A Short Prelude - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 9

huts and modest farms occupied these lands, their unorthodox warfare defeated formal
armies, and in the end, for da Cunha, it was they, more than any former treaty, slav-
ing gang, or glorious military enterprise, who were responsible for transferring enorm-
ous, contested swaths of Amazon terrain from other claimants to Brazil. These were the
unsung colonials that shaped, were shaped by, and sprang from the “womb of the wa-
ters”—the Amazon itself. This ethnographic and historical argument was the crux of da
Cunha's national and imperial narrative.
Before da Cunha set sail to the Purús, he viewed Amazonia as a place of nature, “un-
ready for Man,” 16 repeating the received ideas of the time. As he traveled into the rub-
ber country of the Purús, his maps and writings unveiled an inhabited landscape, one
thatincludeddesperatedebtpeons,tormentedIndians, caucho collectors,toilingyeoman
families, British engineers, German boatmen, Parisian fortune hunters, and pitiless rub-
berbarons.ThisvibranthumanizedcountrysidesupportedBrazilianimperialideologies,
where colonial claims grew from settlement and use. As in Os Sertões , da Cunha begins
in cliché and ends up in a world of earnest work and a tropical homeland in Amazonia's
deep interior. This discovery was completely at odds with the northern European tropic-
alisms thatfavoredan“empty” world,alargelynatural, wildplace inhabited byindolent
primitives, a tabula rasa waiting for the industrious enterprises, colonists, and civilizing
missions of the imperial North and whiter races.
An Empire of Nature
Patricia Seed, a historical anthropologist, points out in her illuminating study of ideo-
logies of conquest that in northern European laws, classification of places as “waste-
land,”wilderness,anunusedemptiness,wascentralforlegallyjustifyingexternalclaims
totropicalterritory. 17 Thenumerous,mostlyAnglophonenineteenth-century naturalists,
cartographers, and adventurers whose writings on Amazonia have so much defined it as
“portentous nature” contributed to this colonial view, although today they are read more
for their environmental aesthetics than their imperial pronouncements.
What is remarkable, though usually unnoted (except by da Cunha), is that these ob-
servers largely traveled by commercial steamship on the main channel, stopped at the
regularwoodingstations,collectedspecimensinroughlythesameplaces(orhadtheloc-
als do it while they prepared them), and, ironically, were crafting the ideas of the forest
primeval crammed with exotica on regular, British-owned steamboat routes at the mo-
ment when the region was becoming the migratory goal for more than million people
and the export platform for close to half of the world's latex, one of the most valuable
global commodities at the time. 18 Da Cunha himself derided these explorer writings and
had little patience for most of the explorers—“they stood merely at her threshold . . .
and never knew Amazonia”; 19 he devoted his own texts to the exploits of the ecclesiast-