Journal of a Voyage to the Coast of Patagonia

January 1780. Three vessels of the King of Spain leave Montevideo for a coast that no one has ever surveyed. Their mission can be put in a single sentence: to find, somewhere between the 44th and the 52nd degree of south latitude, a harbour, fresh water and good land, and to found a town there. Antonio de Viedma, an official of the Crown, keeps the journal of this obstinacy.

Four harbours sounded without finding a spring. Wells dug and then deepened because the water comes up brackish. The frigate Nuestra Señora del Carmen runs aground and breaks up in the night with the horses still on board. A winter of scurvy, eighteen days of frost, a comet, mutiny placards nailed up at night under a hut at Puerto Deseado. Viedma sends the sick and the discontented back to Buenos Aires and stays on this coast with fifteen men. At the Pozos de San Julián he raises a wooden fort, blesses a chapel, sows wheat that finally comes up, and waits two summers for a ship that does not arrive.

Then there are the others. Two hundred horsemen on the beach, a cacique named Julián who lends his horses and refuses sabres, a cauldron of flour shared every morning, a quarrel over access to the salt flat, a funeral at which the dead woman's horses are sacrificed. Three years of neighbourly life with the Tehuelche, and at the end the November 1782 march to the west, as far as the great lagoon from which the Río de Santa Cruz flows, at the foot of two snow-covered peaks that the Indians call the chaltel. No map in Europe shows them yet.

The journal is followed by a description written in Buenos Aires in December 1783: the coast surveyed harbour by harbour from the 44th to the 52nd degree, then the portrait of a people observed at close quarters for three years, their toldos, their hereditary cacicazgo, their marriages, their quarrels settled with fists, their idol Camalasque carved from the wood of shipwrecks. Few eighteenth-century witnesses looked at the Tehuelche so closely or for so long. Published only in 1837 by Pedro de Angelis in Buenos Aires, after fifty-four years in the archives of Seville, this text had never been translated into French and, as far as we know, not into English, Portuguese or Italian either: it existed only in Spanish, in a scholarly edition shared with another narrative.

The first complete modern rewriting for today's reader, making this testimony accessible without betraying anything of the voyage. Original illustrations and ten maps of the voyage show the route, while a set of reference aids (glossary, chronology, index) and selected passages of the original text shed light on the reading.