The southern half of the New World.
11 stories from this region.
In October 1704 the Scottish sailing master Alexander Selkirk, convinced his worm-eaten ship would sink, demanded to be put ashore on an uninhabited island 670 km off Chile. The ship did sink. Selkirk survived alone for four years and four months, was rescued in 1709 as a goat-skinned 'wild man' — and a decade later Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe.
Read the story →When Nevado del Ruiz erupted on 13 November 1985, its melting ice cap sent lahars — volcanic mudflows — down river valleys onto the sleeping town of Armero, Colombia. Around 23,000 of its 29,000 inhabitants died. Hazard maps had predicted the flow path almost exactly; evacuation never happened.
Read the story →Between 1864 and 1870 Paraguay under Francisco Solano López fought Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay simultaneously. By the end López was dead at Cerro Corá, child soldiers in false beards had been sent into battle, and Paraguay had lost a share of its population — perhaps 60 per cent, and the great majority of its adult men — without parallel in modern warfare.
Read the story →Discovered in 1545 at 4,000 metres in the Andes, the Cerro Rico of Potosí produced a huge share of the early modern world's silver. By 1600 Potosí ranked among the largest cities on Earth. The forced-labour mita system fed Indigenous workers into its tunnels for 250 years, and the mountain — honeycombed and slowly collapsing — is being mined still.
Read the story →In November 1780 the kuraka José Gabriel Condorcanqui — Túpac Amaru II — executed a Spanish corregidor and raised the southern Andes against colonial abuses. The rebellion he started outlived him: captured in April 1781, he was forced to witness his wife's execution and was quartered in Cuzco's plaza. The wars that followed killed on the order of 100,000 people.
Read the story →In 1879 Chile went to war with Bolivia and Peru over the nitrate-rich Atacama Desert. Chile won everything: Peru's richest provinces, an occupation of Lima — and Bolivia's entire coastline. Bolivia has been landlocked ever since, maintains a navy on Lake Titicaca, and still marks the loss every year.
Read the story →Argentine military forces invaded the British-administered Falkland Islands at 04:30 local time on 2 April 1982. The British task force dispatched on 5 April 1982 retook the islands across 21 May - 14 June 1982. The 74-day war killed 649 Argentine and 255 British military personnel. The Argentine military junta collapsed within a year.
Read the story →Maria Sibylla Merian, a 52-year-old Frankfurt-born artist and naturalist, sailed alone with her younger daughter to the Dutch colony of Suriname in June 1699. Over two years she documented the life cycles of approximately 90 South American insect species, ate the same food as her enslaved Indigenous and African informants, and produced the 1705 *Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium* — one of the founding works of modern entomology.
Read the story →Louis-Auguste Cyparis was the most famous of the two survivors of the 1902 Mount Pelée eruption. He was recruited by Barnum & Bailey's Circus in 1903, toured the United States as "the man who lived through doomsday" for the next eight years, and died in obscurity in Panama in 1929.
Read the story →Alfred Dreyfus spent four years and seven months in solitary confinement on a small island off French Guiana. He was the only prisoner. His guards were forbidden to speak to him. He kept a diary and survived.
Read the story →Manco Inca was the Spanish puppet ruler of conquered Peru. In 1536 he escaped, raised an army of 100,000, and laid siege to Cuzco for eleven months. He nearly succeeded. The last Inca state he founded would survive another 36 years.
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