“American Amazon”? - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 120

Caribbean. In his view, it had two estuaries: the first where it poured into the Atlantic
and the second, its “true estuary,” where it deposited its sediments in the seas off the
southern Gulf Coast. This was the logic that folded Amazonia into North American he-
gemony. Oceanographically, Maury said, “that river basin (the Amazon) is closer to us
than to Rio and puts . . . the mouth of that river within the Florida pass and as much un-
der our control as is the mouth of the Mississippi.” The implications of this are noted by
da Cunha in his fragment where he calls the Amazon “the least patriotic of rivers.” 16 Da
Cunha's attention to this detail suggests that he was familiar with (and nervous about)
Maury's analysis, and indeed he worried about Maury's positions a great deal. 17
In Maury's view, in earlier times civilizations had emerged from discrete watersheds
like the Tigris or the Yellow River. But now, he believed, large multi-river basins would
become the great cultural and economic integrators. 18 Amazonia was seen as part of an
“American Mediterranean,” with the colonization and commerce of systems of water-
sheds (including the giant waterways like the Mississippi, Orinoco, and Amazon and
Central American rivers such as the Motagua, Patuca, and Cocos) mastered by a “New
Rome” based in the southern United States—New Orleans or Norfolk. 19 The relation-
ships of the winds and tides meant that “ships sailing from the mouth of the Amazon for
whatever port of the world are forced to our very doors by the southeast and northeast
trade winds: New York is the half-way house between Pará and Europe.” 20 For Maury,
the ocean currents mingled not only the waters and sediments of Amazonia with those
of North America but also their destinies.
Maury viewed the tropics as a cauldron that powered the earth's marine machinery,
but he also thought the tropics would fulfill other divine purposes. 21 The linking of
American Manifest Destiny to God's glorious ocean devices had several implications.
By midcentury, the Southern politicians more or less understood that slave economies
wouldenjoynofurtherterritorialexpansioninNorthAmerica.Excludedfromthenorth-
ern Great Plains and the West, Southern slavocrats shifted their gaze to the tropics.
“Southern Manifest Destiny” was a kind of inverse of Jefferson's imperial dreams. In-
stead of the Jeffersonian “Empires of Liberty,” the war cry of some Southern secession-
ists was “Imperial Republics of Slavery.” As the conservative journal DeBow's Review
wouldputitin1849:“WemustmeetourDestiny,aManifestDestinyoverallofMexico,
South America, the West Indies.” 22 Some antebellum Southerners, such as soon-to-be
Confederate president Jefferson Davis, already viewed the Gulf of Mexico as Confeder-
ateterritory.Others,likeMississippigovernorJohnQuitman,aveteranoftheannexation
of Texas and the Mexican-American wars, turned his gaze to the tropical terrains, full of
squabbling caudillos, proto-revolutions, native peoples, and freebooters of all kinds, and
saw a Central and South America that could be disciplined and developed as part of a
new American “Confederacy.” 23