Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
These contributions would be difficult to grasp, though, if there were no unifying thread
of Brazil, the Amazon, his time, his style, and history. Placing da Cunha's work in the
global context of “Scramble for Amazonia” helps clarify the purposes of his prose.
The Scramble for the Amazon
Another protagonist of this topic is Brazil's greatest diplomat, the Baron of Rio Branco.
Rio Branco incorporated an area the size of France into the young republic and secured
the Brazilian boundary of more than twelve thousand miles, most of it in Amazonia. His
diplomatictalentshadbeenhonedinlegationstoEngland,France,Germany,andtheUn-
ited States. Sent initially overseas as a kind of pleasant sinecure during the last decades
of Emperor Pedro II, he lived in Liverpool, the most important European port for tropic-
al commerce. As a member of the Brazilian delegation there, he was well placed to note
the prominence of Amazonian latex in the world economy, an insight that eluded many
southern Brazilians, entranced as they were by the wealth of their coffee production.
Other postings sent him to Paris and, especially relevant, to Berlin during the “Scramble
for Africa”: the European powers, inflamed by highly public colonial exploits such as
those of Stanley in the Congo, inter-European rivalries, and more than a century of cov-
ert and detailed resource surveys, parceled out a continent among themselves, heedless
of the local inhabitants. 11 These lessons about the imperial ambitions and practices of
EuropeanpowerswerenotlostonRioBranco.LaterstintsinBernandinNewYorkalso
proved highly strategic.
Rio Branco was also alert to the territorial ambitions of the other hemispheric re-
publics, the United States to the north and Peru and Bolivia to the west. Rio Branco
had spent time in Washington preparing for a territorial adjudication between Brazil and
Argentina that was mediated by US president Grover Cleveland, and there had seen
firsthand American methods of continental consolidation. By 1902, when Rio Branco
took over as the minister of foreign affairs, North Americans had had more than half a
century of enterprise and programs aimed at the Amazon. The Baron observed with a
combination of admiration and apprehension the US adventures in the Spanish Amer-
ican West (where a third of Mexico became US territory), its filibustering hemispheric
forays into Central America and the expropriation of Panama from Colombia.
BrazilconfirmeditsnationalboundariesinAmazoniabythwartingtheimperialambi-
tions of France, Britain, the United States, Belgium, Bolivia, and Peru. In this Scramble
for the Amazon—a territorial grab that occurred at the same time and involved many
of the same actors as the Scramble for Africa—da Cunha, as Rio Branco's agent, car-
ried out remarkable feats of physical exploration, political maneuverings, and discurs-
ive construction. Da Cunha deployed every imperial idea on offer—historical conquest,
manifest destiny, historical settlement, national mythologies, social and historical carto-
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