“Such is the river, such is its history” - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 193

for the new book, especially in light of da Cunha's other descriptions of a nascent and
new civilization emerging from the “womb of the waters.” What is most striking about
these few pages is that rather than summarizing the works of other geologists as he had
atCanudos,inAmazonia,hetookfieldmeasurements,incorporatedthe“shippingnews”
of channel dynamics, and integrated into this his reading and critiques of the few nat-
uralists who had taken up Amazonian geology and geomorphology: Hartt, Derby, Wal-
lace, Bates, von Martius, and Agassiz. He challenged the applicability of the “cycle of
erosion”theoryofHarvard'sWilliamMorrisDavis(thedominantgeomorphicparadigm
of the time) to upper Amazonia.
The essay “General Observations” in À margem was a literary version and complete
intellectual revision of a scientific paper, “Um rio abandonado (O Purús),” published
in the Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileira 2 in 1905, shortly after da
Cunha returned from Amazonia, and republished in À margem with a slightly differ-
ent title, “ Rios em abandono.” 3 In the first version, da Cunha framed his discussion
of Amazonian landforms in terms of William Morris Davis “geomorphic cycle” or
the “cycle of erosion.” This model, based on Davis's analysis of the Alleghenies in
Pennsylvania, was informed by both Lyellian and Darwinian ideas of evolution, where
erosionprocessesdeterminedthestageofdevelopment.Landscapeswentthroughyouth,
maturity, and old age, beginning as huge flat plains were subjected to erosion, then
shaped into mountains, moving toward a mature form of river system and ending up as
old depositional flat peneplains with hyper-meandering rivers, a landscape, on the face
ofit,ratherlikethatofthePurús.Eventually theywouldbeuplifted andthecycle would
begin again in an unending repetition of “structure, process, and stage.”
The simplicity and elegance of this model enchanted generations of scholars. Given
daCunha'stasteforhistoricalandstagetheoriesandhistrainingingeologyatPraiaVer-
melha, and given that Davis's theory was the dominant and widely taught paradigm of
landscape development at the time, it is not surprising that shortly after his arrival back
in Manaus he thoroughly embraced it. In his early 1905 article he argued that the “Purús
was one of the best examples of it [Davis's model].”
However, Anthony Orme, a historian of geomorphology, notes that these organismal
metaphors were but one strand in the understanding of landscape, and as compelling as
Davis's imagery and metaphor were, Davis was very weak on the actual mechanics that
generated the landforms. 4 It was civil engineers (members of da Cunha's profession)
who were providing quantitative data on flow, flux, and landscape change. Although
their understanding of the physical mechanisms would later prevail, in the early twenti-
eth century this quantitative line of research was still a distant rival within geomorpho-
logy. Other paradigms were also lurking in the wings, including Alfred Wegener's idea
of plate tectonics (a theory Orville Derby and Frederico Hartt favored), and American