Argonauts of the Amazon - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 236

Figure 15.1. A fact checker: Alexandre Buenaño, of the Peru-Brazil Joint Commission.
This “lesser strata” of Amazonian explorers (da Cunha was one of them and revered
their work) remains largely underappreciated, in part because they wrote in Spanish and
Portuguese and their purposes were not to resolve some abstract scientific question, to
collect exotica, or to have riveting adventures. Indeed, the fact checkers hated travel
drama and their often lethal outcomes. Mostly they hoped to avoid the close shaves so
loved by armchair explorers, since they would have so many of them. Their task was
to solve some seemingly mundane but crucial physiographical problems on which en-
tire tropical imperial enterprises might hinge. These involved straightforwardly empir-
ical topics: who the natives were, how many were there, what languages were spoken,
what were the soils like, what and how things were grown, the real names of the rivers,
whetherareportedmountainrangeactuallyexisted.Suchquestionsseemoflittleimport
today, precisely because they have been so definitively answered via the empiricism of
these “fact checkers” of empire. Because these travelers were often addressing specific
national rather than “natural” problems, they are the largely unknown titans in the pan-
theon of Amazonian exploration. They included Lardner Gibbon, William Chandless,
Richard Schomburgk, Louis Cruls, Ricardo Franco, Silva Coutinho, Fausto Maldonado,
John Randolph Tucker, Henri Coudreau, and Frank Church, all of whose efforts infused
the“AmazonScramble.”Theseranksofobserverssetsailundertheauspicesofregional
colonialism, as in the case of da Cunha, or carried out similar travels cloaked in a more
international register, such as the efforts of Chandless, Herndon, Coudreau, and Schom-
burgk.Theyusedtheirmapsstrategically andclearlyunderstoodtheirrolesaschessmen
in “great games” unfolding in the region.
Another significant and largely ignored source of survey, natural history, and inform-
ation on the natives was the ecclesiastics, whose reports on the lay of the land were as
careful and meticulous as those of military explorers. They too were staking out ter-
rain and territory. Da Cunha called Padre Samuel Fritz “Amazonia's first geographer”