Nicaragua en el Siglo XIX

This work is focused in the 19th Century and is a compilation of fifteen scarcely known testimonials. Almost all were written between 1823 and 1900 by foreigners that lived in or visited Nicaragua with diplomatic, scientific or economical purposes, or simply passed by when crossing the famous Transit Route : from San Juan del Norte to San Juan del Sur and vice versa. Jorge Eduardo Arellano, a master erudite, studies each of them, evaluating and extracting these news and reports in their correspondent introductions. He clarifies soundly the historical circumstances in which the writers were involved. These texts, for the first time grouped in this volume, include colonial administration statistics; productive activities; civil wars vicissitudes; uses and daily life; governors and politicians pictures, popular personalities and characters; channel project studies; cities and towns descriptions; monuments; rudimentary means of transportation; lakes and volcanoes; flora and fauna; ancestral and religious traditions. In these selections we find various texts from the last Spanish governor in the province, Miguel Gonz lez Saravia; from Holland s general consul for Central America, Jacobo Jaefkens; from two engineers contracted for working in the inter-oceanic channel project: Guatemalan Jos Batres Mont far and British John Baily. Also included are selections from the archeologist and diplomatic John L. Stephens; from the pro-American French priest Carlos Esteban Brasseur de Bourbourg, translator of the Popol Vuh and the Rabinal Ach ; from the mining entrepreneur William V. Wells, also American, who explored the Honduran region of Olancho; as well as from the Austrian ethnologist Carl Scherzer, translator, this time into German, of the Popol Vuh. Also from notorious authors, such as the famous writer Mark Twain, Frank Vincent, J. Laferri re, consul from his country in Central America, Desir Pector, Nicaraguan general consul in Paris; Baroness Wilson, an exotic Spanish publicist and Crisanto Medina, a Nicaraguan diplomatic in Europe, author of Nicaragua en 1900.