Part 29

“Santa Lucia” is the most beautiful place I have seen in South America. It is a pile of rocks six hundred feet high, cast by some volcanic agency into the centre of the great plain on which the city stands. It was here that the United States Astronomical Expedition of 1852, under Lieutenant Gillis, made observations. Before that time, and as far back as the Spanish Invasion, it was a magnificent fortress, commanding the entire valley with its guns. Tradition has it that the King of the Araucanians had a stronghold here before the Spaniards came. After the departure of the United States expedition Vicunæ McCenna, a public-spirited man of wealth in Santiago, undertook the work of beautifying the place. By the aid of private subscriptions, and much of his own means, he sought all the resources that taste could suggest and money reach to improve on nature’s grandeur. His success was complete. Winding walks and stairways, parapets and balconies, grottoes and flower-beds, groves of trees and vine-hung arbors, follow one another from the base to the summit; while upon the west, at the edge of a precipice eight hundred feet high, are a miniature castle and a lovely little chapel, in whose crypt Vicunæ McCenna has asked that his bones be laid. Below the chapel, three or four hundred feet on the opposite side of the hill, is a level place on which a restaurant and an out-door theatre have been erected. Here, on summer nights, come the population of the city to eat ices, drink beer, and laugh at the farces played upon the stage, while bands of music and dancing make the people merry. This is the resort of the aristocracy. The poor people go to Cousino Park, at the other end of the Alameda, drink _chicha_, and dance the _cuaca_ (pronounced _quaker_), the Chillano national dance.

The cuaca is a sort of can-can, except that it is decent, and the men instead of the girls do the high kicking. But when the dancers are under the influence of chicha--that liquor which tastes like hard cider, but is ninety per cent. alcohol--skirts and modesty are no impediments to the success of the dance. The couples pair off and face each other, while on benches near by are women thrumming guitars and singing a wild barbaric air in polka time. Each woman and man has a handkerchief which he or she waves in the air, and they sway around in postures that are intended to show the grace and suppleness of the performer, and often do. The dance usually ends with a wild carousal, in which men and women mingle promiscuously, embrace each other, and then go off to the chicha bars to get stimulants for the next. It is common in fashionable society to end the tertulias with the cuaca, as in the United States with the ancient “Virginia reel;” and if the young people are unusually hilarious, scenes occur which watchful dowagers desire to prevent. School-girls at the convents dance the cuaca when the nuns will allow them; and although in its ordinary form it is not nearly so immodest as some of our dances, license has been taken so often as to bring it into disrepute. One evening at the opera a pretty married woman was pointed out as the most graceful and agile cuaca dancer in Chili, and it was asserted that she could throw her heels higher than her head.

At the other end of the Alameda are the Exposition grounds and Horticultural gardens, laid out in good style, and improved to the highest degree of landscape architecture. There is a fine stone and glass building, a miniature copy of the Crystal Palace in London, used as the National Museum of Chili, whose contents were mostly stolen from Peru during the late war. A zoological garden has been added, to exhibit the animals brought from Peru, like the curiosities of the museum, as contraband of war. The elephant died from the severity of the climate, two of the lions are missing from the same cause, and the rest of the menagerie are suffering from exposure and cold to which they are unaccustomed.

The opera-house at Santiago is owned by the city, and is claimed to be the finest structure of the sort in all America. It certainly surpasses in size, arrangement, and gorgeousness any we have in the United States. It is built upon the European plan, with four balconies, three of which are divided off into boxes upholstered in the most luxurious manner. The balconies are supported by brackets, so that there are no pillars to obstruct the view. Under the direction of the mayor, each year, the boxes are sold at auction for the season, and the receipts given, in whole or in part, as a subsidy to the opera management.

Everywhere one goes in Santiago and other cities in Chili are to be seen the ornaments of which Peru was so mercilessly plundered--statuary and fountains, ornamental street-lamps, benches of carved stone in the parks and the Alameda, and almost everything that beautifies the streets. Transports that were sent up to Callao with troops brought back cargoes of pianos, pictures, furniture, books, and articles of household decoration stolen from the homes of the Peruvians. Lampposts torn up from their foundations, pretty iron fences and images from the cemeteries, altar equipments of silver from the churches, statuary from the parks and streets, and everything that the hands of thieves and vandals could reach, were stolen. Clocks--one of which now gives time to the marketplace of Santiago--were taken from the steeples of the churches, and even the effigies of saints were lifted from the altars and stripped of the embroideries and jewels they had received from their devotees. In the courtyard of the post-office at Santiago are two statues of marble which cause the American tourist to start in surprise, for George Washington and Abraham Lincoln stand like unexpected ghosts before him. Their presence is not announced in any of the guide-books, which is accounted for by the fact that they, like most everything else of the kind in Chili, were brought from Peru.

