“American Amazon”? - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 134

mineral and land rights adjacent to the route of the railroad, a concession of some 560
square kilometers. The persuasive Church raised some six million pounds—a huge sum,
almost 600 million in current pounds 90 —in bonds from London venture capitalists des-
pite Bolivia's very dubious reputation in international lending circles. This was quite
a feat, since the Bolivian commercial agents Peto, Betts and Co. had trundled around
Europe trying to mortgage all of Bolivia's resources. Church described what was on
offer this way: “The whole of Bolivia—animal, mining, financial, and almost spiritu-
al—exclusive rights of international communication and river navigation—Bolivia in-
side out, present and future, Bolivia down to the base of the Andes.” 91 In some fin-
ancial circles this freehanded approach to mortgaging national territory was considered
questionable and the deals unenforceable. Church's survey experience in the region and
the fact that he had worked as a formal analyst for several upper Amazon governments
(Peru,Ecuador,Brazil,Bolivia,andwhoknowswhatotherclandestinepartners),aswell
as his long association with Markham, gave him a legitimacy that was lacking in others
hawking upper Amazon real estate. 92
It certainly helped that gold had recently been discovered in the Caupolicán district
just to the south of the Acre, an area to be served by the proposed railroad. Church's
Bolivian company bought the rail rights from Church's Brazilian company for twenty
thousand pounds in cash, a very large sum at the time, and certainly a useful one in any
era. While some might have viewed this as a kind of self-dealing, it did consolidate the
bundle of rights into one company. Church began his enterprise with subcontracts to a
Philadelphia construction firm, P. T. Collins, which sent some 750 American laborers,
200 Bolivian Indians, and 200 Ceará migrants to the site where they actually built tracks
and ran a train (whose main engine they named Colonel Church). 93 The business itself
collapsed in a complex multinational cloud of litigation involving Bolivia coastal com-
pradors dismayed at the possible deflection of trade from their Pacific venues to Atlant-
ic ones, various British interests, and bribery scandals involving the Bolivian president,
along with the usual disease and strife in construction projects in the Amazon. When
everything fell through—a fairly regular destiny for Madeira-Mamoré ambitions—the
transportation development rights ultimately were resold to King Leopold II of Belgi-
um. 94
“An East India at our very doors!”
The Bolivians continued their own ambitions for settlement and opened negotiations
with yet another American, Azanel Piper. Armed with Chandless's maps, Piper re-
portedly had also partially explored the 1,700-mile length of the Purús. 95 In the first real
attempt at a charter company in the upper Amazon, the Colonization Company of Cali-
fornia incorporated in San Francisco in 1870, in the hope that the vision of yet another