A Journey to Brazil, 1853

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Excerpts from the original manuscript of George Dunham's travel journal.

In designing a lesson plan around Journey to Brazil and nineteenth-century U.S. travel narratives, an
instructor may also want to include a representative of those works dedicated to travel in the Holy Land.

Texts that focused on journeys to Palestine and its surrounding territories enjoyed a massive degree of popularity among American readers, particularly in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Some of the more popular of these works included Twain's The Innocents Abroad (1869) and W. M.

Thomson's The Land and the Book (1870), an illustrated travelogue of the Holy Land. In his critical study American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania, Hilton Obenzinger argues that since many Americans regarded themselves as a chosen people, anointed by God to carry out a revivalist mission in this new nation, written works on the Holy Land held for them a special interest. Obenzinger insists, and many critics agree with him, that even if Holy Land literature was not the most popular form of travel narrative (though it may have been), then it was certainly the most ideologically signi cant.

Dunham's journal forces us to at least re-think that assertion. The 1853 publication of the journal shows an interest on the part of the American reading public in travel, both real and imagined, to places throughout the Americas as well.

Richard Henry Dana, the same man who famously wrote on the western frontier, would chronicle his travels in the Caribbean in an 1859 book entitled To Cuba and Back: A Vacation Voyage.

John O'Sullivan, accredited with the coining of the term Manifest Destiny, would in later years become a staunch advocate for the annexation of Cuba to the U.S. Finally, A Journey to Brazil provides yet another piece of compelling evidence that the hemisphere as a whole played a role in the U.S. imagination equal to that of both the western frontier and the Holy Land.

Bibliography

• Dana, Richard Henry. Two Years Before the Mast and Other Voyages. New York: Library of America, 2005.
• Edwards, Justin. Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature, 1849-1930. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 2001. 
• Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002.
• Obenzinger, Hilton. American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999.
• Thomson, W. M. The Land and the Book. London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1870.
• Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad; Roughing It. New York: Library of America, 1984.