Imperialisms, Revolutions, and Resolutions in the Caribbean Amazon - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 103

Pombal had general policies, but he also had in mind a specific model of a sort of col-
onist utopia: he sought to transfer the frontier town of Mazagão, a Portuguese outpost in
Ceuta, Morocco, to Amapá. 59 The colony would be a slavocratic military outpost that if
successful might define a new form of occupation. Pombal was certainly aware of the
catastrophic Kourou experiment, but in his colonial exercise the state would intervene
to smooth out the transition while the colony, accustomed to remote militarized border
conditions, embarked on sugar and rice production with its own slaves. Transporting the
entire community of some twelve hundred citizens with ample state and urban planning
to their new tropical home seemed the epitome of rationality, especially when compared
the deadly chaos of Choiseul's colonization. But various problems ensued, not the least
being disease, lack of experience with floodplain agriculture and forestry, and the adapt-
ation issues inherent in the differences between a life in arid Morocco and one on the
equator with upwards of three meters of rain per year. The predictable catastrophe en-
sued, with most of the whites dying in fevered penury, as the black slaves slipped away
into nearby mocambos or created their own, turning Mazagão, meant to be a Portuguese
frontier outpost, into a black and mixed-blood polity. 60
Theproblem wasthat Europeans without immunities simply diedfrommultiple bouts
of fevers, usually vivax malaria but also yellow fever. The continuing mortality made
it seem that the only viable colonization had to be based on Africanized (or African)
laborers with their sickle cell and Duffy resistance to both falciprum and vivax malaria.
Indeed, the most successful small farmer colonizations were the autonomous runaway
settlementsandthenewethnicallycomplexindigenouscommunitiesthatpersistedinthe
shadow of the imperial colonizing efforts. Knowledge of the native pharmacopeia also
helped. Quassia bark, named after a maroon medicine man, was one of these, 61 but the
ethnopharmacology of the region seems to have been rich in fever remedies. 62
Both as symbol and as concrete alternatives, the maroon communities were but one
inspiration for revolt. Throughout the Caribbean, in Jamaica as well as Suriname, in-
dependent maroon polities had made deals with imperial powers that respected their
autonomy as independent states. The invention of freedom, as historian João José Reis
has put it, had ceased to be an abstract idea as the region entered the age of revolution.
Revolutions and the Wild Coast
In the Caribbean Amazon, the realities of worlds of autonomous quilombo and indigen-
ous communities influenced ideas about political possibilities. 63 The violence that in-
hered in the extensive slave communities of the Caribbean and Brazil was constantly
stimulating flight. These refugees took advantage of regional macropolitics. The am-
biguous boundaries, shifting European sovereignties, and creation of neutralized zones
produced an open political “commons” where both the terrain and the diplomatic polit-