Map of the American Hemisphere, 1823

A portion of a map from Henry Tanner's A New American Atlas (1819-1823) that includes
the U.S.'s Atlantic seaboard and Brazil.

Similar to other works of the time, Dunham foregrounds the exoticism of the foreign that readers found so tantalizing. Arriving in Brazil for the rst time, he marvels at the sense of di erence he feels between this place and the U.S.: I rst sett (sic) foot on land in Bahia in Brazill (sic) and looked around in astonishment it seemed like being transported to another planet more than being on this continent everything was new and wonderfull (sic) the buildings without any chimneys and covered with tiles the streets narrow and full of negroes a jabbering (35). 

He goes on to write, in a similar vein, the trees green and covered with tropical fruit and every thing else so di erent from home that was some time before I could realize that I was here (36). The combination of foreign landscape, architecture, and peoples overwhelms Dunham, producing in him a sense of disorientation that was common among nineteenth-century author-travelers. 

At the same time, the presence of a black slave population would have been a point of keen interest, as well as identi cation, for many U.S. readers. Dunham no doubt knew that readers would be projecting their own experiences with slavery onto these moments within his journal, exciting curiosity about his experiences and debate about the relative merits and practices of the slave system. Many critics, such as Amy Kaplan in The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, have written that it is this blurring of the domestic and the foreign, of home and abroad, that is central to the socio-cultural operations of travel literature. 

Later in the journal, after he has spent some time in Brazil, Dunham engages in sharp criticisms of thepractical workings of this society, another familiar trope from the travel narrative. Manifestations of his frustration take on nationalist overtones in statements such as, I am satis ed it is of no use to make any calculation on anything in this country where it depends upon the people to perform it (see Figure 2 [a]); or, they say that whenever a person has the consumption in this country if they have the fever they die immediately (see Figure 2 [b]). 

The latter pronouncement portends the death of the American traveler owing to the relative medical backwardness of foreign lands. The implied superiority of U.S. knowledges and practices pervades much travel literature of this time, including those forementioned texts concerning the burgeoning western frontier. As scholars have noted, these articulated attitudes toward the western territories invited, or perhaps even demanded, the civilizing in uence emblematized by competent white Americans.