The exiled Freire meanwhile was receiving aid from Santa Cruz who had recently created the Peru-Bolivian Confederation with himself as its chief, and whose ambitious designs included the installation of a government in Chile which would be his complaisant and obliged friend. With arms obtained in Peru, General Freire made a descent upon the island of Chiloe, but the rebellion was quickly suppressed, war declared against Santa Cruz, and the Peruvian fleet surprised and seized. While the army of invasion was waiting for the order to embark a few companies engaged in a mutiny which brought about a horrible tragedy. Portales had come to the camp to watch the preparations. The mutineers seized him as hostage, and fleeing to the interior carried him along locked in a closed carriage. In the middle of the winter night they encountered a detachment of government troops, and with the first volley the guards stopped the carriage. A man got out, walked unflinchingly to the side of the road, a half dozen shots rang out in the still air, and he fell. When the first light of dawn illumined the field, the victorious national guards found a body lying pierced by four bullets--it was Portales. But his work had been too thoroughly done for even his own death to affect it. He had found his country feeble and divided, torn by feud and faction; he left her prosperous, united, possessing surplus vitality for a successful foreign war. Prieto and the conservatives were not shaken; the expedition to Peru proceeded, and though the first failed, the second won the battle of Yungay, overthrew Santa Cruz, and made Chile the dominant power on the Pacific coast. At the end of his two terms of five years each, Prieto was succeeded by General Bulnes, the hero of the war. Foreign commerce was increasing by leaps and bounds; the growth of the customs revenues put government finances on a sound footing; the expenses of the war against Santa Cruz had been provided for out of current income. William Wheelwright had established the first steamship line on the Pacific. The political policy of Bulnes was as repressive toward the liberals as his predecessor's. However, education and literary activity were encouraged; a new university was inaugurated at Santiago in 1843. The opera and the drama flourished, and society took on a more intellectual and cosmopolitan tone. Even religious doctrine and the relations of Church and State were discussed with considerable freedom and warmth, and everywhere were signs of an awakening--a flowering out of the industrial, commercial, and intellectual life of the nation. German colonists were induced to settle in the forested valleys and mountains of the South, and that part of Chile became and has remained more Teutonic than Latin. The discovery of gold in California opened a market for Chilean wheat and gave a fresh impetus to commerce and agriculture, while the mines of Copiapo began to yield their inexhaustible wealth.