CHAPTER XIVIMMIGRATION

The First Immigrants of the South.—Araucanian Lands.

Organised immigration efforts began in Chile just before the middle of the nineteenth century, during the régime of President Bulnes; they ceased within a few years, and recommenced between 1881 and the end of the century: thenceforth the flow has been regulated by a series of laws of strict tendencies. For a number of years the largest contributor of blood to Chile has been Spain, but there are no colonies such as those created by the Brazilian system, newcomers of today usually finding industrial employment in cities, or the coal, nitrate and copper camps. For several years before 1914, when immigration practically ceased, the average entry was less than 2000, of whom at least 75 per cent were Spaniards. Chile’s first batch of regular immigrants arrived in 1850, following the efforts of an energetic agent in Europe. There were 70 German men, 10 women and 5 children in the party, who sailed round the Horn, had a passage of 120 days and were landed at Corral. Both Valdivia and Corral were economically dead at this period; it would perhaps be more exact to say that they had never lived. The sea-port and the riverine city had been maintained as frontier posts against pirates on the ocean and Indians on land during the Spanish colonial days; a small mixed population had grown up as a result of Valdivia’s utilisation as a dumping-ground for convicts from all the West Coast. Evildoers were shipped here as a convenient means of obliteration, and a number never returned north. Forthirty years following independence from Spain Valdivia languished, the forts decaying and the soldiers indifferent. There was no connection with the rest of Chile except by sea, for the land of the unsubdued Araucanians lay, a broad belt of forbidden land, below the populous towns of the Central region.

Corral had twenty-eight houses when the Germans landed; Valdivia’s plaza was a rubbish-heap, the streets unmade, the one-story houses of mud had unglazed windows. To add to the troubles of the agent who had brought the settlers, governmental negotiations for land on which to plant the colony had not been completed. Vicente Perez Rosales, the agent, tells in his memoirs that as soon as immigration to the south loomed in view as a fact, tracts of land that had been wild and valueless suddenly acquired owners and a price. Enterprising citizens went forth into the woods, found some ancient Indian who was willing for a consideration to swear that such and such a tract was his inheritance from his fathers, and, for another consideration, to sell it.

Vicente Perez found it an extremely difficult matter to fight this new flood of landowners, and had no time to spend upon litigation; so, philosophically, he adopted similar methods, and presently acquired territory. But meanwhile provision had been made for the first arrivals by the public spirit of Benjamin Viel, a French citizen of Valdivia, who gave for their settlement the pretty Isla de la Teja which lies at the confluence of the Calle-Calle and the Cruces rivers in front of Valdivia City. Today the island is covered with prosperous businesses, most of them carrying German names—breweries, a paper mill, two or three shipbuilding yards.

Valdivia, a Flourishing New Southern City.

Punta Arenas, the Southernmost City in the World.

Puerto Varas, facing Calbuco Volcano, Lake Llanquihue.

The agent then went to look for interior land for the next batches of colonists, and, finding that forest country was unclaimed, started to explore what was still virgin country to the white man. He lived on honey and wild nuts, struggled through dense woodland to the edge of Lake Llanquihue, chose his ground, and then gave his chief Indian scout, the celebrated Pichi-Juan, thirty pesos to burn clearings through the heart of the forest. It was this Indian who brought the first fifty yoke of oxen to the borders of the Gulf of Reloncaví, driving them through the jungle from Osorno and opening the first track.

Pichi-Juan took three months to burn a belt five leagues wide, and fifteen leagues long, through the Osorno Valley, leaving isolated woods to serve for house-material and fuel. Puerto Montt, at Melipillo, was founded in February, 1853, among blackened stumps, and the new colony, also of Germans, had two bad winters when the crops rotted in the ground; but by 1861 had progressed so well that the town was made the head of the province.

One hundred and five more settlers had come in 1852; another batch four years later. By 1858 Puerto Montt was self-supporting, with cultivated fields, flour mills, and was exporting brandy and honey, planks, tanned leather and wheat flour. Between the foundation of the settlement and 1864, when immigration of German families ceased, 1363 people had entered. Henceforth the opened territory received continual additions of energetic people from many parts of the world, Chileans themselves went south, and today there is no better developed and managed part of Chile.

A new spurt of immigration occurred after 1881, when the Mapoche Indians obstinately held claim tosovereignty over the broad belt of lands known as Araucania was finally destroyed by the republican forces of Chile. With the frontier barrier overthrown, farming lands lay open, and the Government made a fresh bid for European settlers.

