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The people sometimes mix the incienso of the Silla with the flowers of the pevetera, another composite plant, the smell of which resembles that of the heliotropium of Peru. The pevetera does not, however, grow on the mountains so high as the zone of the befarias; it vegetates in the valley of Chacao, and the ladies of Caracas prepare from it an extremely pleasant odoriferous water.
These are the city of Castro as it is called, Chacao, Calbuco, and the port of San Carlos. This last is the largest and most flourishing. In 1774 it contained sixty houses, with 462 inhabitants. In 1791, it had increased to two hundred houses and eleven hundred inhabitants; but its prosperity arose on the ruin of Chacao, which was the only port in the whole archipelago till 1768.
Chacao was formerly the principal port in the island; but many vessels having been lost, owing to the dangerous currents and rocks in the straits, the Spanish government burnt the church, and thus arbitrarily compelled the greater number of inhabitants to migrate to S. Carlos. We had not long bivouacked, before the barefooted son of the governor came down to reconnoitre us.
We were shown the palace of the Tuileries, and the statue of the Elector at Berlin. An apothecary who had been ruined by an unhappy propensity for working mines, accompanied us in our excursion to the Serro de Chacao, very rich in auriferous pyrites. We continued to descend the southern declivity of the Cordillera of the coast, in which the plains of Aragua form a longitudinal valley.
Towards the end of the year 1566, he sent Ruiz Gamboa with a detachment of sixty men to reduce the archipelago of Chiloé to subjection. Gamboa met with no resistance in this enterprise, and founded in the large island of Ancud or Chiloé, the small city of Castro, and the sea-port of Chacao.
Accordingly, on the 30th November, we entered the channel which divides the island of Chiloe from the main land of Chili, and stood in for the harbour of Chacao under French colours, intending to have attacked the towns of Chacao and Calibuco by surprise.
On the south of the Cerro de Chacao, between the ravine of Tucutunemo and Piedras Negras, the gneiss is concealed beneath a formation of serpentine, of which the composition varies in the different superimposed strata.
Shortly after, a boat came with a message from the governor, offering to treat with me, if I would send an officer to Chacao: But I answered, that I would treat no where but on board, and that he was now too late, as I had already sent eighty men on shore to take all they could find.
By this strange mismanagement, I missed a favourable opportunity of seizing the town of Chacao, which I might easily have done if I had appeared before it within forty-eight hours after our arrival, when the governor was totally unprovided for resistance.
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