South American Explorer Number 66

64 Pages·2002·14.4 MB·English

by  The South American Explorers Club

S O U TH
A M E R I C AN
EXPLORERS
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SOUTH AMERICAN EXPLORER
AMFRI
EXPLORER
EDITOR
Don Montague
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Rebecca Devaney
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Daniel Buck
Dominic Hamilton
Christopher Holmes
Federico B. Kirbus
Anne Meadows
D. Bruce Means
Maralyn Polak
DESIGN DIRECTOR
Lou Robinson
MANAGER
Gus Cam
PROJECT COORDINATOR
Susan McCutcheon
SRLES AND MARKETING
Vicky Williamson
MARKETING ASSOCIATE
Kristina Anderson
LIMA CLUBHOUSE
MANAGER
Simon Atkinson
QUITO CLUBHOUSE
MANAGER
Cynthia Smith
ASSISTANT MANAGER
Erin Fair
CUSCO CLUBHOUSE
MANAGER
Fiona Cameron
EVR PROJECT MANAGER
Melani Martinod
RECORDS SUPERVISOR
w/o PORTFOLIO
Craig Sorensen
ADVISORS
Hilary Bradt
Jean Brown
Tim Cahill
Nelson Carrasco
Ace of Clubs 49
John W. Davidge HI
Eleanor Griffis de Zufiiga Ad Index 39
Paolo Greer Ask the Doctor 52
John Hemming TheSottth American Explorerislhequaner\y journa\oi the South Ameri Classifieds 56
Geoffrey Hird
can Explorers Club, a nonprofit 501 (c)(3) corporation located at 126 In Club News 48
Leighton Klein dian Creek Road, Ithaca, NY 14850, telephone [phone]. A one- Corner Books 59
Forest Leighty year subscription is U.S. $22.00, additional $10.00 ($7.00 for Canada)
Loren Mclntyre for overseas postage. No part of this publication may be reproduced with Cyberpage 61
Joanne Omang out prior written consent of the publisher. All statements in articles and Letters 4
Rob Rachowiecki advertisements are those of the authors and advertisers and do not neces Maps 62
Maruja Reyes sarily represent the views of the South American Explorers or the South
News Shorts 5
David Smith American Explorer Magazine. Copyright © 2001. All Rights reserved.
Virginia Smith Lima, Peru Clubhouse: Casilla 3714, Lima 100, Peru (street address: South American Explorers 54
Gerald Starbuck Avenida Republica de Portugal 146, Brena, Lima), telephone (511) Tips and Notes 53
Humberto Valdivia 425-0142. Quito, Ecuador Clubhouse: Apartado 17-21 -431, Eloy Alfaro,
Quito, Ecuador, (street address: lorge Washington 311 y L. Plaza, Quito),
MEDICAL ADVISORS
telephone [phone]. Cusco, Peru Clubhouse: Apartado 500, Cusco,
Dr. Andrew Schechtman Cover: Ensign Elias Bonmaison, one of the
Peru (street address: 930 Avenida del Sol, Cusco), telephone [phone]-
Christine Ross last survivors of the Battle of Angamos. A
102. Reprints of articles are available from the Ithaca office. Unsolicited
LEGAL ADVISOR articles must include a self-addressed, stamped envelope; photographs retired officer in his eighties, Elias cut a fine
J. Michael Dowling should be insured or registered. Neither the South American Explorers figure at all social events with his pure white
YOUTH ADVISORS nor the South American Explorer Magazine is responsible for material moustache and rows of medals and had a
Zachary James Montague lost or damaged in the mail. Website: http://www.saexplorers.org. reputation for never sitting out a dance.
NUMBER 66, WINTER 2002
"Marie" handles the Ecuador Mission desk. very high profile deal at the time due to the
(I made this inquiry because I myself was Gold Rush and the urgent need for a short
interested to find out Fr. Porter's current cut to California — but aren't. One of my
status; having first known about his work theories is that they're with Headley's
sometime around 1970, and being now 88 papers since Strain had no heirs (Headley
yrs. old myself and beginning to feel a little was a best selling author in mid to late 19th
tired, I've wondered whether he could be still century and actually wrote about Strain
working). He is). after his death in 1857, noting he had access
Two: Thank you for the informative to the explorer's papers). Of course,
column on "La Tola." It inspires me to send Headley's papers, at least the mother lode of
this year's Christmas budget to support the them, are nowhere to be found either.
