Imperialisms, Revolutions, and Resolutions in the Caribbean Amazon - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 113

ated the triumvirate, who took Trajano prisoner. This news was accompanied by insinu-
ations that Cabral had been bilking miners and embargoing entrance of the French into
the Calçoene. This spurred the governor of Guiana into action. He sent Captain Lunier
and a crew of soldiers on the warship Bengali to investigate the matter. When they ar-
rived on the Amapá River, a pitched gun battle ensued, Lunier and four of his men died,
fourteenBrazilianswerekilled,andthelocaltownwassackedandburned.Thesurvivors
loaded the Bengali and steamed back toward Cayenne. This bit of Amazonian chaos—a
French military incursion into what was clearly Brazilian territory, capture of a French
magistrate, death of a military captain, sacking of a city, and so on—made the volatility
of the situation clear. 101
FEMMES DES PLACERS.
Figure 7.5. Women of the Golden Placers.
Faced with this distressing configuration, in 1893 the foreign minister of Brazil, Car-
los de Carvalho, sent two powerful secret agents into what was certain to be an acri-
monious fray. Rio Branco, still a diplomatic functionary based in Europe, was deployed
to the French archives to excavate the region's geographic and diplomatic history. He
was preparing for what Coudreau called—apparently without irony—“a savage tourna-
ment of historical geography.” The other strategy was to send a master of the tropics
to review the place. Swiss zoologist Emilio Goeldi, the director of the Pará Museum
and an eminent scientist in European circles (he'd been a protégé of Ernst Haeckel),
was sent into the Contestado and especially to the Cunani under the mantle of scientific
collection. 102 Coudreau was prominent in European scientific circles, and his assertions
needed a counterweight.
The intersection between science and espionage in Amazonia surely has no better ex-
emplar than the Amapá expedition of Goeldi. In fact his archaeological finds in 1895 of
cavesfilledwithgorgeousfuneraryurns,truemasterpieces,wasoneresult,andthesecan