Unedited Gaze

Kawésqar Women and Men in the journal and watercolours of Lieutenant Vereker (H.M.S. Alert, 1879)

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22199/issn.0718-1043-2020-0041

Keywords:

Western Patagonia, Kawesqar, Fuegians, British Empire, Travel literature, Watercolours

Abstract

The Royal Navy’s officer F.C.P. Vereker did like to paint, and he did live on board between 1865 and 1884. Since he was 15 and up to his 34 he travelled through the world engaging in different tasks, as sounding the coasts of Patagonia and Australia, or bombing the port of Fort Jesus, in current Kenya. In most of his destinations, Vereker painted watercolours, and wrote down his impressions about them and the peoples who inhabited there. Almost all of his manuscripts of fine calligraphy and attached small paintings are located at the Royal Geographical Society, in London, and all of them remain unpublished. In this article I do present for the first time Vereker’s double register, visual and textual, of his stay in the South American Pacific archipelagos in early 1879, focusing on his representations of the Kawésqar men, women and territory; they are analysed in the context of the travelogues of the period. I do argue that the singularity of Vereker’s work is meaningful as it does produce a rather nuanced narrative, distant of the barbarizing rush of British authors as Fitz Roy, Cunnigham y Coppinger.

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Author Biography

  • Alberto Harambour, Universidad Austral de Chile

    Profesor de la Universidad Austral de Chile, investigador del centro FONDAP-IDEAL, e investigador responsable del Fondecyt 1181386 “Estado y mercado en las fronteras de la civilización. Historias transnacionales del colonialismo poscolonial en América del Sur (1870’s-1940’s). Entre sus publicaciones recientes se encuentran Soberanías Fronterizas. Estados y capital en la colonización de Patagonia (Argentina y Chile, 1830-1922) (Valdivia: Ediciones de la Universidad Austral de Chile, 2019) y el artículo, con Álvaro Bello, “La Era del Imperio y el colonialismo poscolonial: conceptos para una historia de las ‘fronteras de la civilización’ en América Latina”, Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 47: 2 (julio 2020).

     

References

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Published

2020-12-28

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Section

Historia

How to Cite

Harambour, A. (2020). Unedited Gaze: Kawésqar Women and Men in the journal and watercolours of Lieutenant Vereker (H.M.S. Alert, 1879). Estudios atacameños, 66, 155-173. https://doi.org/10.22199/issn.0718-1043-2020-0041