"Ni_os de la Calle" program. Marie says the Another admittedly remote possibility is
check may be sent via her desk and it will be that they ended up in Brazil. Prior to the
Dear SAE Editor, channeled directly to the Ni_os project if so Darien fiasco, Strain convinced the navy to
designated. Keep in mind that we have to pay quasi sponsor his survey of the Brazilian
What fun to have a Haiku Contest! I have
$9 or a little more, out of your donation for interior. It was a pretty gutsy undertaking
no monetary inducement nor other forms of
currency exchange rate." for the 1840s and according to a Strain
bribery except that you folks can consider
Really enjoy your publication, obituary "his services to the cause of
yourself flattered when I say that you are all
Mrs. 6.L.W., Milton, MA. science, thus early rendered, were suitably
wonderfully crazy and I look forward to
acknowledged by the Imperial Government,
every example of it. My Haiku DOES allude to
Dear Editor, and at this day no American stands higher in
South America as you can see.
the public estimation than Lieut. Strain." This
I'm six months plus into researching a
I forthcoming book for Crown about Lieut. was written in 1857 (he apparently traced
New Life in Five Days the course of the rivers Tiete and Parana-
Isaac Strain, the doomed US naval explorer
On Stone Pathways with Old Gods panema to their confluence with the Parena,
best known (if a bit unfairly) for screwing up
Chilca to SunGate though not before all but one of his all
in the Darien, Panama, as he attempted to
volunteer expeditioners deserted).
I made the trip in 1994 at age 60 with a survey a "miracle" route for an interoceanic
wonderful inspiring guide. I still become canal. Many know the basic story: With prior Anyway...I'm curious if in anyone's
choked up thinking of the experience. Thanks British reconnaissance of the Caledonia-San research on explorers in Latin America
for the contest and am looking forward to the Miguel route suggesting the trans-isthmus they've ever come across info on Strain's
other contestant's entries. expedition would take only a few days, Strain Brazilian adventure and if anyone has any
provisioned for 10 days. Sixty days later a advice on who to contact in Brazil for
My answer to your question for your contest skeletal Strain stumbled out of the jungle, information about Strain. In Strain's only
with several of his 27-member band having book, Cordillera and Pampa (about a six
poet profile is:
died of starvation or disease en route. The month trek he took from Valparaiso to
book will tell the story of Strain — whose Buenos Aires in 1849), he lists himself a
"Ah, so, the ancient Japanese poetry form
Darien adventure was preceded by ambitious corresponding member of the Historical and
that challenges the poet to capture the
explorations in Brazil, the Pampas, and Baja Geographical Institute of Brazil. I assume
intangible spirit... etc."
— and his controversial march, which that's the same organization as the present
ultimately cost him his life at the age of 36. day Instituto Historico e Geografico
Thanks, you folks are really great. I hope
Brasileiro. If readers know any helpful (and
to visit Cusco again. The clubhouse there The Darien Exploring Expedition of 1854
perhaps English speaking) souls there I'd be
was snippeted in McCullough's Path
wasn't open yet when I stayed just 2-3 blocks
greatly appreciative. Finally, if SAE club
up the hill from its location. Between the Seas and has been told in an
members have any ideas on where great
Rosemary Clarke abbreviated way in many other places.
naval journals may go and disappear I'd love
Probably the most thorough telling was in a
to hear them.
Dear Editor, Harper's Monthly three-part article in the
Best,
1850s, which told the story of the expedition
Two matters re your Vol. 65, Autumn 2001 Todd Balf
at near book length. The author, Joel Tyler
edition: [phone]
Headley, apparently had access to Strain's
One: The "letter-to-the-editor" inquiry re Fr.
journal as well as others from the expedition.
John Porter.
