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Amazon peripheries as economically exciting as the French colony of Saint Domingue,
the jewel of the “sugar Caribbean,” or the Brazilian Northeast. Both areas were gen-
erating generous returns for their colonial masters, and understandably, the metropoles
hoped to transform the undefined Amazon lands into profitable enterprises. Next, trop-
ical colonization seemed amenable to rational and scientific approaches to these men of
the Enlightenment, instead of the ad hoc and messy procedures that had thus far pre-
vailed. Both invested in “acclimatization” gardens, botanical exploration and plant col-
lection.
40
Choiseul sent a protégé of the Jussieu botanical clan, Jean Baptiste Aublet
(1720-1778),apharmacistandthefirstformalethnobotanistofAmazoniatostudylocal
economic botany, plant adaptation, and agronomy as a support system not only for local
Guiana as subsistence support for the productive sugar islands, rather than importing
preserved beef from Ireland or wheat from France. In addition, French royal botanist
and biopirate (and archrival of Aublet) Henri Poivre sought to use the region to accli-
matize various plants of the spice trade and thus to break the Dutch monopoly on pre-
cious essences. To this end he secretly “acquired” trees of cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg,
mangosteen, lychee, and candlenut to develop high-value exports in addition to sugar-
cane. These were planted out on the grounds of the governor's mansion, La Gabrielle.
42
Aublet, an unsung Amazon hero of New World natural history, produced foundational
taxonomic works in ethnobotany and even introduced de la Condamine to
Hevea
latex.
Aublet himself was taken with another kind of latex,
Parahancornia amapá
. This tree,
known as
amapá
(which gives the Brazilian state its name), produces a latex used as
milk, as well as a rumored antisyphilitic on which Aublet hoped to make his fortune.
Aublet died shortly after returning to Paris, however, and his collections were acquired
were spirited to the botanical garden in Belém.
BothChoiseulandPombalsoughttodevelopthelabormixthatwouldtransformtheir
torpid Amazon colonies into economic dynamos through a better labor configuration or
a better type of laborer. Choiseul had eliminated slavery in France but had little interest
in doing so in the colonies, yet he was concerned about the loyalty of slaves in interna-
tional conflicts, no doubt partly because of the persistent rebel wars between black fu-
gitives and Dutch militia in Suriname, just to the north of his colony, and the regularity
of insurgencies throughout the region. The Caribbean Amazon was very unsettled, with
the Dutch to the north, the Portuguese to the south, and fugitive polities of “Revolted
Negroes” and “Palenque Nations,” as the maps had it, in the interior. Choiseul had lost
Canada to the British, and it was that victory that inclined him toward white colonists
as a military strategy for protection against incursions into the Antilles. In Guiana he
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