Release date is 2025-11-04

Laurent Vogel, Pierre Lacaze and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by the Library of Congress)

"Trois ans d'esclavage chez les Patagons" by A. Guinnard is a first-person captivity narrative and travel account written in the mid-19th century. It recounts the author’s enslavement among Patagonian and Pampas peoples, blending a harrowing survival story with close, often technical, observations of landscapes, languages, tools, and customs. The focus is both experiential and ethnographic, offering danger-filled journeys, violent encounters, and detailed cultural portraits.

The opening of the narrative presents a brief preface: the author expands a previously published sketch, explains his aims, defends his map and spellings, and notes skeptics, before dedicating the work. He then tells how, as an ambitious young man, he sails to the Río de la Plata, arrives amid political unrest in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, and, blocked from stable work, sets out on foot toward Rosario with an Italian companion. Their winter crossing of the Pampas turns desperate—storms, loss of shoes, a near-drowning in a flooded ravine, days of starvation and delirium, a lifeline kill of a puma, and a broken compass that sends them into Indigenous territory. Ambushed while hunting, his companion is slain; the narrator is wounded, bound, and carried off, then left naked, weak, and forced to eat raw horseflesh. The account pauses to map the country and its peoples—Pampas, Mamuelches, and Patagons—describing rivers, salinas, game, and camps. He identifies his first captors as Poyuches, sketching their tents, superstitions, dawn bathing, and fear of storms, before being sold to the Puelches, who treat him harshly as he learns riding, lazo, and bolas, and observes their hospitality and horse-breaking. He also outlines the poorer, horseless Tchéouelches, and the section ends with his being sold again to Patagons of the east. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Paris: P. Brunet, 1864