For three years, Auguste Guinnard was a captive and slave of the native Indians in Patagonia. His account of his time there is a thrilling tale of endurance and perseverance, and provides a rare insight into a culture as alien to the author as it was strangely familiar. The often brutal circumstances of the author's passage through the beautiful country did not lend itself to a strict observation of times or dates, nor to the more unhurried documentation of those such as Dickens or George Musters. Guinnard, however, manages to capture the intensity of his turbulent adventure, and in so doing to paint a vivid picture of the complicated structures and hierarchies of those intelligent and sophisticated "savages."