Argonauts of the Amazon - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 241

Figure 15.4. Manoel Urbano, genius loci and guide to Labre, Coutinho, Chandless, Agassiz, and
James.
Analysis of the role of scientific exploration has largely focused on how these excur-
sions shaped scientific efforts in remote landscapes and transformed the imperial coun-
triesintermsofideologies(ideasaboutraceandenvironment),scientific paradigms(the
rise of new classification systems, the theory of evolution), and theories of human his-
tory. 30 Because New World scientists had seminal roles in the construction of modern
knowledge systems through their taxonomic, evolutionary, and ultimately ecological
contributions, literatures that were keenly focused on the imperial ventures and the
continental-scale diasporas within the global economy as well as active processes of na-
tion creation perhaps merit more attention than they had received thus far. These themes
were exactly da Cunha's subject.
From the most aristocratic or scientifically sophisticated traveler to the most reviled
native slave, the Amazon seethed with people moving on its rivers and through its
forests, though often noted by outsiders as mere wisps of smoke rising from the forest,
glimpsed from the deck of a steamship. The various journeys can be seen as a kind of
fugue of economic and imperial practices: They involved new economies and systems
of resource use. There were new labor regimes. New bureaucracies came into being,
systems of proconsuls and militaries rose from the tropical ooze—all of this mediated
and midwifed by steam travel and new technologies in the metropole. Underpinning the
surges of population into the vast outback was the massive outflow of coveted latexes,
products that put the region at war and had drawn our particular group of travelers, the
imperial fact checkers Euclides da Cunha and Alexandre Buenaño, into the fray.