Carleton Watkins Valparaíso, 1849
disruptions, a sixteen-foot high tsunami. The extent of damage to calle de la Aduana, no. 113 is unknown, however, the studio was on the upper floor and thus would have been less vulnerable to the high water.
The earthquake swarm of spring, 1849, was documented in writing by the head of a U.S. Navy contingent that was present in Valparaíso on a special mission.[20] The published report shows there was plenty of advance warning for photographers and others to prepare themselves with preliminary tremors on the five preceding days. On November 18, the most violent tremor came at 6:12 a.m., lasted eighty-four seconds, and is estimated to have measured 7.5 on the present-day Richter scale. The earth shook violently for almost a minute and a half. Periodic earthquakes continued with four more on November 18, then multiple tremors on November 19 and 20. The U. S. Naval team recorded a total of thirty-one individual seismic events over the same number of days in October and November, followed by another comparably severe earthquake a month later. It struck Valparaíso on the afternoon of December 22, 1849, by which time we believe Carleton had been practicing photography for a little more than six months. As a novice in photography he was unprepared to take his camera into the field.
However, no other photographers in Chile appear to have done so either since no daguerreotype or other photographs showing the aftermath of the enormous 1849 Chilean earthquakes have survived, nor is there evidence that any were made. The procedures of photography had evolved to a point that such pictures would have been possible from a technical perspective. Common sense tells us that if photographs of earthquake damage had been made they would have survived because of their local cultural and historical importance. However, photographers were not inclined to make daguerreotypes in the field even when they were bystanders to historic events.
The situation was not unique to Chile. In the aggregate, thousands of daguerreotypes were made in Europe and the Americas in the 1840s and 1850s, but the vast majority of them were created in the controlled environment of the photographers' studios. Very few daguerreian photographers worked outdoors because the materials were clumsy and the key procedures required to secure an image—sensitizing and developing the plate—were prone to erratic results when performed out-of-doors. Moreover, photographers generally took their cameras into the field only when someone hired them to do so, and these types of assignments were few and far apart. Since one-of-a-kind daguerreotypes could not easily