Imperialisms, Revolutions, and Resolutions in the Caribbean Amazon - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 93

ofFrenchGuiana.Ashelefthisamour,Palhetaborethecontrabandcoffeeplantstucked
into the charming bouquet he took home to Brazil as a romantic memento, and thus
he introduced the commodity that would define the Brazilian agricultural economy for
much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 20 It was quite a memorable affair—one
certainly not forgotten by those who had wished to maintain the coffee monopoly. And
then there is Papillon, the escapee from Devil's Island (when French Guiana became a
penal colony), whose memoir was later made into a film starring 1960s heartthrob Steve
McQueen. But these disjointed anecdotes hardly capture the nature of its history and
how seriously and how long France yearned to claim the Contestado to consolidate a
major New World presence. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, formal treaties
began to specifically address the sovereignty issues, which were as murky as the man-
groves and just as treacherous. This diplomatic backdrop with its highly mobile bound-
aries framed the “on ground” ventures, most specifically the diasporas from Brazilian
and Guiana's slaveries into the Contestado landscapes.
Diplomacy and the Wild Coast
ThefoundationaltreatyforthisregionisthatofUtrecht(1713),whichplacedthebound-
ary of French Guiana at the “Vicente Pinzón,” in this case the Oyapoque, at latitude 3.8
north of the equator and about 420 kilometers from the Amazon. The treaty gave Brazil
both sides of the channel on the lower Amazon and preserved its control over naviga-
tion through the estuary. It also limited French commerce of and with natives below the
boundaryline.Nothingwassaidaboutthewesternlimits,sincethesestillweremediated
by the Tordesillas line (until 1750) and in principle under Spanish control, and in any
case the interior remained largely a cipher. 21 Utrecht was part of negotiations in dyn-
astic conflicts (the War of Spanish Succession) among the European crowns including
France, Great Britain, Austria, and the Low Countries as well as Portugal. Predictably,
there were problems.
The central problem was, which river was the “Vincente Pinzón”? The Oyapoque?
This northern version of the Pinzón—as noted, about 420 kilometers to the north of the
Amazon—was the preferred Brazilian boundary. On the other hand, the French argued
that Yapoc (the maps have more than twenty different spellings) was a generic term for
“island,”andtheonlyplacewithalargeenoughislandtomeritsuchanamewasMarajó,
the Switzerland-sized island in the Amazon estuary. Through this linguistic manipula-
tion, the magistrate of the French colony, the Marquis of Ferrolle, would argue that the
French claim stopped at the banks ofAmazon. Others argued that Oyapoque actually re-
ferredgenericallyto“river,”andtherewerenumerousriversthatparalleledtheAmazon.
These included the Calçoene, the Caraporis, the Rio Amapá, the Rio Cunani, and most
critically the Araguarí at 1.1 latitude, about 120 kilometers north of the main channel,