Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [74]
Darwin first noticed Chile’s craze for mining while climbing a mine-riddled mountain in central Chile. He also toured a copper mine at the base of the Andes in Jajuel. The mines were purely extractive, and the melting was done elsewhere. “Hence the mines have a singularly quiet aspect to those in England,” Darwin wrote. “Here there is no smoke or furnaces or great steam-engines to disturb the quiet of the surrounding mountains.” While Darwin spent several days “scrambling in all parts” of those mountains, the miners who lived there didn’t get to take advantage of the scenery. They worked dawn to dusk. Their food consisted of sixteen figs and two loaves of bread for breakfast, boiled beans for dinner, and roasted wheat grains for supper. “They scarcely ever taste meat,” Darwin wrote with apparent sympathy, “as with twelve pound per annum they have to clothe themselves & support their families.”
The story was much the same elsewhere. At a gold mine south of Santiago, owned by an American named Nixon (“to whose kindness,” Darwin wrote, “I was much indebted”), Darwin was “struck by the pale appearance of many of the men.” These men, he learned, worked deep in a shaft mine, carrying 200-pound loads of rock up a rickety wooden ladder. They were only allowed to see their families for two days once every three weeks and were fed only beans and bread. “They would prefer living entirely upon the latter,” Darwin wrote, “but with this they cannot work so hard, so that their masters, treating them like horses, make them eat the beans.”
Still the miners didn’t complain, Darwin noted. There was more money in mining than in farming, and with mining, there was the possibility of finding a new vein and striking it rich. Darwin told one story about a man who’d picked up a rock to throw at his donkey—and found the rock heavy with silver. He had discovered the most profitable mine in northern Chile. Men were so enthusiastic for mining that on Sundays they would head out into the desert with crowbars, looking for exposed veins.
Much of northern Chile still depends economically on mining. After deciding to keep the rental car for another day, Josh and I found a representative sample of the craze in the high hills outside Coquimbo, in a small, red-dust-covered town called Andacollo. The city limit sign welcomed us to town—popu lat ion 4 ,000—and po inted to an old mine where tourists could go to see demonstrations of old gold-mining techniques. I pulled off the highway into the dirt, and an old woman walking by the small wooden visitor’s center waved at me. “There aren’t any miners here today,” she said.
“Are there any real mines around?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, just up the road.”
We drove to the mine office, a portable building resting on stilts in the red dirt. Once we’d passed inspection at the gate and guard station, we were ushered inside. No window views reminded us of the desert, and the humming air conditioning, fluorescent lighting, gray carpet, and picture-lined cubicles could have been ripped from the twenty-second floor of a Manhattan office tower. A secretary told us to sit down, and a middle-aged man in a pink collared dress shirt came out to greet us a few minutes later. He introduced himself as Roberto Pardo, the mine’s finance director, and in fluent English asked what I was doing at the mine.
“I’m writing about Darwin—”
“I’m the missing link!” he said.
He beckoned us into his office, where he sat down behind a desk and pictures of his two sons in their ice hockey uniforms. “I lived twenty-five years in Canada,” he said. “The company used to have its head office in Vancouver. But after Pinochet’s dictatorship left Chile, I returned. I like it here now.”
I asked Pardo how things had changed since Darwin had described the conditions at Nixon’s mine.
“Quite a bit,” he said, smiling. “When we built this plant in 1995 it was technically one of the most advanced in the world. Our mine exploitation is done with a fleet of huge equipment.