Besides the trade of hides, tallow, and dried meat, the inhabitants of Conception send every year eight or ten ships of forty or fifty tons to Calao laden with corn; besides supplying meal and biscuit to the French ships, which take in provisions there in order to proceed to Peru, and for their voyage back to France. All this were quite inconsiderable for so fine a country, were it better peopled; since the land is so extraordinarily fertile, were it well cultivated, that they only scratch it for the most part, by means of a plough made of a crooked stick, and drawn by two oxen; and, though the seed be scarcely covered, it produces seldom less than an hundred fold. Neither are they at any more pains in procuring their vines, in order to make good wine. Besides which, as they have not the art to glaze their jars in which the wine is secured, to make them hold in, they are under the necessity of pitching them. And this, together with the goat-skin bags in which it is carried from the estancias, gives it a bitter taste like treacle, and a flavour to which it is hard for strangers to accustom themselves. The grasses also are allowed to grow without any attention or industry being employed in grafting. Apples and pears grow naturally in the woods, and in such abundance as it is hard to comprehend how they could have so multiplied since the conquest, as they affirm there were none in the country before. The mines of _Quilogoya_ and _Quilacura_ are within four leagues of this port, and afford vast quantities of gold. At the _Estancia del Re_, or king's farm, which is at no great distance, there is by far the most plentiful _lavaders_, or washing-place for gold in all Chili, where sometimes they find lumps of pure gold of prodigious size. The mountains of the Cordelieras are reported to contain a continued chain of mines for many hundred miles, which certainly is highly probable, as hardly any of these mountains have hitherto been opened without vast quantities of metal being found in them, especially fine copper, of which all the artillery in the Spanish West Indies is constructed, at least all that are used in the countries on the South Seas.