A Short Prelude - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 4

ofwarrottinginamassgrave,theheadofAntonioConselheiro,the“Kingof jagunços ,”
impaled on a pike, led the returning battalions back to a deliriously cheering Salvador.
But the larger meaning of barbarism and the taste for annihilation remained in the air.
Os Sertões is an unhappy epic of a backwoods polity, an autochthonous, desperate, and
brave population who were, as he would describe it, “the bedrock of our race.” 4 This
was the revelation of da Cunha's book for Brazilians, who at the time could barely take
their eyes off the Atlantic with its arriving boatfuls of new topics and stylish fashions.
Os Sertões was a literary sensation, an icon of “Brazilianness” in sea of derivative
novels. Da Cunha was soon considered among the most illustrious writers of his
time—indeed of any time—eclipsing virtually all of his cohort, with the possible ex-
ception of his friend the great mulatto novelist and satirist Machado de Assis. Euclides,
Machado, and a handful of literary critics such as his friends Silvio Romero and José
Verissimo(whowillappearlaterinthesepages)wereconcernedtocreateaBrazilianlit-
erature, a national literature that did not obtain its style or inspiration from mostly Fran-
cophone pretensions. 5
The battles of Canudos were da Cunha's Iliad . He transformed what had been framed
as straightforward military repression against a backward, racially degenerate monarch-
ist uprising into a more complex, essentially anticolonial rebellion. The revolt was, as
he wrote it, the ambiguous expression of an autonomous national culture, a culture that
he and his literary circle felt could be described by Brazilian writers only in Brazilian
idioms, since Europe had no words for their experience. This hybrid culture bred in the
backlands landscape was also largely invisible to the coastal elites (inveterate and avid
Europhiles) and the masters of the new republic. 6 As da Cunha put it: “What we know
of the sertões is little more than its rebarbative etiology, desertus. . . . We could easily
inscribe on large swathes of our own maps our searing ignorance and dread: Here be
Dragons.. . .Ourowngeographyremainsanunwrittenbook.” 7 Hisnexttaskwasthein-
scription of another enormous backland, a “new geography” of Amazonia, into Brazil's
national destiny.
As Selvas : Explorer, Scholar, and Paladin of the Amazon
It was in the clashing imperialisms of Peru and Brazil, the last great contest in the
Amazon Scramble, that da Cunha's next role in the formation of the young republic un-
folded. What was at stake in these arbitrations was, in da Cunha's view, 720,000 square
kilometers of Amazonia, the source of one of the most valuable global commodities
at the time, rubber. As an aide to the Baron Rio Branco, José Maria de Panhanos, da
Cunha mapped one of the longest tributaries of the Amazon, the Purús, and developed
the nationalist/imperial narrative that would shape the boundary mediations between
Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru by unveiling the hidden histories of Amazonian conquest and