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History of Paraguay: discovery and the first European travellers

The first European to reach the country was a shipwrecked Portuguese sailor, Alejo García. Around 1524 he set out from the coast of Brazil with Guarani guides, crossed what would become Paraguay and the Chaco, and reached the borderlands of the Inca empire, bringing back silver; he was killed on the way home. His journey gave rise to the legend of a Sierra de la Plata, a mountain of silver, and in 1527 and 1528 Sebastian Cabot sailed up the Paraná and then the Paraguay River in search of it.

The town came next. On 15 August 1537 Juan de Salazar de Espinosa founded Asunción, which for half a century was the capital of the whole River Plate region. In 1541 the settlers of abandoned Buenos Aires withdrew there; Domingo Martínez de Irala, elected by them, governed the colony, where Spaniards and Guarani mixed from the start. Ulrich Schmidl, a Bavarian soldier of the conquest, described the Guarani, the Payaguá and the marches into the Chaco. In 1612 Ruy Díaz de Guzmán, born in Asunción, wrote the first history of the land by one of its own sons.

In the seventeenth century the name Paraguay came to mean, in Europe, an experiment: the Jesuit reductions, founded among the Guarani from 1609. In 1639 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya told of their defence against the slave raiders of São Paulo and published a dictionary of the Guarani language. Martin Dobrizhoffer described the Abipón of the Chaco; Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix published his History of Paraguay in 1756, and Voltaire sent Candide there in 1759. The expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 and 1768 closed the era.

Science arrived with Félix de Azara, a Spanish officer posted to the frontier from 1781 to 1801, who described the birds, mammals and peoples of the country. After independence in 1811, Dr Francia sealed Paraguay off from the world: the Swiss doctors Johann Rengger and Marcelin Longchamp, held there from 1819 to 1825, and Aimé Bonpland, a captive for ten years, left some of the few eyewitness accounts. The Robertson brothers, Scottish merchants, published their letters in 1838.

Under the López family the country opened up, and the American Thomas Jefferson Page surveyed its rivers from 1853 to 1856. The War of the Triple Alliance, from 1864 to 1870, devastated it; Richard Burton toured its battlefields and the engineer George Thompson wrote its history. Settlers followed, among them the founders of Nueva Germania in 1887.

This collection gathers our editions of eyewitness accounts and a directory of other early accounts of Paraguay.

Our titles on this subject

Colonial Description of Peru and Chile

Reginaldo de Lizárraga, late 16th c.

Around 1605, a Spanish Dominican friar completes half a century of exploration of the New World, from Quito to the Strait of Magellan. A first-rank witness judges colonial America without sparing anyone.

By the late sixteenth century Spanish America was no longer a land of conquest but a settled empire of viceroys, mines and convents. Reginaldo de Lizárraga, brought to Peru as a child, belonged to the first generation raised in the colonies and judged the country from within. His description, from Quito to the Río de la Plata, shows government, Church and Indigenous resistance through the eyes of a local, far from the official chronicles written for the Crown.

A Cruising Voyage Round the World

Woodes Rogers, 1708-1711

The corsair who rescued from a desert island the sailor who became the model for Robinson Crusoe.

Published in 1712, the journal of Woodes Rogers is one of the great English privateering narratives of the South Sea, written in the time of the War of the Spanish Succession. It tells of the rescue of Alexander Selkirk at Juan Fernández, the source of Defoe's *Robinson Crusoe*, the capture of Guayaquil and of a Manila galleon, then the return by Guam, Batavia and the Cape. Its descriptions of the Spanish coasts of the Pacific fed the English expeditions of the eighteenth century.

Journal of Brazil

Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege, 1777-1855

Along the gold and diamond roads, a German mineralogist probes the depths of Minas Gerais.

The *Journal of Brazil* catches Minas Gerais just as the Portuguese court settles in Rio and the gold begins to run short. A mining engineer, Eschwege adds geology, roads, laws and statistics to the travel narrative, and brings together the testimony of Freireis, Marlier, Langsdorff, Martius and Prado. He also documents the indigenous peoples of Minas and the 1808 war against the Botocudos, seen from inside the colonial administration.

