“American Amazon”? - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 122

“How fortunate the Amazon is empty”
But should Amazonia be peopled with, in Maury's words, “an imbecile and indolent
people”? 32 The answer for Maury was clearly no—“the sort of labor necessary to the
extensive cultivation of cotton plants is compulsory labor.” “Looking into the future,”
Maurywrote,“IhaveseenanAfricanslavepopulationsofAmericaclusteredaroundthe
border of this 'Mediterranean sea.'” 33
Maury had strong environmental determinist views on race. He was a devotee of
Arnold Guyot, a protégé of Agassiz, who had trained with him in Neuchâtel, Switzer-
land. Agassiz had arranged for Guyot to join him at Harvard, although Guyot eventually
tookapostatPrinceton.Guyotwasaglacialgeologistandameteorologist;infactheul-
timately became the founder of the US Weather Bureau. Guyot was a creationist whose
views on environment and racial hierarchies echoed those of Agassiz and were outlined
in Guyot's book The Earth and Man and somewhat more rabidly in later life in his
Creation, or The Biblical Cosmogony in the Light of Modern Science . 34 Theprominence
of these three men, Agassiz, Guyot, and Maury, who headed major scientific institutions
of their day, speaks to the legitimacy and power afforded to scientific racism.
The Earth and Man contained rousing arguments about Northern intellectual acuity,
European imperialism, and a very specific justification for imperial occupation of the
tropics. This statement inspired Maury enough to quote it in his letter to Herndon: “It
is reserved for the European race not only to exhibit the most perfect phase of Human
Civilization but to impress that Civilization on other races of the World.” More to the
point, “the progress of the Negro would never develop from within, but by necessity be
imposed from without.” Informed by these ideas on the racial superiority and the fash-
ionable environmental determinism of the day, Maury would argue that “this [Amazo-
nia] is a place for slaves. The European and Indian have been battling with these forests
for 300 years and not left the merest mark. If someday its vegetation is tamed, if one
day its soil is reclaimed from the forest, its wild animal and reptiles subdued by the by
the plow and axe, it will have been done by the African. This is the land of parrots and
monkeys and only the African is up the task which man must realize there.” 35 While the
brawn would be black, the technical and sophisticated knowledge would remain the do-
main of their white masters. 36
With abolition, there would be four million slaves suddenly loosed into the American
scene. It would be far better to take white Americans and their slaves en masse and, as
had happened in the Mississippi, have them people a new place with a fruitful system
until it reached it its full productivity. These views required some empirical reconnais-
sance,anditwasMaury'skinsmanHerndonandmidshipmanGibbonwhowerecharged
with the task.