirty miles wide, sometimes hilly, sometimes spreading out into plains, yet everywhere so narrow that both the Coast Range on the one side and the spurs of the Andes on the other are within sight of the inhabitants who live between them. This long and narrow central depression is Chile, just as the cultivable land on each side the Nile is Egypt; and in it all the people dwell, except those who are to be found in the few maritime towns.
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.
Seen from the sea, Valparaiso is picturesque, and has a marked character of its own, though the dryness of the hills and the clearness of the light make it faintly recall one of those Spanish or Italian towns which glitter on the steep shores of the Mediterranean. It resembles Messina in Sicily in being very long and very narrow, for here, as there, the heights, rising abruptly from the shore, leave little space for houses, and the lower part of the town has less than a quarter of a mile in breadth. On this narrow strip are all the places of business, banks, shipping offices, and shops, as well as the dwellings of most of the poorer class. On the hills above, rising steeply two hundred feet or more, stands the upper town, which consists chiefly of the residences of the richer people. Their villas, interspersed with gardens, have a pretty effect seen from below, and in rambling along the lanes that run up to heights behind one gets charming views over the long line of coast to the north. Communication between the lower and upper towns is carried on chiefly by elevators (lifts) or trolley cars worked on the cog-wheel system.
At the time of my visit, the city was half in ruins, rebuilding itself after a terrible earthquake. The lower town had suffered most, for here, as at Messina and at San Francisco, buildings erected on soft alluvial ground were overthrown more frequently and completely than those that stood on a rocky foundation. The opportunity was being taken to widen and straighten the principal thoroughfares, and to open up some of the overcrowded poorer districts. The irregularities of the site between a sinuous coastline and spurs projecting from the hills make the city plan less uniform and rectangular than in most Spanish-American cities, and though nothing is old and there is little architectural variety, still the bright colours of the houses washed in blue or white, the glimpses of rocky heights seen at the eastern end of all the cross streets and of the sea glittering at the western give a quality of its own to the lower town, while the upper town has its steep gardens and tree clumps and wide prospects over the bay and the jutting capes beyond.
But Valparaiso is perhaps most picturesque when seen from a steamer anchored in the bay, especially when its white houses and hills, green for a few weeks in spring, meet the eyes of one who comes from the barren deserts of Bolivia and the nitrate region. In front are the ocean steamers and the tall spars of Australian clippers; nearer shore the smaller craft are tossing on the ocean swell; the upper town is seen rising on its cliffs behind the lower, with high pastures and rocky hummocks still further back. Far away in the northeast the snowy mass of Aconcagua, loftiest of all American summits, floats like a white cloud on the horizon.
A few miles north of Valparaiso is the pretty residential suburb of ViÑa del Mar, beyond which the rocks come down to the sea, here and there enclosing stretches of sandy beach on which the great green rollers break. The dark yellow Californian poppy (Eschscholtzia) which covers the fields in such masses round San Francisco is equally common here. Woody glens come down from the hills; and in the bottom of one of these the principal sporting club has laid out a race-course and polo ground, where we saw the fashionable world gathered for these diversions, just as popular here as in Europe. (South America has not yet given any game of its own to the world as the North American Indians gave La Crosse and the East Indies polo.) Everything looked very pretty in the fresh green of October, but everybody shivered; for though the summers are extremely hot, the spring was less genial than one expected in this latitude. Valparaiso has winds equally chilling whether they come down from the snowy Andes on the east or up from the Antarctic current on the west. It is a windy place and in summer a very dusty one, but in comparison with the dismal barrenness of Mollendo and Antofagasta it deserves its name of Valley of Paradise.
Despite earthquakes and northern gales, Valparaiso continues to be the most flourishing seat of world trade on the western side of its Continent, the only South American rival of San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver. It is also the centre of the coast trade of the Chileans, the only Spanish-American people who have shewn taste or talent for seafaring. We felt ourselves back in the modern world when we saw a Stock Exchange, having since we left New York passed near no city possessing that familiar appliance of civilization. Apart from stocks, abundant opportunities are supplied for speculation by the sudden and violent fluctuations in exchange upon Europe. The commercial houses are chiefly English and German, and among the Chilean firms there are some that bear English names. The Europeans of former days soon made themselves at home here, and their descendants in the third or even the second generation are patriotic Chileans. Some of the heads of British firms told me that the young men who come out to them to-day from England, are not, as a rule, equal either to those of thirty years ago or to the young Germans who are sent to serve German houses. "They care less for their work,"—so my informants declared,—and "they do it less thoroughly; their interests at school in England have lain chiefly in playing, or in reading about, cricket and football, not in any pursuit needing mental exertion, and here where cricket and football are not to be had, they become listless and will not, like the young Germans, spend their evenings in mastering the language and the business conditions of the country." What truth there is in this I had no means of testing, but Valparaiso is not the only foreign port in which one hears such things said.
Fifty miles inland, as the crow flies, but much farther by railway, is Santiago, the capital of Chile, and in population the fourth city in South America.51 Except Rio de Janeiro, no capital in the world has a more striking position. Standing in the great central valley of Chile, it looks out on one side over a fertile plain to the wooded slopes of the Coast Range, and on the other looks up to the gigantic chain of the Cordillera, rising nineteen thousand feet above it, furrowed by deep glens into which glaciers pour down, with snowy wastes behind. At Santiago, as at Innsbruck, one sees the vista of a long, straight street closed by towering mountains that crown it with white as the sea crowns with blue the streets of Venice. But here the mountains are more than twice as high as those of the Tyrolean city and they never put off their snowy vesture. Wherever one walks or drives through the city in the beautiful public park and on the large open grounds of the race-course, these fields of ice are always before the eye, whether wreathed with cloud or glittering against an ardent sky.
