Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the Ge ...

Even granting the possibility of an administrative perception of insufficient defenses along the Frontera,¹⁷ B. Philippi’s proposal to the Chilean government was apt to be dismissed as coming from a foreigner and civilian with few government contacts and no political clout. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the Chilean government did not adopt the proposal.

Rewriting

Nevertheless, the proposal links into a chain of textual permutations that calls for a closer examination of its making. Only weeks before B. Philippi asked García to communicate his settlement scheme to the government, he had caught the intendant’s interest by presenting him with a Spanish-language version of a seminal report on an expedition to Lake Llanquihue that he and a few other men had conducted in February of the same year. Simultaneously, B. Philippi sent a German version of the same report to his brother in Germany, where it was published by the Geographic Society of Berlin. In Berlin, the report was introduced by title as the “Mittheilungen,” or “communications,”¹⁸ of a disinterested naturalist that would, as one of B. Philippi’s earlier contributions to the Society asserted, “not seem unworthy of the attention of the honorable Geographic Society, as they regard places rarely visited by Europeans and may in many respects expand our knowledge thereof ” (“Einige Mittheilungen” 40).¹⁹ The Spanish version, in turn, was presented to the government as an actionable proposal, namely to build a new road along the route that B. Philippi had chosen during his February expedition. The report was accompanied by a map, “Map of a New Road from Osorno to Chiloë, proposed by Bernardo Philippi 1842,”²⁰ which, in title as in content, cast the “Mittheilungen” as the narrative part of a text whose primary impact resided in the representation of territorial organization and control. The Chilean manifestation of B. Philippi’s initial report relegated the narrative to the elaboration of an administrative project expressed in geographic terms. In this way, the two versions of the report addressed two vastly different audiences.