Maps, Texts, and History - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 284

ively incorporating millions of hectares into Brazilian national territory. 14 A lying map
wasadangerousyetusefulthing,onethatcouldleadtravelerstodoom,ormisleadthem,
or transfer huge terrains from one country to the next. Early maps were persistently and
creatively copied. After the Luso-Hispanic empires embargoed information about the
continent, maps were increasingly creations of rumor and aesthetic tradition. The mis-
drawnlinesofonemapcouldbecometerritorial assertionsastheyweretranscribed onto
another. Lying maps were also parts of security strategies. The map of the varadouros ,
the interfluvial pathways of the Upper Amazon produced by da Cunha in March 1906,
was a semi-lying map, meant to confound field military copyists as tensions heated up.
Itsproduction marked daCunhanotonlyasahighlyskilled cartographer butalsoasone
thoroughly schooled in cartography's complex uses.
It was in the “deep” cartography of the Upper Amazon and through the question of
errors that da Cunha would both assert authority for his own maps (and the Chandless
Chart produced with local sage Manoel Urbano) and claim competing geographies and
cartographies to largely be fictions, lacking the authority of “having been there.” 15 That
maps could be texts of multiple and layered meanings, and could be produced and read
with rhetorical and political eyes, was clear to the both the author and the cartographer
in da Cunha, who as an artist and a scientist understood the powers both of fiction and
of what was taken as fact.
Wars Made Maps (and Maps Made Wars)
Cartography was known as the “science of princes” due to the direct relation of systems
of territorial knowledge to questions of state power. The usefulness of maps in defense
andwarfarehasadeephistory,andthispolitical useofthemisobviousandwellknown.
Mapmakers marched with armies. The impetus for the Purús mapping exercises, after
all, had been the Acrean War and the Peruvian skirmishes. The claims of old maps un-
derpinned this conflict as much as modern resources. If negotiations failed, then recon-
naissance maps would become inputs to military campaigns.
Maps visually carved out national space and made purported nationals of those who
residedwithintheoutlinesofthecartographicframe.Brazilhadcartographically“incor-
porated” everyone to the east of the Paraguay River and south of the Amazon as Brazili-
an by 1750 via the map lines of the Treaty of Madrid. Regardless of how the inhabitants
might have classified themselves (as native nations, for example), they were now tech-
nically Brazilian. Brazil wasinventive initsspatial logics,relyingonjuridical rationales
when convenient, on military skirmishes, and on settlement histories read through the
lensofmanifestdestiny,evenwhentheirtruemeaningwasflight from Brazilianslavery,
as was the case of Amapá. Maps showing settlement were an established weapon in the
largerBrazilianexpansionisttrajectory,aswehaveseen,evenwhenthelandunderclaim