Part 28

No one ever goes to Juan Fernandez without bringing away rocks and sticks as relics of the place. There is a very fine sort of wood peculiar to the island which makes beautiful canes, as it has a rare grain and polishes well.

SANTIAGO.

THE CAPITAL OF CHILI.

Nature never intended there should be a city where Valparaiso stands, but the enterprise of the Chillanos, aided by English and German capital, has built there the finest port on the west coast of South America, and the only one with all the modern improvements. The harbor is spacious and beautiful, and ten months in the year it is perfectly safe for shipping, but during the remaining two months, when northern gales are frequent, vessels are often driven from their anchorage, and compelled to cruise about to avoid being dashed upon the rocks on which the city is built. The harbor is circular in form, with an entrance a mile or so wide facing the north. A breakwater built across the entrance would give the shipping perfect protection, but the sea is so deep--more than a hundred fathoms--that such a work is considered impracticable. In this harbor, drawn up in lines like men-of-war ready for review, are hundreds of vessels, bearing the flags of almost every nation on the earth except that of our own. Occasionally the Stars and Stripes are seen, but so seldom that, as an American resident expressed it, “they cure all the sore eyes in town.” Trade is practically controlled by Englishmen, all commercial transactions are calculated in pounds sterling, and the English language is almost exclusively spoken upon the street and in the shops. An English paper is printed there, English goods are almost exclusively sold, and this city is nothing more than an English colony.

In Valparaiso, as everywhere else in Chili, there is an intense prejudice against the United States, growing out of the attitude assumed by our Government during the late war with Peru. The prejudice has been aggravated and stimulated by the English residents. This, with the natural arrogance of the Chillanos, who think they have the finest country on earth, and that the United States is their only rival, makes it rather disagreeable sometimes for Americans who go there to reside. For this and other reasons our commerce with Chili has fallen off from millions to hundreds of thousands, and it will be difficult to increase it as long as the prejudice of the people exists, and lines of English, French, German, and Italian vessels connect Valparaiso with the markets of Europe.

There is no steam communication with the United States, and all freight is sent in sailing-vessels around the Horn or by way of Hamburg or Havre. The freight charges from Valparaiso to New York by way of the Isthmus are more than double those to the European ports, and it is about thirty per cent. cheaper to ship goods from New York to Europe, and from there to South America, than by way of Aspinwall and Panama. Passenger fares as well as freight are subject to this discrimination. One can go from Valparaiso to Europe _via_ the Strait of Magellan--a voyage of forty-one days--cheaper than to Panama--a voyage of twenty days, which ought to be made in ten. It costs about ten cents per mile on a steamer from Valparaiso to the Isthmus, to California, or to New York, and about two cents a mile to Europe. As if this were not enough, the steamship company, a British corporation which controls navigation on the west coast, arranges its time-tables so as not to connect with the New York steamers at the Isthmus, and its steamers usually arrive at Panama the day after the Pacific Mail ship leaves Aspinwall, so as to subject the traveller to the expense and annoyance of ten days’ delay on the fever-haunted Chagres. Freight and mails receive the same treatment, and every possible obstacle is raised to divert trade from the United States to Europe.

Valparaiso means “the Vale of Paradise,” but somehow or other there was a misconception in this particular, for there is no vale and no symptoms of Paradise. An almost perpendicular mountain ridge forms a crescent around the bay, towards the shores of which descend steep, rocky escarpments. Here and there watercourses have furrowed ravines, or barancas, as they are called, which offer the only means of reaching the outer world. Along the narrow strip of sand which lies between the sea and the cliffs the town stretches three or four miles. In some places there is width enough for only a single street, at others for three or four running parallel to each other, but they only extend a few blocks. The one street, the only artery of commerce in Valparaiso, is “the Calle Victoria,” stretching around the entire harbor, and skirted by all the banks and hotels, the counting-houses of the wholesale firms, the shops of the retailers, the Government buildings, and the fine private residences. The rocky cliffs have been terraced as the town has grown, and the city now extends back upon the hills a long distance, one man’s house being above another’s, and reached by stairways, winding roads, and steam “lifts,” which carry passengers up inclined planes, like those at Niagara and Pittsburg. What roads there are were laid out by the goats that formerly fed upon the mountain side, and these twist about in the most confusing and circuitous fashion. One has to stop and pant for breath as he climbs them, and an alpenstock is needed in coming down. The hacks in Valparaiso have three horses attached to them, and the teaming is done in carts drawn by four oxen.

