Travel Reference
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they traveled through the conflict zones. This voyage (and its rationale) contrasted re-
markably with the placid flotillas of explorers who were marking out an “uninhabited”
Amazon of “Nature,” just as the region was flooded by hundreds of thousands of mi-
grants for the expanding latex economies. The Amazon was the object of treaties, armed
incursions, and roving battalions for much of the nineteenth century and deeply integ-
rated into global commodity circuits. European and hemispheric players were prowl-
ing in the environs, looking for an excuse to intervene. While travelers marveled at the
grandeur of the “untrammeled” Amazonian forests, at the time it was a geopolitical hot
spot.
Having been a journalist of the Paraguyan War, Rio Branco knew how deadly cam-
paigns could be in the tropical swamps of Brazil's western borders and wanted to avoid
the inevitable disasters of far-flung tropical battlegrounds. Rio Branco much preferred
the “Chancellery wars” of negotiations, where well-crafted historical arguments and na-
tionalist rhetoric stood a good chance of success. 13
Imperial Ideologies: Da Cunha and the Anti-imperium
As historical commentary, da Cunha's writings were to shape the arbitration over the
disputed frontiers. The Peruvian argument was essentially a bureaucratic one based on
administrative domains in the earlier Viceroyalty of Peru. Da Cunha used his travel, re-
search, and cartography to recast the debate in idioms that reworked frontier Amazonia
away from treaty histories or conquest by the transient mixed-blood slavers from São
Paulo known as the bandeirantes , to settlement rooted in the less glamorous but cour-
ageouseverydayactionsofthe sertanejos. InBraziliannationalmythology,the bandeir-
antes hadclaimedAmazoniathroughtheirmonumentaltravelsofdiscoveryandplunder.
They were, however, ephemeral presences in Amazonia no matter how important they
were symbolically. Rather than fashioning a “boys' own” story of bravura and far-flung
ruffians, da Cunha cast the story of Brazilian claims quite differently through the efforts
of his backlanders, while still keeping São Paulo's (and Brazil's) national heroes on the
stage. It was important to do this because the bandeirantes were a powerful entrepren-
eurial element in São Paulo's emerging modernist identity, in contrast to the indolent ol-
igarchs who still dominated Brazil's external image. 14
Da Cunha saw Amazonia's true conquerors in the modest, impoverished, and beaten-
down sertanejos he first saw in Canudos, who incarnated the “everyday forms” of
nation creation, transforming an “unknown swamp” into an economic engine of the
new Brazilian republic. He saw South American explorers and settlers as Amazonia's
true discoverers, placing the region within a South American practices of national ex-
ploration, regional imperialism, and settlement rather than the typical narrative of “dis-
covery,” scientific or otherwise, by external colonial powers. 15 The sertanejos ' little
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