Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Hastings went to Brazil, carried out some preliminary assessments, promptly wrote
his “Immigrants Guide to Brazil,” and organized a colony in Santarém, a town at the
mouthoftheTapajos. 63 “TheAmazon,”Hastingsnoted,“remindsusoftheMississippi.”
The colony itself was not so successful, and an account of the travails the migrants en-
dured to arrive in the humid little entrepôt reads like a melodramatic novel with extor-
tion, shipwrecks, mutiny, and onboard epidemics. 64 A few families endured and were
quite successful, and as elsewhere in Brazil, Americans were considered innovators in
agriculture. One of the first rubber plantations was established there with some twenty
thousand trees by descendants of the American colonizers. It was this early plantation
experience that later, unfortunately, convinced Henry Ford to establish his plantations
and company towns near Santarém. 65
Many English-speaking tourists and scientists washed up on the doorsteps of the
Santarém Confederates and enjoyed their hospitality. 66 The Anglophone enclave at
Santarém attracted adventurers of all types, including an Englishman, Henry Wickham,
his wife Violet, and their four children, who resided there, struggling economically for
several years. In the 1870s Wickham devised the biopiracy that would ultimately un-
ravel the Amazon rubber economy when he shipped out some seventy thousand seeds to
Britain's Royal Gardens at Kew. 67 Other migrants, including some Confederate military
men, joined Latin American armed forces. John Randolph Tucker, a rear admiral in the
Confederate Army, was invited to join the Peruvian navy with a few hand-picked Con-
federate officers. Later Tucker was appointed president of the Peruvian Hydrographical
Commission of the Amazon, which surveyed the upper Amazon from the ports at Iqui-
tos and upper Ucayali tributaries. Tucker and his cohort of Confederates were respons-
ible for naming the Ucayali port of Leticia at the intersection of Peru, Colombia, and
Brazil. It was named after President John Tyler's granddaughter, the first person to raise
the Confederate flag. 68 James Orton, traveling under the auspices of the Smithsonian in
1867, enjoyed meeting the Confederate crew on the Ucayali as he traveled around the
upper Amazon, noting natives, economies, shipping, and the value of exports in a less
famous but more economically quantitative reconnaissance of the region. 69
The impact of Maury and Herndon on Amazonian enterprises and entrepreneurs was
palpable in imaginary travels as well as concrete tropical ventures. In light of Con-
federate colonies on the Amazon, the young Mark Twain's yearning to take a steam-
boat to the Amazon and become a coca entrepreneur seems not so far-fetched. He had
read Herndon's book and, learning about coca cultivation, dreamed of introducing this
substance to the world at large. 70 Others, alive to the colonization discussion but con-
cerned about a different dimension of the slavery question—“the problems of the Free
Negro”—begantodreamofcoloniesintheAmazon,notformastersbutforfreedAmer-
ican slaves.
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