A Short Prelude - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 10

ic, administrative, and diasporic travels that unfolded everywhere in Amazonia's deep
interior rather than adulating what were in many respects nineteenth-century spy trips,
reconnaissance, and colonial ecotourism.
TherewereotherscramblesatplaybesidestheBrazilianstorythatItellhere:Peruwas
actively engaged in contests with Ecuador, Colombia, as well as Bolivia, the Venezuela-
Colombia boundaries were complicated, and some adjudications, such as that between
Brazil and Great Britain, have been masterfully described elsewhere. 20 Yet none had
such an eloquent observer, and none were as significant: the Purús was the largest and
last episode of the Brazilian side of the Scramble.
The Amazon and Artistic Ambitions
DaCunhasawhissurveypositionasasignificantprofessionalcoup,buthealsorealized
that it would provide him with the foundations for a new literary work. He intended to
title his new work “O Paraíso Perdido” (Paradise Lost) and for it to be a companion
volume to Os Sertões. The fragments he wrote on the Amazon contain many structural
elements that parallel his novel—the landscape description, the social relations, the re-
gional history, and detailed discussions of ecological adaptation.
His Amazonian writing extends the saga of the ravaged northeasterners to their next
economic and geographic phase. While Os Sertões ends with the backlanders who chal-
lenged traditional oligarchs and the new republic being crushed by them, his Amazon
epic would chronicle the making of Brazil's tropical empire by those same sertanejos .
What he remarks in another context could easily be applied to those migrants: “What I
had first seen as a desperate crawl and grasping was in fact a leap of triumph.” 21 They
would, he felt, scrawl Brazil's true destiny over the continent and, more importantly,
evolve a new tropical civilization of mixed-blood pioneers, a New World counterweight
to white European imperialism. The “bronzed titans” who had been driven down in de-
feat in the Northeast materialized in the Amazon as the masters of its (and Brazil's) des-
tiny. In this sense, the ideological transformation in Os Sertões from the fashionable ra-
cialclichésaboutthe sertanejos totheirreincarnationasbedrockofBrazilisthepointof
departure for his Amazonian oeuvre.
Fragments
Da Cunha's Amazon material was, by his own assessment, to be his masterwork 22 and
his second “volume of revenge.” Yet he never finished it, because he was shot to death
by his wife's lover. Most of the attention that has fallen on his Amazon days focuses
on a few polished elements that were jumbled together and published posthumously as
À margem da história (At the Margin of History). 23 There are newspaper columns, the
formal survey reports with their rich historical additions, his essays on the Peruvian and