Part XV: The taking of Chile.
Since the Treaty of Utrecht, the Spanish monarchy had been intimately linked to the French monarchy under the Bourbon dynasty. Spain was now only a second-rate power, while France had become the first European power and was strengthening its colonial hold on the New World year after year...
At the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century, the Captaincy General of Chile was a terribly marginalized territory in the Spanish Empire. Between the
Atacama Desert in the north and the colony of
Conception in the south (on the north bank of the
Biobio River), several tens of thousands of Hispanic settlers and mestizo survived (solely through subsistence farming in a region with to little economic appeal) in particularly hostile conditions and in poverty.
The Spanish conquistadors had never succeeded in pacifying the Mapuche territories south of the Biobio River and in annexing their territories to the Spanish Empire, after having suffered very heavy military defeats against them at the end of the 16th century. The Mapuches thus made regular raids north of the Biobio river to ravage the Spanish colonies. To this Amerindian peril was added a climatic peril: Chile is just near the subduction zone between the Nazca plate and the South American plate, Chile was thus ravaged by numerous earthquakes from the XVI to the XVIII century. The earthquake of 1647 in
Santiago, capital of the captaincy, was so devastating that the buildings of the colony almost all collapsed. Finally, smallpox epidemics, which were particularly prevalent in the captaincy, prevented any demographic development of the Hispanic settlements in Chile. So much so, that after the loss of the main maritime outlet in the Southern Cone (the Silver River Basin), Spain wondered if it should not abandon Chile and completely evacuate the Southern Cone for good...
At the beginning of the reign of Louis XV, the French monarchy was disappointed by the fact that two-thirds of the population of Antarctic France, in the colonies of the Atlantic coast, were Protestants. The royal court insultingly referred to Antarctic France as a "Huguenot rubbish dump". But France wanted to revitalize Catholicism in the Southern Cone by founding a new model Catholic colony, totally free of Protestant heresy. And the lands along the Pacific Ocean, west of the Andes, appeared to be an ideal location...
In 1728, while the French monarchy was at the same time fighting against other schismatic Catholic currents in the metropolis that threatened the stability of the Church (Jansenism and Richerism), a royal decree integrated the Mapuche territories (south of the
Biobio River) into Antarctic France as an indigenous reserve. In 1729, at the Treaty of Seville (which ended a war between England and Spain), France took advantage of its authority as the first European power to demand that the English return Minorca and the Strait of Gibraltar (which had fallen into the hands of the Royal Navy during the War of the Spanish Succession) to its Spanish alliy. In exchange, Spain agreed to place the captaincy of Chile under a dual French-Spanish colonial administration.
As French missionaries and administrators arrived in the colonies of Chile, the colony of
Castro (the only Hispanic colony present south of the Biobio River that managed to survive the Mapuche attacks), on the island of
Chilowé, became in a few years a major religious pole near the Mapuche territories. The island of Chilowé had indeed a very mild oceanic climate, comparable to the climate of England or the West of France, the island was thus perfectly adapted to the human settlement. The island was thus quickly dotted with numerous monasteries, from where missionaries left to evangelize the hundreds of thousands of Mapuche. Several Mapuche reductions were also created, on the model of the former Guarani reductions. The Mapuche were quite hostile towards these missionaries and many missionaries went to Mapuche territory to a certain death, most of them went over there in the hope of ending up as martyrs and going to heaven. Nevertheless, in virtue of Catholicism and the good evangelization of the natives, France had forbidden the Huguenot planters of the slave colonies to invest the region, France also proclaimed to be the protector of the Mapuche populations so the Mapuche lands were sanctified and no settler could take them. The integrity of the Mapuche was thus fully respected in contrast to the Guarani and good relations between the French and the Mapuche were eventually established.
In 1750, Spain was forced to sign the
Treaty of Madrid with Portugal and France, while Portugal had just established its total domination over the Amazon basin and the Guyanese region up to the
Essequibo River (after driving the Dutch out of their colonial possessions in the
jungle), while France had firm control over Chile (Spain had no more than a virtual control over its captaincy), and while the Spanish colonial empire was beginning to falter: Spain accepted the termination of the Treaty of Tordesillas and recognized the northern Brazilian possessions beyond 46° 37' west. Spain also agreed to terminate the General Captaincy of Chile and to transfer Chile entirely to France. In exchange, the boundaries of the Spanish, Portuguese and French colonial domains in South America were to remain frozen forever.
Finally, Chile became an important maritime crossroads in the mid-18th century. The colony of
New Havre, founded in 1736 in the north of the island of Chilowé, became the port from which explorers left to discover the secrets of the immense ocean that separates the
Indies from America, and from which most of the French long-distance ships (necessary to cross the immense distance between the Pacific and metropolitan France) were built. For the naval industry and to develop new agricultural lands for farmers, the forests of the island of Chilowé were therefore cleared. A small village, named
Baie Profonde by the French colonial authorities, also became the port interface of
Saint-Jacques-du-Chili in the 1750s. Baie Profonde, populated by several thousand inhabitants, quickly distinguished itself by a magnificent architecture perfectly adapted to the uneven relief of the city.