Farthest, not last; there were still entradas to be made in the jungles of the Andean/Amazonian borderland, and Spain's northern frontier in the Americas had a last expansive phase which reached Nootka in 1790, while in the south her heirs, the Argentine and Chilean Republics, did not overcome the last Indian- 76 -resistance in Patagonia until the late 1870s and 1880s. But Chile was the last phase of the Conquista proper, and its farthest reach.

Almagro set out from Cuzco in July 1535, in detachments totalling at least 500 Spaniards.^[50] He went past Lake Titicaca and down the Atlantic slope into the northwest corner of Argentina, thence across the desolate Puna de Atacama, at some 4000 metres; gruelling journeys in which thousands of his Indian supply-train died of cold, hunger, and mountain sickness. He recuperated near Copiapo; only one of the supply ships for which he had arranged made contact, and probably reached the bay of Valparaiso. His main body advanced as far as the Aconcagua valley, a little to the north of modern Santiago, and patrols to the Rio Maule. This was in the depths of a probably unusually severe winter, for the reports of this beautiful and now productive country were gloomy. But

- 77 -here, on the very verge of Inca influence, they met only a few rude and tough tribes; there were no roads, no cities, no possibility of a coup as at Tenochtitlan or Cajamarca; above all no gold. The return was made along the coast; the first entrada was a failure.

The Conquistador of Chile, Pedro de Valdivia, was a man of better stamp than the average of his fellows; nearer to Balboa or Cortes than to Pizarro or Almagro. His first force consisted of only about 150 Spaniards; in effect the defeated in the first civil war, and with each upheaval in Peru there were new recruits from the losing side. Indeed, it is clear that on the local level, and sometimes on the viceregal one, the entrada was practically an instrument of policy to rid the community of the failures and the more intolerable swashbucklers of the Conquista.^[51]

Valdivia left Cuzco in January 1540; avoiding Almagro's dreadful Andean route, he pushed slowly down the coast, taking a year to reach central Chile, now—it was summer—a smiling country. Here, on 14 February 1541, he founded the city of Santiago. Indian resistance, slight at first, now stiffened with this evidence of a permanent intrusion; in September the Indians sacked and burnt the primitive townlet. They were repelled, but for two years the ‘captives of their conquest’, isolated from Peru, could achieve no more than modest consolidation, and at times they even faced extinction. In 1544 what is now the delightful little town of La Serena was founded, with thirteen citizens, to be destroyed by the Indians and rebuilt in 1549, by which year the total Spanish population was about 500. Political events in Peru now gave Valdivia a freer hand and reinforcements, which could enter through the new port of Valparaiso. Some placer gold was found, but the colony was already becoming, as it was long to remain, one of agricultural and pastoral settlement. There were more city foundations: Concepcion in 1550, Valdivia in 1553.

However, as the expansion sought to pass the Rio Biobio, it became apparent that there was a new dimension in the Indian resistance. The Spaniards were now face to face with the Araucanians, a numerous loose confederacy of determined warriors who proved able to marry Spanish fighting methods with their own. Valdivia himself was killed at Tucapel in December 1553, and his tiny force annihilated. It seemed that the limits of the Conquista had been passed. But the Indian leader Lautaro could not induce his people to undertake what might well, at that stage, have been a decisive counter-offensive across the Biobio. He in turn was slain in battle in 1557, and thenceforward the Araucanians were on the defensive. But most of the country south of Concepcion, except for Valdivia, remained a debatable ground for generations. In this ‘Flanders of the Indies’, with no organised state to overthrow and take over, the conquest had to be piecemeal and ‘There was no possibility of applying the “Cortes plan”.’^[52] Some advanced positions lost in the sixteenth century were not regained until the nineteenth; Osorno, sacked by the Indians in 1600, was rebuilt in 1796, following the original plan of 1558. The final settlement was not reached until- 78 -1883, after the War of the Pacific. In Chaunu's words, ‘Chile was saved by amputation’, and ‘Araucania remained, for three centuries and to its misfortune, in the hands of the Araucanians’^[53]—though it might be thought that if one must be conquered, it is better to wait, if one can, till the conquerors have themselves gained something in conscience and in civilising capacity.

The frontier struggles left their mark on Chilean colonial society; with so much of it a marchland, and its economy based on the land, colonial Chile never became so diversified a society as Mexico and Peru, never attained their wealth and sophistication. An outlier, cut off from the flowering of Peru by the Atacama deserts, walled in by the Andes (some spillover on to the Argentine glacis was a source of weakness rather than strength), fronted by ‘the greatest desert of all’, the South Pacific, Chile could not really break out of its shell until the opening of that Ocean as a locus of world trade: then Valparaiso could become one of the great relay-ports. Till then, the mark of Chile was a modest but tough provincialism, in fact rusticity: the first university dates from 1756, the first printing press was almost unbelievably late, perhaps not until 1812. The corresponding dates for Mexico and Peru are (at latest) 1553 and 1539, 1571 and 1584.^[54]