Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ers as the most “other” as well as the “top predator.” This model of masculinity has had
a durable life on best-seller lists, from William Lewis Herndon and Lardner Gibbon, Al-
cot Lange, Charles Barrington Brown and William Lidstone, Upde Graff,and Theodore
Roosevelt to Peter Fleming and David Grann's biography of Percy Fawcett's
The Lost
City of Z
. Scientists and adventurers so dominate our view of Amazonia that it has ef-
fectively obscured another set of literate and relatively well-informed travelers, people
who worked deep in the interior.
Fact Checkers of Empire
The European romantic movements, the emerging aesthetic of the tropical picturesque,
and scientific collection were the flip side of a far more mundane phalanx of official
national surveyors lugging theodolites and chronometers, making notes, charting their
courses. Unlike the naturalists, who tied their studies of the unknown to an exalted sci-
ence and a speculative tropical future (the scientific genre almost always seemed to re-
quire commentary on transforming the exuberant nature into productive enterprise), the
surveyors were meant to bind their landscapes into a grid, to transform terra incognita
into recognizable terrain depicted in the simple dimensions of formal mapping for the
claiming of territory. The purpose of Buenaño and da Cunha's efforts was, after all, to
culminate in a map.
Theexplorationswereusedtodeterminewhichvaluableproductsmightbecommand-
eered and who might help or hinder in this enterprise. Knowledge that might contribute
to colonial efforts and resource extraction was the mundane but crucial information on
soils, crops, disease, medicinals, geologies, navigability, peoples, economic botany. The
“interests”ofothercolonialpowerswerealsoofobjectsofintensecuriosityandwerein-
cludedinthe“charges”giventotheseexplorersbytheirpatronsandtheirnations.These
travels could also enlighten relevant governments about aptness of places for coloniz-
ation itself. The number and scale of these exercises are often quite surprising. Peru's
commissioned explorations of the river routes, Vias Fluviales, sent many mapping and
resource survey expeditions into the tributaries of the Ucayali and Madre de Dios. The
officialdom of Amazonian states was concerned to sponsor travels to keep an eye on
what was escaping their provincial taxes and to provide more general information about
the region.
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