Question: Would there be much interest in, or demand for, an English-language book on the history of the production of Chile Saltpetre (sodium nitrate) from the mining of the natural raw material caliche during the nineteenth century?
Let me give some background to this enquiry, and please forgive me if this takes some time, the situation is complicated!
Potted history of nitrate mining
Caliche (see footnote) was an important commodity for much of the nineteenth century. As described at various times in some articles which appeared over the years in Mining Magazine:
"The nitrate ore, 'caliche', is found in the Chilean Atacama desert, in a discontinuous strip on the eastern slopes of the Pacific coastal range between the latitudes of 19º and 26º south."
"The mining industry in Chile has a long history ..flourishing particularly in the years following Independence, gained in 1818.. An important sector for many years was the nitrate industry. Chilean nitrate was first exported to Europe in 1830, since when the industry has produced a total of over 140 million tonnes of sodium and potassium nitrates, the peak annual output having been in 1928 when 75 mines (called 'oficinas') employed 45,000 men and produced 3.2 million tonnes of nitrates."
"A French company started iodine production in Chile in 1868, from nitrate ores, immediately exporting all its output to Europe. Soon, Chile dominated the world market, and it has been estimated that this country supplied about 65% of the world's iodine between 1880 and 1950."
The book and its author
The book describing the Chilean nitrate mining industry I am referring to, as explained below, exists only in draft form and is in the Spanish language. The author was the late Dr. Ronald Crozier. Ron was born of Scottish parents in 1930 in Antofagasta: his father was manager of some of the nitrate mines. Ron grew up in Chile, going, when he was old enough, to boarding school in the capital, Santiago. He then went on to Glasgow University to study chemistry and from there to Ann Arbor University, Michigan, to do a PhD in chemical engineering. After a period on the university staff, Ron joined Dow Chemicals in 1958, rising to be business development manager for Dow International, based in London and Zurich. He left Dow in 1969, returning to Chile to take up the post of chief executive of Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile SA, in charge of four nitrate mines, a railway and two ports, with a total of 13,000 employees. He left this post some time after President Allende nationalised the mines in Chile.
Ron returned to the USA and from 1972 to 1976 was president of the Minerec Corporation, flotation reagent manufacturers. Returning to Chile once more in 1977, he was managing director of Tecnologia Minera Ltda based near Santiago, again producing flotation reagents, for a time supplying the El Teniente copper mine. Later he established and became president of Croslo Chemical, a Santiago-based firm which was a sales agency for chemicals and mining machinery. In parallel with this he became established as a consulting engineer, carrying out business development planning, project evaluation, design and evaluation of mineral and chemical processes, his clients including international corporations and the United Nations.
His publications included two books, "Flotation: Theory, Reagents and Ore Testing" (Pergamon Press, 1992) and "Guns, Gunpowder and Saltpetre: A Brief History" (Faversham Society, 1998). In addition he presented papers and wrote nearly 90 articles, some in Spanish, some in English. He was a long-time contributor to Mining Journal Ltd's publications.
In the early 1980s Ron was elected a fellow of the world-wide but London-based Institution of Mining and Metallurgy and for seven years served on its Council as the overseas representative for Latin America, assiduously timing his business visits to London to be able to attend IMM Council meetings at least once a year..
In the late 1990s Ron's consulting career was cut short by the onset of illness which left him confined to a wheelchair, but he embarked on a plan to write a book on the history of the nitrate mining in Chile. This was intended to be used by university students in that country so was written in Spanish. His writing came to an abrupt end when, sadly, he died while sitting at his computer in August 2001.
It took his widow Sabine some time to assemble all his books, files and historical records, but eventually in July 2004 she transferred a considerable amount of material to the Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago. A special "donations room" in the university library now houses his collection, containing about 150 books, mostly on mining history, some 200 years old; some 48 historical maps dealing with Chilean/Peruvian/Bolivian mining, including some original maps over 100 years old; many old photographs of former nitrate plants from his father's collection (his father having worked in the Chilean nitrate industry for some 50 years); sundry historical documents relating to both technical and political aspects of nitrate mining; and Ron's unfinished book, in hard copy and on CD. Sabine's hope in donating all this was that the university would be able to get maybe some post-graduate students to study the raw material and complete the book - Ron's unfinished draft, amounting to around 260 pages, covers only the nineteenth century.
On her Christmas card to me in December 2007, however, Sabine wrote "The finishing of the nitrate book has not been successful. Although I gave them all his notes to finish the 20th century, they claim it will take a graduate student two to three years to do it, and money and volunteers are in short supply. I am thinking of funding it myself, or asking them to publish the 260 pages he finished. Conundrum!"
On a more hopeful note, she tells me in a recent e-mail that a student at the Universidad de Los Andes, interested in the nitrate industry, who has already consulted some of Ron's documents for an undergraduate project, and might want to do a post-graduate study on the topic.
