Second Time Around for Gripping First Ride Down the Amazon

This reissue of an American bestseller of 150 years ago brings us not only a remarkable man’s gripping tale of his journey through an exotic land, but also a fine window into the American mind of the 1850s. The young nation had been independent barely 75 years but was feeling its oats: It had just seized half the territory of Mexico, and California with all its gold was newly admitted into the Union. To the young republic, the future seemed dazzlingly bright.

So it was perfectly natural for the secretary of the Navy to send William Lewis Herndon, a young lieutenant, to Peru to climb the Andes, and descend the Amazon from its sources in the Cordillera and travel to its vast mouth at the Atlantic.

The exploration required the assent of the Peruvian and Brazilian authorities. Both willingly agreed because neither was capable then of undertaking such a venture on its own or, perhaps, could imagine that such a feat could be done. Peru was in post-independence turmoil; Brazil was still torpidly governed by an emperor.

Herndon’s written instructions carried no hint of the purpose of the expedition, but he seems to have clearly understood it as a quest to see what commercial advantages his seafaring nation might find there. His conclusion was clear: Open the Amazon to the commerce of all nations, and U.S. steamboats would conquer the vast South American interior.

When the Government Printing Office published his report in 1854, it was enthusiastically received by the public. The secretary of the Navy ordered 10,000 copies for the first run; three months later, he ordered 20,000 more. The young Mark Twain was so stirred by it that he tried to go to Brazil, but at New Orleans he found no boats to Para at the river’s mouth, so he hired on as a hand on a Mississippi steamboat instead.

“Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon” was reissued at the instigation of Gary Kinder, author of “Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea,” an account of the greatest sea disaster in American history, the sinking of the SS Central America, bearing passengers and gold from California, off the Carolina coast.

Herndon was the ship’s captain, and Kinder describes how he managed to save all 60 women and children by moving them to another ship during a raging hurricane. He and the men aboard went down with the ship. Kinder read Herndon’s Amazon report to find out what kind of man he was, and discovered a modest, engaging one, slight of build but strong of constitution, able to cross a 16,000-foot pass in the Andes unaffected by the thin air.

And Herndon also turned out to be a fine writer, for the most part, without the elaborate effects that muddied so much 19th century American prose. But Herndon did not entirely do away with flourishes, as this anthropomorphic description of the Amazon flowing from Peru into Brazil shows: “The march of the great river in its silent grandeur was sublime; but in the untamed might of its turbid waters, as they cut away its banks, tore down the gigantic denizens of the forest, and built up islands, it was awful. It rolled through the wilderness with a stately and solemn air. Its waters looked angry, sullen and relentless, and the whole scene awoke emotions of awe and dread--such as are caused by the funeral solemnities, the minute gun, the howl of the wind, and the angry tossing of the waves, when all hands are called to bury the dead in a troubled sea.”

Herndon’s beliefs reflected his times. He seems to have accepted slavery, in Brazil as in the United States, as a natural condition among men. He foresaw its end in the U.S., but thought that perhaps the American plantation owners might profitably transfer themselves and their slaves to cultivate the lands of Brazil.

“Exploration” also suggests that Herndon liked the Brazilians and Peruvians he met but bore a Yankee’s disdain for their “indolence.” With American energy, with the railroad and the steamboat, with the plow and the ax, it would be clear that “no territory on the face of the globe is so favorably situated.” The interior of South America would yield wealth, Herndon declared, that would outdo that of “ancient Babylon and modern London.”