(In the 1820s members of the European expatriate community frequently attended to baptismal formalities not in Roman Catholic churches onshore, but on British ships moored offshore.)

As a mining engineer he exploited new copper-smelting technology employing "coal-using reverbatory furnaces"[5] which his father had introduced to Chile during or before the 1830s[6] and which at this stage gave an important competitive advantage.

He actively promoted the construction of the railway connecting La Serena with the port of Coquimbo, taking a significant shareholding in the project, which also linked up two of the family's smelting locations.

In La Serena he also backed the drainage project, proposing the construction of a canal to divert water from the Elqui River to an outlet near the port which would drain the coastal area of the Bay of Coquimbo.

There were good strategic reasons to protect the port in order to avoid the interruption of the transport of ores from the Lambert mines to the industrial processing plants in Swansea and to prevent an attack on the domestic smelting works at "La Compañía", a couple of kilometers inland from the bay.

On 5 May 1880, embarking from Cowes on the Isle of Wight (England), Charles Joseph Lambert set sail aboard the company yacht for a round the world trip, accompanied by his wife, their four youngest children, a governess, a nurse, a maid, a valet, a footman, a minister of the church and an artist called Robert Prichett.

He suffered "an epidemic of ‘choleric diarrhoea’" and booked a passage on a steamship to Liverpool where he spent his final months staying in an hotel beside the Royal Yacht Club.