The interior of the city does not offer very much to the traveller. There is one long, broad and handsome thoroughfare, the Alameda, adorned with statues and with four rows of trees, as well as several plazas, small compared to those of Lima and Arequipa, but very tastefully planted. There is a cathedral of the familiar type, spacious and well proportioned, with the usual two west towers and the usual silver altar. There are handsome government offices, and a fine building for the legislature. The streets are narrow, the houses seldom high, for here also earthquakes have to be considered. Everything looks new, as might be expected in a place which was small and poor till the end of the eighteenth century, and which has grown rapidly within the last sixty years with the prosperity of the country. Prosperity and confidence are in the air. Great, indeed, is the contrast between old-fashioned Lima and still more ancient Cuzco, or between La Paz, nestling in its Barranca under the mountains like an owl in the desert, and this brisk, eager, active, modern city, where crowded electric cars pass along crowded streets and men hurry to their business or their politics even as they do in western Europe or North America. Santiago is a real capital, the heart of a real nation, the place in which all the political energy of the nation is focussed, commercial energy being shared with Valparaiso. Here are no loitering negroes, nor impassive Indians, for the population is all Chilean, though close inspection discovers a difference between the purer and the less pure European stock. A great deal of native blood flows in the veins of the Chilean roto.
There is little of historical or archÆological interest in Santiago, no skeleton of its founder (as of Pizarro in Lima), for Pedro de Valdivia was taken prisoner and killed by the Araucanian Indians hundreds of miles away; no palace of the Inquisition, for Santiago was in the seventeenth century too small a place to need the elaborate machinery of the Holy Office for the protection of its orthodoxy. Till the War of Independence it was a remote provincial town. But Nature has given it one spot to which historical associations can attach. When Valdivia, one of the ablest and boldest of the lieutenants of Pizarro, was sent down hither to complete the conquest of that southernmost part of the Inca dominion from which Almagro had returned disappointed in the quest for gold, his soldierly eye lit upon and marked a steep rock that rose out of the plain on the banks of a torrent descending from the Andes. On this rock he planted (in 1541) a rude fort and, after receiving the submission of the neighbouring Indians, marched on still further south, into regions which the Incas had never conquered. After some successes, a sudden rising of the natives chased him back and he had to take refuge in the fort upon this rock, now called Santa Lucia. Besieged for many weeks and reduced to the utmost extremity of famine, he held out here with that desperate tenacity of which the men of Spain have given so many examples from the days of Saguntum to those of Cortes at Mexico and from those of Cortes to those of Palafox at Saragossa. The Indians had, however, no notion of how to conduct siege operations and at last Valdivia was relieved. The fort remained, and beneath it there grew up in course of time the city.
The ancient Acropolis or Hill Fortress is a familiar sight in India, in Greece, and Italy, and in western Europe also. Gwalior and Trichinopoly, Acrocorinthus and Taormina, and in England, Old Sarum, Durham, Exeter, Shrewsbury, London itself, are instances, and the Fortress has often as in the last four cases, been the germ of a city. But so far as I know Santa Lucia, below which Santiago has grown up, is the only conspicuous instance in the two Americas of any such stronghold built by Europeans. The hill, a little over two hundred feet high, is much lower than are the Castle Hills of Edinburgh and Stirling, and the space on it smaller. It is lower even than the Castle Rock of Dumbarton, which it more resembles. Like those three, it is a mass of hard igneous rock, so irregular in form as to suggest that it may be a detached fragment of an old lava flow, and most of its sides are so precipitous as to be easily defensible. The buildings which had defaced it having been nearly all removed, it is now laid out as a pleasure ground, and planted with trees. Walks have been made round it, with a footpath to the craggy summit, and there is a statue of Pedro de Valdivia, the only monument to any one of the Conquistadores which I can remember to have seen in Spanish America, for the men of that famous group are not much honoured by their colonial descendants. Every evening we walked to the top to enjoy the wonderful view over the valley, and the last rays of the sun reddening the Andean snows. A still more extended view is obtained from the summit, surmounted by a colossal statue of the Virgin, of the hill of San Cristobal, whose base is half a mile from the town.
