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Account of the author's journey to the California gold fields, interrupted by a captivity of 97 days in Patagonia.
The following book revolves around the story of a man who sets out to correct erroneous assumptions on the existence of a race of giant humans rumoured to be living in Patagonia and described in early European accounts, called the Patagonian giants. The first mention of these people came from the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan and his crew, who claimed to have seen them while exploring the coastline of South America en route to the Maluku Islands in their circumnavigation of the world in the 1520s.
The Spanish conquerors who explored the southern cone of South America reported back to Europe that the region was empty of human inhabitants. In truth, however, the large area supported a thriving, albeit low-density, population of foragers. Those foragers—the Mapuche, Tehuelche, Rankuelche, and Fueguian peoples—are the subject of this volume, which presents archaeological and ethnographic studies of their past. The southern cone of South America was one of the last regions to be colonized on earth. When the Spanish Royal Crown experienced difficulties expanding its colonial frontiers to include these lands, the area became known as a vast wildnerness at the very edge of the civilized world. As a result, the native peoples who did indeed inhabit the area were marginalized and as time passed the significance of their historical experience was ignored. This compilation of research by noted scholars of the region investigates the past of peoples largely neglected by the historical accounts of their conquerors. The history of the native peoples of Pampa, Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego is a vital aspect of the region's past. Their historical knowledge and experience play a vital role in the struggle of a people to maintain a sense of cultural difference in an ever-changing world.
Even before the arrival of Europeans to the Americas, the practice of taking captives was widespread among Native Americans. Indians took captives for many reasons: to replace--by adoption--tribal members who had been lost in battle, to use as barter for needed material goods, to use as slaves, or to use for reproductive purposes. From the legendary story of John Smith's captivity in the Virginia Colony to the wildly successful narratives of New England colonists taken captive by local Indians, the genre of the captivity narrative is well known among historians and students of early American literature. Not so for Hispanic America. Fernando Opere redresses this oversight, offering the first comprehensive historical and literary account of Indian captivity in Spanish-controlled territory from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Originally published in Spanish in 2001 as Historias de la frontera: El cautiverio en la America hispanica, this newly translated work reveals key insights into Native American culture in the New World's most remote regions. From the "happy captivity" of the Spanish military captain Francisco Nunez de Pineda y Bascunan, who in 1628 spent six congenial months with the Araucanian Indians on the Chilean frontier, to the harrowing nineteenth-century adventures of foreigners taken captive in the Argentine Pampas and Patagonia; from the declaraciones of the many captives rescued in the Rio de la Plata region of Argentina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the riveting story of Helena Valero, who spent twenty-four years among the Yanomamo in Venezuela during the mid-twentieth century, Opere's vibrant history spans the entire gamut of Spain's far-flung frontiers. Eventually focusing on the role of captivity in Latin American literature, Opere convincingly shows how the captivity genre evolved over time, first to promote territorial expansion and deny intercultural connections during the colonial era, and later to romanticize the frontier in the service of nationalism after independence. This important book is thus multidisciplinary in its concept, providing ethnographic, historical, and literary insights into the lives and customs of Native Americans and their captives in the New World.
This book describes the history of Patagonia from its discovery by Magellan to recent times. Since its early exploration Patagonia has been associated with conditions of extreme hardship and suffering. Men and ships were lost in the dangerous waters of the Straits of Tierra del Fuego, giving rise to tales of mysterious cities populated by the shipwrecked sailors, survivors of the many failed expeditions. Early Spanish attempts to colonize Patagonia ended in failure and the region remained largely uninhabited until the arrival of the Welsh in 1865. Their peaceful coexistence with the natives ended abruptly when the Argentine Army entered Patagonia and took over the Indian lands, which were promptly distributed to new settlers. As a new frontier society, Patagonia could not fail to attract its share of desperadoes and adventurers, the most notorious of whom are described in the book, including gold prospectors, hunters and bandits such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The volume also narrates the anarchist’s struggles that took place in Patagonia at the beginning of the 1900s and the unsuccessful attempt by Perón’s government to convert Argentina into a nuclear power. In the early 1800’s the French traveller and explorer D’Orbigny said, " Perhaps there is no region within the world of which so much has been said, but so little is known." Patagonia is still a largely unknown and uninhabited place, but it does have a rich history as described in this book.