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

Crónica del Perú, Pedro de Cieza de León, 1553 (1553)

The soldier-chronicler traveled the same roads as Lizárraga, a generation earlier. He saw Cajamarca after Atahualpa, Cuzco after Pizarro, Potosí in its earliest days. His prose, simple and precise, is the great source for descriptions of Peru during the conquest. Lizárraga knows it and sometimes cites it without saying so. To read Cieza after Lizárraga is to go back a generation, to find the cities under their first coats of plaster, the Indians still close to the shock of conquest.
Amédée-François Frézier, Relation du voyage de la mer du Sud aux côtes du Chili et du Pérou (1716)

Three years after Rogers, the military engineer Frézier sets out for the South Sea disguised as a merchant captain. From 1712 to 1714, from Concepción to Valparaíso, from Callao to Arica, he secretly draws up plans of the ports, counts the Spanish guns and garrisons, and observes the mines and the crops. He brings back to France the Chilean strawberry plant, which will give us our garden strawberries. His account appears in Paris in 1716 and an English translation follows as early as 1717. It covers the coast that Rogers sails up, seen this time by an officer's eye, attentive to defences more than to booty. The book is Relation du voyage de la mer du Sud aux côtes du Chili et du Pérou.
Richard Walter, A Voyage Round the World by George Anson (1748)

Thirty years later, Commodore Anson's squadron almost retraces the route of the Duke. Setting out in 1740 and decimated by scurvy off Cape Horn, it recovers at Juan Fernández, where the sailors find goats with slit ears that they link to Selkirk. It plunders Paita, watches in vain for the galleon off Mexico, then in 1743 seizes the Covadonga near the Philippines. The narrative, published in 1748 under the name of the chaplain Richard Walter, becomes a great publishing success. It shows what naval war made of Rogers's privateering model. See A Voyage Round the World by George Anson.
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Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du roi La Boudeuse et la flûte L'Étoile (1771)

Setting out in 1766 to hand the French settlement on the Falklands over to the Spanish, Bougainville passes through the Strait of Magellan, crosses the Pacific by way of Tahiti, Samoa, the New Hebrides and the Solomons, then reaches the Moluccas and Batavia before returning across the Indian Ocean. It is the first official French naval voyage round the world. His account, published in 1771, feeds the philosophers' debate on the noble savage. The comparison with Rogers is telling: the same seas, the same Dutch ports of call, but a voyage of state, of scholars and observation, where Rogers led an enterprise of prizes. The book is Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du roi La Boudeuse et la flûte L'Étoile.
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Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, Alexander von Humboldt, 1814–1825 (1814-1825)

The Prussian scholar retraces the Andean journey with the instruments of the Age of Enlightenment. Quito, Lima, Cajamarca, Chimborazo, the mercury of Huancavelica: the same places, seen through the eyes of the naturalist. Humboldt seldom cites Lizárraga, but he walks in his shadow, and the two books placed end to end offer a panorama spanning three centuries: colonial Peru still brand new in one, colonial Peru in its final stretch in the other.
Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied, Voyage au Brésil dans les années 1815 à 1817 (1820-1821)

In 1815, Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied landed at Rio and went up the coast toward Bahia, accompanied for a time by Freireis, Eschwege's companion among the Coroatos, and by the botanist Friedrich Sellow. He entered the forests of the Rio Doce and the Mucuri, where the war of 1808 had been declared on the Botocudos, and spent weeks among them. His Travels in Brazil, published in Frankfurt in 1820 and 1821, extends exactly Eschwege's chapters on the Indians of Minas: the same forest, the same peoples, the same violence of the frontier, observed a few years later by a naturalist who wants to understand them.
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Johann Baptist von Spix et Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, Voyage au Brésil (1823-1831)

Arriving in 1817 with the retinue of Archduchess Leopoldina, the zoologist Spix and the botanist Martius, the very man whose notice on Langsdorffia Eschwege publishes, crossed Brazil over three years: São Paulo, Minas Gerais and its mines, the sertão, Bahia, then the Amazon. Their account in three volumes, published in Munich from 1823 to 1831, is one of the great monuments of the scientific exploration of the country. In it we find Villa Rica, the exhausted lavras, the mule roads and the Indians of Minas, seen by two Bavarians who often walk in the footsteps of the Hessian engineer.
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Hercule Florence, Voyage fluvial du Tietê à l'Amazone (1825-1829)

