Werlich’s book is perhaps the most thorough study of any ex-Confederate who left his homeland and sought to make a new life or a new living in Latin America, far from Yankee tormentors. Admiral John Randolph Tucker’s odyssey in Peru and Chile in the 1860s and 1870s not only forms a fascinating coda to the aftermath of the Civil War but constitutes a chapter in the evolving relations between the United States and Latin America.
Although other characters of fame dot the landscape, Werlich focuses on Tucker, whose career is traced first through the U.S. Navy and then as a Confederate officer who rose to the rank of commodore. Tucker found little employment of satisfaction after the Civil War. When offered the chance to assume command of the combined Peru-Chilean fleet defending the coasts in 1866 against the Spanish, he accepted. He fought no battles, except against prickly Chilean and Peruvian naval officers, and was forced from his position after eight months. He then became chief of a hydrographic commission appointed by President Mariano Ignacio Prado to map the Peruvian Amazon. From the late 1860s until 1874 Tucker and a small contingent of ex-Confederates and Peruvian colleagues worked out of Iquitos on their commission, producing the first modern maps and scientific descriptions of the region.
Werlich’s great strength is narrative based on an impressive research in original documentation. The historian of the period and of the region will find vignettes and anecdotes aplenty that add fleshtones and humanity to our knowledge of the region. If there are flaws, one is the tendency to follow every path and every character into the byways of detail. One might also have wished for some intepretative synthesis to place the subject within the context of modern historiography. That will have to be done by the reader. Excellent notes and a solid index support the narrative that meanders from the battlefields of Virginia to the drawing rooms of Santiago and the whorehouses of Iquitos.
