52 pages • 1 hour read
Eva IbbotsonJourney to the River Sea
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: These Chapter Summaries & Analyses discuss the source text’s use of outdated and offensive terms to discuss Indigenous cultures and its portrayal of colonial stereotypes of Indigenous people. Journey to the River Sea also depicts racist attitudes.
The story opens in 1910 at the Mayfair Academy for Young Ladies, a boarding school in London run by two unmarried sisters, Miss Banks and Miss Emily. The young protagonist is Maia, the only non-white girl in the class. She was orphaned two years earlier when her parents died in a train crash in Egypt, and this tragedy serves as the motive force of the plot. In the opening scene, Maia is in geography class and nervously awaiting the arrival of Mr. Murray, her interim guardian and her late parents’ lawyer. When he arrives, he announces that she will be going to South America to live with the Carter family, which consists of Mr. Clifford Carter (her father’s second cousin) and his wife and twin daughters. Maia is to travel there with a governess in a month’s time. When she returns to class, her friends are shocked and worried to learn that she must go live in a jungle, and her teacher assigns everyone homework to study facts about the Amazon.
After dinner, Maia heads to the library and stays up all night reading about the Amazon. When she returns to class, her peers recite facts about the various dangers that exist in the rainforest. By contrast, Maia presents her discoveries of the area’s natural history, beautiful scenery, and interesting fauna. She tries to comfort herself and appear brave to her school friends. A month later, she feels sad and nervous as she leaves the boarding school and her friends. On the journey, she is accompanied by Miss Minton, an old, severe woman who is to be her new governess.
Chapter 2 Summary
Maia and Miss Minton board a steamship called The Cardinal, which will take them to the Carters’ home in Manaus, Brazil. Aboard the ship, Maia befriends a young blond boy named Jimmy Bates, now known as Clovis King. Also an orphan, Clovis lived in England with his foster mother until he was adopted by the thespian couple, Mr. and Mrs. Goodley, who use him as a part of their traveling theater troupe The Pilgrim Players. Clovis explains that his foster mother gave him up in the hopes that he would earn a good living as an actor. In reality, the Goodley family is poor and leads a difficult life moving from place to place. Clovis is homesick for his foster family, English weather, and familiar food, and he asks Maia and Miss Minton to give him news of his home.
Maia feels badly for Clovis and his dislike of the hot climate of the Amazon. However, she is excited about her new home and hopes it will be like Greece, where she spent time with her parents when she was young. After a month-long voyage, the ship finally arrives at its first South American port, Belem. Clovis and the Goodley group disembark, but the two new friends make plans to meet again in the future. As she continues to travel on the boat to Manaus, Maia is enthralled with the sights and sounds of the Amazon and excitedly imagines her new life with her two new adoptive sisters, Gwendolyn and Beatrice.
Chapter 3 Summary
When they finally arrive at Manaus, Mr. Carter’s agent, Rafael Lima, meets them at the dock, explaining that Mr. Carter is unable to meet them and is waiting back at the house. Miss Minton and Maia board the Carters’ drab green boat, which is crewed by a stoic Indigenous Brazilian named Furo. They head down the river toward the Carter’s house, and when they arrive, Maia is disappointed to find that the Carters are not as friendly as she had imagined. She is also sad to discover that the Carters do not spend time outside in the jungle because it is too wild for them, and that Mrs. Carter sprays chemical pesticides around the house to keep the bugs out, so it smells like Lysol. At mealtimes, Maia laments that the Carters eat only imported English food; they also hold prejudiced views of the local area and people, explaining that they view the Indigenous people of Brazil as “filthy” and the local markets as “full of germs” (27). Far from appreciating the landscape, they are determined that “the jungle must be kept at bay” (27).
Maia is lonely and homesick for the warmth of her friends from boarding school, and she wonders why the Carters adopted her. Miss Minton, however, realizes that the Carters have adopted Maia to take advantage of the allowance they receive for taking care of her, but in order to protect Maia’s feelings, the governess doesn’t reveal this to her young charge. When Maia begins her school lessons with the Carter twins, she is surprised to discover that she is ahead of them in all subjects but math. However, because Miss Minton doesn’t call on her during class, she worries that she has done something wrong until Miss Minton reveals her secret plan to teach Maia independently from the twins. She shows Maia her trunk full of fascinating books, and Maia is grateful and feels happy for the first time since her arrival.
Chapter 4 Summary
Cleverly appealing to Mrs. Carter’s pride in her daughters’ intelligence, Miss Minton requests that Maia be tutored independently from the twins because she is behind in her studies. Mrs. Carter agrees, and Maia happily begins her new curriculum, which includes discussing literature, reading and writing poetry, and learning about the natural history of Brazil. At Miss Minton’s request, Maia visits Mr. Carter to ask for maps of the local area. When she visits his office, he shows her his rare and valuable collection of famous people’s glass eyes procured from undertakers and collectors around the world; Maia pities him.
One day, Maia travels to Manaus with Mrs. Carter, the twins, and Miss Minton, the latter of whom she has started to fondly call “Minty.” The group pursues shopping, theater, and dance lessons for the girls. The dance lesson is interrupted when two darkly clad private investigators called Trapwood and Low burst in and interrogate the class for information on the whereabouts of Finn Taverner, the son of the recently deceased naturalist Bernard Taverner. They are tasked with repatriating the boy back to England, but no one knows where he is or what he looks like. Maia sees the two men again later at the natural history museum, where there is an exhibit of medicinal plants that Taverner donated to the museum before his death. The museum proprietor, Professor Glastonberry, lies and claims that Taverner didn’t have a son; it is later discovered that he does this to protect Finn.