It's great stuff except that nobody's seems to
Fr. Porter gets mail thru:
have seen those journals since Headley had
Selesian Missions
his hands on them. They should be in the
PO Box 30
Navy Dept., or the National Archives, or the
New RocheUe, NY 10802
Library of Congress — the expedition was a
Tel: [phone]
SOUTH AMERICAN EXPLORER
not about to give in. "Rules are rules," remarks about Hugo Chavez, and
he says. you'll be dealing deal with the likes of
Tarek William Saab, the head of the
Maybe so but although pageant
Venezuelan Congressional Committee
rules forbid modeling underwear,
on Foreign Affairs. Saab is cracking
beauty queens are not precluded from
down on foul-mouthed foreigners, and
sporting thong-style swimsuits in
is threatening to deport anyone who
advertisements.
criticizes the president or as he puts it,
anyone caught "mounting a campaign
ASHES FOR ASHES to destabilize the country."
What's a gram (0.035 ounces) of Actually, no one is sure what that
human ash worth, anyway? last line means. For example, would
"Up yours, Hugo," amount to
Well it may well be priceless if it
mounting a campaign, or destabilize
WHO'S WEARING THE happens to be portion of the revered
the country? Think about it.
remains of Antonio Jose de Sucre, a
PANTS?
revolutionary leader who led the fight Anyway, until things change
Was she or wasn't she? for independence from Spain in the members traveling in Venezuela are
That is the question being asked of 19th century across the Andean urged be wary. After you've "done"
a Colombian beauty queen stripped of region. Bolivia's first president, Sucre Venezuela —seen Angel Falls, Puerto
her crown for wearing panties. Just so is also credited with securing Ayacucho, and the other sights - we'd
like you to participate in a little
you know, it's a violation of beauty Ecuador's independence in an 1822
survey. All you have to do is find a
pageant rules in Colombia to appear military battle. Until Ecuador switched
park or street corner, get up on a soap
in an advertisement for underpants, or, to the dollar, Ecuador's currency bore
box and shout, " Hugo * * * * yourself
more precisely, to appear in an ad for his name.
**** ******. Chavez likes ******
underpants wearing (or presumably Sucre lies buried in Quito.
* «• Or »
not wearing) underpants.
But Joe Antonio Sucre was born in
It's important to note the expletive
So was she wearing underpants? Cumana, Venezuela, in the state called
used, location, time of day, and
"Certainly not," says the attractive Sucre to be exact. Venezuela would
reaction, —if, for example, you're
Maria Fernanda Lopez who, until like to repatriate her native son, at
dragged off the box and kicked,
this..ah... flap... reigned as Miss least partially, and has approached
applauded, or deported.
Antioquia Province. She was, she Ecudor requesting a gram or so of
protests, wearing something altogether Sucre's ashes.
different - to wit a "multifunctional
Ecuador is weighing the request but SIE6 HESTON
outerwear garment!"a claim backed
is concerned lest Sucre's tomb crack if
up by the manufacturer of the... loin Alright, so maybe you don't think
opened. If the tomb can be opened
covering. Charlton Heston can act, and you
without harm, a trade seems likely. It
object to him fronting the NRA. Big
In the advertisement which caused so happens Ecuador may be thinking
deal. At least he's not a Nazi.
all the stir, Lopez appears in a black, of asking Venezuela for a gram of the
skin tight garment. The ad bears the ash of Simon Bolivar, the great That's true, off film. But now the
caption "A Very Special Sensation." Venezuelan statesman and leader of American actor will cap a sixty-year
And the "multifunctional outer wear the revolt of the South American film career performing as the Nazi war
garment"? Well, it looks for all the colonies against Spain. criminal, Josef Mengele, a.k.a. the
world like..you know...underwear, that angel of death.
is like something you might see if a Heston, who recently turned 77, is
cheerleader were jumping up and WATCH YOUR MOUTH currently shooting the film in Brazil,
down and you saw what she was
Say your walking along the street in where Mengele hid out for years.
wearing underneath if you happened
Caracas and you see an election If you're not a Charlton Heston fan
to be looking in that direction or
poster. Maybe it's not your day and you just might want to skip this one.
something.
you mutter something like, "Chavez Chances are if you didn't like him as
An indignant Lopez has asked s*c*s," or "Who's the big fat Moses, Ben Hur and El Cid you
pageant officials to investigate the * * ::- * ;:• * si- * } " certainly won't want to sit through 90
matter saying, "There has been a Well, if you're overheard saying minutes of Heston as the twisted
misunderstanding. We need to get to something like that about Hugo doctor Nazi war criminal Mengele.
the bottom of this."
