Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson

Eva Ibbotson’s Journey to the River Sea was first published in 2001 to critical acclaim. The story, which is set in 1910, tells of the adventures of orphan Maia as she journeys up the Amazon river to her relatives in Brazil. As she does so, she falls in love with the ‘river sea’ (as it is called by locals) and longs to explore the wonders of the rainforest. 

There are several points of connection between Journey to the River Sea and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s books. Early on in the narration, Ibbotson establishes an explicit intertextual connection to Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy. While aboard the Cardinal liner en route to Brazil, the protagonist Maia meets Clovis King. Clovis is a child actor who is playing the part of the angelic lordling in a dramatic adaptation of the book. He is inconsolable because he is on the verge of puberty and trying to play the part of a seven-year-old. If he fails to play well or, if his voice breaks onstage, he will be thrown out by his adoptive parents; worse still he will have no chance to return to his beloved England and the foster mother he left there. Unlike the adventure loving Maia who is always on the lookout for new experiences, the fretful Clovis dreams of yorkshire pudding and bad weather and wishes to put an end to his itinerent acting career. 

Life mirrors art in Journey to the River Sea as Clovis gets an opportunity to play a real life Fauntleroy. Finn Taverner, an orphan living alonein the Brazilian jungle, is being hunted by agents for his uncle Sir Aubrey who wish to return the heir of Westwood to his rightful home. But Finn has no desire to return to England and claim his fortune; therefore he asks Clovis to use his acting skills to take his place as the long lost heir.  Ibbotson also borrows a central plot line from Hodgson Burnett’s book in that both books feature long lost heirs and the imposters who seek to usurp them. 

In Hodgson Burnett’s book, Cedric Erroll is every inch a lord, even before he receives the title. As with Sara Crewe or Dickens’ Oliver Twist, his noble nature and purity of heart is explained by the fact that he secretly is an aristocrat, even though he doesn’t know it. Their fairy tale rags to riches stories are not related to character development, but rather depend on character revelation. Each child faces a series of difficult tests designed to test their true character; their inner nobility is rewarded with an external recognition of their elevated social status.

Ibbotson’s book reverses this trope. While the imposter in Little Lord Fauntleroy is discovered and cast out, the pretender Clovis in Journey to the River Sea is taken in as the rightful heir. Sir Aubrey’s faith in ‘The Blood’ causes him to see an uncanny likeness between the penniless actor and his heir’s great uncle Alwin Taverner, an Admiral in Nelson’s navy. In this way, Ibbotson lampoons the socio-cultural hierarchies established by her literary predecessor. Material wealth is disdained by the honourable characters in the book and aristocratic position is represented as a form of incarceration rather than reward. In this book too, the focus is primarily on character revelation rather than internal development. Maia and Finn both face a series of trials that test their true nature; having passed the tests, they are each entitled to their fairy tale ending. Their reward is the freedom to continue their explorations up the Amazon, albeit under the watchful eyes of Maia’a governess Miss Minton.

Author Eva Ibbotson (1925-2010)

For Ibbotson, the natural world is a place of regeneration. When Maia falls in love with the Amazon, she gathers the strength to find herself. Journey to the River Sea establishes  a contrast between wildness/vibrancy on the one hand and cultivation/sickness on the other. This is illustrated most clearly in her depiction of the cruel treatment of her book’s heroine, Maia, at the hands of her venomous relations, the Carters. The cruelty of the Carters, who own a rubber plantation on the Amazon River, correlates with their uneasy relationship to the natural world. The Carters refuse to eat native food and spend copious amounts of money on disinfectants and insect repellent in a fanatical effort to keep the jungle at bay; they are European usurpers in this Amazonian wilderness. 

However, despite its critique of colonial and racist mentalities, Ibbotson’s novel does skirt quite close to essentialising stereotypes in her descriptions of Finn’s ‘Indian side’ and his ‘European side’. For instance, when Finn vows to shoot the detectives of they come near him again Maia shivers and is reminded of his ‘Indian side’. Thus his ‘wildness’ is socially inscribed. While Ibbotson valiantly rails against degrading stereotypes of the indigenous tribes of Brazil, by reversing the tropes of these constructions - substituting bad natives with good natives, she runs the risk of replicating them. Nevertheless, this highly evocative exploration of the Amazon will certainly succeed in drawing readers in.

A wonderful story and masterfully written, Ibbotson's Journey to the River Sea will be a firm favorite of children who like to imagine places and lives distant from their own.