The new hotel, in the eyes of foreigners who have been compelled to stop at the old ones, is the finest ornament in Santiago. It is a magnificent structure, with three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of furniture from Paris, and a five thousand dollar cook from the same place. All the rooms have grates for fires--which is an innovation--and are furnished as handsomely as any of the hotels in New York, while the restaurant is as good as Delmonico’s. Of course there must be some oddity about the place--it would not be suited to the country if there were not--and here it is that the bar is placed in the café where the ladies lunch. It is the only hotel bar in South America; and the proprietor, who wanted to introduce all the modern improvements, was rather bewildered in selecting the location of this one. It is a gorgeous affair of silver and crystal, and the ladies admire it as much as do the men. At first they were disposed to walk up and say, “The same for me, if you please,” with their brothers and husbands, but have been convinced that the proper form is to sit at the tables and take their drinks there. To see a lady drinking a cocktail in the bar-room of the Grand Central of Santiago may startle the prohibitionist who goes there, but it is quite as much the fashion as is the sucking of mint-juleps through a straw on the balconies of a Long Branch hotel.

The Chillano is the Yankee of South America--the most active, enterprising, ingenious, and thrifty of the Spanish-American race--aggressive, audacious, and arrogant, quick to perceive, quick to resent, fierce in disposition, cold-blooded, and cruel as a cannibal. He dreams of conquest. He has only a strip of country along the Pacific coast, so narrow that there is scarcely room enough to write its name upon the map, hemmed in on the one side by the eternal snows that crown the Cordilleras, and on the other side by six thousand miles of sea. He has been stretching himself northward until he has stolen all the sea-coast of Bolivia, with her valuable nitrate deposits, all the guano that belonged to Peru, and contemplates soon taking actual possession of both those republics. He has been reaching southward by diplomacy as he did northward by war; and under a recent treaty with the Argentine Republic he has divided Patagonia with that nation, taking to himself the control of that valuable international highway, the Strait of Magellan, and the unexplored country between the Andes and the ocean, with thousands of islands along the Pacific coast whose resources are unknown. By securing the strait, Chili acquired control of steam navigation in the South Pacific, and has established a colony and fortress at Punta Arenas by which all vessels must pass.

Reposing tranquilly now in the enjoyment of the newly acquired territory along the Bolivian and Peruvian border, and deriving an enormous revenue from the export tax upon nitrate, the Chillano contemplates the internal dissensions of Peru, and waits anxiously for the time when he can step in as arbitrator and, like the lawyer, take the estate that the heirs are silly enough to quarrel over. It is but a question of years when not only Peru but Bolivia will become a part of Chili; when the aggressive nation will want to push her eastern boundary back of the Andes, and secure control of the sources of the Amazon, as she has of the navigation of the strait.

On the beautiful Alameda of Santiago stands a marble monument erected several years ago, after the partition of Patagonia, to commemorate the generosity of the Argentine Republic. That statue will some day be pulled down by a mob. The people are already regretting the impulsive cordiality which suggested it, and are looking with jealous eyes at the progress and prosperity of their eastern neighbor. But Chili will find in the Argentines a more formidable foe than the nation has yet met, and her generals will have some of the conceit taken out of them if the armies of the two ever come into collision. Although the Argentine Republic is making more rapid strides towards national greatness, there is no

doubt that at present, in all the conditions of modern civilization, Chili leads the Southern Continent, and is the most powerful of all the republics in America except our own. Her statesmen are wise and able, her people are industrious and progressive, and have that strength of mind and muscle which is given only to the men of temperate zones. There is a strong similarity between the Chillanos and the Irish. Both have the same wit and reckless courage, the same love of country and patriotic pride; and wherever a Chillano goes he carries his opinion that there never was and never can be a better land than that in which he was born; and although he may be a refugee or an exile, he will fight in defence of Chili at the drop of the hat. There is something refreshing in his patriotism, even if it be the most arrogant vanity. Our people are becoming ashamed of their Fourth of July, and the Declaration of Independence is the butt of professional jokers. The Chillano will cut the throat of a man who will not celebrate with him the 18th of September, his Independence Day; and there is a law in the country requiring every house to have a flag-staff, and every flag-staff to bear the national colors--a banner by day and a lantern by night--on the anniversaries of the republic. All the schools must use text-books by native authors, all the bands play the compositions of native composers, and visiting opera and concert singers are compelled to vary their performances by introducing the songs of the country. It is said that a Frenchman can never be denationalized. The same is true of the Chillano. There has not been a successful revolution in Chili since 1839; and although there is nowhere a more unruly and discordant people, nowhere so much murder and other serious crimes, in their love of country the haughty don and the patient peon, the hunted bandit and the cruel soldier, are one.

