The early history of Chile, if less picturesque than that of Peru, is full of incident--often dreadful--and doughty deeds. Bluff old Almagro it was who set his eyes upon Chile--Almagro, the partner of Francisco Pizarro, partners whose quarrels finally resulted in the death of both.
The Indians of Cuzco had told their conquerors of a land that lay beyond the desert and the mountains to the south, reaching no man knew whither; a land not a great empire, but one of many tribes, and so easily to be subdued, and, moreover, overflowing with gold and silver. This land they called Chile. Fiery spirits flocked to Almagro's standard from Panama for another of those "dare-devil heroic marches into the unknown world which only greed and faith could inspire." Almagro's band consisted of 600 white men and 15,000 Indians, and it left Cuzco in 1535.
"To have descended to the coast and thence march by the lowlands would have been the easiest way, but it was the longer, and the adventurers were as impatient to reach their goal as the Pizarros were to see them gone: so Almagro marched straight along the Inca road, past Lake Titicaca, across part of Bolivia and what is now Argentina, and then over the Andes. Daring and difficult as some of the Spanish marches had been, none hitherto had had to encounter the hardships that faced Almagro on his Andean progress. Cold, famine, and toilsome ways killed his followers by thousands, and to the frost and snow of the mountain sides succeeded hundreds of miles of arid deserts, where no living thing grew and no drop of water fell.
"At length, with but a small remnant of his host, Almagro found himself in a well-defined region, consisting roughly of a vast valley running north and south, the giant chain of the Andes enclosing it on the east with foothills and spurs projecting far into, and in some places almost intersecting, the narrow plain, and a lower range of mountains bordering it upon the west, and shutting it off from the sea, except here and there, where a break in the chain occurred. The valley was relatively narrow, so narrow that in many places the hills on either side were clearly visible, but the adventurers as yet knew not that this curious strip of broken plain between two mountain ranges extended with its immense line of coast for well-nigh 2,000 miles, and was destined to become, from its natural formation, the first maritime nation of South America.