Imperialisms, Revolutions, and Resolutions in the Caribbean Amazon - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 106

of them—also found their final resting places in the feverish coast. 74 The colony was
among the largest and most important of the nineteenth-century penal colonies and per-
haps was the inspiration for Franz Kafka's famous short story “In the Penal Colony.”
When steam engines came into widespread use in the mid-nineteenth century, criminals
formerly assigned to prison galleys of the Mediterranean were sent to the tropical gulag
as a form of colonialism on the cheap, as in Australia. Prisoner/colonists became chain
gangs of colonial agricultural laborers, but unlike Australia's salubrious colony, Guiana
was lethal: virtually all its eighty thousand inmates are lost to history. 75
The end of slavery in French Guiana, the winds of revolution, and the presence of
independent autonomous communities in the interior of the northern Amazon had ex-
traordinary impacts on slaveholding in northern Brazil. News of revolutions was car-
riedbyboatmen,slavesthemselves,gossip,andalltheroutesthroughwhichinformation
flowed. Abolition in French Guiana galvanized slaves along the Amazon. 76 The lands
of the Cabo Norte had become a “transnational” space in the sense of a no-man's-land,
or at least sem rei and sem lei (without king or formal law). Many fleeing slaves moved
uptheAraguarí,whilethewesternboundariesofFrenchGuianawerestillundetermined
and possibly extended to the Rio Negro, so it was reasonable to flee past the cataracts
to the headwaters of rivers like the Trombetas to the forests and savannas of the Guiana
shield, where interaction with the maroon polities was possible. 77
FrenchGuiananslaveowners,unhappywiththisturnofaffairs,soughtrefugeinPará,
many taking up residence in Bragança, to the east of Belém, and some even into the
prime sugar (and slave) zones of the Mojú River. 78 Other things moved besides people.
Two of the Guianan migrants, Michel Grenouiller and Jacques Sohut, had been val-
ued botanists at La Gabrielle and eventually were contracted to direct the newly created
botanical garden in Belém. They managed to smuggle out clandestine plant matter from
LaGabrielletoplantandtestinBelém,includingtheimportantcanecultivarTahiti(now
known as Cayenne), which came to dominate Brazil's sugar production. 79
Freedom's Short Reprieve
Slavery was reintroduced into French Guiana when Napoleon rescinded abolition in
1804. 80 By then the Contestado was populated with numerous free refuge settlements.
This state of affairs changed rapidly in response to the exile of the Portuguese crown to
Brazil. French Guiana was captured in a joint British-Portuguese assault and the entire
region, from the Maroni River to the Amazon, was held from 1809 to 1817; slavery was
reintroduced by Brazil, and consolidated just as its hold had been loosening. An escape
hatch had crashed shut.
TheCaribbeanrevolutionsdid,howeverhaveeffectsinBrazil.AshistoriansJoãoJosé
Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes have noted, insurgents of the many nineteenth-cen-