Mapuche Wheat

Mapuche women harvesting wheat; unknown photographer and date.  On line at flickr

 As Alfred L. Crosby’s book The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 demonstrates, the interchange of plants, animals and diseases between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia changed the world.  American maize, potatoes, beans, cassava and sweet potatoes, adopted as staple foods from Ireland to China and Africa, led to tremendous dietary and demographic changes.  But while old world food systems were transformed by native American food plants, few indigenous American cultures adopted Old World crops as staple foods.

There are several reasons.  The reduced and disheartened American populations seldom needed new food sources; within the first 100 years after contact old world diseases combined with war and slavery killed 50 to 90% of American Indians, depending on the region. But climatic differences were also important; Amerindian population centers—Mesoamerica and the Andes--were in the tropics, areas with summer or year-round rainfall, and frequently, high altitudes.  The crops the Europeans brought were domesticated mainly in the temperate zone from Southwest Asia to the Mediterranean, with dry summers and winter rainfall.  Wheat, the Europeans’ most important crop, is not well suited to tropical America, and in spite of the conquistador’s insistence that their native workers plant it, successful production was, and is, limited to temperate areas: northern Mexico and the south western United States;  and Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.

In the north, Pueblo Indians adopted wheat and barley, but they never supplanted maize as staple crops.[1]  In Chile things were different: the indigenous Mapuche adopted and came to depend on a large number of European crops, especially wheat, along with barley, broad beans, peas, and flax.

The Mapuche homeland, stretching from the Rio Bio Bio to the island of Chiloe in south central Chile (map), has a temperate oceanic climate similar to Western Europe’s.  Average summer temperatures, which decease toward the south, are in the 60s and 70s, and winter lows are usually above freezing. Rainfall is concentrated in the winter months, and increases toward the south, reaching 120 inches in the higher elevations of Chiloe Island.  Prior to the Spanish conquest, the Mapuche were a riverine people, dependant on hunting, fishing and collecting wild foods and cultivating maize, potatoes, quinoa, lima beans, chilies, and squash; all plants with tropical origins and, with the exception of potatoes and quinoa, summer crops not especially well suited to the increasingly cool and rainy climate of the south.

When the Spanish arrived, on horseback and with steel weapons fresh from the conquest of Peru, they quickly ran roughshod over the Mapuche, defeating and decimating them in battle after battle and building fortified settlements as far south as Valdivia.  They found the country to their liking.  In 1558 Jerónimo de Vivar wrote:

Wheat and barley yield very well… all the vegetables and legumes of our Spain yield very well.  And grape vines do very well, and fig trees.  And all the other plants of our Spain will yield very well, because the climate is very good. [2]

But within a generation, the Mapuche obtained horses and developed military strategies that matched and frequently surpassed those of the Spanish, and by 1600 they had destroyed the Spanish settlements, taken thousands of prisoners, and driven the Spanish north of the Rio Bio Bio, which was to be the frontier between the two peoples for the next 300 years.  In the process however, the Mapuche way of life changed drastically.  They were forced to abandon their riverside communities and take up a highly mobile way of life based on their herds of cattle and horses and shifting agriculture based largely on wheat.

In his History of the Ancient Mapuches of the South, José Bengoa, a Chilean anthropologist who has written extensively on Mapuche history, explains why: 

The war led to an economic transformation in all aspects of indigenous society. The need for mobility encouraged herding over agriculture for subsistence, and the burning of fields, commonly done by the King’s soldiers during the summer campaigns, broke the back of indigenous agriculture.  It no longer made sense to plant maize in open areas.  This was one of the reasons for the early and rapid incorporation of wheat into the indigenous economy.  In southern Chile wheat has a short productive cycle. It can be harvested in December, whereas maize is harvested in February or May, which left it highly vulnerable to summer attacks.[3]

Cultivation of wheat posed no problems from the Mapuche.  They already cultivated maize, quinoa and madi (or made, a small oil seed) and those who had been captives of the Spanish would have been familiar with wheat cultivation, as would the Mapuches’ own Spanish captives.  While there are no records of early Mapuche cultivation methods, the Spanish planted by sowing broadcast and the Mapuche probably followed the same practice.

