Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
settlement. Had Peru won the arbitrations it would have become an Amazonian super-
power—a kind of Brazil. Instead, Brazil with its documents, maps, essays. and argu-
ments, largely prepared by da Cunha, prevailed, giving us the map of the Amazon we
know today, as he brought into focus unseen worlds—places, he would argue, that were
the most Brazilian of Brazil.
Da Cunha would write a great deal of the social geography of Amazonia's least-
known western territories through the formal surveys of the Purús River, the recovery
of the region's hidden history in documents, treaties, maps, and oral accounts, in his
own rural sociology and political commentary on the disputed territory that had been
called for centuries “the Land of the Amazons.” This was his Odyssey to the Iliad of
Canudos. The ravaged northeasterners would reemerge in the Amazon through the great
sertanejo *1 diaspora, as they fled El Niño droughts and the residues of slavery and mi-
grated to the watery forests and the labor-starved rubber economy. 8
As Selvas : The Jungles
Considering the continental size of Amazonia and the fact that most European polities
had colonies in South America, the lack of attention that has been paid to competing
Amazonian imperialisms is surprising. The famously uncertain or creative boundary
lines,theendlesscontestationoverlandsandlabor,thecontendingambitionsovermyth-
icaloractualbountykeptadventurers,ecclesiastics, crowns,andspiesrivetedongreater
Amazonia.TheriseofsteamtravelandtheopeningoftheAmazontointernationaltrade
made exploration vastly easier, made possible the explosive commerce in latexes, and
intensified the politics of the Scramble.
Most scientific travelers of the nineteenth century had agendas beyond the sale of
their collections, the advancement of science, or simple exploration. Even a casual re-
reading of these works places them at the heart of imperial trajectories. 9 Naturalists,
surveyors, and adventurers were part of what Joseph Conrad called “Geography Mil-
itant,” the colonial enterprise concerned with both science and conquest. 10 Strikingly,
most nineteenth-century naturalists portrayed Amazonia's “reality” to European readers
as an untrammeled wildness, a “Land without History,” as da Cunha would title (with
great irony) a famous set of essays. Recent scholarship, as well as da Cunha's own re-
ports,revealsfarmorecomplexregionaleconomies,sociologies,andhistories.Thismo-
ment of Euro-American imperialism and Atlantic globalization had no better or more
eloquent scientific or social observer than da Cunha.
Da Cunha's Amazon writing addresses topics a century ahead of his time: “everyday”
forms of state formation, environmentalism, political ecology, comparative imperial-
isms, social history “from below,” political cartography, and comparative social history.
He wrote on tropical geomorphology, and he remains a premier historical ethnographer.
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