Chile, like the rest of South America, is a country of large estates, the early conquerors having received grants of land, many of which have not since been broken up into smaller properties; so there exists a landed aristocracy something like that of England in the eighteenth century, with peasants cultivating the soil as tenants or labourers, while the small middle class consists of shopkeepers or skilled artisans in the towns. The leading landowners spend the summers in their country houses and the winter and spring in Santiago, which has thus a pleasant society, with plenty of talent and talk among the men, of gaiety and talk among the women, a society more enlightened and abreast of the modern world than are those of the more northern republics, and with a more stimulating atmosphere. Santiago has always been the centre and heart of Chile both politically and socially and has in this way contributed to give unity to the nation and to create a Chilean type of character. The jealousy felt by the country folk against the capital which has been the source of so much strife in other states was generally less marked here. Santiago leads; Santiago's influence forbids any attempts at federalizing the republic. Though learning and science have not quite kept pace with conquest and prosperity, there is a thriving university, and a fine museum, placed beside the zoological and botanical gardens. The last and the present generation have produced some gifted writers and among the too few students of to-day is one of the most accomplished historians and bibliographers in Spanish America, SeÑor JosÉ Toribio Medina. The bent of Chilean genius has, however, been on the whole towards war and politics. The material development of the country by railways, the opening of mines and the extension of agriculture, important as these are, do not absorb men's thoughts here so much as they do in Argentina and indeed in most new countries. Politics hold the field just as politics held it all through the nineteenth century in England and in Hungary, perhaps the most intensely political countries of the Old World.52
The mention of these two countries suggests another point of resemblance. The Chileans, a race of riders, are extremely fond of horse-racing. The races at Santiago rouse immense interest and are the occasion of a great deal of betting, not only in the city, but also at Valparaiso, for such of the Valparaiso sportsmen as cannot come to the capital gather in their clubhouse and carry on their betting during the progress of each race, every detail of which is reported from moment to moment by telephone, the bets coming as thick and fast as if the horses were in sight upon the course.
Chile is the only country in South America which can boast to have had no revolution within the memory of any living man. In 1890 there was a civil war, but that conflict differed materially from the familiar military revolutions of the other republics. President Balmaceda had quarrelled with the legislature, claiming that he could levy taxes without its consent, and was overcome, after a fierce struggle, the navy supporting the Congress, and the command of the sea proving decisive in a country with so long a coast line. So scrupulously regardful were the Chileans of their financial credit, that both Balmaceda and his congressional antagonists, each claiming to be the lawful government, tendered to the foreign bondholders payment of the interest on the same public debt while the struggle was going on.
There were, at the time of my visit, five political parties or divisions of the Liberal party, besides the Conservatives. The President had died suddenly while travelling in Europe, and the Liberal sections, holding the majority in Congress, met to select the candidate whom they should put forward as his successor. The discussions and the votings in their gatherings went on for several weeks, but force was never threatened; and the Chileans told their visitors with justifiable pride that although twelve thousand soldiers were in or near the capital, no party feared that any other would endeavour to call in the help of the army. Chile is also the only South American state which takes so enlightened an interest in its electoral machinery as to have devised and applied a good while ago a system of proportional representation which seems to give satisfaction, and certainly deserves the study of scientific students in other countries. I saw an election proceeding under it in Santiago. The result was foreknown, because there had been an arrangement between Liberal sections which ensured the victory of the candidates they had agreed upon, so there was little excitement. Everything seemed to work smoothly.
What I had seen of the aspects of nature round Santiago increased the desire to know something of southern Chile, a region little visited by travellers, but reported to be full of those beauties which make the scenery of temperate regions more attractive, at least to persons born in the temperate zone, than all the grandeurs of the tropics. Accordingly we set off for the south, the Chilean government having kindly provided special facilities along their railways.53 All the lines, except that which crosses the Andes into Argentina, are the property of the state. From Santiago to the strait which separates the large island of Chiloe from the mainland, a distance of 650 miles, there stretches that long depression mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the northern part of which contains nearly all of the population as well as most of the cultivable area of the republic. The railway that traverses it from end to end is the main highway of the country sending off branches which run westward to the towns that lie on or near the coast, and as it keeps generally in the middle of the valley, one gets admirable views toward the Andes on one side and the Coast Range on the other.
Travelling south, one observes four changes in physical conditions. The rainfall steadily increases. At Santiago it is only about fifteen inches in the year; at Valdivia, 440 miles to the south, it is seven times as great. With this abundant rainfall, the streams are fuller, the landscape greener, the grass richer, the trees taller. The mountains sink in height, and not the Andes only, but the average height of the Coast Range also. The snow line also sinks. Near Santiago it is about 14,000 feet above sea-level; at Valdivia it is rather under 6000. These four things completely alter the character of the scenery. It is less grand, for one sees no such mighty peaks and wide snowfields as rise over Santiago, but it is more approachable, with a softer air and more profuse vegetation. As compared with the desert regions of northern Chile, the difference is as great as that between the verdure of Ireland and the sterility of the Sahara.
From Santiago to Osorno, the southern limit of our journey, there was beauty everywhere, beauty in the fields and meadows which the railway traverses, beauty in the wild quebradas (narrow glens) that descend from the Andes, beauty in the glimpses of the snow mountains where a break in the nearer hills reveals them. But I must be content to speak of a few points only.
The long depression between the Andes and the Coast Range, which forms the best part of Chile, is crossed by a series of large and rapid rivers descending from the Andean snows and forcing their way through the clefts in the Coast Range to the sea. The first of these is the Maule, which was the southernmost limit of the conquests of the Inca monarchs. Next to it, as one goes south, is the still larger Biobio, on whose banks the Spaniards strove for nearly a century with the fierce Araucanian tribes, till at last, despairing of success, they desisted and allowed it to be the boundary of their power. It is the greatest of all Chilean streams, with a broad and strong current, but is too shallow for navigation, and the commercial city of Concepcion, which lies a little above its mouth, uses the harbour of Talcahuano as its port.