Many of the leading men of Chili are and have been of Irish descent. Barney O’Higgins was the liberator, the George Washington of the republic, and Patrick Lynch was the foremost soldier of Chili in the late war. The O’Learys and McGarrys and other Chillano-Irish families are prominent in politics and war and trade. There is a sympathetic bond between the shamrock and the condor, and nowhere in South America does the Irish emigrant so prosperously thrive. Chillano wit is proverbial. The jolly, care-for-nothing peasant is the same there as upon the old sod, and the turgid, grandiloquent style of literature which prevails in other portions of Spanish-America in Chili finds a substitute in the soul-stirring, fervid oratory which is one of the gifts of the Irish race. A Chillano driver who was beating a mule was remonstrated with. The man looked up and remarked that it was the most obstinate animal he ever drove. “The beast thinks he ought to have been a bishop,” he said.

The vanity of the Chillano passes all comprehension. The officers of the army and navy actually offered their services, through the British minister, to England when there was a rumor of war with Russia; and with the slightest encouragement they would be willing to take the domestic as well as the international complications off the hands of the British cabinet. One day the English paper at Valparaiso published a satire, announcing that the Lords of the Admiralty had selected three leading Chillano naval officers to command the Bosporus, the Baltic, and the North Atlantic fleets. The officers as well as the people would not accept the bogus cablegram as a joke until the next issue of the paper, in which it was explained; and the former were actually polishing up their swords and uniforms to take their new commands.

The Chillano is not only vain but cruel--as cruel as death. He carries a long curved knife, called a _curvo_, as the Italian carries a stiletto and the negro a razor, and uses it to cut throats. He never fights with his fists, and knows not the use of the shillalah; he never carries a revolver, and is nothing of a thug; but as a robber or bandit, in a private quarrel or a public mob, he always uses this deadly knife, and springs at the throat of his enemy like a blood-hound. There is scarcely an issue of a daily paper without one or two throat-cutting incidents, and in the publications succeeding feast-days or carnivals their bloody annals fill columns.

As a soldier the Chillano is brave to recklessness, and a sense of fear is unknown to him. He will not endure a siege, nor can he be made to fight at long range; but as soon as he sees the enemy he fires one volley, drops his gun, and rushes in with his curvo. His endurance is as great as his courage, and no North American Indian can travel so far without rest or go so long without food and water as the Chillano peon, or _roto_, as the mixed race is called. As the cholo in Peru is the descendant of the Spaniards and the Incas, so is the roto in Chili the child of the Spaniards and the Araucanian Indians, the race of giants with which the early explorers reported that Patagonia was peopled--“Menne of that bigginess,” as Sir Francis Drake reported, “that it seemed the trees of the forests were uprooted and were moving away.” They have the Spanish tenacity of purpose, the Indian endurance, and the cruelty of both. Each soldier, in the mountains or the desert, carries on his breast two buckskin bags. In one are the leaves of the coca-plant, in the other powdered lime made of the ashes of potato-skins. The coca is the strongest sort of a tonic, and by chewing it the Chillano soldier can abstain from food or drink for a week or ten days at a stretch. He takes a bunch of leaves as big as a quid of tobacco in his mouth, and occasionally mixes the potato-ashes with the saliva to give the juice a relish. Canon Kingsley, in that remarkable novel, “Westward Ho!” describes two of the band of Amyas Leigh as deserting their companions at the sources of the Amazon, and takes them into a beautiful bower with two Dianas of the Indian type. There they chew coca-leaves with the girls, sink into a voluptuous stupor, and give themselves up to love, like the lotos-eaters, until Amyas comes to remonstrate. The men recommend him to follow their example with the Venus who has been found in an Indian queen and admires the young commander; and the Puritan is on the point of yielding to the fascination of the scene, when a reptile comes, strangles one of the girls, and revives the moral instincts of the men. The reverend word-painter was misinformed as to the peculiar influence of the drug, as it does not produce a stupor in those who use it. It is not a narcotic, but a stimulant.

The Chillano soldier is not easily subjected to discipline, and outvandals the Vandals in the destruction of property, as the present condition of Peru will prove. He burns and destroys everything within his reach that has sheltered an enemy. No authority can restrain his hand. The awful scenes of devastation that took place have nothing to parallel them in the annals of modern warfare. On the battle-fields nine-tenths of the dead were found with their throats cut, and the Chillanos took no prisoners except when a whole army capitulated. They ask no quarter and give none. The knowledge of this characteristic, and the fear of the Chillano knife, were powerful factors in the subjugation of the more humane Peruvians.