In a shallow plowed and harrowed field the wheat is thrown on the fly, almost without covering it and leaving it at the mercy of the prodigious quantity of birds that Chile has and shortly thereafter to the invasion of weeds that this type of cultivation allows to grow freely…  [4]

Through the 19^th century, the Mapuche’s harvest was by hand:

They cut the wheat with a sickle, tied the sheaves and tossed them with pitch forks into ox carts that took them to the threshing floor.[5]

And threshing was also done manually.  Juan Amasa, a Mapuche of the village of Collipulli explained:

After the harvest they would bring together 10 or 20 Indians, men and women, young and old to thresh the wheat with their feet.  The chief himself does not work, but is in charge of directing the threshing as a “corporal.”  Depending on the size of the pile of wheat the Indians go around it in lines of two to four people holding hands with their bodies inclined forward in a particular threshing step, executing two food movements with each step.  That is, the foot is put forward then drawn back, sliding the sole of his foot over the wheat, and then there is another step with the same foot, continuing the same sliding motion with the other foot and moving forward.  To the rhythm of the threshing they sing to entertain themselves in this monotonous work.[6]

If the amount of wheat was greater, horses were used for the threshing, a Spanish practice adopted by the Mapuche.

 Trillas   are now common summer festivals,  as pictured below at  the 2012 Trilla a Yegua Suelta (threshing with loose mares) in Aguila Sur Paine.

After the straw was brushed aside, the wheat remained on the ground. To separate the wheat from the chaff, it was winnowed—thrown into the air where the lighter chaff blows away and the wheat falls to the ground or the winnowing tray.

Mapuche wheat in a winnowing basket.

 Once winnowed, the Mapuche prepared wheat for consumption in several ways, most derived from tways that they had traditionally processed maize: 

Toasted flour: mürke (harina tostada)

Toasted flour was one of the most important Mapuche wheat products, adapted from the aboriginal toasted corn meal—an indigenous American Indian food from New England to Chile.  North America settlers called it “parched corn”[7], in Mesoamerica it is known as pinole, in NW Argentina it is ñaco, and in Chile mürke. 

The “happy captive,” Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán who was a prisoner of the Mapuche during the 1620s and who provides one of the earliest accounts of Mapuche food, mentions “toasted flour” (harina tostada) seven times, once specifically to toasted maize flour “mixed with quinoa and made”[8] although never specifically to toasted wheat flour.  (In fact, “wheat” (trigo) is only mentioned once in the text.)    

Later travelers in the Araucanía such as Edmund Reuel Smith mention toasted flour or meal frequently—and specifically to toasted wheat flour-- referring to it as a major food:

…toasted wheat and linseed ground together, of which I had already become fond, regarding the "ulpo" as not only a pleasant beverage, but almost as a necessity, in the absence of bread.[9]

José Begona describes the preparation of mürke, as follows:

The making of toasted wheat is a usually a happy family ceremony. It is a food that all apprectiate.  Earlier it was made in a clay callana, but the ones I have seen are metal.  They are like a large skillet, with a long wooden handle of a meter or more.  It is often hung from the ceiling with wire, to keep from burning oneself and to make toasting easier.  It is put over the kitchen hearth in the center of the house [and now frequently over a wood stove].  The wheat is put into the callana and stirred so that it does not burn.  A boy usually helps his mother in this task, until the wheat is well toasted and hot.  From there it is taken to the grain mill from which and perfumed smoke rises.  As it comes out of the mill it is mixed with hot water to make ulpo or allowed to cool and added to apple chicha [cider], for one of the most successful combinations of Mapuche cuisine.  The guests drink the chicha stirring the toasted flour with a spoon.  And wheat again becomes the focus of their conversations.

Traditional Mapuche milling stone

 photo:  Italo Martínez Rival

Modern hand grain mill. photo ñiyael mapuche

Toasted wheat was, and is, eaten as ulpo, mixed with cold or hot water (chercan) or was boiled in water to make a porridge.  My wife recalls having ulpo as a child, and of eating it sprinkled over watermelon.  It continues to be popular and is available in supermarkets.

Lightly toasted wheat that is coarsely ground is tukun, locro in Chilean Spanish.  It is added to soups and stews.

Peeled wheat: kako cachilla (mote de trigo)

Another indigenous American technique for preparing maize was transferred to wheat by the Mapuche: nixtamalization. In this process dry maize kernels are cooked in water containing an alkali—wood ashes, lye or lime--which causes the maize to swell and the pericarp or clear skin of the kernel to come loose.  The maize, now called nixtamal in Mexican Spanish is washed thoroughly to remove the pericarp and the alkaline taste and then is either ground to make tortillas or tamales, or cooked further to make pozole (mote in the Andes, hominy in N. American English).

