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

The reports, written from the perspective of the traveler on location, purport to impart knowledge—in the form of empirical geological, hydrographic, climatic, zoological, botanical, and anthropological data—to an interested but passively observant European readership. The essay, on the other hand, at once embraces and radically deviates in various ways from the expansionist strategy of scientific description. It supplements the reports’ discourse of scientific observation of nature with utilitarian analyses of the resources, business opportunities, and financial prospects geared at a readership who may act on such information.

This change of tone cannot be reduced to the mere presence of additional information. B. Philippi’s simple twist of authorial intent, stated in the introduction and repeated occasionally throughout the essay, considerably changes the value of his signifiers. The uninvolved report on geology becomes an assessment of land ownership and distribution, mining prospects, and the cost of real estate; hydrography of bodies of water and their sources and estuaries turns into an evaluation of transportation potential; climate and weather observations serve as evidence of agricultural promise; the nomenclature of the local flora and fauna shifts towards a discussion of their agricultural value; the anthropological study of natives and creoles mutates into an assessment of consumer markets. The introduction to the essay, then, fundamentally changes the dynamic of the text. By recasting the valency of signifiers and shifting from an observing to an appropriating rhetoric, the pamphlet supplants the intended audience, switches genre, and alters the field of operation of what is, in parts, the same text as before.

In contrast to the military proposal, the rewrite’s authoritatively empirical voice, clear persuasive strategy, and capitalist rhetoric acted on its readers as desired. While the Geographic Society in Berlin continued to produce scientific discourses on Southern Chile, complementing B. Philippi’s reports with footnotes, supplemental talks, and discussions of the collections that he had shipped to the museum,²⁵ R. Philippi privately recruited settlers in his home state of Hesse-Kassel on his brother’s behalf (and for that purpose very likely circulated the pamphlet in the years before its delayed publication).²⁶ He soon convinced the first would-be emigrants to leave Germany for Chile instead of other American destinations such as the United States or Argentina.