Here, one is already in a well-watered land, but before I describe the scenery of this delightful region something may be said of the coast towns, which are quite unlike those of northern Chile and Peru. Concepcion, founded by Valdivia to bridle the Indians, is an attractive little city, with a large plaza and wide streets, which are tidy and well kept. Indeed, as compared with those of Spain and Italy, the larger cities of South America are as superior in cleanliness as they are inferior in architectural interest. Cuzco stands almost alone in its offensiveness to sight and smell. The cheerful airiness and brightness of the place are enhanced by the beauty of the wide river on whose north side it stands, and along whose shores, backed by wooded hills, there are many pretty villas with gardens, most of them the property of the British and German colonies who live here in social good will and active business competition. The former have laid out an excellent golf course a few miles away towards the Ocean and have infected some Chileans with their passion for the Scottish game. Though not now so large as Valparaiso, the city has played a more important part in Chilean history, for it was the military capital of the southern frontier on the side of Araucania and the centre of the energetic and fighting population of that region. The leading families formed the only aristocratic group that was capable of resisting, as, after independence had been achieved, they did occasionally resist, the larger aristocratic group of Santiago. There was not enough wealth in those days to build stately churches or mansions, but the place has a look of dignity and is more Chilean and less cosmopolitan than Valparaiso.
Talcahuano, possessing the finest natural harbour in central Chile, has been made the principal naval stronghold of this country which sets store upon the strength of its navy, deemed essential to protect its immensely long coast line. An enemy possessing a more powerful fleet would, it is thought, have Chile at its mercy until the longitudinal railway is completed which is to run the whole length of the country parallel to the coast. A naval harbour has been formed and docks built and batteries erected to command the approaches. From the heights one sees across the ample bay the site of an old Spanish town, abandoned because exposed to the English and Dutch sea-rovers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Since this time no hostile European vessels54 have appeared in these waters, though they have seen plenty of sea-fights in the days of the Revolution and in those of the great war between Chile and Peru, and again in the civil war between Balmaceda and the Congress.
Two other places on the Chilean coast are worth mentioning. From Concepcion a railroad, crossing the Biobio by a bridge three-quarters of a mile long, runs southward to the ports of Coronel and Lota. The shore, sometimes rocky, sometimes bordered by thickets or grassy flats behind sand beaches, is extremely picturesque; and were it in the populous parts of Europe or North America, it would be lined by summer cottages and alive with children. But its vegetation and general aspect are curiously unlike those of the Atlantic coasts of either of those two continents, and remind one rather of California. At Lota, the hills rise boldly from the sea and a large island lying some way out gives variety to the ocean view. Here, on an eminence behind the town, is a garden of singular interest and beauty which I had especially wished to see because it had excited the admiration of my friend, the late Mr. John Ball, the distinguished botanist and traveller, who has described it in his Notes of a Naturalist in South America, published in 1887. It occupies the top of a hill which breaks down almost precipitously to the shore, and was formed by a wealthy Chilean, the owner of a coal mine and copper smelting works close by, who built a handsome villa, and assisted by an energetic Irish gardener, laid out a park with admirable taste, gathering and planting a great variety of trees and shrubs and so disposing the walks as to give delightful views along the coast and out into the ocean. There are few things in the course of journeys which one recalls with more pleasure than parks and gardens which combine opportunities for studying the flora of a new country with the enjoyment of natural beauty. This place had the peculiar interest of showing how, in a mild and humid climate, trees and shrubs from sub-tropical regions may flourish side by side with those of the temperate zone. Its profuse variety of trees, many of them seen by us for the first time, lives in my recollection with the gardens of the Scilly Isles and those on Valentia Island on the coast of Kerry, and the famous park at Cintra (near Lisbon), the two former of these possessing similarly favourable climatic conditions. The landscape at Lota is more beautiful than at any of those spots, and though it is marred by the smoke of the smelting works placed here to take advantage of the coal mine, one must remember that without the coal mine and the smelting works their owner would not have had the money to expend on the park and gardens.
About two hundred miles to the south of Concepcion a large river finds its way to the sea through a comparatively wide and open valley and meets the tide of the ocean at a point where Valdivia, the lieutenant of Pizarro, whom I have already mentioned as the first Spaniard to penetrate into these wild regions, built a small fort and called it by his own name. His fort was thenceforth the chief and sometimes the only seat of Spanish power in this whole stretch of country, constantly besieged and reduced to dire extremity by the warlike Indians, but almost always saved because it was accessible by sea from the ports of Peru. No trace now remains of the ancient stronghold, nor, indeed, are there any old houses, for in this well-wooded part of Chile houses are built of timber and fires are proportionately numerous and destructive. A terrible one had swept away half the town in 1909. They were busy rebuilding and improving it, for the country all round is being brought into cultivation, and trade is brisk. The phenomena remind one of western North America, though the pace at which population grows and natural resources are developed is far slower. There is a German colony, of course with a large brewery, the chief manufacturing industry of the spot, and a somewhat smaller British mercantile colony. The town stretches along both banks of the broad stream, on which light steamers ply to the seaport of Corral, some twelve miles below. Here, also, the resources of the land are being exploited. A French company has erected large works for the smelting of copper, which is brought by sea from the ports of northern Chile. All the most recent metallurgical appliances have been introduced, and a considerable population has been drawn to the place. It is, however, an indigenous population. That inrush of immigrants from Europe, which is the conspicuous feature in North America, wherever railways or other large works are being executed, or new industries set up, is here wanting. It has not yet been worth while to tempt Italian or Slavonic labour from Europe. Here at Corral, one touches an interesting bit of history. There are on both sides of the port ancient forts which command not only the harbour and the passage out to sea, but lovely views over the smiling land and wooded mountains. In their present form they seem to date from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. They stand now as mouldering and grass-grown monuments of a vanished empire. Erected to protect the colonists from British and Dutch attacks, they succumbed long afterwards to a later British adventurer leading those colonists themselves against the power of Spain. Less than a century ago (in 1817) they saw one of the most brilliant achievements of Lord Cochrane, then fighting for the Chilean revolutionaries, when with the crews of his few ships he stormed these forts, chasing the Spaniards away to Valdivia and received next day the surrender of that town, their last stronghold on the Chilean mainland. The services of this Scotchman are gratefully remembered here along with those of two men of Irish stock, O'Higgins and Lynch. All three have won a fame not unlike that of Lafayette and Rochambeau in the United States.
