"The lands through which the Spaniards passed were teeming with fertility, and tilled like a garden, and the sands of the frequent rivers abounded in gold; but the people were hard to enslave, and the leader that at last aroused them for a final successful stand was Valdivia's own Araucanian serf, Lautaro. The Christian chief fell into an ambush led by him in 1553, and though Valdivia begged and bribed hard for his life, vengeance sated itself upon him. His heart was cut out, and the Indian arrows soaked in his blood, the heart itself, divided into morsels, being afterwards eaten by the braves, whilst his bones were turned into fifes to hearten the tribesmen to resist the invaders. "For well-nigh a hundred years the fight went on in the country extending from the Biobio to the archipelago of Chiloé, and it ended at last in the formal recognition of the independence of this splendid race, who had withstood in turn the Inca and the white man. Even then the struggle was not over, for the Spaniards could ill brook the presence of an independent Indian people in their midst as civilization and population grew in South America. But what force and warfare could never compass, time, intermarriage and culture have gradually effected, and in our own times the Araucanians have become Chilean citizens."[17] [17] _Chile_, Scott Elliot (Martin Hume's Introduction), South American Series. Chile threw off the yoke of Spain in 1810. The yoke upon the Indies was really falling off itself. Spain was too weak to coerce her colonies much longer. But in 1814 Spain tried again. A half-Irish Chilean patriot was the hero of this struggle, a patriot who, his ammunition giving out, charged his guns with coin in lieu of grapeshot and cut his way to Santiago, and he on land and the Englishman Cochrane on the sea caused Chile to become one of the foremost factors in the final liberation. Many travellers have rendered homage to the beauty of the Chilean landscape. "The appearance of the Andes from the Central Valley is always imposing, grandiose and magnificent. They are unique: it is worth crossing half the world to see them. The dry, stimulating air and the beautiful cloudless sky in themselves provoke enthusiasm."[18] [18] _Chile_, loc. cit. Elsewhere I have spoken of "the beautiful Andes and the death-dealing Andes." Almagro's terrible march across the Chilean Andes, as described elsewhere, shows these characteristics of the Cordillera vividly. Much of the early history of Chile is made up of the rebellion of the Indians; their attacks upon the coastal towns, such as Concepcion and Valdivia, which they sacked, massacring the Spaniards.