ROOTS OF ANGLOPHILIA
One of the reasons I feel at home in Chile is the fact that the British are still admired here.
Two British seadogs loom large in Chilean memory: Sir Francis Drake and the Highland chief Lord Cochrane.
The great Elizabethan navigator is remembered as a pirate who bombarded Valparaiso in 1578. His victory over the Spanish Armada off Plymouth is not generally known. He commands respect but not love.
Thomas Cochrane, on the other hand, is celebrated as a bold sailor in the Hornblower style who founded the Chilean Navy and sent “the Dons” to the bottom, ending their exclusion of the British Empire from trade with South America. Vested interests in a good cause. Cochrane – dimissed as a young lieutenant from the Royal Navy for insubordination but later reinstated with the rank of admiral - also commanded the revolutionary navies of Brazil and Greece. Napoleon dubbed him “le loup de mer.”
One of the reasons I feel at home in Chile is the fact that the British are still admired here.
Two British seadogs loom large in Chilean memory: Sir Francis Drake and the Highland chief Lord Cochrane.
The great Elizabethan navigator is remembered as a pirate who bombarded Valparaiso in 1578. His victory over the Spanish Armada off Plymouth is not generally known. He commands respect but not love.
Thomas Cochrane, on the other hand, is celebrated as a bold sailor in the Hornblower style who founded the Chilean Navy and sent “the Dons” to the bottom, ending their exclusion of the British Empire from trade with South America. Vested interests in a good cause. Cochrane – dimissed as a young lieutenant from the Royal Navy for insubordination but later reinstated with the rank of admiral - also commanded the revolutionary navies of Brazil and Greece. Napoleon dubbed him “le loup de mer.”
The Laird of Dundonald, a keen agriculturalist who brought tools and seeds with him to South America, was disappointed by the land he received in payment for his decisive part in Chilean Independence. “Payment of Chile!” he snorted - a phrase still in use among Chileans who feel short-changed. But at least there is a Cockrane Street in every little town, not far from the statue of General Bernardo O’Higgins, the son of a renegade Irishman who, as a servant of the Spanish crown, became Captain-General of Chile and Viceroy of Peru. Bernardo O’Higgins’s mother was a Chilean lady of rank, forbidden by the colonial powers to marry his father, being a Spanish official. Sent to England for his education, their son plotted against Spain with San Martin, the Argentine leader, in the “Laurtaro” Masonic Lodge in London, named after a Mapuche warrior who harried the conquistadores. O’Higgins is honoured as “Father of the Fatherland.”
One of the unsung British heroes of the Chilean struggle against the Spanish yoke is a dashing young Colonel from Guernsey, William De Vic Tupper. After distinguishing himself in the patriotic cause, he was murdered by supporters of the dictator General Prieto in 1830. Tupper arrived in Chile with instructions to found a family firm but decided to join the colours of “Supreme Director” O’Higgins, whom he later arrested in Valpariso during a mutiny when the “Padre de la Patria” attempted to impose a dictatorship. Tupper married Isidora Zegers, a young lady from a prominent family, leaving three sons to ensure that his name, like many English ones, was a fashionable tag.
A prominent Englishwoman in Chile during these swashbuckling times was Maria Graham (later Lady Caldicott), whose husband, one of Lord Cochrane’s captains, died in her arms as his ship docked in Valparaiso, leaving her to sketch in the picturesque port and write a lively diary in which she pokes fun of nuns who spend their time smoking and talking politics but is generally charmed by peasants and the aristocracy. She survived the great earthquake of 1822, which destroyed almost all the buildings of the city, and was a shrewd observer of state affairs, informing us that San Martin was an odious individual who smoked opium.
Soon after the birth of the republic, Valparaiso – “the Pearl of the Pacific” until its decline in 1910 when the Panama Canal cut out the need for ships to round the Horn – was galvanized by a British colony of merchants and bankers, by far the most important economic group in the country whose families lived in villas above the port on “Mount Pleasant” (Cerro Alegre). They introduced fox-hunting and got themselves buried in a Protestant cemetery in the face of Catholic intolerance. British companies like Pacific Steam Navigation (1840) and the Scots trading firm of Williamson Balfour & Co. (1852) dominated commerce in Chile. Copper mining was in the hands of British capitalists like Mr Edwards, whose family still own the conservative national newspaper “El Mercurio.” The nitrate trade was a virtual monoploy of John Thomas North, a reservist colonel from Tower Hamlets who hired The Illustrated London News to improve his image in the City. “The Nitrate King” laid a railway across the Atacama Desert to serve his works and ports.
A bizarre manifestation of English influence in a land which was never formally a British colony is the story of Percival Henry Edmunds, who deserted his wife in Buenos Aires to live with a twelve-year-old girl on Easter Island, which he ruled on behalf of the Chilean government and a Balfour Williamson subsidiary called “Company for the Exploitation of Easter Island”. A grandson of the founder of the Midland Bank, Percy was an amateur archaeologist who sent back his priceless finds to his mother in England.
Among more positive English visitors was the tireless traveller Marianne North (no relation to the Colonel) whose marvellous collection of paintings of Chilean plantlife is displayed in an impressive gallery built at her own expense in Kew Garden in London. She was also a talented musician who lost her singing voice through bad nerves but braved every type of creepy crawly or hostile native to sketch her subjects. Marianne numbered among her friends and admirers the nonsense poet and painter Edward Lear and Charles Darwin, who explored Chile during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle but died two years before Marianne’s own visit to the country towards the end of her life in 1884. As it happened, the great zoologist climbed the mountain of La Campana (“The Bell”) close by my house, where the only forest of Chilean palm trees (Juboea spectabilis) still survives. Darwin found these palms, which he thought “for their family, ugly trees” being “thicker in the middle than at the base or top”, at an elevation of at least 4,500 feet. Others think the Chilean palm is strange but beautiful. It has been threatened with extinction since the nineteenth century by the extraction of its resin as a substitute for honey. Although the process, which necessitates the destruction of the tree, is now illegal, one can find cans of “miel de palma” on supermarket shelves, hopefully artificial.
