[From pirates to virus: the Oropesa's journey]

In 1902, being Chile a country free of yellow fever, the British steamship Oropesa arrived from Rio de Janeiro with three passengers suffering this disease. Captain Hayes rejected the quarantine imposed by the local Junta of Sanity in Punta Arenas and also in Coronel, following his journey with the sick passengers to Valparaiso, port where he accepted a brief quarantine and medical services for the most compromised of the three patients, who unfortunately died. The knowledge about yellow fever and the applicable epidemiological measures in that time in Chile come to us through the sessions of the Superior Council of Public Hygiene. The threat that implicated the presence of the Oropesa in Chilean coasts is compared with the arrival of British pirates and corsairs in the colonial centuries, before the independence, announced with the alarm cry charque (for Sharp) is coming to Coquimbo!