Argonauts of the Amazon - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 229

Because Chandless had left this question unanswered in his explorations, the commis-
sion was also meant to prove or disprove the existence of Lake Rogualgoalo as the
source of the Purús, Ucayali, and Madre de Dios.
On April 5, 1905, the Joint Commission for the Reconnaissance of the upper Purús
assembled with its men, matériel, and scientific equipment and “set out in search of its
destiny.” They departed from Manaus, whose latitude and longitude had been precisely
determined, and all their measurements were tethered to this fixed point, the axis mundi
of the rubber world. They embarked from this physical landmark to follow a marker
of another kind, the map of William Chandless, the British explorer, which they would
verify both as guide and as model. There was also the terra incognita—the part of the
Purús untraveled by Chandless, still among the most remote of the terrestrial mysteries.
Finally, like so many earlier explorers from Sir Walter Raleigh on, they would be enga-
ging with mythical terrain, in their case the question of Lake Rogualgoalo. They would
traverse a geography from the most precise and scientifically known to the utterly con-
jectural and imaginary.
With these directives, the reconnaissance team set sail in a virtual brotherhood with
the flotillas of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers, ranging from a handful
of the most august scientific explorers (many of them aristocrats) under the patronage
of crowns and princes, to the fact-checkers of empire (tropical surveyors and adminis-
trative travelers), to a diaspora composed ofrunaway slaves, outcasts, and captives from
the ruins of native societies, the exiles of catastrophes of northeastern El Niños and mi-
grants from a larger world in upheaval. There were businessmen reviewing portfolios
and a rogues' array of “tropical tramps” and adventurers from all over who sought their
fortune in the Amazon's rail and port construction crews or as carpenters, seamen, tap-
pers, or skilled laborers. Travelers' tales reported a surprising cosmopolitanism, with
Europeans of every nationality, outcasts of the Ottoman Empire, footloose Americans,
Chineseindentured“coolies,”Caribbeancreoles,andindigenouspeoples—Andeansand
Amazonians in bewildering diversity. The Upper Amazon at the time was probably as
multicultural as any place on the planet. There were also tourists and adventurers, living
out Victorian fantasies of masculinity in a spiritual and physical face-off against wild
nature.
The Amazon was not empty: ecclesiastics, natives, the residue of early booms, and
traces of earlier events were also to be found. Native intellectuals were the sources for
much of the natural history and landscape knowledge that would keep the explorers
alive, and in some cases make their names.
These voluntary and involuntary migrations materialized in the Upper Amazon
forests, all part of a massive transformation that changed that terra nullius into a vital
part of a globalized economy, consolidated nations, and produced a geopolitical flash-