In these seaports we saw the commercial side of Chilean town life, a side in which the foreigner plays a considerable part, whether he manages metal works for European capitalists or represents some great English or German trading firm. Temuco, situated in a purely agricultural district, supplying its wants and serving as a market for its produce, is of a different type and gave one a notion of what corresponds in Chile to the smaller country town of England or North America. It is a new place, for this region was almost purely Indian till thirty years ago, covers a great deal of ground, and reminds one more of an Hungarian or Russian town than of the North American West, for the wide and generally unpaved streets were not planted with trees and the one story houses were mostly thatched. The air was soft and humid, rich green meadows stretched out on every side and though there were evident signs of growth and comfort, nobody was in a hurry. The country is lovely. To the west are picturesque wooded hills, outliers of the Coast Range, and on the east, there opens a view of the Andes twenty or thirty miles distant, their snowpeaks rising behind a mass of dark green forest. We were entertained to dinner by the officers of the regiment quartered here, the commandant, who was also governor of the district, presiding, and met a large and agreeable company composed of the officers and their wives, a few officials, and some of the chief business men. Here, as everywhere in Chile, educated society is more modern and less ecclesiastical in sentiment than what the traveller finds in the more northerly republics. In listening to the graceful and well-phrased speech in which the commandant toasted the guests, we had fresh occasion to admire the resources of the Castilian tongue, which like the Italian, perhaps even more than the Italian, seems to lend itself more naturally than English or German to oratory of an ornamental kind.
While in Peru and Bolivia the great mass of the aboriginal population remained distinct from their Spanish masters, in Chile the fusion began early and went steadily on until, except in one district, the two races were blended. A certain number of families, including most of the aristocracy, have remained pure white; but many more intermarried with the natives, and the peasants of to-day belong to this mixed race. As elsewhere in Spanish America, the man of mixed blood deems himself white, and does so the more easily here, because over most of the country there are no longer any pure Indians. The aborigines of this region were less advanced in the arts of life than those of Peru, but they were better fighters and of a bolder spirit. They have made a good blend with the whites; the Chilean roto is a hardy and vigorous man.55
The one district in which a pure Indian race has remained is that in which Temuco stands, for this is the land of those Araucanian Indians to whom I have already referred, a race deservedly famous as the only aboriginal people of the Western hemisphere that successfully resisted the European intruders.56 I had imagined this people dwelling in the recesses of forest-covered mountains, and themselves tall and stalwart men like the Patagonian giants whom Magellan encountered on the other side of the Andes. But the Mapoche57—that is the name by which the Araucanians call themselves—are, in fact, short men, though sturdy and muscular, with broad faces, not unlike some East Asiatic types. Their country is part of that long and wide depression which constitutes the Central Valley of Chile, a fertile land which, though doubtless once more thickly wooded than it now is, was probably, even in the days of Valdivia's invasion, partly open savannah. There is, and apparently there always has been, so little game that the natives must have lived chiefly by tillage, for they had, of course, neither sheep nor cattle. Although less civilized than were the tribes dwelling north of them, who had received some of the material culture of the Inca empire, they had risen above the savage state, and were at least as far advanced as were the Algonquins or Dakotas of North America. They had organized a sort of fighting confederacy of four tribes, resembling the "Long House" of the Iroquois Five Nations. Each tribe had its leading family in which the chieftainship was hereditary, but if the eldest son were not equal to the place, a second or other son might be selected by the tribe in his stead. For war, they chose leaders of special bravery or talent, as Tacitus tells us that the Germans of his time did. Their weapons were the lance, probably a sort of assegai, and the axe or tomahawk of stone, and a club of wood, sometimes with a stone head fastened to it. When Valdivia, having overcome the more northerly tribes, and having strengthened his force by contingents from them, crossed the Biobio into the Araucanian country, the chiefs of the confederacy summoned a general assembly of all the fighting men—a sort of Homeric agora—and after three days' debate, resolved on resistance. In the first encounters they suffered terribly from the firearms and the horses of the Spaniards. Valdivia defeated them and marched through their country as far as the place where he built (as already mentioned) the town which still bears his name. After a few years, he returned with a stronger force hoping to complete his conquest. A hundred miles south of the Biobio the Araucanians attacked him. Their furious charge could not be stopped by musketry—gunshot range was very short in those days—the invading force was destroyed, and Valdivia, flying from the field, was captured. While he was attempting to save his life by a promise to withdraw altogether from Chile, an old chief smote him down with a club.
