“American Amazon”? - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 119

intimately connected with the US ambitions and international diplomacy of seafaring,
steamship development, and river trade. He was powerful enough, and in the 1850s the
navy was important enough, that he could mobilize the national resources to send his
brother-in-lawHerndonalongwithLardnerGibbononanexpeditionthatwouldproduce
one of the durable Amazon travel classics: Exploration of the Valley of the Amazons . 9
As Maury outlined it in his letter of instruction to Herndon, the expedition was to “pre-
pare the way for that chain of events” so that soon the region would be understood “as
an American Colony.” 10 This reconnaissance was meant to provide the empirical found-
ation for US colonization of the Amazon: to, as he put it: “revolutionize, republicanize
and Anglo-Saxonize that valley.” 11
Maury's interest in Amazonia and Confederate imperialism had many sources: his
professional work on the flow of currents, his yearnings for a “Southern Manifest
Destiny,” and his preference for certain theories about environmental determinism and
racialhierarchy.Allofthesecoalesced inavisionofa“Confederacy intheTropics”that
wouldreachfromVirginiaintotheAmazon,andabroaderhemisphericdivisionbetween
American slave and nonslave economies. 12 The politics of Maury place him centrally in
the Southern faction of the Young America movement in the United States.
TheYoungAmerica movement hadseveral strands.Onewasaloosecultural andcrit-
ical literary association whose purpose was to develop a distinctly “American,” postco-
lonial,NewWorldvoice.AmongthisgroupwereiconsoftheAmericancanonEmerson,
Melville, and Hawthorne. 13 Others were radical populists in favor of agrarian reform,
involved in the free soil movement, and supporting the various 1848 uprisings. But bey-
ond cultural nationalism and the socialist sympathies of one part of the Young Amer-
icans was another that took its inspiration from a more imperial and politically conser-
vative cast. These Young Americans were engaged in a deep political re-imagination of
US political sensibilities and global role. This involved a shift from the centralized gov-
ernance, isolationist, yeoman trajectory of the postrevolutionary Jeffersonian period to
the more imperial thought and laissez-faire economy that inhered in Jacksonian demo-
cracy. 14 The important Southern segment of this movement was inflamed by a fiery na-
tionalism, Manifest Destiny, and international interventionist politics, and was also pro-
foundly pro-business. 15
“Our Sweet Sea”
Maury'sargumentforlinkagesbetweenAmericaandAmazoniatookitsinspirationfrom
hisstudyofwindandcurrents,fromwhichheconcludedthatalogreleasedatthemouth
of the Amazon would float through the Caribbean (that “American Mediterranean” and
“our sweet sea”) past the Mississippi delta through the Gulf of Mexico and the Flor-
ida Straits. Thus, like many other rivers of the Southern states, the Amazon fed into the