Euclides and the Baron - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 177

taming power of the unsung, maligned backwoodsmen, attached to the land, who trans-
form amorphous terrain into national territory. It is the tappers, not the urban elite, who
are the midwives of Amazonian Brazil, the greater part of the nation.
Twocountries,tworelationstolandscape,bothraciallyheterogeneous:oneconstructs
its history only in plunder, roaming the landscape, builders only of ruins. Peru, says da
Cunha,isasocietywithoutqualitiesortraditions,populationsnotyetapeople,adespoil-
ing culture, an incarnation of the convulsion and turmoil of earthquakes. In contrast to
this “apprenticeship in calamity” rises the Brazilian “civilizing molecule”: the domest-
icating “attachment of Man to the Land,” the development of a new and transformative
civilization in the remotest part of the planet: not the mythical “lost cities” but new ones
with schools, newspapers, a cherished theater. Multiple races and nationalities, instead
of a divisive history, meld into the national culture under the tutelage of the sertanejos .
Brazilian caboclos shape immigrants into “our language, our ways, our destiny.” Rather
than the bandeirantes or imperial armies, it is the modest tappers who are both masters
and protectors of this distant territory, claiming it for the fatherland in an entirely novel
way, building an arcadia instead in a turbulent world, a world of progress against one of
plunder.
These essays were da Cunha's great salvos into his future.
“I admit illusions . . .”
Da Cunha desperately needed employment. He dreamed that he might manage the con-
struction of the Madeira-Mamoré railway, that lethal trench that rivaled the Panama
Canal as a death maw with its endless swamps, peculiarly deadly malaria, and the usual
scourges of typhoid, influenza, and construction accidents. 26 The border demarcation
commissions too were a potential source of work. There were also hundreds of lesser
sinecures that accrued to the new republic—but he had managed to irritate many of its
patronswithanoutburstorasnidecolumn,orsimplyhisairoftetchyself-righteousness.
Da Cunha had yearned for Acre with its “Republic of Poets.” The previous year, as
he wrote his friend Luis Cruls, astronomer and director of Rio's observatory “I've been
nourishing a dream for the last few days, of traveling to Acre. But I don't quite see how
to manage it.” 27 He hoped that Cruls, who had directed the boundary team of the Jav-
ari in 1902 (with Pando, who would later become president of Bolivia), might be able
to put in a good word for him among the powers that be. “As for me,” he wrote to his
friend Vicente Carvalho, “I admit illusions: I have thousands of promises, thousands of
hopes even as I believe that tomorrow I will be thwarted and annoyed in the number
of my choices. If this doesn't happen, I fall back on engineering, and the little scraps
of my surveying.” 28 On Coelho Neto's advice, he sought out his former Praia Vermelha
schoolmate Lauro Müller, minister of public works for the state of São Paulo. He de-