Here we have a Chilean volcano, Choshuenco. We don’t know too much about when and how often it erupted because the maps in Chile were so bad that it was not clear which volcano might be going off. Many of the early maps of Chile were done by Jesuit Missionaires and in 1768 the Jesuits were forced out of Chile. No maps for you, was perhaps an unintended outcome. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
I am afraid Chile is not going to come across too well in this write up. In addition to the map issue, and the glacier issue we will get into later, we have the matter of the overprint. The overprint signifies that it is a postal tax issue that increases the denomination six fold. What do you do when a post office has a pile of nine year old stamps in such a low denomination that they can no longer get your mail anywhere. You could throw them away of perhaps auction them off to stamp dealers for pennies on the already too few centavos. If you just overprinted a new value you would remind the postal patron how fast prices are rising and by extension how badly managed the government was. So instead the overprint is presented as a postal tax, a one time charge to update the postal system. Was anybody fooled?
Todays stamp is issue RA1, a 12 total centavo postal tax stamp issue of Chile in 1970. It was originally part of an eight stamp issue from 1961. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents whether used or unused or whether or not it is overprinted.
The Chosehuenco volcano lies in the Los Rios region of Chile. It had a sister volcano named Mocho and in the valley between there is a glacier. There is some debate on where the current name of Chosehuenco came from. Some say it is from the Mapuche Indian word for yellow waters. Others think it come from the Indian Chod hu, which translates into water to be dyed yellow. Wonder how the Indians would do that?
The area was first mapped by Jesuit priest Alonso de Ovalle in 1645. He called it Peguipulli because you could see the peak from Lake Penguipuli. That was going to have to do until Abbot Molina published his book in Italy in 1795 on the geography of Chile. Molina had grew up in Chile but has a Jesuit Priest, he was forced into an Italian exile as Chile banished Jesuits in 1768. One can imagine how much his memory of the area had deteriated since leaving so many years before but he did contribute a new name for the volcano, Valdivia. Molina is most famous for noticing and writing about elements of animal evolution 45 years before Charles Darwin. Darwin quoted Molina extensively in his later work. The first reference to the current name was from 1895.
I mentioned that the two volcanos have a glacier between. In 2001, there was a grave report made that the area of the glacier had shrunk 40 percent since 1976. The remaining area was on borrowed time unless something drastic was done. Needless to say nothing drastic was done, you can’t after all snap your fingers and make it colder. Thankfully the doomsday folks have proved pessimistic and nearly 20 years later, there is still a large area of glacier in the area.
Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast Jesuit Priests with good memories. Come again tomorrow when there will be another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.