19th-Century Travel Narratives of the Americas
In the nineteenth century, America stopped being a closed empire. In 1808 the Portuguese court, fleeing Napoleon's armies, moved to Rio de Janeiro and opened Brazil's ports to foreign trade; the Spanish American wars of independence, between 1810 and 1825, lifted in turn the bans that had kept travellers out. Naturalists, diplomats, engineers and merchants poured through the gap, and each brought back an America of his own.
Brazil was the first laboratory. Johann Baptist von Spix and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, who arrived in 1817 in the retinue of Archduchess Leopoldina, travelled as far as the Amazon and brought back thousands of plants; Auguste de Saint-Hilaire spent six years crossing the inland provinces; the expedition led by the Russian consul Langsdorff pushed towards Mato Grosso from 1824 to 1829. For fifteen years the painter Jean-Baptiste Debret drew daily life in Rio, its slaves and its ceremonies, while Johann Moritz Rugendas painted landscapes that became a model for a whole generation.
Further south and west, the young republics drew scientists and the merely curious. Alcide d'Orbigny explored Argentina, Bolivia and Peru from 1826 to 1833; Flora Tristan, who came to Arequipa in 1833 to claim an inheritance, watched Peru's civil wars with the eye of a free woman. Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace sailed for Amazonia in 1848, and Bates stayed eleven years. In Central America, John Lloyd Stephens and the artist Frederick Catherwood revealed the Maya cities of Copán, Palenque and Uxmal between 1839 and 1842.
In the north the task was no longer discovery but understanding a new society. Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States in 1831-1832 and drew from it his reflections on democracy; Frances Trollope mocked American manners. The painter George Catlin, then Prince Maximilian of Wied with his artist Karl Bodmer, went up the Missouri in the 1830s and painted the nations of the Plains shortly before the epidemics that devastated them. The Oregon Trail, the California gold rush of 1849 and the Indian wars then turned the West into a story of emigrants, prospectors and soldiers.
From one end of the continent to the other, these texts accompany the birth of the American nations and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples: scientific curiosity sits beside the appetite of investors, and nostalgia for a wild world is written at the very moment it is being cleared.
This collection brings together our editions and a directory of related texts.
Our titles on this subject
Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme
Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.
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Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied, Voyage au Brésil dans les années 1815 à 1817 (1820-1821)
In 1815, Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied landed at Rio and went up the coast toward Bahia, accompanied for a time by Freireis, Eschwege's companion among the Coroatos, and by the botanist Friedrich Sellow. He entered the forests of the Rio Doce and the Mucuri, where the war of 1808 had been declared on the Botocudos, and spent weeks among them. His Travels in Brazil, published in Frankfurt in 1820 and 1821, extends exactly Eschwege's chapters on the Indians of Minas: the same forest, the same peoples, the same violence of the frontier, observed a few years later by a naturalist who wants to understand them.
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Maximilien de Wied-Neuwied, Voyage au Brésil dans les années 1815, 1816 et 1817 (1820-1821)
From 1815 to 1817, Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied travels up the coast of Brazil from Rio to Bahia, through the forests of the Rio Doce and the Mucuri, among the Botocudos, whom he observes with a new attentiveness. Near the bay, at Nazaré, he is arrested at the time of the Pernambuco insurrection and held for three days, until the governor of Bahia orders his release. He then follows Itaparica, its whaleries and its fences of whale bone, and leaves Salvador in May 1817 aboard a ship the government had requisitioned. Ten years after Ver Huell, the same suspicion of the foreigner, and the same bay.
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Johann Baptist von Spix et Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, Voyage au Brésil (1823-1831)
Arriving in 1817 with the retinue of Archduchess Leopoldina, the zoologist Spix and the botanist Martius, the very man whose notice on Langsdorffia Eschwege publishes, crossed Brazil over three years: São Paulo, Minas Gerais and its mines, the sertão, Bahia, then the Amazon. Their account in three volumes, published in Munich from 1823 to 1831, is one of the great monuments of the scientific exploration of the country. In it we find Villa Rica, the exhausted lavras, the mule roads and the Indians of Minas, seen by two Bavarians who often walk in the footsteps of the Hessian engineer.
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Johann Baptist von Spix et Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, Reise in Brasilien (1823-1831)
Sent by the King of Bavaria in the wake of Archduchess Leopoldina, the future empress of Brazil, the zoologist Spix and the botanist Martius travel the country from 1817 to 1820. After Minas Gerais and its diamond mines, they reach the coast at Salvador, then set off again across the caatinga, where thirst and fever nearly kill them, study the Bendegó meteorite and finally ascend the Amazon. Their account, published from 1823 to 1831, is the great scholarly inventory of a country that the opening of the ports, decreed at Bahia in 1808, had just made accessible to foreigners. What Ver Huell looked at as a curious observer, they classify as naturalists.
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Maria Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (1824)
At the end of 1821, Maria Graham arrives at Bahia aboard the frigate Doris, commanded by her husband, as Brazil prepares to break with Lisbon. Her journal, published in 1824, describes the lower town, its markets, its churches, the sedan chairs and the slave market, which she says she cannot look at without shame and indignation; she also visits the island of Itaparica and its cane fields. English, educated, soon a widow, she sees the city with different eyes from the young Dutch officer, but the same sloping streets, the same cadeiras and the same violence of slavery run through both books, fourteen years apart.
