Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
If one goes back exactly one century to search for this enchanting period, one learns with great dis-
couragement of a report done in 1752 by the Ensign Governor, General Captain Mendonça Furtado:
“The Captaincy was reduced to total ruin.” Appearances clash with realities, exposing the same fail-
ures. Or rather, they complement and confirm the same decadence in an impressive way.
In1762,theBishopofGrãoPará,theextraordinaryFatherJoãodeSãoJosé,aclericwithaVoltairi-
ansenseofironyandthewriting style ofthepamphleteer AntonioVieira, concluded after areview of
men and things, that “the root of the vices of this land is sloth,” and summed up the regional person-
ality characteristics in this discouraging way: “lustful, drunken, and thieving.”
A hundred years pass. One tries to see if things have improved. One opens the austere pages of
Alfred Russel Wallace and sees that in some aspects he seems to have copied directly from that witty
Benedictine, because the undisciplined society that passed before that astonished scholar was one of
“drinking, gambling, and lying” in the same distressing heedlessness.
This impious indifference to superior qualities, the systematic renunciation of scruples, and the
lighthearted and casual view of error extends down from the finest houses to the hovels of the rubber
tappers. Browse through our old chroniclers, especially the imaginative Father João Daniel, and re-
view the moral and physical obstacles that weaken their characters. And read Tenreiro Aranha, José
Verissimo, and dozens of others. In these topics are strewn all the dramas of depravity in human his-
tory.
Then there is the incoercible physical fatalism. Nature, dominant and brutal in the full expression
of its energies, is an adversary of man. In the perpetual steam bath (as Bates puts it) one completely
understands the allure of a complacent and free life, a life without risks, but without the delicate vi-
brations of the spirit spurred by the dynamism of ideas, and devoid of the superior tensions of a will
whose acts transcend merely egotistical impulses. An Italian doctor, a superb talent—Dr. Luigi Bus-
ontheforestdweller.Thefirsteffectisaformofsuperexcitationofthepsychicandsensualfunctions,
followed then by the weakening of all faculties, beginning with the noblest ones. But in this appeal
to the classic theory of climatic influence, he forgets, like so many others, the secondary, random, but
appreciable effect of the very inconstancy of the physical base on which society is constructed.
The capriciousness ofthe river infects man himself. InAmazonia in general this happens: the wan-
dering observer who has been ranging throughout the basin in search of its various marvels has at the
end of hundreds of miles the impression of traveling in a loop, where the same beaches, levees, and
islands present themselves, the same flooded forests, and bayous stretch out as far as the eye can see
in empty horizons.
Whenencounteredbythenomadicman,natureseemsstable,buttheimmobile observerpositioned
on the river margins would be astounded by unexpected transformations: the scene, invariable in
space, would change through time. To the eyes of the sedentary person who planned to submit nature
to the stability of cultivation, it appears stunningly insurgent and changeable, surprising him, some-
times assaulting him, frightening him, and almost always chasing him away.
Adaptationworkedthentowardnomadism.Therein,ingreatpart,liesthecompleteparalysisofthe
people who wander here in an enervated and sterile agitation.
Whether one likes it or not, for the Amazonia of today we should entirely restore, as definition of
epoch: “Below the Equator there is no sin.” The Amazonians know this. At the entrance to Manaus
rises the beautiful island of Marapata. Lovely though it may be, it is a sinister augury. Most singular
Search WWH ::
Custom Search