From this time on the warfare lasted with occasional intermissions for more than sixty years. The Araucanians discovered by degrees tactics fitted to reduce the advantages which firearms gave to the Spaniards. They obtained horses, and, like the Comanches in Arizona and the Basutos of South Africa, learnt to use them in war. They produced leaders like Lautaro and Caupolican of talents equal to their bravery. When they found themselves unable to stem a Spanish invasion they retired into their woods, and as soon as the enemy had retired, they fell upon the forts and raided across the border. Weary of this incessant and apparently hopeless strife, the Spaniards at last agreed to a treaty by which the Biobio was fixed as the boundary. During his daring cruise in the Pacific in 1578 Sir Francis Drake had occasion to land on the Chilean coast. The Araucanians, seeing white men come in a ship, assumed them to be Spaniards, and attacked them. Had they realized that Drake's crew, being the enemies of their own enemies, would gladly have been their friends, an alliance profitable to both parties could have been struck, and it might have been serviceable to Drake's English and Dutch successors. Fearing such a contingency, the Spaniards made it a part of their treaty with the Araucanians that they should give no help to the maritime foes of Spain. Fresh wars from time to time broke out, but they always ended in the same way, so Araucania continued independent down till, and long after, the revolt of Chile from Spain.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the nation had begun to lose its old fighting habits. Diseases contracted from the whites had reduced its numbers and sapped its strength, while peaceful intercourse with the colonists had mitigated the ancient animosity. Accordingly, when Chile, about 1881, asserted her authority, and the town of Temuco was founded in the middle of the Araucanian country, the idea of resistance which some of the chiefs entertained was dropped on the advice of others who saw that it would be hopeless under conditions so different from those of the seventeenth century. Thus it may still be said of this gallant race that though they have consented to become Chileans, they remain the one unconquered native people of the continent. Though there has not been much intermarriage between them and the Spanish colonists, the long conflict had a marked effect upon the character of the latter, giving to the Chileans a rude force and aptitude for war not unlike that which the constant strife with the Moors gave to the Spaniards in the Middle Ages. The earlier part of the conflict had the rare honour of being made the theme of an epic poem which ranks high among those of modern Europe, the Araucana58 of Alonzo de Ercilla, who himself fought against Caupolican. No ill feeling seems to exist now between the Mapoche and the Chileans. Educated men among the latter feel a certain pride, as do the Araucanians themselves, in their romantic history, each race remembering that its ancestors fought well.
How large the Mapoche nation was when the Spaniards first came is quite uncertain. The estimate of 400,000 seems excessive for a people who had no cattle, and did not till the soil on a large scale. Even now while some put the present population as high as 140,000, others put it as low as 50,000. There is, unfortunately, no doubt that they are diminishing through diseases, especially tubercular diseases, which have spread among them from the whites, and are now transmitted from parents to offspring. Laws have been passed for their benefit, and a functionary entitled the Protector of the Indians appointed, but some of these laws, such as those restricting the sale of intoxicating liquors, are enforced quite as imperfectly as they are in other countries better known to us. The tribal system has almost vanished, but the local communities into which the people are now grouped respect the heads of the old families and often regret the days when a simple and speedy justice was administered by the chieftains.
Scattered over a wide area they dwell in villages of grass huts or frame houses, the latter far less favourable to health, and live by tillage or stock keeping, though a few go north to seek work and are deemed excellent labourers. The custom observed by the Kafir chiefs in South Africa, of allotting a separate hut to each wife, does not seem to hold here, but as the huts are large, each wife, if there are several, is allowed her own hearth and fire. Some families have considerable estates; some own large herds of cattle and sheep which at certain seasons are driven across the Andean passes to the pastures of Argentina.
While the wars lasted there was, of course, no question of converting the Araucanians to Christianity; and though in the intervals of peace friars sometimes went among them, they remained practically heathen till the establishment of Chilean authority in 1882. Their religion is a form of that spirit worship which one finds among nearly all primitive peoples. Its rites are intended to avert the displeasure of the spirits, to obtain from them fine weather or rain (as the case may be), and to expel a noxious demon from the body. The priesthood—if the name can be used—is not hereditary and is confined to females. The women who discharge the functions of wizards or medicine men are selected when young by the elder sorceresses and initiated with elaborate rites. A tree of a particularly sacred kind is chosen and a sort of ladder of steps cut in it, which the sorceress mounts to perform the ceremonies. When the tree dies, its trunk continues to be revered and is dressed up with fresh green boughs for ceremonial occasions. I could not find that any other natural objects, besides trees, receive veneration, nor is there anything to shew that the Inca worship of the sun and the host of heaven had ever spread so far to the south. The old beliefs and usages are now fast waning. Many Mapoche have become Christians, a considerable number Protestants, converted by the English South American mission, others Roman Catholics. They are described as a people of good intelligence, and easy to deal with when they are treated with justice, a valuable element in the population, and one which Chilean statesmen may well seek to preserve, if drink could be kept from them and the germs of hereditary disease rooted out.
