Maps, Texts, and History - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 288

of settlement and connection, reaching, by implication, back into the terra firma, woven
togetherbythe varadouros “thatspreadeverywhere.”Thesimplevisualsofthemapalso
expressed naked power: Peruvians were vastly outnumbered, they controlled little of the
watercourse, and should Brazil choose to do so, it could (and did) close the river, ob-
ligating Peruvians to transport their entire production over to the Ucayali waterways, or
even over the Andes.
For Brazilians, the documentation of the settlement of the landscape by Portuguese
speakers would have several important effects. First, it expressed an “imperialism”
withoutstateimperialism,theeverydayformsofterritorialoccupationthatwereimplicit
in the names, and bore witness to a conquest not by rampaging armies but by the foot-
steps of legions of humble northeasterners. Next, the names themselves were deeply ex-
pressive of an expanding spatial history, emblems of nation creation produced in the or-
dinary practices of daily life, the planting of orchards and naming. These were not sites
of imperial baptism but rather the modest christenings of nascent societies.
Fifty years after the Chandless map, the Buenaño/da Cunha chart was crammed with
names expressing everything from geographic clichés (for example, Boa Vista—nice
view)togastronomicnames,surelyofinteresttoearlierextractors,andpossiblyresidues
of native practices: Peach Palm, Cacao Tree, Brazil Nut Stand, Pirão (Pestle), Umari (a
fruit),Tambaqui(alargecatfish)—adelicioussamplingofAmazoniandomesticatedand
wild edibles. There are agronomic descriptions: Large Meadows, Red Soil, High Lands,
Good Gardens, Black Wood. The channel is predictably full of the names of saints, in-
voking them as protectors and the place itself as offerings, as well as nostalgically evok-
ingtownsandhamletselsewhereinBrazil.Therearegeographictranspositions:Europe,
Barcelona, Palestine, New Olinda, Belém. Da Cunha noted in his histories a shift in
existential conditions ranging from “Suffering” to “Bom Lugar”—good place. It was a
world where Brazilians were applying names, imagining goals, inhabiting the country.
The voids of the Chandless map had been turned into active places of the production
of daily life and global commodities, crammed with Brazilian settlement. But what had
been the “fullness” of the Chandless chart, anchored to its Indians, was now emptied.
In the supplemental documents (see chapter 20 ) da Cunha would repeat the story of
improvement, of attachment to place, of taming the wild, of an adapted new race, the
best promise of a tropical civilization putting down roots and creating a nation and an
economy from a swamp. The semiotics of the fuzzy line with its relentless names would
invoke a history, a culture, and a destiny. This forward arc of modern nationhood would
be compared with the sparse and nomadic trajectory of the Upper Purús, whose inhab-
itants and habits had made it wilder and poorer than when they found it through the
subjection of natives and depletion of resources. Visually the map revealed a populous
world morphing into a mostly empty one and was meant to be read through the uplifting