This process is not thought to have extended further south than Colombia prior to the Spanish conquest, but it was part of the Mapuche culinary repertory by the 1620s when Pineda y Bascuñán was a Mapuche captive.[10]  He mentions being given mote eight times; corn mote twice and barley mote once. The rest were “mote” with no modifier.  Today in Chile unmodified “mote” means wheat mote and Chilean historian Begona believes that both toasted wheat flour and wheat mote were part of Mapuche diet by this time, although bread was not.[11]

The process of making wheat mote, as Mapuche Luisa Quidel does it for sale in Temuco is as follows:

After the wheat is harvested you must obtain ashes for processing the wheat from a local bakery.  The ashes need to be cleaned and passed through a sieve to make good wheat mote.  The mote must be cooked at a suitable temperature for the best results, so it is done over a wood fire.  It is a slow process, but gas is too expensive.  Next the water is drained off, and the mote, husks now loosened by the ashes, is peeled.  It is scrubbed by hand and this is also a sacrifice; it is tiring work and there is no one to help her. The process is finished when the mote is well washed and allowed to rest until she leaves to sell it early the next morning. [12]

Mote is eaten as a boiled grain, like rice, and in soups and stews with other products: potatoes, beans, peas.  It is also the basis for catuto or mültrun, a bread like mixture of ground mote, lard or oil, and salt which is formed into oblong rolls, and eaten as is, toasted on the coals, as below, or sautéed in a little grease[13]. (It is also made of boiled wheat that has not been peeled.)

Catutos on the coals.  photo: Pablo Azúa

Wheat beer:  mudai or muday (chicha de trigo)

In South America chicha (from chichab, “maize” in an aboriginal language of Panama) usually refers to an alcoholic beverage made of corn, but it can also refer to virtually any fermented fruit cider or even unfermented maize drinks. In modern Chile it refers to lightly fermented grape wine or, in the south, to apple cider.  Mudai, maize chicha, was traditionally made by cooking ground corn in water, adding masticated maize meal, and allowing the mixture to ferment.  The chewed meal contains enzymes from the saliva which convert the maize starch into sugar, which yeasts then convert into alcohol. (In making beer “malting” or sprouting the grain accomplishes the same purpose.)  Sometimes left over muday from a previous batch with well developed yeast was added to speed fermentation.

The Mapuche quickly adapted the same process to wheat and barley.  Edmund Reuel Smith, who came to Chile as a civilian member of the US Naval Astronomical Expedition (1849-52), traveled through Araucanía to see and learn abut the Mapuche.  He found mudai  “a kind of fermented liquor, rather muddy but not unpleasant to the taste.”  Later he saw how it was made[14]:

Today’s mudai is made without mastication, and may be drunk at any stage in the fermentation process.  Lightly fermented mudai is a refreshing, milky and slightly sour drink.  When I asked why they served the “light” variety, my host said “wincas [non Mapuches] don’t usually like the strong kind.” The recipe below comes from the web site Mapuches Urbanos:

 Other recipes add yeast and substantial quantities of sugar (replacing much of the wheat) to produce a more alcoholic beverage in less time.

Bread:  kofke

Bread was not an early addition to the Mapuche diet.  Pineda y Bascuñán mentions it only once, and then in the context of a Mapuche chief with a mestiza daughter and presumably a Spanish wife

We arrived at mid day and were received with great pleasure and regaled highly as this chief was very Spanishised [españolado] and ostentatious:  his house had many chickens, fresh meat, bacon, sausages and maize and wheat bread, and above all, a lot of chicha of different types.

He also mentions empanadas, tortillas and “fried buñuelos and rosquillas and sopaipillas of eggs,” Spanish pastries made of wheat flour, but these do not seem to have been common in Mapuche kitchens until the late 19^th and 20^th centuries when they could take their wheat to mills for grinding into a fine flour.

