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MLN 120.2 (2005) 287-293



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Francis Bond Head and Domingo Sarmiento:

A Note on the Sources of Facundo

University of Virginia

More than a dozen narratives of residence and travel in Argentina and Chile were published in England between about 1825 and 1835. These narratives have been extensively catalogued and described (Cordero; Jones), and in the twentieth century almost all of them were translated into Spanish for the first time. They clearly provide valuable—if somewhat biased—information about social and economic life during the period, and they have very frequently been cited as an important influence in the development of Argentine literature in the early nineteenth century. The extent and nature of that influence, however, may well be a considerably more complicated matter than has often been assumed, and it is important not to overstate the case. A few copies of these travel books might have reached Argentina before 1840, but none was published in French, the primary foreign language of most cultured Argentines. My purpose here is to provide a brief description of the most important of these travel narratives and to reopen the question of their real impact on Argentine literature in general and on Sarmiento's Facundo in particular.

These travel narratives were written by "non-professional cultural producers," to use Pierre Bourdieu's term (124)—a group of Englishmen from various economic and social backgrounds and with different levels of education and literary ability who served as what Mary Louise Pratt has called "the capitalist vanguard" of British mercantilism [End Page 287] in Argentina and Chile (146-48). These narratives provided sedentary readers back in England with detailed descriptions of an exotic and largely unknown area widely believed to possess enormously valuable mineral and agricultural resources, but they also celebrated the physical and emotional superiority of the English male, hardy enough to survive extraordinary physical and emotional hardships amid harsh and unforgiving landscapes that sometimes bear almost no resemblance to the sublime panoramas Humboldt and other earlier travelers had described (Cicerchia 7; Pratt 149).

At the same time, these narratives often confirmed their English readers' social, ethnic, and religious prejudices, in general portraying both urban and rural Spanish Americans as indolent, filthy, and resistant to progress. Edmond Temple's comments in his Travels in Various Parts of Peru are typical: "The Gauchos, or inhabitants of the endless plains called pampas are, in appearance, a fine race, but in comparison with the peasantry of England and France, little better than a species of carnivorous baboon. . . . [But] I have never seen amongst them that abject, that degrading misery, which is so general among the peasantry of Erin go bragh!" (1: 60-61). Despite their shared conviction of the superiority of all things English, however, the most widely-read of these texts—those of Miers, Andrews, Temple, and Head—do not narrate English triumphs. Rather, they recount the serious reverses suffered by the mining companies these men were hired to lead and represent, and their publication may have influenced a temporary retreat of British investment in Spanish America after about 1830 (Pratt 147).

Far and away the most popular of these narratives among English readers, Captain Francis Bond Head's Rough Notes taken during some rapid journeys across the Pampas and among the Andes, was written "in exception to the entire discourse" of this group of texts, and "aggressively reversed the value signs of his compatriots" (Pratt 153).1 Head's narrative romanticizes both the landscapes and the populations he encounters, idealizing the Gauchos with whom he travels and the Indians who both frighten and fascinate him. First published in London in 1826 and widely read and reviewed at the time, Head's [End Page 288] book was in its fifth English edition by 1851. An American edition was published in Boston in 1827, and was reviewed in the prestigious North American Review (24.55: 295-321). The Rough Notes were never translated into French, but a reviewer for the influential Paris journal Le Globe in 1826 praised the book...

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