Chavez, the President, it's a crime. It's
Raimundo Angulo, director of also your ticket out of the country.
Colombia's National Beauty Queen, is
That's right. Utter disparaging
NUMBER 66, WINTER 2002
Surface of Salar de Atacama. Sharp-edged caliche tufts about 3 feet high.
Remaining wreckage of Oficina Laura.
SOUTH AMERICAN EXPLORER
The War
of The Pacific
Background to War
ATACAMA
Loren Mclntyre
A
tacama is the name of a vanished Indian nation. No
one speaks their language any more, but the desert
is so dry that their forlorn graveyards reveal almost
as much about the occupants' culture as do Egyptian
tombs. MJPHMMBBMt WM
Thousands of mummies have been recovered, their flesh
parched by natural means, their skulls deformed to
sugarloaf shapes by binding in infancy.
The word Atacama is loosely employed. For conve
nience, for lack of a collective name, and since it is easy to
remember, it is sometimes used for the entire west coast of
South America desert. Of course no Peruvian accepts that.
More commonly, Atacama refers only to the lower, Chil
ean part of the west coast desert. Politically, Atacama is »"y
the proper name of Chile's III Region, at the southern end >
of the desert. North of it lies Chile's II Region, Antofagasta, jgtSffl
wrested from Bolivia by the War of the Pacific. Still far
ther north is Chiles' I Region, Tarapaca, once owned by * «1J
Peru. Its frontier city is Arica, and most geographers con
sider that the Atacama begins there and stretches south to
Coquimbo. '.
a
Mummified skull with headdress of ancient Atacameno male.
NUMBER 66, WINTER 2002
It is a very old desert. To travel it is to travel back in Pizarro's partner, Diego de Almagro, having arrived too
time. Since it has rarely rained in ten or fifteen million late to share fully in Atahuallpa's ransom, was encour
years you can see ancient tectonic and volcanic features as aged to conquer the southern half of the Inca Empire. He
exposed as a Martian landscape. Between Ilo and Tacna led 570 Spaniards and 12,000 Indians into the Atacama
in southernmost Peru you can drive across empty sands in search of gold. The "Men of Chile" found only disen
still rutted by wagon tracks and the marching feet of long- chantment. They returned so embittered that they rebelled,
vanished armies. In a wetter climate such vestiges would seized part of Peru, and eventually murdered Pizarro.
have been erased by weathering or disguised by vegeta Until independence from Spain three centuries later, few
tion. This aridity has preserved other evidence of the past traveled the Atacama except cateadores, prospectors look
on view in museums: artifacts unearthed from tombs be ing for gold and silver and for ancient graves that might
neath the sands. The prehistoric chronicle is both marvel hold both. Many a prospector stayed up all night, hoping
ous and murderous. Ancient embroideries, their color still that daybreak would let him follow the alicante, a legend
vibrant, depict warriors' delight in taking human heads as ary bird whose wings glowed gold or silver depending upon
trophies. which metal it ate. If the alicante felt menaced before reach
rutted by wagon ing its feeding place, it would fold its wings and disappear.
Then the disappointed prospector might become just an
other empanado, a desert rat, lost and hungry with noth
tracks and the ing to drink, sunburned in the daytime and shivering all
through the Atacama night.