Since that time, however, bread has been a major factor in Mapuche life.  José Begona, who has referred to the Mapuche as The Wheat People, writes:

Making bread continues to be the principal activity of the Mapuche woman.  It occupies a good part of her day.  There are several customs.  Some women prefer to leave the dough over night, ready to make bread in the morning, others like to make use of the embers of the kitchen hearth and have the bread ready.  This is the “ash bread” [tortilla de rescoldo], cooked in the hot ashes of the hearth.  Sometimes it is left overnight and the next day, on getting up, the bread is ready and still hot.  Other women rise, knead and prepare the bread for breakfast. [15]

The other common Mapuche bread is the sopapilla, fried bread.  Although individual household recipes differ, the dough for the two can be the same:  Flour is mixed with salt and a piece of dough from a previous day and/or baking powder, and in some households lard, and kneaded.  It is allowed to rise, and if it is to be a tortilla de riscoldo, buried in the ashes of the hearth.  For sopapillas the dough is rolled out into a 4 or 5 inch circle and fired in oil, or preferably (according to some) in horse fat.  (For more on Mapuche sopapillas and tortillas de riscoldo, see Mapuche Food: Ethno Tourism/Ethno Gastronomy.)

Noodles: pangkutra (pantrucas)

Humble noodles of flour, water, salt and perhaps egg and oil, cooked in a meat broth were the most commonly eaten “traditional Mapuche foods” encountered in a recent survey of Mapuche dietary habits in Temuco.[16] (The next most common were tortillas de riscoldo, merkin and horse meat.)

Links:  Arte Culinaria Mapuche contains 20+ Mapuche recipes in Spanish

More posts on Mapuche food in Eating Chilean:

Mapuche Food: Ethno Tourism/Ethno Gastronomy

Feasting with the Enemy: 17th Century Mapuche food

Eating Piñones

Chilean Corn (Choclo Chileno)

Broad Beans and Peas

Eating Chilean Horse Meat

---

[1] Vlasich, James A.  2005. Pueblo Indian Agriculture.  University of New Mexico Press.  P. 27 On line at http://books.google.com/books

[2] Torrejón, Fernando and Marco Cisternas.  2002.  Alteraciones del paisaje ecológico araucano por la asimilación Mapuche de la agroganadería hispano-mediterránea (siglos XVI y XVII)  Revista Chilena de Historia Natural 75: 729-736.  On line at http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S0716-078X2002000400008&script=sci_abstract  All translations mine unless otherwise noted.

[3] Bengoa, José. 2003. Historia de los Antiguos Mapuches del Sur, Ed. Catalonia, Santiago de Chile. p. 302

[4] Gay, Claudio. 1862-1865.  Agricultura, Tomo 2. París: En casa del autor; Chile: Museo de Historia Natural de Santiago, p. 19. On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documentodetalle.asp?id=MC0002688

[5] Begona, José.  2002. Historia de un conflicto: El estado y los mapuches

en el siglo XX. 2nd Edition. p. 88. Santiago: Editorial Planeta Chilena S. A.

[6] Lenz, Rodolfo. 1895-97. Estudios Araucanos. Anales de la Universidad de Chile, Vol. 97. p. 115. On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl//temas/documento_detalle.asp?id=MC0003440

[7] Houghton Mifflin Word Origins:parched corn. On line at http://www.answers.com/topic/parched-corn

[8] Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, Francisco, 1608-1680. 2001. El cautiverio feliz, Tomo dos; edición crítica de Mario Ferreccio Podestá y Raïssa Kordić  Riquelme. Santiago de Chile: Seminario de Filología Hispánica, Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades, Universidad de Chile, p. 638. On line at  http://books.google.cl

[9] Smith, Edmund Reuel. 1855. The Araucanians; or, Notes of a Tour among the Indtia tribes of Southern Chile.  New York:  Harper & brothers. p. 269 On line at http://books.google.cl

[10] How nixtamalization arrived in Chile is unknown.  The most likely alternative is that the Spanish, some of whom had been in areas where the practice was common such as Panama and Mexico, introduced it to Peru and then to Chile.  But if this is the case the absence of corn tortillas, the food most commonly made from nixtamal, in Peru and Chile is difficult to explain.

[11] Bengoa, José. 2008. Historia del Pueblo Mapuche (Siglos XIX y XX). 7th corrected Edition. Santiago: Lom Eds.