An evening view of Valparaiso from a steamer in the bay is quite novel, as the lines of lights, one above the other, give the appearance of a city turned up on end. Electric lamps are placed upon the crests of the cliffs, throwing their rays over into the streets and upon the terraces below with the effect of moonlight. During the day, however, the irregular rows of houses, of different shapes and elevations, clinging to the precipices, look as if a strong wind might blow them overboard, or an earthquake shake them off into the bay.

The business portion of Valparaiso along the beach shows some fine architecture, more elaborate than is to be seen elsewhere in Central and South America, there being a rivalry in handsomely carved façades and other adornments. The shops and stores are as large, and contain as complete an assortment of goods, as those in any city in the world. There is no city in the United States having the population of Valparaiso (125,000) with so many fine shops, and such a display of costly and luxurious articles. The people are wealthy and prosperous, the foreign element is large and rich, and the place is famous, as is Santiago, the capital, for the extravagance of its citizens. Some of the private residences are palatial in their proportions and equipments, and millions of dollars are represented under the roofs of bankers and merchants. There are clubs as fine as the average in New York or London, public reading-rooms, libraries, picture-galleries, and all the elements which go to make up modern civilization. The parks and plazas are filled with beautiful fountains, and with statuary of bronze and marble, much of which, to the shame of Chili, was stolen from the public and private gardens of Peru during the late war. The Custom-house is being torn away to give place to a magnificent monument to Arthur Pratt, an Irish hero of that struggle. Pratt’s reckless courage made him the ideal of all that is great and noble in the mind of the Chillanos, who have erected a monument to his memory in nearly every town. Streets and shops, saloons, mines, opera-houses, and even lotteries are named in his honor, and the greatest national tribute is to destroy the old custom-house in order to erect his monument in the most conspicuous place in the principal city.

The oddest thing to be seen in Valparaiso is the female street-car conductors. The street-car managers of Chili have added another occupation to the list of those in which women may engage. The experiment was first tried during the war with Peru, when all the able-bodied men were sent to the army, and proved so successful that their employment has become permanent, to the advantage, it is said, of the companies, the women, and the public. The first impression one forms of a woman with a bell-punch taking up fares is not favorable, but the stranger soon becomes accustomed to this as to all other novelties, and concludes that it is not such a bad idea after all. The street-cars are double-deckers, with seats upon the roof as well as within, and the driver occupies a perch on the rear platform, taking the fare as the passenger enters. The Chillano is a rough individual; he is haughty, arrogant, impertinent, and abusive. There is more intemperance in Chili than in any other of the South American States, and consequently more quarrels and murders, but the female conductors are seldom disturbed in the discharge of their duties, and when they are, the rule is to call upon the policemen,

who stand at every corner, to eject the obstreperous passenger.

Street-car riding is a popular amusement with the young men about town. Those who make a business of flirting with the conductors are called “mosquitoes” in local parlance, because they swarm so thickly around the cars, and are so great a nuisance. Not long ago a comic paper printed a cartoon in which some of the best-known faces of the swells of Valparaiso appeared on the bodies of mosquitoes swarming around the car of “Conductor 97,” who had the reputation of being the prettiest girl on the line. This put a stop to the practice for a while, and caused some of the fashionable young men to retire to the country, but it was soon resumed again. The conductors, or conductresses, are usually young, and sometimes quite pretty, being commonly of the mixed race--of Spanish and Indian blood. They wear a neat uniform of blue flannel, with a jaunty Panama hat, and a many-pocketed white pinafore, reaching from the breast to the ankles, and trimmed with dainty frills. In these pockets they carry small change and tickets, while hanging to a strap over their shoulders is a little shopping-bag, in which is a lunch, a pocket-handkerchief, and surplus money and tickets. Each passenger, when paying his fare, receives a yellow paper ticket, numbered, which he is expected to destroy. The girls are charged with so many tickets, and when they report at headquarters are expected to return money for all that are missing, any deficit being deducted from their wages, which are twenty-five dollars per month.

The women of Chili are not so pretty as their sisters in Peru. They are generally larger in feature and figure, have not the dainty feet and supple grace of the Lima belles, and lack their voluptuous languor. In Valparaiso half the ladies are of the Saxon type, and blonde hair looks grateful when one has seen nothing but midnight tresses for months. Here, too, modern costumes are worn more generally than in other South American countries, and the shops are full of Paris bonnets. But the black manta, with its fringe of lace, is still common enough to be considered the costume of the country, and is always worn to mass in the morning. The manta is becoming to almost everybody. It hides the defects of homely forms and figures, and heightens grace and beauty. It makes an old woman look young, a stout woman appears more slender under its graceful folds, and even a skeleton would look coquettish when wrapped in the rich embroidery which some bear.