The occupation by the Araucanians of a considerable part of the central Chilean valley accounts for the fact that the population of the region beyond them to the south has grown but slowly. It now contains no Indian tribes till one gets across the channel of Ancud to Chiloe and the other islands along the coast. Few settlers came to these parts from Europe until about the middle of last century the Chilean government encouraged an immigration from Germany which continued, on a moderate scale, for a good many years, but thereafter stopped altogether. Going southward from Valdivia one finds both in small towns and in rural districts round them a good many solid German farmers and artizans and tidy little German Fraus who might have come straight out of the Odenwald. We spent a night in Osorno, our furthest point toward the south, a neat and prosperous looking town, and dined with one of the leading German citizens, a man of wide reading, and especially devoted to Robert Burns, whose poems he recited to us, and to Thomas Moore, some of whose songs he had translated into German. Thereafter a group of the German residents hospitably took us to their club, where they have a concert hall and just such a Kegelbahn (skittle alley) as that in which I remember that we students used to play at Heidelberg in 1863, about the time when the parents of these worthy Germans were migrating to Chile. They gave us champagne, the unfailing accompaniment of every social function in South America; but it ought to have been Bavarian beer. This is the only part of western South America to which any considerable mass of settlers have come from Europe, for most of the English, Germans, French, and Spaniards one meets in the commercial and mining centres are passing business visitors. On the other side of the Andes it is different, for there the Italian immigration has been and still is very large.
Comparatively few immigrants enter Chile now, which would imply that the quantity of land available for agriculture, but not yet taken up, is supposed to be not very large. To me the country we traversed appeared to be far from fully occupied, though on such a matter the impressions of a passing traveller are of little value. Of all the parts of the New World I have seen there is none which struck me as fitter to attract a young man who loves country life, is not in a hurry to be rich, and can make himself at home in a land where English is not the language of the people. The soil of southern Chile is extremely fertile, fit both for stock-raising and for tillage. The climate is healthy and mild, without extremes either of heat or cold. Wet it certainly is, but not wetter than parts of our own western coasts.
The summer sun is strong yet not oppressive, the air both soft and invigorating, for Ocean sends up shrill blowing western breezes to refresh mankind.59 There are no noxious beasts, no mosquitoes, no poisonous snakes, nor other venomous creatures, except a spider found in the cornfields whose bite, though disagreeable, is not dangerous. Intermittent fevers, the curse of most countries where new land is being brought under cultivation, seem to be unknown. There are deer in the woods, and plenty of fish in the clear, rapid rivers. The Englishman who loves hunting will not want for foxes; the North American golfer will find grassy flats by the sea, waiting to be laid out as links. Remote, secluded, and tranquil as the country is, the settler should have little difficulty in procuring whatever Europe supplies, for even at Osorno he is only forty hours from Santiago, and Santiago is now only two days from Buenos Aires, and Buenos Aires only seventeen days from Europe.
Perhaps it is the charm of the Chilean scenery that prompts a view of the country, considered as a home for the emigrant, more favourable than might be taken by one to whom life would be just as enjoyable in the boundless levels of Manitoba as within view of a snowy range. Perhaps, also, this charm of southern Chile with its soft, green pastures and shaggy woods and flashing streams was enhanced to us by contrast with the dreary deserts of Peru and Bolivia, through which we had lately passed. Whoever has in his boyhood learnt to love the scenery of a temperate country never finds full satisfaction in that of the tropics, with all their glow of light and all their exuberance of vegetation. Such lands are splendid to visit, but not so good to live in, for exertion is less agreeable, the woods are impenetrable, and the mountains, therefore, less accessible, and the constant heat is enervating, not to add that insects are everywhere, and in many places one has to stand always on guard against fevers. Nothing could be grander than the landscapes in the Andes which we had seen, nor more beautiful than the landscapes in Brazil which we were shortly to see. But of all the parts of South America that we visited, southern Chile stands out to me as the land where one would choose to make a home.
Two excursions, one to the sea, the other into the hills, gave us samples of two different kinds of scenery. Of the many brimming rivers that sweep down from the Andes across the Central Valley none is more beautiful in its lower course than is the Rio Bueno. It has in the course of ages cloven for itself through the hard rocks of the Coast Range a channel so deep that the tide comes up to the little town of Trumajo forty miles from the sea, and from that town small steamers can pass all the way to the bar at its mouth. In one of these little craft which a kind friend had procured we spent a long day in sailing down and back again. The hills on each side, sometimes hanging steeply over the stream, sometimes receding where a narrow glen opened, were clothed with the richest wood. It was a brilliant day in October, answering to our April, and the sun brought out an infinite variety of shades of green in the young foliage in these glens, the trees all new to us, and the spaces between them filled with climbing plants hanging in festoons from the boughs. Wild ducks and other water-birds fluttered over the water and rose in flocks as the little vessel moved onward, and green paroquets called from the thickets. As it nears the sea, the river spreads into a wide deep pool under a crescent of bold cliffs, and at the end of this is seen the bar, a stretch of sand on which the huge rollers of the Pacific break in foam. There is a lighthouse and a few houses near a flat stretch of meadow by the banks, the grass as green and the flowers as abundant as in Ireland. Specially vivid were the yellow masses of gorse, apparently the same species as our own, and, if possible, even more profuse in its blossoms than on those Cornish shores of which it is the chief ornament. I have seen few bits of coast more picturesque than this meeting of the still, dark river and the flashing spray of ocean under rocks clothed with feathery woods.
