Richard Vowell was a British mercenary who served in the Wars of Independence in Hispanic America. A study of his writings offers a new perspective from which to reconsider the influential arguments of the section of Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York, 1992) that deals with European travel in the region in the period. The analysis centres on the ways in which Vowell depicted Hispanic American masculinities, indigenous peoples, collective identities and the diverse groups that made up society during the wars of independence. Vowell's writings suggest that further sources might be read against the traditional canon of commercial travel literature generally used by historians for the period 1800–1850.