Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
of “leper colonies,” it is a colony of lost souls. Here, they say, new arrivals to Amazonia deposit their
consciences.
Observe the reach of this popular fantasy. Another island at the mouth of the Purús lost its old geo-
graphic name and is now known as the Island of Conscience. The same with the island at the falls of
the Juruá River. There's nothing lighthearted about this attention to lost conscience. Those who pass
through these portals, on to the diabolical paradise of the rubber forests, surrender their best qualities
and doom themselves, laughing at the deep irony of their situation.
And there, in the exuberant forests of Hevea and Castilla , awaits the most monstrous organization
of labor that was ever imagined by unbridled greed. There the seringueiro , and we do not refer here
to the rich Patrão, the seringalista , but rather to the worker tethered to the rubber-collecting estra-
das— thepathwayswherethetapperincarnatesatremendousirony:itisthatheworkstoenslavehim-
self.
“A land with a great deal of history . . .”
Amazonian may have appeared to some “without history,” but it was at the center of
powerful global historical and economic forces. Da Cunha and Alexandre Buenaño (the
Peruvian chief of party) were not confronting an emptiness but a theater of war. The ex-
pedition would be traveling through settlements with national administrative posts and
contentious customs houses—a place where gracious mansions overlooked crammed
trading posts like Seringal Macapá, with its many retainers, its ladies riding sidesaddle
on elegant white mules, and forests that were webs of trails and portages.
While letters from Manaus made reference to his “encounter with the wilderness,” he
well knew, because after all a Peruvian-Brazilian war was simmering, that the place was
hardly “vacant.” And indeed, for both Buenaño and da Cunha the entire object of this
expeditionwastoseethePurúsnotasemptybutratherasfull,crammedwiththeunsung
agents who carved out a living in those forests, the material expression of personal and
national destinies. The Purús they confronted was hardly the “primeval landscape” of
theimmensebiologicalparkthatnowclaimstheseterrains,butratherwastiedtointense
commercialforces,financialempires,andprofoundprocessesofeconomicandtechnical
change that stretched overtheglobe.Therealm ofrubberunderpinned thismostdynam-
ic economy and shaped its sociologies and ecologies in countless ways. Da Cunha and
Buenaño were off to the exuberant forest, its landscapes shaped by “monstrous organiz-
ation of labor” and a social ecology as he first imagined it, shaped by unbridled greed.
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