32 INTRODUCTION. 



the port was abandoned ; the populace in parties were ransacking 

 the houses, and the beach was covered with people trying in vain to 

 get on board the ships. 2000 ounces of gold and silver belonging to 

 the treasury had been lost or stolen, and the prisoners had broken 

 loose, and turned the guns of the batteries upon the royalists. Nine 

 ships full of the fugitives sailed for Peru, but being in want of water, 

 put into Coquitnbo, where the patriots fired on their boats, and they 

 proceeded to Guasco, where they discovered, that in the hurry of 

 their departure they had left their chief, Marco, behind, each vessel 

 thinking he was in the other. Upon this discovery, Don Manuel 

 Olaguer Zelin took the command, and the little fleet proceeded in 

 safety to Lima. 



The patriots immediately marched into Santiago, where all their 

 friends, and all who found it convenient to appear such, joined them. 

 General San Martin was called upon to take the office of supreme 

 director ; but he excused himself, and recommended to their choice 

 Don Bernardo O'Higgins, a native of the country, as one of her 

 bravest and most enlightened defenders ; San Martin remained at 

 the head of the army. Meantime, the royalists still possessed the 

 provinces of the south, and maintained a constant communication 

 with Peru by means of their superiority at sea, a superiority which 

 threatened to render vain all the exertions of the patriots.* The 

 attention of the new government was, therefore, immediately turned 

 to the creating a naval force. Captain Tortel, a Frenchman, who had 

 been a privateer and a smuggler on so large a scale as to have been 

 almost the commander of a man of war, and almost a merchant, had 

 long been settled in Chile. He was from Toulon, and had the prin- 

 ciples and feelings of the best and earliest of the French republicans. 

 The two launches which, in the former patriot government, had done 



* See Appendix. Manifesto del Gubrerno. The English merchants had effectually 

 assisted the patriots by supplying them regularly with arms and accoutrements. As 

 official paper of the royalist government of 1816, alleges as a recent reason for not allow- 

 ing strangers to enter the ports, even to trade in copper, that Don Juan Diego Ber- 

 nard had supplied the patriots with ninety -eight pair of pistols. 