The white crystals
marching feet of
helped propel
long-vanished
bullets in the
armies
Crimean War and
Although it is the world's driest desert, the Atacama is
not rainless. All of its hundred-odd weather stations have explode shells at
recorded some precipitation at some time. Sporadic cloud
bursts may lay an inch of water on a rain gauge or may
miss it by a mile, making for iffy averages. Coastal cit Gettysburg.
ies—Arica, Iquique, Antofagasta—go for years without re
cording so much as a tenth of a millimeter, hardly enough
to dampen this page. A half-mile-high coastal range pre
vents beach sand from blowing inland, leaving the Atacama Then cateadores discovered vast deposits of a substance
surface crusty and seemingly worthless. they called salitre, saltpeter, although it was not potas
The "Men of Chile" sium nitrate, KN03, used since the 12th century for mak
ing gunpowder. In fact their new find was sodium nitrate,
NaN03, just as useful as an ingredient of explosives, and,
later on, fertilizer. Like seabird guano, salitre is soluble in
found only
water; rain would have washed it away. Unlike guano, its
origin is a mystery. There are many conflicting theories as
to why it occurs in the Atacama and nowhere else on earth,
disenchantment.
but most agree that millions of years of rainlessness had a
lot to do with how layers accumulated thick enough to
have commercial value. Processing plants called oficinas
Inca armies marched down from Peruvian highlands refined the salitre from caliche—an aggregate of minerals
and conquered the Atacamenos in the 1470s, about the which lies in layers several feet thick just under the Atacama
surface. Shipments of nitrates to England and the United
time Francisco Pizarro was born in Spain. He was in his
States began in the 1830s. The white crystals helped pro-
60s when he captured the Inca Atahuallpa at Cajamarca.
8 SOUTH AMERICAN EXPLORER
pel bullets in the Crimean War and explode
shells at Gettysburg. They brought ruin to Peru
and riches to Chile after the War of the Pa
Visit a ghost oficina
cific.
fallen soldiers
at sundown.
crying for
water while
their
blood gurgles
For half a century, the Atacama nitrate
works proliferated. Then overwhelming events
shut down most of them. By 1931, early in the
Great Depression, 60,000 men, two-thirds of
the work force, had been laid off. Meanwhile,
German chemists had learned how to separate
nitrogen from ambient air. As some two mil
lion tons of nitrogen stands above every square
mile of the earth's surface, the nitrogen supply
is inexhaustible. Synthetic fertilizers soon cap
tured the market. Nowadays their contribu
tion to agriculture is essential to saving much
of the human race from starvation.
Scattered 400 miles up and down the
Panamerican highway are remains of scores of
oficinas. Some have been declared national
monuments. The Chileans call them
cementerios, cemeteries of rusty iron, crum
bling adobe shacks, and teetering bandstands.
Near the abandoned plants rise artificial buttes.
The flat-topped hills are tailings from salitre
processing.
When you travel the Atacama, visit a ghost
oficina at sundown. Stand and listen. You're
apt to hear a rumbling in the wind. Although
it may be just a disintegrating iron smokestack
or a flapping sheet of metal hinged to a bro
ken wall, the muffled sound will call to mind
the distant fire of cannon and fallen soldiers
crying for water while their blood gurgles. If
Lower aerial of Atacama.
so red a liquid might make a garden grow, some
soils of Atacama would have burst into bloom.
NUMBER 66, WINTER 2002
MILLIONS OF HUMANS HAVE DIED
in their prime from the effects of three
minerals found in the deserts and moun
tains of western South America. The gold of
the Incas led to the loss of their empire and
much of its population. The silver of Potosi
consumed multitudes of miners and fur
thered Spain's conquests in Europe. The
nitrates of Atacama slew more swiftly.
Made into propellants and explosives, they
shattered bodies on battlefields and at sea
during the century of warfare that began in
the Crimea and ended with World War II.
Those nitrates do not concern us much
today but they were known to William
Shakespeare who lamented that "This
villainous saltpetre should be digg'd out of
the bowels of the harmless earth" to deci
mate the ranks of armored knights and
longbowmen in Lincoln green. The Chinese
had learned to mix six parts of saltpeter
with one part each of carbon and sulfur to
make gunpowder. When the dangerous mix
reached Europe it changed the course of
history.
10 SOUTH AMERICAN EXPLORER