![]() Water is brought in boards from Pisagua, about forty miles to the northwards … In like manner firewood, and of course every article of food, is imported. The inhabitants live like persons on board a ship every necessary coming from a distance. The town contains about a thousand inhabitants, and stands on a little plain of sand as the floor of a great wall of rock, 2000 feet in height which here forms the coast … The aspect of the place was most gloomy: the little port, with its few vessels, and small group of wretched houses, seemed overwhelmed and out of all proportion with the rest of the scene. July 12 th We anchored in the port of Iquique. And, while it was possible to convert Chilean saltpetre to ordinary saltpetre, the early industry was constrained by its inefficiency, requiring concentrated ores of over 60 per cent nitrate content, large quantities of fuel and a transport system reliant on mule-trains to cross the mountains to the coast.Ĭharles Darwin, arriving in 1835 on HMS Beagle, commented on the port city of Iquique and a visit to the fledgling saltpetre industry further inland: It burns fiercer, at a lower temperature and is less absorbent than Chilean sodium nitrate. The compound commonly used to create gunpowder is ordinary saltpetre, or potassium nitrate. By 1812 several companies had been established inland from the coastal port of Iquique to mine saltpetre for the manufacture of gunpowder.ĭespite the potential and demand, the industry was slow to take off. The new-found resources heightened Spain’s interest its South American colonies included saltpetre-rich provinces. Shortly afterwards, the Napoleonic wars increased demand for gunpowder – of which saltpetre is the key ingredient. The fuse was lit by Joseph Dombey, a French scientist, who brought back samples of sodium nitrate to Europe after a scientific expedition in 1778. ![]() But a chain of events in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was to draw global attention to this sparsely occupied area. Consequently, Tarapacá’s settlement was largely limited to the coast and occasional desert oasis fed by meltwaters. Tarapacá is a deeply inhospitable region, with rainfall that is effectively zero, and an average temperature of 30☌ during the day, dropping to 2☌ at night. A generation of European entrepreneurs made Chile their home: James Thomas North from Leeds came to South America aged 27 as a boiler riveter and went on to become the ‘nitrate king’, accruing vast personal wealth and political influence James ‘Santiago’ Humberstone, a chemical engineer, had the Tarapacá town renamed after him, while the local pampinos who worked there created a distinctive cultural identity. Scientists, such as Darwin and Humboldt, helped spread the message of saltpetre’s potential to the world. But the raw ingredients of this story are more than the generosity of geology: personalities and nations are firmly fixed in the equation. ![]() And Tarapacá’s mineral-rich desert pampa sandwiched between the Andes and the lower Cordillera de la Costa coastal mountains, has the largest deposits of saltpetre in the world. This bleak but beautiful place has left an extraordinary physical legacy that extends well beyond the sight of the Andes, and offers a stark lesson in global influence and the in-built vulnerability of supply chains.Īt the centre of this story is a simple, naturally-occurring chemical compound – sodium nitrate (NaNO 3) – or saltpetre. And yet Humberstone, alongside many other deserted neighbours, was once at the heart of an industry that transformed towns and cities, dominated economies, changed politics and led to war, reshaping countries in a way that is still felt today. ![]() This once thriving place is now a ruined assemblage of twisted tin sheeting, abandoned houses and disappearing roads, overshadowed by mountainous slag heaps and the skeletons of industrial machinery: a Macchu Picchu for the industrial era. In the high, thin air of Chile’s Tarapacá region, a northern extension of the Atacama Desert, lies the ghost town of Humberstone.
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