A Spanish Prisoner in the Ruins of Napoleon’s Empire

This little gem offers a snapshot of Europe at a time of enormous flux and confusion and constitutes a treasure trove for historians, linguists, human geographers and other scholars interested in matters relating to social interaction, gender and the environment. Mainly, because it is not exactly what the title may suggest. It is not a diary, but a journal based on notes that were revised from memory a year after a three-month trip was undertaken by a Spanish escapee from Chalon-sur-Saône, the village where he had, indeed, spent five years in captivity as a prisoner of war, albeit with permission to live in rented rooms and to pay occasional visits to friends in nearby PoW camps. Nor is this work a translation as some reviewers have stated, but something rather unique: a source written in English by somebody who was not a native English speaker. Praise is due to the colleagues, relatives and friends of Christopher Schmidt-Nowara who brought this edition to light after his untimely death in 2015 respecting his decision to let the original manuscript shine through ungrammatical errors and various strains of Castilian, French and German literally poured into English words in order to give the reader a sense of the lively, direct, at times hilarious style of the author. Fernando Blanco White (1786–1849) descended on his paternal side from Irish merchants who early in the eighteenth century migrated to Seville escaping the penal laws, made their fortune and as a result were granted the privileges of the Spanish nobility in perpetuity. Fernando’s father, Guillermo changed the family name to Blanco and married into the local gentry. Thoroughly integrated into Andalusian society, the Blancos still retained important links with the British Isles through their commercial activities and those of the local Irish community among whom it was common for their offspring to receive at home the rudiments of the English language.

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