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tainingtothearea,andthemassivestudyoftheregion,
Oiyapoc and l'Amazone
,byJoa-
quim Caetano da Silva, a tome that reviewed the history of these debates in detail with
Rio Branco's own annotations. Rio Branco also emphasized the importance of the Mon-
roe Doctrine and the necessity of limiting European spheres of influence in the Western
Hemisphere, a feature of the adjudication that was thoroughly noted and widely com-
mended in US policy circles. John Bassett Moore wrote a very approving analysis of
the adjudication for the
New York Times
, highlighting this element of the diplomacy, in
which, given his close relation to the Brazilian delegation, he most likely had a hand.
106
The presence of Goeldi in Switzerland was also certainly useful in swaying the ad-
judicators, especially because as a zoologist and museum director, he was viewed as a
more reliable scientific observer than the hot-blooded Coudreau, whose reviews were
casuallywritten,impassioned,andnovelisticcomparedtothedryerstylesofthemuseum
director and Rio Branco. What was clear, in a bizarre twist of the doctrine of
uti posse-
detis
, was that the Contestado had been occupied for a long time by Brazilian runaways,
and they had “our (Brazilian) ways, our language, and our customs” and thus captured
enormous new territories (261,588 km
2
) for the
patria
that many of them had rejected.
The Pará Museum was renamed the Emilio Goeldi Museum.
Rio Branco was a hero: he had taken two of the thorniest boundary adjudications and
transformedthemintoBraziliantriumph.Twoyearslater,in1902,RioBrancowouldbe-
come Brazil's foreign minister. He would be taking on a series of scrambles in the west-
ern Amazon that were as volatile as the gold mines of the Contestado. There he would
confront hemispheric aspirants and international stalking horses in a place that was im-
mensely richer and more populous: the Purús watershed.
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