Initially, Maia is excited about going to the theater to reunite with her friend Clovis, who is performing there, but at the box office, the twins explain that the show is sold out and that they don’t have a spare ticket for her to attend. Maia is forlorn. Meanwhile, Clovis, who is living in an insect-infested hotel room with the Goodleys, looks forward to seeing Maia and Miss Minton again and hopes that Maia will keep her promise to come and see the show.
Chapter 5 Summary
The twins boss Maia around while getting ready to go to the theater. Maia hopes that Mrs. Carter will change her mind about allowing her to join them so that she can keep her promise to Clovis, but the Carters leave without her. When Miss Minton is struck with a migraine, Maia decides to use her navigation skills and map to follow the path and the rivers to the city so that she can see Clovis after the show. She sneaks out of the hotel but very quickly gets lost in the dense jungle.
Maia falls and cuts her hand on a thorny branch, and as she gets up, scared and hurt, she sees a boy in a canoe approaching her from down the river. She asks him for help to get to the city, using a mixture of English and her limited Portuguese. The boy, whom she later discovers is Finn, offers her a ride in his boat, pulling the thorn from her hand and protecting her when she almost gets hit by a spiked low branch. At first, Maia is afraid of the Indigenous Brazilian stranger, but she ultimately decides to trust his kindly manner. When they reach the edge of the city, he drops her off and returns to the jungle.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
The novel’s opening chapter uses common adventure story tropes to set up its story of Human Greed and Exploitation in a time of scientific and colonial exploration. The protagonist and hero of the story is the orphaned Maia, whose relocation to the Amazon will facilitate her profound transformation as she learns more about the natural world around her. Initially, however, she represents an imperialist perspective, for she first wishes to assimilate into English society and adopts mainstream standards of beauty, imagining her new adoptive twin sisters as “fair and curly-haired and pretty; everything she longed to be and wasn’t” (10). She also harbors a Fear of the Unknown, imagining the Amazon as an exotic and dangerous landscape full of parasitic wildlife and hostile foreign inhabitants. This attitude of fear is shared and intensified by her classmates’ wild imaginings, which they convey through their gruesome and sensationalized depictions of Brazilians with “terrifying swirls of paint” and “piranhas that strip all the flesh off your bones” (12). Their presuppositions and fear that the Indigenous people of the Amazon region will be inherently hostile reflects the narrowness of their prejudiced and colonialist viewpoints.
The early chapters of the novel are designed to establish a deep contrast between these limited colonialist views and Maia’s own willingness to overcome the prejudices of her companions and guardians and learn to embrace the Amazonian peoples and landscape for who and what they are. Thus, the novel offers a voice of resistance to the imperialist perspective through intertextuality as Maia attempts to educate herself rather than relying on the presuppositions of those around her. Instead of parroting their fears, she makes it a point to study facts about the area and reads a critique highlighting the impact that a person’s attitude to exploration will have on the experience. The passage states, “For whether a place is a hell or a heaven rests in yourself, and those who go with courage and an open mind may find themselves in Paradise” (11). This sentiment marks the true beginning of Maia’s shift in perspective from the Fear of the Unknown to the enthusiastic curiosity and open-mindedness that leads to her transformation. Her willingness to go live with the Carters and her optimism about her experience there as she dreams of her new family on the boat adds to her dynamic characterization, and she will continue to grow bolder as new adventures come her way throughout the story.
In addition to being a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, Maia’s transformation also follows the classic structure of a hero’s journey, a trope common to many fantasy and adventure tales. Just like many literary heroes before her, she heeds the call to adventure, and within the context of this specific story, her youth, inheritance money, and status as an orphan free her to answer the call with optimism and hope. By contrast, the young actor Clovis, whom she meets on the ship, is not as privileged as she is and therefore acts as a foil to her character. Rather than enjoying the benefits of financial security, Clovis lives in bleaker, impoverished circumstances and is taken advantage of by his adoptive parents for financial gain. The author therefore uses the character of Clovis to create a more realistic and dire portrayal of orphanhood during this time frame . Clovis’s character also allows opportunities for Maia to mature as she becomes less naïve about worldly difficulties. His hardships give him clearer insight, and his comment about the twins’ potential to be a “double dose” of “nasty” also foreshadows the true nature of the Carters, which Maia dismisses offhand. Such foreshadowing also reinforces the novel’s status as a bildungsroman, for the cruel twins are Maia’s first test and act as antagonists that create conflict during her journey.
In order to convey the true extent of Human Greed and Exploitation, the novel makes use of fairy-tale motifs and stereotypes that are popular in children’s literature. For example, after living with the Carters, Maia compares herself to the character of Cinderella, for she too is bullied and abused by her adoptive mother just as Maia is poorly treated by Mrs. Carter and the brutal twins. In fact, the twins are caricatures of selfish exploitation, for they are abusive to Maia simply because she is more open-minded than they are. They are likewise jealous of her friendships, for they are so self-centered that they have no friends and are not even capable of loving each other. The novel therefore uses exaggeration and humor to create turn the twins into flat caricatures, comparing them to “pale insect grubs that exist only to be fed and groomed by others” (41). This disdainful and comical portrait of self-centeredness and greed extends to Mrs. Carter as well, for she is described as being “the sort of person who would smell of violets or lavender, but to Maia’s surprise she smelled strongly of Lysol” (26). Mrs. Carter’s fear of the natural world is therefore exaggerated through her hypervigilant chemical treatment of bugs in the jungle; this behavior satirizes her xenophobic fear of otherness, and the narrative implies a philosophical connection between her war on the local insects and her deep dislike of the local culture. By contrast, Maia’s dynamic characterization sets her apart from the narrow-minded Carter family and positions her as the hero and moral model in the story, for unlike them, she is able to learn and transform.