In Chili mantas and skirts of white flannel are worn by _penitentas_--women who have committed sin, and thus advertise their penitence, or those who have taken some holy vow to get a measure nearer heaven, and who go about the street with downcast eyes, looking at nothing and recognizing no one. They hover around the churches, and sit for hours crouched before some saint or crucifix. In the great cathedral at Santiago and in the smaller churches everywhere these penitentas, in their snow-white garments, are always to be seen on their knees, or posing in other uncomfortable postures, looking like statues. They cluster in groups around the confessionals, waiting to receive absolution from some fat and burly father, that they may rid their bodies of the mark of penitence they carry, and their souls of sin. Ladies of high social position and great wealth are commonly found among the penitentas, as well as young girls of beauty and winning grace. The women of Chili are as pious as the men are proud, and this method of securing absolution is quite fashionable. Souls that cannot be purged by this penitential dress retire to a convent in the outskirts of the city, called the Convent of the Penitentes, where they scourge themselves with whips, mortify the flesh with sackcloth, sleep in ashes and upon stone floors, and feed themselves on mouldy crusts, until the priests by whose advice they go give them absolution. They are usually women who have been unfaithful to their marriage vows, or girls who have yielded to temptation. After the society season and the carnivals, at the end of the summer, when people return from the fashionable resorts, and at the beginning of Lent, these places are full. For those whose sins have been too great to be washed out by this process, whose shame has been published to the world, and who are unfitted under social laws to associate with the pure, other convents are open as a refuge. Young mothers without husbands are here cared for, and their babes are taken to an orphan asylum in the neighborhood, to be reared by the nuns for the priesthood and other religious orders.

It was from one of these places that the famous Henry Meiggs got his second wife, and the adventure is still related with great gusto by the gossips of Chili. An American dentist named Robinson lived in the same block on which the convent was situated, and from the roof of his house the garden of the nuns was plainly visible. Boccaccio never told a more romantic tale, for it involved notes tied to stones and thrown into the garden, rope-ladders, excited nuns, infuriated parents, and an outraged Church. But the adventure was followed by forgiveness and marriage, and the widow now lives in Santiago, in the luxury which her legacy from the great railroad contractor provides.

In the orphan asylum at Santiago there are said to be two thousand children of unknown parentage, supported by the Church, and this in a city of two hundred thousand people. There is a very convenient mode for the disposition of foundlings. In the rear wall surrounding the place is an aperture, with a wooden box or cradle which swings out and in. A mother who has no use for her baby goes there at night, places the little one in the cradle, swings it inside, and the nuns on guard hearing a bell that rings automatically, take the infant to the nursery. The next morning the mother, if she has no occupation to detain her, applies for employment as a wetnurse. However this plan may be regarded by stern moralists, it is certainly an improvement on infanticide, a crime almost unknown in Chili. But one may hunt the country over to find a house of correction for men. Sin, shame, and penitence appear to be the exclusive attributes of the weaker sex. Men are never seen at the confessional; they never wear white wrappings to advertise their guilt; and at mass in the morning the average attendance is about one man to every hundred women.

Santiago is reached from Valparaiso by a railway which is run on the English plan, and is similar in its equipment and system of management to those of Europe. The scenery along the line is picturesque, the snow-caps of the Andean peaks being constantly in view, and Aconcagua, the highest mountain on this hemisphere, can be seen nearly the entire distance. A few miles from Valparaiso, and the first station on the road, is Vin del Mar, the Long Branch of Chili, where many of the wealthy residents of the country have fine establishments, and usually spend the summer. It is by far the most modern and elegant fashionable resort in South America, and reminds one of the popular haunts along the Mediterranean. The journey to Santiago is made in about five hours, and one is agreeably surprised when he arrives to find in the capital of Chili one of the finest cities on the continent.

