Brazil and La Plata: The personal record of a cruise

Stewart, C. S. (Charles Samuel), 1795-1870Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.8
Word count
883K words
Chapters
89

Tags

English Originals Travel Human GeographyHistorical ReappraisalTravel WritingNature ObservationSea VoyageAdventure JourneySouth American ExplorationGeography ScienceExotic CultureCross-Cultural View

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Brazil and La Plata: The personal record of a cruise by C. S. StewartAuthor: Stewart, C. S. (Charles Samuel), 1795-1870,Language: English, Class: F2501: Latin America local history: Brazil, Release Date: Jun 11, 2017

Editor's review

This book is a travel account by the 19th-century American naval officer Charles S. Stewart, recording what he saw during a cruise along Brazil and the La Plata basin. As a personal record of a voyage, its value lies not in systematic historical argument but in firsthand observation: the look of ports, coastal society, life aboard ship, and the everyday details of a transatlantic journey all carry the immediacy of a first-person account. For Chinese readers, the readability of such a text comes from its "rawness"—foreign observations not processed through modern narrative framing, which preserve a firsthand impression of the 19th-century South American coast. The free electronic edition from Project Gutenberg makes it easy to search and read alongside other sources. It suits reading as supplementary material for research on South American history, maritime history, or travel literature, and is also suitable for general readers interested in 19th-century transoceanic travel to browse at leisure. Note that the original is in English and that the narrative carries the perspective and limitations of the author's era.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents and chapter titles first, identify sections on Brazil and the La Plata, then read those closely
  2. Use a map of South America to trace the ports and routes mentioned and build a sense of space
  3. Read the author's observations alongside later historical accounts, noting his era's standpoint
  4. For the English original, read through for the general sense first, then return to details that interest you

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65
  66. 66
  67. 67
  68. 68
  69. 69
  70. 70
  71. 71
  72. 72
  73. 73
  74. 74
  75. 75
  76. 76
  77. 77
  78. 78
  79. 79
  80. 80
  81. 81
  82. 82
  83. 83
  84. 84
  85. 85
  86. 86
  87. 87
  88. 88
  89. 89

FAQ

Is this book a novel or nonfiction? It is a personal maritime account in which the author records in the first person what he saw during a cruise along Brazil and the La Plata basin. It belongs to travel literature and historical source material, not fiction.
Can I read it without a background in South American history? Yes, but it helps to know the general outline of post-independence 19th-century South America and to have a map at hand. The book is rich in detail but not systematic, and without background it is easy to mistake individual observations for overall judgments.
What are the advantages of the electronic edition? The Project Gutenberg edition is free and publicly available, supports full-text search, makes it easy to locate passages by place name or port, and is convenient for comparing and quoting alongside other sources—useful for researchers organizing materials.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Stewart, C. S. (Charles Samuel), 1795-1870 Author

Charles Samuel Stewart (1795–1870) is an author about whom only limited public information is available; the library currently holds just one work by him, Brazil and La Plata: The Personal Record of a Cruise. Judging from the title, the book is a personal record organized around a sea voyage, describing what the author saw and experienced in Brazil and along the Rio de la Plata in South America, and combining elements of travel writing with a ship's log. Works of this kind are usually written in the first person and focus on on-site observations of local customs, port scenes, and events along the way, offering first-hand material for later readers interested in nineteenth-century coastal travel and local life in South America. Since the library provides no confirmed details about his birth and death dates, nationality, or biography, this note makes no conjectures and confines itself to a brief description of the subject and genre of his surviving work.