Agents were sent out to Switzerland, France, England and Germany, and prospective colonists were offered 40 hectares of land (about 100 acres) in some regions; in others, twice this amount; part of the passage-money was given, a yoke of oxen, seeds, implements, materials for house construction, and a cash advance towards the expenses of the first year. Against these advances was set off a mortgage upon the property, to be repaid in three years.

By the year 1884 a French-Swiss colony had been established at Quechereguas, and another at Traiguen, fifteen miles distant. In the same region, at Victoria, were Germans and Swiss; French settlements had been made at Quina, Angol and San Bernardo, while in the Temuco region were more Swiss colonies, as also at Quillen, Puren, Galvarino, Contulmo and Ercilla. Between 1881 and 1887 the European newcomers had invested 8000 francs (the Chilean peso being then worth five francs) in land, and the colonists in Araucania numbered about 4000.

Their early life had its difficulties. When railways began construction through the long-secluded territory the Indians became infuriated, and the unfortunate colonists suffered from repeated raids. Property was destroyed and settlers attacked and killed when the Angol-Traiguen section of the line was commenced, and eventually a special police force was established to protect the new settlements. The Swiss Government made investigations through their consulate in Valparaiso, raising certain points in connection with thewell-being of the Swiss immigrants, their physical security, and delay in obtaining land titles, and, although the Chilean authorities did their best to ameliorate conditions, a check to the invitation extended was felt for a time. However, the young towns began to prosper, the Chilean Government planned and began more railways, and before the end of the century the whole territory had been tentatively opened. Cultivated fields spread over the face of the old Indian reserve, joining eventually with the Valdivia and Llanquihue lands settled thirty years previously.

Two small specialised groups of immigrants are to be seen in the south in addition to the German and Swiss wave. After the last Boer War, a number of farmers came from South Africa with their families, and settled upon the Island of Chiloé. Here the fair-haired children of the Boer folk thrive, the farms are neat and well kept, and the properties, many of them extending to the sea’s edge, appear to flourish. The other transplantation is that of a group of Canary Islanders, a hardy folk who have acquired land on the beautiful Budi Lagoon, on the coast of Cautín Province. In the southern provinces below the Bio-Bio, however, the long existence of the Spanish outposts next door to Indian populations had its effect upon both groups. The Indians learned quickly to adopt the European habit of keeping domestic animals—they are said to have owned 50,000 sheep by 1567—and to till the soil; the Spaniards or their descendants of mixed blood learned to live contentedly in houses of mud bricks, to eat Indian food and to prepare it in the Indian manner. The southern tribes had no domestic cooking vessels: holes in the soil, beaten hard and lined with stones, were heated with wood fires, and the food, thickly wrapped in leaves, was placed in a red-hotcavity and covered down with branches: all kinds of food together—shell-fish, birds, green vegetables, potatoes—were put in, the whole coming out as an appetising, steaming mass. Thiscurantowas adopted by the mestizos, and still survives in certain localities as a favourite dish, exactly as the old Peruvianlocro, the potato stew of Inca days, is still an indispensable item of the menu of upland West Coast towns today.

Neither coffee nor tea were to be had in the south in early days; the former in fact had not yet come into general European use, while the import of tea was forbidden under the Spanish colonial régime; the mestizos took to a drink made of ground and parched maize mixed with water, or chicha, or the infusion of yerba maté, imported overland from Paraguay. The latter custom still survives in country regions, while the colonists from Central Europe of last century filled their need for coffee with a decoction of dried, burnt and ground figs. The use of the woollen poncho, a garment excellently adapted to the climate, has long been general amongst the farming classes or any others spending much time out of doors and, especially, in the saddle.

Captain Allen Gardiner, in Chile between 1814 and 1838, observed that in the south a spade was used by the Chilenos which was a copy of the Indian implement, made of a horse’s blade-bone lashed to a four-foot-long pole; that thread was spun by hand without a wheel, and cloth woven upon the “very rudest description of a loom”; and that the descendants of both races built their ranchos of an oval shape, with mud floors, wattled sides, no windows, an interior row of supporting posts, and a roof with openings at each end of a raised ridge-coping; the fire was built in the middle of the floor.

Material comforts brought by contact with the world, and prosperity resulting from access to markets, transformedthe mode of life after the arrival of colonists, the advent of the railway, and the commencement of steamship services. When flowers began to be seen in the window-spaces of southern houses in place of iron grilles, as Vicente Perez Rosales says, it was the signal of a new standard.

Formal colonisation in Chile is today little needed, but there is a constant informal inflow of white foreigners of good standing who in a considerable proportion marry the charming Chilean women and are added to the permanent population. No great wide spaces are undeveloped, and the natural increase of a healthy land will suffice for industrial needs.

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