Hired as a draftsman on the expedition that consul Langsdorff, the letter writer of the Journal of Brazil, led from 1825 to 1829, Hercule Florence, a native of Nice, went down the Tietê from the province of São Paulo, reached Mato Grosso by the rivers, then joined the Amazon. His journal, kept in French and published much later, tells of canoes, portages, the fevers that ruin the expedition and the peoples met. He follows the river routes toward Cuiabá, whose convoys, attacked in the previous century, are recounted in Prado's account at the end of Eschwege's collection. The interior of Brazil, seen at water level.
Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, Voyage dans les provinces de Rio de Janeiro et de Minas Geraes (1830)

The botanist Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, from Orléans, spent the years 1816 to 1822 in Brazil and brought back thousands of plants and a long series of narratives. The first, published in Paris in 1830, follows the road from Rio to Minas Gerais, by the same registros, the same ranchos and the same arraiais as the Journal of Brazil. Saint-Hilaire looks at people as much as at flora: the decline of the mines, the poverty of the gold washers, the slaves, the Indians of the aldeas. Read after Eschwege, he gives the sequel to the picture, a few years later, with the quiet precision of a naturalist who takes his time.
Voyage d'un naturaliste autour du monde, Charles Darwin, 1839 (1839)

The journal of the Beagle crosses Valparaíso, Coquimbo, Lima, Concepción, and Patagonia. Darwin observes the same ports, the same bays, but also the ruins of cities destroyed by earthquakes and colonial war. His pages on Chile and Peru tell what became of the cities Lizárraga had seen founded or mourned: Concepción in ruins, Valparaíso thriving with trade, Lima gripped by political unrest.
Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches (1839)

Aboard the Beagle from 1831 to 1836, Darwin in his turn skirts Brazil, touches the Falklands, rounds Cape Horn, stays in Chile and Peru, then spends five weeks in the Galápagos in September 1835, before returning by the Cape. Where Rogers sought fresh water and tortoises to feed his crews, the young naturalist notes the differences from island to island among the finches and the giant tortoises. His journal, published in 1839, changes the way these archipelagos are seen, which the Bristol privateers took for dry and useless rocks. See Journal of Researches.
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Souvenirs d'un voyage au Chili, Gabriel Lafond de Lurcy, 1843 (1843)

The French sailor frequented the ports of the southern Pacific coast in the years following independence. His pages on Valparaíso, on Callao, on the ruins of Arica take the measure of time passed: the same bays, the same winds, but the Spanish banners have vanished, and the Creole republics seek a new order amid the setting Lizárraga once inventoried.
Herman Melville, Les Encantadas ou îles enchantées (1854)

In 1841 the whaler Acushnet sails past Albemarle Island, in the Galápagos, with a young sailor named Herman Melville aboard. Thirteen years later, under the pseudonym Salvator R. Tarnmoor, he publishes in Putnam's Monthly ten sketches of these islands of ash and lava, peopled by tortoises, hermits and former buccaneer lairs. He cites the old buccaneer accounts, such as Cowley's, by sailors who, before and after Rogers, came there for tortoises. The text, reprinted in 1856 in The Piazza Tales, turns into a moral landscape the archipelago that Rogers's journal describes as a hurried seaman. The sketches are The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles.
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Richard Francis Burton, Explorations des hautes terres du Brésil (1869)

British consul at Santos, Richard Francis Burton traveled through Minas Gerais from June to November 1867, then went down the São Francisco by raft from Sabará. His book, published in London in 1869, promises in its very title "a full account of the gold and diamond mines." He devotes long chapters to the Morro Velho mine, worked by an English company, where slave labor continues. Half a century after Eschwege, the gold of Minas is no longer washed from the rivers but torn from the depths: Burton shows what became of the land that the Hessian engineer already saw running dry.
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Aux pays de l'argent, Jules Huret, 1911 (1911)

The reporter for Le Figaro crosses South America on the eve of the First World War. Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Potosí, La Paz, Lima: he visits the same places as Lizárraga, but with a train, a camera, a journalist's notebook. The Inca cities have become tourist attractions, the Potosí mine is nearly exhausted, and the colonial legacy shows through everywhere like bones beneath the sand.

History of Paraguay: discovery and the first European travellers