A Journey to Brazil, 1853

Figure 5.1: An excerpt from page 14 of George Dunham's travel journal.

Dunham is more literal in his addressing of the relationship between traveler-citizen, himself, and his home country, the U.S. After a few days on board the Montpelier, he writes almost in passing, today I suppose Frank Pierce is inaugurated President of the United States but as I am out of his jurisdiction I care but little about it (see Figure 1). Once he has arrived in Brazil, he notes a visit to the American Consul,  compelling one to ask after the role of the U.S. in Brazil as well as what privileges Dunham might continue to enjoy as an American citizen even while on foreign soil. Journey to Brazil is a text that, like much of the travel literature of its day, questions the place of the nation and its citizen-subjects within an increasingly tangled set of international relations.

For readers of these texts, it is the relationship, or potential relationship, between the U.S. and other countries that takes center stage once the protagonists arrive at their destination. The novels of Melville and Poe were informed by the growing economic interest on the part of U.S. merchants in the South Paci c. 

As commercial activity increased in this portion of the globe, many observers agitated for the U.S. government to protect and facilitate the activities of these merchants. The disastrous encounters between the novels' characters and the island natives seems to warn against U.S. imperial involvement so far beyond its territorialboundaries. 

That being said, in a series of articles he wrote for The Southern Literary Messenger around this same period, Poe advocated quite clearly for an enhancement of U.S. interests in the South Paci c, so by no means can we assume that the political leanings of these authors were set in stone.

Much like Poe in Arthur Gordon Pym, Dunham devotes a fair amount of his text to cataloguing and attempting to classify the exotic plant-life and wildlife that he encounters over the course of his journey.

Dunham recounts that, during a hunting trip in Brazil, I shot three large birds two of them was kinds that I had shot before but one was a long necked blue bird like some of our shore birds and when we got back he wanted my gun to shoot an owl he took it and went out and in about ve minutes he came in with the most queer looking thing of owl kind I ever saw it was about four feet across the wings nearly white and the face looked almost like a human being (154). 

These passages may seem innocent enough; however, Dana Nelson explains in The Word in Black and White that any instance in nineteenth-century U.S. writing of the accumulation and categorization of scienti c knowledge regarding foreign territories portends some degree of imperialistic investment and desire. So although Dunham may have had no interest in presenting Brazil as a potential U.S. colony, it is possible, even likely, that he was adopting certain techniques and styles from other travel narratives that did possess an imperialistic bent.