author

Martin Dobrizhoffer

1717–1791

An Austrian Jesuit missionary, he spent years in South America working among Indigenous communities and later turned those experiences into one of the best-known firsthand accounts of the Gran Chaco. His writing is valued for its vivid detail, even as modern readers approach it with the caution due any eighteenth-century colonial source.

2 Audiobooks

An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, (1 of 3)

An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, (1 of 3)

by Martin Dobrizhoffer

An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, (2 of 3)

An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, (2 of 3)

by Martin Dobrizhoffer

About the author

Born in Graz on September 7, 1717, Martin Dobrizhoffer entered the Jesuit order in 1736. In 1748 he left for South America, where he worked in the Jesuit missions for many years, especially among the Guaraní and the Abipones in the Chaco region.

After the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish territories in 1767, he returned to Europe. Back in Vienna, he wrote the work for which he is best remembered, a large history and description of the Abipones and the wider region, drawing on his own experiences as a missionary.

Dobrizhoffer died in Vienna on July 17, 1791. Today he is chiefly remembered as a missionary chronicler whose observations preserve a rare and substantial European record of life in parts of eighteenth-century Paraguay and the Gran Chaco.