“American Amazon”? - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 123

Maury's imperial position was that of Henry Walter Bates: “everything in Amazonia
remains to be done.” 37 Amazonia was, said other explorers like Charles Mansfield, “a
boundlesswaste.” 38 Mansfieldwouldputitthisway:“Likedogsinamangertheythem-
selves don't use the land and inhibit others from doing so. What a monstrous insanity
to guarantee with treaties the possession of such lands to the Iberians.” This view impli-
citly expressed the fashionable imperial ideas of Emmerich de Vattel, the Swiss jurist of
international law whose views on sovereignty and “natural law” suggested if a country
were not effectively occupying its lands, or held more than it would use or cultivate, it
should not oppose itself to others able to do so. Even liberal polities in Europe that had
earlier frowned on the idea of empire were finding it politically much more to their taste
by the mid-nineteenth century, and Vattel provided useful rationales. 39
The tropes of emptiness, primitivity, and incapacity were hardly new in the annals of
tropical claiming, but the nineteenth-century North American interests in the Amazon
Scramble animated several types of logics: economic interests melded to divine right,
merit bonded to destiny,chosen people (within the racial hierarchies), preferred political
system (republic), and the virtues of free trade (central to the economic theory of the
time), as well as in the larger political imagination involving righteous dominion and
heavenly purpose. “How fortunate it was that the Amazon was empty,” wrote Maury,
“since then it could be populated by North American slaves.” 40
Maury's Instructions
Maury's letter to Herndon of November 13, 1850, was wild about the possibilities of
colonization. In Maury's opinion, which later echoed throughout Herndon's tome, open-
ing the river to free trade would soon induce a flood of colonists and their slaves
from the United States, and with steamboats and open navigation a vibrant economy
wouldemerge—“itwouldberegardedforallpracticalpurposesasanAmericancolony.”
Maury admonished Herndon not to let on to officials that he was reviewing Amazonia
for its possibilities for Confederate colonization. 41 Instead, Maury emphasized that
Herndon should forge friendships with governments and interests on the upper
Amazon—Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador—because if these countries cemented regional navig-
ation rights with Brazil, a means of “free trade” with external trading partners (the Un-
ited States) might indeed be possible. By 1853, when Maury published his collection of
essays on Amazon colonization, The Amazon and the Atlantic Slopes of South America ,
the strategy that he preferred was clear: develop treaties and alliances with countries in
theupperAmazonthathadwonopennavigationrightsintheAmazon,andthroughthese
stalking horses the United States could acquire access to the whole channel. 42
Maury's letter of instruction to Herndon urges exploration of “familiarity”: Could
one grow Southern crops like cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco? Was there any coal? Did the