Although the climate of Santiago is similar to that of Washington or St. Louis, the people have a notion that fires in their houses are unhealthful, and, except in those built by English or American residents, there is nothing like a grate or a stove to be found. Everybody wears the warmest sort of underclothing, and heavy wraps in-doors and out. The people spend six months of the year in a perpetual shiver, and the remainder in a perpetual perspiration. It looks rather odd to see civilized people sitting in a parlor, surrounded by every possible luxury that wealth can bring (except fire) wrapped in furs and rugs, with blue noses and chattering teeth, when coal is cheap, and the mountains are covered with timber. But nothing can convince a Chillano that artificial heat is healthful, and during the winter, which is the rainy season, he has not the wit to warm his chilled body. It is odd, too, to see in the streets men wearing fur caps, and with their throats wrapped in heavy mufflers, while the women who walk beside them have nothing on their heads at all. During the morning, while on the way from mass, or while shopping, the women wear the manta, as they do in Peru, but in the afternoons, on the promenade, or when riding, they go bareheaded. Although the prevailing diseases are pneumonia and other throat and lung complaints, and during the winter the mortality from these causes is immense, the Chillano persists in believing that artificial heat poisons the atmosphere; and when he visits the home of a foreigner, and finds a fire, he will ask that the door be left ajar, so that he may be as chilly as usual. At fashionable gatherings, dinner-parties, and that sort of thing, I have seen women in full evening-dress with bare arms and shoulders, with the temperature of the room between forty and fifty Fahrenheit. They often carry into the _salon_ or dining-room their fur wraps, and wear them at the table, while at every chair is a foot-warmer of thick llama wool, into which they poke their dainty slippered toes. These foot-warmers are ornamental as well as useful, have embroidered cases, and are manufactured at home, or can be purchased of the nuns, who spend much of their time in needle-work.

Every lady seen on the street in the morning carries a prayer-rug, often handsomely embroidered, which she kneels upon at mass to protect her limbs from the damp stone floors of the churches, in which there are never any pews. It used to be the proper thing to have a servant follow my lady, bearing her rug and prayer-book, but that fashion has now become obsolete.

The shops do not open until nine or ten o’clock in the morning, close from five to seven to allow the proprietors and clerks to dine, and are then open again until midnight, as between eight and eleven o’clock at night most of the retail trading is done. The finest shops are in the arcades or _portales_, like the Palais Royal in Paris, and are brilliantly lighted with electricity. Here the ladies gather, swarming around the pretty goods like bees around the flowers, and of course the haughty and impertinent dons come also to stare at them. It seems to be considered a compliment, a mark of admiration, to stare at a woman, for she never turns away. To these nightly gatherings come all who have nothing serious to detain them, and the flirtations begun at the portales are the curse of the women of Santiago. It is not rude to address a lady who has returned your glance, and while she may repulse her admirer, she will nevertheless boast of the attention as a pronounced form of flattery.

The shops are full of the prettiest sorts of goods, the most expensive diamonds, jewellery, and laces. The Santiagoans boast that everything that can be found in Paris can be purchased there, and one easily believes it to be true. There is plenty of money in Chili; the people have a refined taste and luxurious habits. Many of the private houses are palatial, and the toilets of the women are superb. The equipages to be seen in Santiago are equal to those of New York or London, and the Alameda, on pleasant afternoons, is crowded with handsome carriages, with liveried coachmen and footmen, like Central Park or Rotten Row.

The Alameda is six hundred feet in width, broken by four rows of poplar-trees, and stretches the full length of the city--four miles--from “Santa Lucia” to the Exposition Park and Horticultural Gardens. In the centre is a promenade, while on either side is a drive-way one hundred feet wide. The promenade is dotted with a line of statues representing the famous men or commemorating the famous events in the history of Chili, a country which has assassinated or sent into exile some of her noblest sons, but never fails to perpetuate their memory in bronze or marble. On the Alameda, from three to five o’clock every afternoon during the season, several military bands are placed at intervals of half a mile or so, and the music calls out all the population to walk or drive. During the summer the music is given in the evening instead of the afternoon, when the portales are deserted for the out-door promenade.

Fronting the Alameda are the finest palaces in the city, magnificent dwellings of carved sandstone often one or two hundred feet square, with the invariable patio and its fountains and flowers in the centre. Houses which cost half a million dollars to build and a quarter of a million to furnish

are common; and there are some even more expensive. The former residence of the late Henry Meiggs, surrounded by a forest of foliage and a beautiful garden, stands in the centre of a park eight hundred feet square. It is a conspicuous example of extravagance, having cost a mint of money, every timber and brick and tile being imported at enormous expense. It is at present unoccupied, and in a state of decay, there being no one, since the death of Meiggs, with the courage or the means to sustain such grandeur. But though the nabobs seek the boulevard of the city to display their wealth and architectural taste, some of the side streets have residences quite as grand, and even more aristocratic. These more retired quarters have an air of gentility which the Alameda has not acquired--a sort of established aristocratic repose--a riper, richer, and more honorable quiet, that suggests something of social distinction and haughty exclusiveness, venerable solitude and commercial solidity. Another monument to the extravagance of men is known as “O’Brien’s Folly.” It is a magnificent structure, modelled after a Turkish palace, and its cost was fabulous. The owner was an Irish adventurer, who discovered one of the richest silver mines in Chili, and who lived like a prince until his money was gone. His castle is now unoccupied, and he is again in the mountains prospecting for another fortune.