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These memoirs trace the wild and adventurous life of Don Vicente Rosales from his childhood up to the 1860s. During that approximately half-century he saw and did more than a dozen ordinary men. At age eleven in Argentina he witnessed the executions of Luis and Juan Jose Carrera. From there, his activities and adventures took him on several journeys on sailing vessels around Cape Horn; to Paris, where he witnessed the July revolution of 1830; to various commercial endeavors including a distillery, the practice of medicine, and cattle smuggling; into service as an advisor to an Argentine warlord; as a miner for precious metals in the north of Chile; as participant in the California Gold Rush in 1849; as director of the government's project for German immigration and settlement in the wild south of Chile; and also as Chilean consul and immigration agent in Hamburg.

Around the world, Rosales lived through many of his era's watershed moments. His exciting memoirs offer a chance to relive the rush and chaos of these times--from a much safer vantage.