My involvement
I came to know Ron in the early 1980s through articles he contributed to Mining Magazine, of which I was editor, and his articles on mining in Chile for Mining Annual Review, of which I dealt with the Latin America section. When I went to Chile in 1981 to visit mines, I had a fabulous time when, after first arranging for me to visit the Pudahuel copper mine just outside Santiago, Ron and Sabine drove me north, covering 1,600 kilometres in seven days, and visiting the Andina copper mine high in the Andes; an iron-ore pellet plant at Huasco; the School of Mines in Copiapo; Chanarcillo, a nineteenth century silver mine once more in production; Oficina Alemania, a 'national monument' nitrate operation dating from 1880-1910; Mantos Blancos copper mine; Pedro de Valdivia (an active nitrate plant processing 11 million tonnes of caliche a year); and, finally the Chuquicamata copper mine. Leaving Ron and Sabine to drive back to Santiago, I flew back from Chuqui and visited the Molymet metallurgical plant in Santiago before moving on to visit mines in Venezuela.
On another visit to Chile in 1990, after attending the Expomineria exhibition and then having a day off on the public holiday on 21st May celebrating the "Battle of Iquique" in 1879 during the war between Chile, Peru and Bolivia (essentially to gain control of the nitrate mining areas), I flew with Ron to Antofagasta. We hired a truck and drove north to see the copper concentrator and leach plant operated by the Compania Minera Carolina de Michilla SA, and also one of the underground mines supplying this plant, the Mina Susanna (working the deposit since exploited in the Lince open pit). The next day we passed the Punta de Lobos 1 million tonnes a year open pit salt mine, staying the night in the port of Iquique. The next day, a Friday, we visited the Oficina Laguna iodine operation. The weekend was spent visiting old nitrate mining operations: on Saturday in the Pintados area, where, near one of the old mines, a new iodine operation had recently started up; and on Sunday, old caliche mines further north, where we encountered yet more active iodine operations in progress.
On the Monday we drove south from Pica mostly above the 4,000 metre level on unmade inland dirt roads, passing a rail terminal a Ujina used for the shipment of Bolivian sulphur exports and calling at Collaguasi, then a copper exploration site. We went back to Ujina and continued south on the dirt road, some of which had been washed away in a recent flash flood - a bit hairy, and not a place to break down! (Mine water pumped out and discharged into a ditch at the surface at Collaguasi, I had noted, froze within 100 metres of the pipe discharge even in the daytime!). Continuing south beyond Ollague, a border town on the railway route into Bolivia, we drove on a paved road to Calama, for another all-day visit the next day to Chuquicamata. The following day, on the road back from Chuqui to Antofagasta, we turned off a number of times seeking various small mines: one silver operation used multiple shallow shafts up which ore was hoisted in half-tonne kibbles, the technology generally reminiscent of De Re Metallica. Another 40 kilometre diversion on a dirt road seeking a gold mining prospect took us to a one-man salt mining operation, the operator living in an old bus in the dessert, and using his digger when asked to do so by the Mantos Blancos copper mine, who would send a truck to collect salt once in a while. Another diversion off the main road, this time of 57 kilometres, eventually took us to the San Cristobal gold-mining prospect we were seeking, where the Australian geologists on site welcomed the recent copies of Mining Journal I gave them with great enthusiasm. An overnight stay in Antofagasta was followed by a visit to the Escondida copper mine, then under development (the mill was still under construction).
As you can see from the above, I received much help on my visits to Chile from Ron and Sabine Crozier, hence my interest in trying to help Sabine to solve her 'conundrum'.
The question again
Has anyone any ideas? One thought I had was to ask for a copy of the Spanish text on the CD, with a view to having the book, as it exists, covering the nineteenth century, translated into English, maybe even trying that myself (I did, years ago, spend 3½ years in Mexico on an iron-ore mining/ore concentration project, to prepare feed for the Sicartsa steelworks in Lazaro Cardenas, so have a smattering of Spanish, plus a technical Spanish/English dictionary of mineral industry terms), but - would there be much interest in, or demand for, an English-language book on the history of the production of Chile saltpetre from the mining of the natural raw material caliche during the nineteenth century??? If so, I am sure others would be much better qualified to do the translation than I would be. Any volunteers?
Footnote - pronunciation
I was interested to hear some years ago an UK Open University lecturer, extolling the qualities of caliche in a TV programme which was part of the OU Science course my wife was taking, pronounce this as a two-syllable word, Kay - Leesh. It is, of course, a Spanish word, so pronounced with three syllables, something like ka - lee - ché, the latter syllable more or less as in Che Guevarra.
Sorry for the long-windedness of this posting.
Tony Brewis
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