Book Reviews - Alberto Harambour, Un viaje a las colonias: Memorias y diario de un ovejero escocés en Malvinas, Patagonia y Tierra del Fuego (1878–1898): Santiago de Chile: Ediciones de la Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos and Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana, 2016), pp. 176, pb

Un viaje a las colonias: Memorias y diario de un ovejero escocés en Malvinas, Patagonia y Tierra del Fuego (1878–1898) brings together Spanish translations of previouslypublished memoirs and unpublished manuscripts held in the National Library of Scotland by the Scottish shepherd, William Blain. Blain’s memoirs and diary offer a first-hand account of life during the fever of sheep-raising in the Falkland/Malvinas Islands, on Tierra del Fuego and on continental South America, providing a personal perspective on this colonisation process at the southern edge of the Americas. Born in 1852, Blain worked in Scotland as a shepherd until his late twenties, when stories of the vast salaries to be earned by emigrating tempted him to the South Atlantic. He first worked as a shepherd in the Malvinas/Falkland Islands, before setting up the Monte Dinero sheep farm, at Punta Dungeness at the far east of the Strait of Magellan. Blain
also participated in the introduction of sheep to Tierra del Fuego, as a lower-level administrator for the Tierra del Fuego Sheep Farming Company.