Most of the descendants of the British pionerers are fully assimulated. They are often members of the upper-class, and most speak little English. There is, however, a small middle-class English-speaking colony which has moved out of Valparaiso to the modern coastal resort of Vina del Mar. These right-wing little Englanders still run private schools and some are members of the Harmony Masonic Lodge (1872), which is obedient to the United Grand Lodge of England. “Are you on the square?” an English school inspector recently asked me at a barbecue. The lodge has few members now but once boasted of the attendance (1916) of the polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton.
Chileans’ respect for the British of the past can make life more pleasant for residents like me. “Inglaterra” still has a prestigious ring to it, compared with other English-speaking lands.
One of the unsung British heroes of the Chilean struggle against the Spanish yoke is a dashing young Colonel from Guernsey, William De Vic Tupper. After distinguishing himself in the patriotic cause, he was murdered by supporters of the dictator General Prieto in 1830. Tupper arrived in Chile with instructions to found a family firm but decided to join the colours of “Supreme Director” O’Higgins, whom he later arrested in Valpariso during a mutiny when the “Padre de la Patria” attempted to impose a dictatorship. Tupper married Isidora Zegers, a young lady from a prominent family, leaving three sons to ensure that his name, like many English ones, was a fashionable tag.
A prominent Englishwoman in Chile during these swashbuckling times was Maria Graham (later Lady Caldicott), whose husband, one of Lord Cochrane’s captains, died in her arms as his ship docked in Valparaiso, leaving her to sketch in the picturesque port and write a lively diary in which she pokes fun of nuns who spend their time smoking and talking politics but is generally charmed by peasants and the aristocracy. She survived the great earthquake of 1822, which destroyed almost all the buildings of the city, and was a shrewd observer of state affairs, informing us that San Martin was an odious individual who smoked opium.
Soon after the birth of the republic, Valparaiso – “the Pearl of the Pacific” until its decline in 1910 when the Panama Canal cut out the need for ships to round the Horn – was galvanized by a British colony of merchants and bankers, by far the most important economic group in the country whose families lived in villas above the port on “Mount Pleasant” (Cerro Alegre). They introduced fox-hunting and got themselves buried in a Protestant cemetery in the face of Catholic intolerance. British companies like Pacific Steam Navigation (1840) and the Scots trading firm of Williamson Balfour & Co. (1852) dominated commerce in Chile. Copper mining was in the hands of British capitalists like Mr Edwards, whose family still own the conservative national newspaper “El Mercurio.” The nitrate trade was a virtual monoploy of John Thomas North, a reservist colonel from Tower Hamlets who hired The Illustrated London News to improve his image in the City. “The Nitrate King” laid a railway across the Atacama Desert to serve his works and ports.
A bizarre manifestation of English influence in a land which was never formally a British colony is the story of Percival Henry Edmunds, who deserted his wife in Buenos Aires to live with a twelve-year-old girl on Easter Island, which he ruled on behalf of the Chilean government and a Balfour Williamson subsidiary called “Company for the Exploitation of Easter Island”. A grandson of the founder of the Midland Bank, Percy was an amateur archaeologist who sent back his priceless finds to his mother in England.
Among more positive English visitors was the tireless traveller Marianne North (no relation to the Colonel) whose marvellous collection of paintings of Chilean plantlife is displayed in an impressive gallery built at her own expense in Kew Garden in London. She was also a talented musician who lost her singing voice through bad nerves but braved every type of creepy crawly or hostile native to sketch her subjects. Marianne numbered among her friends and admirers the nonsense poet and painter Edward Lear and Charles Darwin, who explored Chile during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle but died two years before Marianne’s own visit to the country towards the end of her life in 1884. As it happened, the great zoologist climbed the mountain of La Campana (“The Bell”) close by my house, where the only forest of Chilean palm trees (Juboea spectabilis) still survives. Darwin found these palms, which he thought “for their family, ugly trees” being “thicker in the middle than at the base or top”, at an elevation of at least 4,500 feet. Others think the Chilean palm is strange but beautiful. It has been threatened with extinction since the nineteenth century by the extraction of its resin as a substitute for honey. Although the process, which necessitates the destruction of the tree, is now illegal, one can find cans of “miel de palma” on supermarket shelves, hopefully artificial.
Most of the descendants of the British pionerers are fully assimulated. They are often members of the upper-class, and most speak little English. There is, however, a small middle-class English-speaking colony which has moved out of Valparaiso to the modern coastal resort of Vina del Mar. These right-wing little Englanders still run private schools and some are members of the Harmony Masonic Lodge (1872), which is obedient to the United Grand Lodge of England. “Are you on the square?” an English school inspector recently asked me at a barbecue. The lodge has few members now but once boasted of the attendance (1916) of the polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton.
Chileans’ respect for the British of the past can make life more pleasant for residents like me. “Inglaterra” still has a prestigious ring to it, compared with other English-speaking lands.
p.s. for a seriously-researched work on the above subject, see William Edmundson's forthcoming book: "A History of the British Presence in Chile from Bloody Mary to Charles Darwin and the Decline of British Influence" (Palgrave Macmillan), available from Amazon and Waterstones.
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