On our way back something went wrong with the machinery and the vessel had more than once to moor herself to the bank till things were set right. This gave opportunities for going ashore and exploring the banks. In some places the forest was too dense to penetrate without a machete to hew a way through the shrubs and climbers. In other places where one could creep under the trees or pull one's self up the cliffs by the boughs, the effort was rewarded by finding an endless variety of new flowers and ferns. The latter are in this damp atmosphere especially luxuriant; and their tall fronds, dipping into the river, were often seven or eight feet long. It was a primeval forest, wild as it had been from the beginning of things, for only in two or three places had dwellings been planted on level spots by the river and little clearings made; and the hills are so high and rocky that it may remain untouched and lonely for many a year to come. The other excursion was towards the Andes. There is along the railway no prettier spot than Collilelfu, where a rapid river, broad and bright like the Scottish Tay, but with clearer and greener water, sweeps down out of the foothills into the meadows of the Central Valley. Here a French company have constructed a little branch railway, partly to bring down timber, partly in the hope of continuing their line far up the valley and across a pass into Argentina, in order to carry cattle to and fro. The manager, a courteous Frenchman from the Basque land of Bearn, ran us up this line through a succession of lovely views along the river to a point where we got horses and rode for seven or eight miles further through the forest up and down low ridges to the shore of Lake Rinihue. The forest was in parts too thick to penetrate without cutting one's way through creeping and climbing plants, but in others it was open enough to give mysterious vistas between the tall stems, and delicious effects where the sunlight fell upon a glade. The trees were largely evergreen, but few or none of them coniferous, for in Chile it is only at higher levels that the characteristic conifers, such as the well-known Araucaria, flourish. Here at last we found that characteristic South American arboreal flora we had been looking forward to, a forest where all that we saw was new, unlike the woods of western North America and of Europe, not only because the variety of the trees was far greater than it is there, but also because so many bore brilliant flowers upon their higher boughs, where the sunlight reached them. We were told that in midsummer the flowers would be still more profuse, but those we saw were abundant and beautiful enough, some white, some crimson or scarlet, some yellow, very few blue. One climber lit up the shade with its red blossoms, and below there were long rows, standing up along the path, wherever it was fairly open to the light, of white and pink foxgloves, a species closely resembling our own, while a woody ragwort, eight to ten feet high, bore a spreading umbel of yellow. The Calceolarias, frequent in Peru, do not seem to come so far south as this. Most of the trees had small leaves, but two, one called the lengue, valued for its bark, and another resembling a laurel, had large, dark green, glossy foliage. It was a silent wood, except for the paroquets and the occasional coo of a wood-pigeon; nor did we see any four-footed creatures, except two large, reddish brown foxes scurrying across the path ahead of us. Wildcats are scarce, and the puma, the beast of prey that has the widest range over the Western Hemisphere, is here hardly ever seen. The woodscape was less grand and solemn than what one sees in the great redwood forests of California or in the sombre depths of those that cover the Cascade Range in Oregon and Washington, where the Douglas fir and the huge "cedar"60 tower so high over the trails that one can scarce catch the light through their topmost branches. Nor can I say that the views were more beautiful than may still be had in the few remaining ancient forests of England with their ancestral oaks and spreading beeches. But there was here a peculiar feature, giving a sense of the exuberant vitality of nature, in the profusion of parasitic plants clothing the trunks of the trees, both the fallen and the living, some of them flowering plants, but more of them ferns and mosses, especially tender little filmy ferns such as one finds on the moist and shady rocks of western Scotland and among the mountains of Killarney.
We embarked on Lake Rinihue in a tiny steamboat, and sailed some miles over its exquisitely clear, green waters. Steep hills from two to three thousand feet high enclose it, and at its upper end, where it winds in towards the central range of the Andes, small glaciers descend from between high snowpeaks. The view, looking across the deep green of the forests, broken here and there by a rocky cliff, up to these glittering pinnacles, had a beauty not only of color and form, but of mystery also,—that indefinable sense of mystery which belongs to little-known countries. In regions like Scotland or the Alps or Norway one has historical associations and the sense of a long human past to enhance the loveliness of hills and groves and streams. Here one has the compensating charm of an untouched and almost unexplored nature. The traveller in southern Chile feels as if he were a discoverer, so little visited is this land, and such a promise of wild beauty waiting to be revealed lies in the recesses of these mountains. Along the shores of Rinihue, which is twelve miles long, there is, save for a house or two at the place where we embarked, no trace of human life. Other such lakes, many of them much larger, lie scattered over a space some four hundred miles long and fifty miles wide on both the Argentine and the Chilean side of the Cordillera, a land of forests virtually unexplored and uninhabited, except by a few wandering Indians, standing now as it has stood ever since the Andes were raised. The day will come, perhaps less than a century hence, when the townsfolk of a then populous Argentina, weary of the flat monotony of their boundless Pampas, will find in this wilderness of lake and river and mountain such a place, wherein to find rest and recreation in the summer heats, as the North Americans of the Eastern states do in the Appalachian hills; and the North Americans of the West, in the glorious ranges along the Pacific coast. Superior to the former region in its possession of snow mountains, equal to the latter in climate and picturesque beauty, and to the naturalist more interesting than either from its still active volcanoes and its remarkable flora, this lake land of the southern Andes is an addition, the value of which the South Americans have hardly yet realized, to the scenic wealth of our planet.
