Imperialisms, Revolutions, and Resolutions in the Caribbean Amazon - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 95

haveinvolvedthearbitrationofnavigationrights.TheTreatyofAmiensof1802brought
the boundary line back to the Araguarí. All these treaties lapsed with the Treaty of Fon-
tainebleau (1807), which dismembered Portugal and sent its monarch into exile. 24
After Napoleon's armies invaded Portugal, forcing the Portuguese king to flee to
Brazil, the colony took military action in 1808 to avenge the ignominious exile of its
monarch: Brazil captured Cayenne and held the boundary up to Suriname at the Maroni
Riverat5.7latitude,givingBrazilcontrolofmorethan630kilometersoftheWildCoast
for eight years, also reintroducing slavery. 25 At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the
Prince Regent of Portugal and Brazil reasserted the boundaries of the Treaty of Utrecht,
which set the frontier of the two countries at the Oyapoque. Both parties were to name
a joint commission to survey the area, but this exercise, as usual, was never carried out.
This produced a continuing flux of settlement and armed skirmishes, and indeed sever-
al circumstances, like runaway slaves and army deserters (or evaders), were making the
region more complicated. In 1841 the two countries agreed to neutralize the area, to ab-
stain from colonization and military exercises until something could be “worked out.” 26
The formal treaties and their locations are indicated in table 2 , which shows how fre-
quently frontiers of the Contestado shifted and gives a sense of the territory at play. It
would take more than fifty years to resolve the final boundaries, during which region-
al tensions only increased. The constant drafting of treaties was one means of claiming:
France and Brazil (and later Belgium) dreamed of formal colonies in the Contestado.
And others—those who had been slaves, military deserters, detribalized natives—also
had their own dreams of polities in those amorphous, aquatic lands.
The Black Amazon
In eastern Amazonia, African imports and Indian slaves were a highly coerced labor
force of more than 90 percent of the population. The number of slaves sold into all the
Guianas and Amazonia was not trivial—over half a million Africans (542,000) found
themselves in the mangroves, estuaries, forests, varzeas , and flooded savannas of the
eastern Amazon and the Guianas: 144,000 in Amazonia, 294,000 (almost as many as
to the entire United States) in Suriname, 72,000 in British Guyana. French Guiana im-
ported only 31,000 slaves, a trickle when compared to almost a million slaves who dis-
embarked in the French Antilles. 27 Recent African arrivals were in general more in-
clined to flight to quilombos , and the activities other than sugar production assigned to
slaves—gathering, hunting, ranching, fishing, and rowing—were extremely difficult to
supervise. Runaway workers became a chronic problem. Not surprisingly, areas thought
to be free zones (like the area north of the Araguarí) became preferred refuges, as well
Cunani and Calçoene Rivers farther north. 28
Table 2. Migration of French-Brazil boundary lines: treaties, negotiations, events.