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
[Illustration: SANTA LUCIA.]
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.
“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.
[Illustration: THE ZAMA-CUACA.]
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.
[Illustration: EXPOSITION BUILDING, SANTIAGO.]
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
[Illustration: STATUE OF BERNARD O’HIGGINS, SANTIAGO.]
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.
[Illustration: PATRICK LYNCH.]
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.
[Illustration: PEONS OF CHILI.]