Almost as soon as Simón Bolívar had bequeathed his illustrious name to the new republic, emancipating it from both Spain and the neighboring Viceroyalties of Peru and Buenos Aires, the British began to eye Bolivia's economic prospects. The British vice-consul in Lima dispatched his secretary, one J.B. Pentland, into Bolivia with instructions to collect economic and demographic data, chart the topography, and collect specimens for the British Museum. In 1826, Pentland took on the assignment with dispatch, wandering the countryside and compiling information on Bolivia's mines, settlements, government, laws, and institutions. But as he came to contemplate the enormity of the problems facing the newly independent Upper Peru, including the economic devastation left by the war of independence, Pentland injected a note of caution into his appraisal of Bolivia's future.

To this British traveler, coming up over the mountains from the desert seacoast, Bolivia's towering cordillera must have given him pause. Pentland quickly realized that the new republic had inherited an unenviable geographic location, especially since it had recently lost the Pacific port of Arica to independent Peru. Except for the tiny panhandle port of Cobija (which would be stolen by Chile in the War of the Pacific), Bolivia suddenly had turned into a landlocked nation, and its only access to the sea was across three hundred moonscape miles of the Atacama desert. Moreover, the republic's internal topography offered little relief from this bleak view.