page_title: Emeric Essex Vidal
section_title: Near-fatal wounding
hierarchical_section_title: Emeric Essex Vidal / Biography / Naval career / Near-fatal wounding
context_page_description: Emeric Essex Vidal was an English watercolourist and naval officer. His opportunities for travel, his curiosity about local customs and human types, and his eye for the picturesque, led him to make paintings which are now historical resources. A landscape painter and a costumbrista, he was the first visual artist to leave records of the ordinary inhabitants of the newly emergent Argentina and Uruguay, including the first depictions of gauchos. He also left records of Canada, Brazil, the West Indies and St Helena, where he sketched the newly deceased Napoleon.
  No full-length biography of Vidal yet exists; only brief accounts, written from the viewpoints of the lands he visited. Although a number of his watercolours have been published as hand-coloured aquatints, or by modern printing methods, or sold at auction, it is plausible that most have been lost or await rediscovery in private collections.
context_section_description: In 1832 Vidal was seriously wounded in the Portuguese War of the Two Brothers.  He was acting as interpreter to the admiral's flag captain and they went on shore in Oporto to observe a Dom Pedro military position which, however, came under attack from a Dom Miguel force.  He was pierced through the body (two sources say through the liver) by a musket ball.  A British officer told the Sunday Times:
  Mr Vidal, the admiral's purser [has] been shot through both sides above the hip.  He is not yet dead, but his case is a bad one.  He was a gentleman universally respected in the fleet, and his wound is deeply deplored.
    Some newspapers reported he was dead.  One source recalled that Vidal was brought back to a British ship bleeding, in great pain, in an open boat.
  Vidal made a recovery and was "still serving, although almost worn out", as late as August 1836 aboard HMS Dublin at Rio de Janeiro, where he wrote a memorial to the Admiralty, complaining that admirals' secretaries got no pensions.
caption: HMS Asia, stern view.  While serving as her purser Vidal was seriously wounded.
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