The Chillanos are cruel to beasts as well as to men. Horses are very cheap in Chili. A good native broncho can be purchased for five dollars, and his owner knows no mercy. The beasts are driven until they drop, and then new ones are sought and subjected to the same treatment. No care is taken to protect or make the animals comfortable. Although the weather is usually cold, stables for horses or cattle are almost unknown. When their labor is over they are turned into a corral, or a pasture, or the street, to seek their own food.

The Chillanos are also careless of machinery. While they are quick to learn, and have much native mechanical ingenuity, they cannot be trusted as machinists. The magnificent cruiser _Esmeralda_, one of the finest ships-of-war afloat, was built in England for the Chillian Government at a cost of one and a half million dollars, but she had not been in the hands of native engineers six weeks before her engines needed repairs and her boilers were ruined. In 1885, during the troubles between England and Russia, she was chartered by the British Government, but afterwards returned to Chili. The Chillanos have a line of steamers running from Valparaiso up and down the coast. They are the finest ships on the Pacific, built on the Clyde, with all modern improvements, but the engineers and captains are Englishmen or Scotchmen. The Government owns and manages the railroads in the republic, but the locomotive drivers are foreigners. Every three or four years--usually before a Presidential election--these men are discharged and natives employed in their stead; but until election is over, and the old engineers are restored to their places, there is a carnival of accidents, and passenger travel is practically suspended. On all railroads are heavy grades and dangerous curves, requiring the greatest care on the part of locomotive drivers. The reckless Chillano thinks it great fun to run a train down a grade at full speed, and a collision is his delight. He enjoys seeing things smashed up, and knows nothing of the necessity of operating trains on schedule time.

In trade the Chillano is a Yankee. At market or in the native shops the buyer is not expected to pay the price first asked. He is expected to enter into a _negotio_, and the seller is disappointed if he loses an opportunity to show his shrewdness in the barter. There is no regularly established price for any article. A market-woman will ask two dollars for a basket of fruit for which she expects to get fifty cents. She will haggle and chatter, plead and remonstrate, and if you start towards another stall, will abandon half a dozen other customers and follow you around, until she finally “splits the difference,” and goes away smiling at her success. The traveller meets with this experience everywhere, particularly at the posadas; and the only safe way to avoid being mercilessly swindled is to make a bargain in writing beforehand.

Most of the hotel-keepers are women, whose husbands are engaged in other occupations; but all the servants, including the cooks and chamber-“maids,” are men. There are better cooks and better classes of food than in other South American countries, and one seldom fails to find a good inn even in the country villages. The markets of Chili, too, are better. The beef, mutton, and other meats have the flavor that is found only in temperate climates; the fish are not so rank and coarse as those caught in tropical waters; and while vegetation is not so prolific, the fruits of the earth have a finer taste. There are oysters equal to those of New Orleans or Mobile, clams and lobsters, and plenty of shrimps, called _camarons_.

Another oddity is the milk stations. At distances of a few blocks on all but the principal business streets is a platform where a cow is tied, which is milked to order by a dairy-maid whenever a customer calls. On a table near by are found measures, cans, and glasses, and often a bottle of brandy, so that a thirsty man can mix a glass of punch if he chooses. In the morning these stands are surrounded by servants from the aristocratic houses, women and children, with cups and buckets, awaiting their turn; and as fast as one cow is exhausted another is driven upon the platform.

The scarcity of lumber has caused the poorer classes to use corrugated sheet-iron as a building material, while the rich use stone for exterior walls, and sun-dried brick or adobe for partitions. There are whole blocks in Valparaiso in which nothing but corrugated-iron houses can be seen, both roof and walls being of the same material. It is said to bear the effects of earthquakes well. People expect an earthquake about once in ten days the year round, and more frequently during the changes of season; but great damage is seldom done. There are two kinds of earthquake, the _terremoto_ and the _temblor_. The latter is only a quivering or shaking of the ground, and is quite common; the other describes the convulsions of the earth when it cracks and rolls like the swell of the sea, overthrows cities, and buries towns in their own ruins. Valparaiso and Santiago have never known any of the latter sort, which are confined to the mountain districts and the neighborhood of volcanoes.

There are more comforts among the people than elsewhere upon the continent, and a higher degree of taste, as is shown by the articles offered for sale in the shops as well as in the houses of the residents, which is owing in a great degree to the example of the large foreign population. The Rev. Dr. Trumbull, who has been in Chili forty-five years, says that he has noticed a marked change in this respect within the last decade, and has seen a gradual and permanent growth in refinement and honesty.