[12].  Aguilera Vega, Eugenia. 2007. Mote: Gusto para unos, vida para otros.  Centro de Medios Independientes Santiago, on line athttp://santiago.indymedia.org/news/2007/06/70390.php as quoted in Eating Chilean: Mote con huesillos, Chile’s favorite summer sweet. October 19, 2009. On line at http://eatingchile.blogspot.com/2009/10/mote-con-huesillos-chiles-favorite.html

[13] Mapuche, Gente de la Tierra. Comidas. Receta de Catutos. On line at http://www4.biblioredes.cl/BiblioRed/Nosotros+en+Internet/Gente+de+mi+tierra/Comidas

[14] Smith, op. cit. p. 302 quotation and illustration

[15] Begonia 202, Chapter 7

[16] Schnettler, Berta et al.  2010 Diferencias Étnicas Y De Aculturación En El Consumo De Alimentos En La Región De La Araucania, Chile.  Rev Chil Nutr Vol. 37, Nº1, Marzo 2010

On line at http://www.scielo.cl/pdf/rchnut/v37n1/art03.pdf.

Breaded Whale Cutlets?

Thumbing through my wife’s classic Chilean cookbook, La Gran Cocina Chilena [1], I came across this recipe in the fish and seafood section:

Breaded Whale Cutlets  (Escalopas de Ballena)

1 kg. whale

2 teaspoons  vinegar

2 eggs

¼ lt. of oil

¼ kg. bread crumbs

Salt, pepper, parsley

Cut the meat into thin cutlets, and soak in vinegar water for approximately 48 hours. Then season with salt, pepper and parsley.  Beat the eggs and pass the cutlets through the beaten egg and then through the bread crumbs.  Heat the oil in a skillet and fry the cutlets. (All translations mine unless otherwise noted)

Aside from confirming my suspicion that the 2000 edition had not received much editing from previous editions (Chile stopped commercial whale hunting in 1983[2]), it made me curious—and cost me several weeks of research.

Was whale once important in Chilean diet?

Well, yes        ...and no.

Except for a brief and evidently unsuccessful marketing campaign to bring whale meat to the urban population in the 60s, whale meat was important only to indigenous Chileans.  Whale oil, on the other hand, was a major ingredient in Chilean margarine for many years.

Whales in Aboriginal Diet

On the coast of Chilean Patagonia, like other coasts where whales and humans existed, a beached whale, with it’s tons of meat and fat, was a gift not to be refused.  The Chilean coast, from the Island of Chiloe south to Tierra del Fuego, was the home of maritime hunter-gathers, the Yaghan, Kawésqar, and Chono[3]  “Canoe Indians.”  They lived on an almost exclusively meat diet, and traveled long distances trough the channels of the southern archipelago in bark canoes warmed by fires built on sod platforms. The men hunted seals and the women dove for shellfish in the frigid water.  They had no clothing other than seal skin capes.  Darwin, like most other Europeans, reacted to them with a mixture of pity and horror:

While going one day on shore near Wollaston Island, we pulled alongside a canoe with six Fuegians. These were the most abject and miserable creatures I anywhere beheld. ….these Fuegians in the canoe were quite naked, and even one full-grown woman was absolutely so. …These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, and their gestures violent.  ….Whenever it is low water, winter or summer, night or day, they must rise to pick shellfish from the rocks; and the women either dive to collect sea-eggs, or sit patiently in their canoes, and with a baited hair-line without any hook, jerk out little fish. If a seal is killed, or the floating carcass of a putrid whale is discovered, it is a feast; and such miserable food is assisted by a few tasteless berries and fungi.[4]

Contemporary anthropology, with a different perspective than Victorian England, views them with neither pity nor horror (although their treatment by civilized people evokes both), but with interest and respect for their adaptation to a difficult environment.  But Darwin’s observation was substantially correct: the mainstay of their diet was seal meat, but beached whales--and shell fish and sea birds--were important.[5]  

Kawésqar seal hunting [6]

The strong tides, narrow channels and shallow inlets made stranded whales relatively common, but sick or injured whales were actively hunted.  Martin Gusinde, Catholic priest and anthropologist who conducted research among the peoples of the Chilean archipelago in the 1920s writes:

It seems almost incredible that the little Yámanas and Alaculufes [Yaghan and Kawésqar], with their fragile and weak canoes, dare to approach live whales in that violent and powerful ocean.  In fact they do so, confident as much in their personal skill as in the efficacy of their harpoons.  The Fuegians never approach a completely healthy whale, as that would be very dangerous.  But there is a chance of success when they approach a whale that has been harassed by a sword fish or is mortally wounded.  Then many canoes approach from all directions.  The men throw their long harpoons and all pull violently on the lines to enlarge the many grave injuries of the animal.  It is attacked from all sides, until at last, each man has thrown all his weapons at hand.  It is strange to see the whale riddled with so many harpoons, javelins, and darts!  Sometimes it happens that after so many hours of work by the Indians the animal escapes, in spite of being gravely wounded. But if the men are able to kill a sick or wounded animal, then they drag the enormous prey to the beach, taking advantage of the tide to push the deformed body of the animal as far on land as possible.  This fish, of incalculable abundance, feeds many families for several weeks; its meat and oil, bones, tendons, barbels, and teeth have many uses.[7]

By 1946-48, when they were studied by French ethnographer Joseph Emperaire, the Kawésqar had largely abandoned their mobile way of life, and lived mainly in the village of Puerto Eden on Wellington Island.  Mestizo hunters had greatly reduced the seal population and the Kawésqar lived largely on shell fish, small game and food provided by the Chilean government—a diet much different from their fat-rich diet of the past.

Puerto Eden

But occasionally a stranded whale was found, and those families who retained a semblance of independence…

…would leave silently during the night, steering toward where the whale was stranded.  Camp was established as close as possible to the beached whale, and for as long a time as the Alcalufe [Kawésqar] temperament could endure it, they fed themselves on the whale meat.  Later the families returned to Puerto Eden completely transformed… The children, in particular, became unrecognizable with the layer of fat that accumulated under their skin.  In other times, according to the old people, the stranding of a whale was the pretext for parties and dances among the entire group.[8]

Whales were also important to other Chilean indigenous costal people like the Lafquenches, Mapuche speakers of south central Chile, and Changos of northern Chilean and southern Peru.[9]  The Changos not only scavenged beached whales, but according to Spanish monk, Antonio Vazquez de Espinosa who visited the area (in 1615?),[10] they hunted whales using harpoons or lances with copper points.

Commercial whaling off the Chilean Coast

We’ll never know when the last stranded whale fed the remaining Kawésqar, but by the 1790s American whalers had discovered the rich whaling grounds of the Pacific and Chilean whales were (metaphorically) feeding the New Bedford and Nantucket, Massachusetts Yankees.

The year 1792 marks the opening of the bold and innovative whaling cycle.  Participating in these events were ore that 24 English vessels, 8 from Dunkirk, 6 from Nantucket and one form Bedford, all crewed almost completely by North American officers and crews.  The harvest was plentiful.  Most returned to their ports of origin with full cargos.[11] 

 

By the 1830s whalers from Europe and America crowded Chilean ports; over 100 were active in 1834.[12]   But while they were allowed to enter and restock at major Chilean ports, they were not allowed to hunt in Chilean waters, leaving the productive inshore waters (more or less) untouched.  This opportunity was not ignored; in 1840 Chilean José Olivares began hunting sperm and humpback whales from the Caleta (fishing village) of Tumbes in Concepción Bay.  His family continued the enterprise until 1944, joined over the years by many others from Punta Arenas to Coquimbo.

Another Chilean whaling family, the Macayas, got their start some 40 years later.  In about 1880 Don Juan Macaya, farmer and father of 14 children, welcomed a young immigrant to the island Santa María, south of Concepcíon. He was Juan Da Silva, descendant of an old Portuguese whaling family.  Da Silva, overwhelmed by the numbers of whales of all species seen off the island’s shore, convinced Macaya to become a whaler, saying, according to family historian, "You’re wasting time on land, because these whales you see there are a millionaire business.” [13]

Source: Seacoast NH

During the 19^th century the main products from whales were oil and baleen or whale bone. Whale oil was used for lighting, especially important in Chile for coal miners’ lamps, in soap, as a lubricant, and in paints and many other products. Baleen, with which many whale species filter food from large mouthfuls of seawater, was used where strength and flexibility were required, including collar stiffeners, buggy whips, parasol ribs, and corset stays.[14] 

Source: Whale world

Captured whales were dismembered at sea or in on-shore whaling stations and stripped of their oil-bearing blubber and whale bone.  Small quantities of meat were sometimes taken, to be fed to the crews, but the carcass and most of the meat was simply discarded into the sea.

