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This “marriage policy” also helped ensure continuity in political liaisons. These af-
final relations “institutionalized” connections from colonials to locals and provided ac-
cess to the knowledge systems necessary for security, trading economies, and traversing
the complex regional and social geography of the Amazon estuaries and tributaries for
blood ascension and autonomy. There were also ecclesiastic proxies—not a major ele-
ment of colonial strategy on the part of the Protestant Dutch and the British, but a regu-
ized administrative structure—the Amazon captaincies—that could respond rapidly and
decisively with local militias (rather than foreign armies) made the Portuguese far less
“outsiders” and more agile than those arriving with their patent letters and mercenaries
from European monarchs. The early Luso occupations in Amazonia had a lot to do with
embeddedness and strategic uses of military, spiritual, and sexual conquest. In any case,
other European empires were busy elsewhere. French Saint Domingue (now Haiti) was
thewealthiestsugarcolony;theDutchhadthelucrativeIndonesianspiceislands,andthe
BritishhadtheirownvaluabletropicalislandsandAmericancolonies,farmoremanage-
able than a poor settlement perched on the edge of a massive jungled continent. These
countrieswerealsodeeplyinvolvedinNorthAmericanhemisphericcolonialpoliticsand
European intrigues in ways that Portugal was not. Manhattan, after all, was ceded to the
British by the Dutch in exchange for Suriname in 1674.
A French Imperial Outpost in the Caribbean Amazon
The French presence inAmazonian South America is notwidely known,although today
the Ariane rockets launched from French Guiana lift into the tropical heavens carrying
about half of the world's commercial satellites. French Guiana's capital, Cayenne (pre-
viously known as Mocambo), was claimed in 1676; its name bespeaks a Creole spice
residing in the back of kitchen shelves rather than an outpost of a powerful tropical em-
pire.Coffeeloversmayhavereadofthebiopiracythatintroducedtheplantsofthatpriv-
ileged drink into Brazil, today the world's largest producer.
In the eighteenth century coffee was highly coveted, and its international trade was
largely monopolized by the Dutch. It was first grown in the New World in Suriname,
but soon administrators in Cayenne were experimenting with its cultivation in its gov-
ernor's distinguished collection and acclimatization botanical garden, La Gabrielle.
18
Sale of seeds and cuttings was forbidden in order to maintain the valuable coffee mono-
Brazilian historical lore has it that Palheta's secret and perhaps true mission was to ob-
tain coffee cultivars from France's La Gabrielle. The method involved a passionate ro-
mance between the Brazilian diplomat and Madame d'Orvilliers, wife of the governor
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