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Hercule Florence, Voyage fluvial du Tietê à l'Amazone (1825-1829)
Hired as a draftsman on the expedition that consul Langsdorff, the letter writer of the Journal of Brazil, led from 1825 to 1829, Hercule Florence, a native of Nice, went down the Tietê from the province of São Paulo, reached Mato Grosso by the rivers, then joined the Amazon. His journal, kept in French and published much later, tells of canoes, portages, the fevers that ruin the expedition and the peoples met. He follows the river routes toward Cuiabá, whose convoys, attacked in the previous century, are recounted in Prado's account at the end of Eschwege's collection. The interior of Brazil, seen at water level.
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Gottfried Duden, Report on a Journey to the Western States of North America (1829)
A few years after Ernst, another German settled on the far side of the Mississippi and in turn wrote for would-be emigrants. Gottfried Duden lived from 1824 to 1827 on a farm near the Missouri River, west of St. Louis, and in 1829 published an enthusiastic report that persuaded thousands of German families to leave. Both books answer the question asked in one of Ernst's chapters: what should the European do? Ernst calculates, Duden makes people dream. Many of his readers, once they arrived, would reproach him for painting Missouri in colours that were far too bright.
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Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, Voyage dans les provinces de Rio de Janeiro et de Minas Geraes (1830)
The botanist Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, from Orléans, spent the years 1816 to 1822 in Brazil and brought back thousands of plants and a long series of narratives. The first, published in Paris in 1830, follows the road from Rio to Minas Gerais, by the same registros, the same ranchos and the same arraiais as the Journal of Brazil. Saint-Hilaire looks at people as much as at flora: the decline of the mines, the poverty of the gold washers, the slaves, the Indians of the aldeas. Read after Eschwege, he gives the sequel to the picture, a few years later, with the quiet precision of a naturalist who takes his time.
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Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)
Landing in New Orleans at the end of 1827, Frances Trollope travelled up the Mississippi by steamboat and settled in Cincinnati, where she opened a grand bazaar that ruined her. Back in England in 1831, she published a scathing portrait of the Americans: tobacco chewing, meals bolted in silence, the fervour of open-air camp meetings, slavery. She followed Ernst's route in reverse, from the delta to the Ohio, and found, eight years on, the towns he had seen being born. Her book caused a scandal in the United States; it remains one of the liveliest accounts of the West in the 1820s.
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Charles Darwin, Voyage d'un naturaliste autour du monde (1839)
On 29 February 1832, the Beagle anchors off Salvador. Charles Darwin, twenty-three, enters a tropical forest for the first time and notes that the word delight is too weak to express what a naturalist feels. At Bahia he observes luminous insects, spiders, a puffer fish that swells with water; later in his book he will voice his anger against Brazilian slavery. This account, published in 1839, is also a book of youth: almost the same age as Ver Huell, the same first great departure, the same wonder of a draughtsman and collector before the nature of the Bay of All Saints, a quarter of a century apart.
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Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, Travels in the Interior of North America (1839-1841)
A Rhineland naturalist already known for his journey to Brazil, Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied came to America in 1832 with the Swiss painter Karl Bodmer. They spent the winter of 1832 to 1833 at New Harmony, the former Harmonist town that Rapp had since sold to Robert Owen, then travelled up the Missouri from St. Louis to the country of the Mandan and the Blackfeet. The book, illustrated with Bodmer's watercolours, extends Ernst's route beyond the Mississippi. Where Ernst had admired a Harmony of hard-working believers in 1819, Maximilian found a town of scientists and reformers, a sign of how quickly the West was changing.
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Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842)
In the spring of 1842 Charles Dickens, already famous, travelled down the Ohio by steamboat to Cincinnati and Louisville, then reached St. Louis by the Mississippi. He went as far as an Illinois prairie, the Looking Glass Prairie, and came back disappointed: the vast plain struck him as monotonous. The meeting of the Ohio and the Mississippi at Cairo inspired a grim page on swamps and fevers. The novelist saw with a city dweller's eyes the landscapes Ernst had assessed as an agronomist, and the contrast is delightful: what enchanted the would-be settler bored the visitor in a hurry to get back to his readers.
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James Wetherell, Brazil. Stray Notes from Bahia (1860)
British vice-consul at Bahia for some fifteen years, James Wetherell died in 1858 without having published his notes; William Hadfield edited them in 1860. They are lively, precise fragments: the cadeiras carried on the shoulder by slaves, the ganhadores singing under their loads, whale meat sold at the market, the festivals, the dead child carried about in a chair decked with ribbons before being buried. Almost everything Ver Huell had discovered in 1808 is still there, barely changed, under the gaze of another foreigner settled in the city. The book shows how little Bahian society had moved in half a century.
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Richard Francis Burton, Explorations des hautes terres du Brésil (1869)
British consul at Santos, Richard Francis Burton traveled through Minas Gerais from June to November 1867, then went down the São Francisco by raft from Sabará. His book, published in London in 1869, promises in its very title "a full account of the gold and diamond mines." He devotes long chapters to the Morro Velho mine, worked by an English company, where slave labor continues. Half a century after Eschwege, the gold of Minas is no longer washed from the rivers but torn from the depths: Burton shows what became of the land that the Hessian engineer already saw running dry.
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Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883)
Before the Civil War, Mark Twain had been a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. In 1882 he went back down the river from St. Louis to New Orleans, weaving into the trip memories of his apprenticeship, pilots' legends, shifting sandbars and the submerged snags that ripped open hulls. This is the river Ernst descended by small boat in 1819, from St. Louis to Natchez, narrowly escaping shipwreck. Sixty years later the towns had grown and the railways were competing with the steamboats, but the river remained the same capricious master.
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