By the last third of the 19^th century petroleum largely replaced whale oil and synthetics began to take the place of whale bone, and as the price of whale oil went into a sharp decline, so did the whaling enterprise.

But starting in 1905 a new technology, hydrogenation, by which oil was converted to a solid, created new markets for whale oil, this time as human food in the form of margarine and shortening.   And at about the same time19^th century whaling methods, the open whale boat, and the hand-thrown harpoon, were replaced by motorized ships with harpoon canons and harpoons with explosive charges. Whaling became much more efficient and profitable, and whaling became a major Chilean industry as new companies were formed in Valparaiso, Punta Arenas, on Chiloe Island, Valdivia, and Corral.[15]

But the largest was established in 1936 in the fishing village of Quintay, south of Valparaiso, by a Chilean conglomerate, the Compañía Industrial INDUS, manufacturer of a wide range of products from animal and vegetable oils.  Facing a shortage of raw materials, INDUS went into the whaling business and established a large on-shore whale processing plant. Two years later INDUS opened a hydrogenation plant.

In its period of maximum production (decade of the 50s)  [INDUS’] operation accounted for 2% of the whales captured and 1% of whale oil production world wide, all destined for the national market.  The main species taken were the fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus) and sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus).[16]

INDUS 6 in Iquique

INDUS’ processing plant in Quintay.

Quintay workers, 1960

Photos:  Balleneros de Quintay

The table below shows Chile’s whale catch in relation to the rest of the whaling world for individual years from 1910 to 1980.[17]

Whale Meat in 20^th Century Chile

In 1965, near the peak of Chile’s whaling production, an article entitled “Nutritional value of whale meat consumed in Chile” appeared in a Chilean journal of nutrition, public health and toxicology. [18]  It began:

The Chilean dietary panorama manifests a scarcity of proteins of animal origin. At the same time, consider the reality that the national territory possesses an extension of more than 4,000 km of coast, and therefore, great fishery resources, thus promotion of consumption of fish, shellfish and whales assumes an indisputable importance.  ….whales used for consumption belong to the varieties finback, blue and humpback, always referring to young animals.  The sperm whale is not eatable by man due to the composition of its fat, but it is processed for the preparation of meal for animal feeds.  The variety of whale preferred in the country is the finback, whose meat is quite similar to that of beef, especially when coming from young animals.

The conclusion, in an English summary was, “The results show that this meat is an excellent source of good quality protein which is highly digestible.”

The article is followed by a public service ad from the Chilean national commission to encourage consumption of “fishery products,” and although whale is not mentioned, the sea creature pictured looks reasonably whale-like. 

I did not discover a campaign specifically promoting whale meat, but there was a campaign to promote whale products, including meat. The poster below, from Balleneros de Quintay, shows foods (translated in red) prominently.

Products obtained from the whale
(click to enlarge)

Ultimately, however, whale did not become popular in Chilean diet, and production was largely exported or converted into whale meal.

The hunting and butchering of whales in Chile was focused primarily on the production of oils, meat meal, bone meal, and finally, meat.  This was largely because the species most commonly token, the sperm whale, was destined exclusively for the production of oils, derivatives, and secondary products; consumption of its meat never gained a place in the national market due to objective problems (difficulties in preservation and cooking) and subjective values (whale meat was considered second class).  Loin meat of fin whales [Balaenoptera physalus], was preferred for human consumption.  The production of meat, principally meat from fin whales, required a series of additional steps during the hunt. The animal could not be harpooned in the loin; and had to be chilled through the opening in the abdominal cavity from the anus to the diaphragm. Only during the last three seasons that the Quintay plant  operated (1964-67), working with three modern whale hunting ships provided by their partner, the Japanese Nitto Whaling Company, did the production of whale meat become important.  As much as nine thousand tons of meat was exported to Japan in 1965.  Meat left over from rendering [the oil] was made into meat meal used in the production of feed for cattle, poultry and domestic animals.  It is estimated that for every 5.45 kilos of whale meat 1 kilo of meat meal was obtained.[19]

But some Chileans did become enthusiastic eaters of whale meat.  Workers at the Chome whaling station “remember the abundance of the weekly 15 kg. of the prized meat of these large cetaceans that the industry provided to each family of its workers.”[20]

Postscripts

The whaling station at Quintay is now the site of the Centro de Investigación Marina Quintay (Quintay Marine Research Center) of the Universidad Andrés Bello and a museum.  Go for a visit; Quintay is also home to excellent sea food restaurants.    

