Imperialisms, Revolutions, and Resolutions in the Caribbean Amazon - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 108

settled, but the violence took on dimensions of intertribal warfare as well, as “coloni-
al tribes” like the Mundurukú faced off the relentlessly insurgent Mura. Amid the up-
roar,toevademassacres,tofleeslaveryorincarceration,manyfleduptotheheadwaters
of Amazon tributaries and into the ambiguous sovereignty and anonymity of the Cabo
Norte. 84 Alfred Russel Wallace, like other later travelers, would report that many of the
black boatmen he employed had had important roles in the failed revolution. 85
As slaves fled from the lands of one colonial power to those of another, extradition
patrols crossed into each other's territories, often snagging other slaves in addition to
their own fugitives, or, in the case of quilombos , rounding up entire populations and
dragging them back across frontiers. These forays predictably had the effect of main-
taining intercolonial tensions at a high pitch. “Property” anxieties were compounded by
deeper political worries: labor withdrawal, autonomous communities, rebellion, and re-
volution made the Cabo Norte zone very unsettled, a realm of seething low-intensity
class,abolitionist,andinternationalconflict.In1841,inresponsetothecontinuingmilit-
aryincursionsandtheambiguityofsovereigntyonbothsides,theContestadowas“neut-
ralized.”
In 1848, as an outcome of revolutionary movements in Europe, slavery was once
again abolished in French Guiana, again stimulating waves of Brazilian runaways flee-
ing to the lands to the north of the Amazon. This prospect was made more interesting in
1855bythediscoveryofgoldontheApprougueRiverbyaBrazilianfugitivefromOuro
Preto in Brazil's mining state of Minas Gerais, who comes down through history known
only as Paulinho. 86
Amazon Klondike and Cunani: The Utopia from Below
Dreams of El Dorado had gilded the very first imaginings of this part of the Amazon by
Walter Raleigh. Now the possibility of instant wealth attracted thousands of people into
the Contestado, sucking labor from local agriculture, attracting hands from elsewhere in
the Antilles—Guadeloupe, Martinique, Suriname (the Saramaka—from the black polity
on that river—came as panners but mainly as canoeists and river traders), 87 Brazil, and
the United States—as well as coolie labor brought in to substitute for slaves. The gold
rush engaged everyone from small-scale clerks to the speculators and financiers on the
Parisian Bourse. 88 Mining involved formal and informal economies that operated more
or less in tandem. These mines were fantastically rich: from 1857 to 1861 the Cayenne
registered more than 2,600 kilograms per year of gold, and in the 1890s Guiana's ex-
portshoveredbetween2,600and3,000kilosannually. 89 Strikesoccurredallthroughthe
Guiana headwaters, and the region also had considerable amounts of rubber, which it
also began to transact.