In 2008 Chile passed a bill banning all whaling and declaring Chilean waters to be a whale sanctuary. 

Links:

Centro Ballena Azul Blue Whale Project.  “Since 1997, Dr. Rodrigo Hucke-Gaete has researched blue whales in Chile and in Antarctica. Within this work he was able to discover the largest aggregation of blue whales in the Southern Hemisphere, in the area of Chiloé-Corcovado, south of Chile. Further research has mainly focused on identifying the summer arrival of whales in southern Chile.”

Centro de Conservación Cetáceas Center for Cetacean Conservation

---

[1] Alfaro, Mónica T. 2000. La Gran Cocina Chilena, 8th Edition.  Santiago:  Ediciones Occidente S.A. p. 303

[2] Who caused the decrease in whales? Greenpeace. On line at http://www.greenpeace.or.jp/campaign/oceans/factsheet/3_en_html.

[3]The Yaghan are also known as the Yámana or Yamana; the Kawésqar are AKA Alacalufes.  There is only one surviving Yaghan speaker, about 20 Kawésqar speakers  and no surviving Chono speakers.

[4] Darwin, Charles. 1909.  The Voyage of The Beagle. The Harvard Classics

Edited By Charles W Eliot LLD. New York:  P. F. Collier & Son. p. 228-29.  On line at  http://www.archive.org/details/voyageofbeagle00darwuoft

[5] Schiavini, Adrián. 1993.  Los lobos marinos como recurso para cazadores-recolectores marinos: El caso de tierra del Fuego. Latin American Antiquity 4(4):346-366.

[6] Barros Valenzuela, Alvaro. 1975. Aborígenes australes de América. Santiago : Lord Cochrane, Chapt. 5. En el país de Ayayema.  On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl//temas/documento_detalle.asp?id=MC0001753

[7] Gusinde, Martin.  1951.  Hombres primitivos en la tierra del fuego. Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de Sevilla. p. 212. On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documento_detalle.asp?id=MC0004214 

[8] Emperaire, Joseph. 1963 (French original, 1955) Los Nómades del Mar.  Ser Indígena - Portal de las Culturas Originarias de Chile. P. 86. On line at http://www.serindigena.cl/territorios/recursos/biblioteca/libros/pdf/nomades_mar.pdf

[9] Bollaert, William. 1860. Antiquarian, Ethnological and Other Researches in New Granada, Ecuador and Chile. London: Trubner & Co.  p. 171 on Line at books.google.com 

[10] Vázques de Espinosa. 1942 (1628) Compendium and Description of the West Indies. Translated by Charles Upson Clark.  Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 102. On line at http://www.archive.org/details/smithsonianmisce1021942smit  

[11] Pereira Salas, Eugenio. 1971.   Los primeros contactos entre Chile y los Estados Unidos: 1778-1809. Santiago : Andrés Bello. p. 42 On line at http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/documento_detalle.asp?id=MC0033424

[12]Ballenas en la bahía de Concepción. Tell Magazine. Feb. 16, 2009  On line at http://200.24.235.2/tell.cl/concepcion/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=640&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

[13] Jorsep (Jorge Sepúlveda Ortiz) 1977. La epopeya de la industria ballenera Chilena. Revista de Marina Armada de Chile En Línea, 1997 #6 On line at www.revistamarina.cl/revistas/1997/3/filippi.pdf

[14] “Baleen” and “Whale Oil” from Wikipedia.

[15] Jorsep, op. Cit.

[16] Balleneros de Quintay: Historia, Educación, y Conservación de un Pueblo Ballenero.  On line at http://ballenerosdequintay.unab.cl/index.php?page=inicio

[17] Whaling Statistics. Whaling Library.  On line at http://luna.pos.to/whale/sta.html

[18] Valor nutritivo de la carne de ballena consumida en Chile.
Schmidt-Hebbel H., Pennacchiotti L, Pérez J.,González C., Meruane J. 1965.
Rev. Nutrición, Bromatología y Toxicología, 1:155

[19] Balleneros de Quintay, op. cit.

[20] Astudillo, Antonio.  2001. Vestigios de una ballenera. Revista Chilena de Antropología Visual  1:85-94.  On line at http://www.antropologiavisual.cl/etastud.htm