Maps, Texts, and History - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 291

Maps 10a and 10b. Details of Chandless map, 1867, and da Cunha map, 1906. These were charted in
the same place about fifty years apart. The da Cunha map reveals a much greater density of habitation.
In this light, the meaning and history of the varadouros —connections between wa-
tersheds and meanders—provided by da Cunha in the travel report (see chapter 20 ) are
significant as rhetorical and political mapping strategies. Da Cunha would (incorrectly
but imaginatively) credit their invention to the Paulista bandeirantes . 20 He portrays
varadouros as a Brazilian landscape artifact, an element as indicative of cultural con-
tinuities as language. Through this wide extension of a “Brazilian” activity he provides
a framework of expansion and unification into the uplands beyond river channel. He de-
scribed it in this way: 21
Between one water course and the next, the forest's expanses are as isolating as though they were
mountains . . . they separate and divide. . . . One sees then this inversion: man, instead of mastering
this land, has become enslaved by the river. The populations never expanded outward but merely ex-
tendedthemselves. Theystretched outalonginfinitelinesandreturnedalwaysbythesameroutethey
started off on. Thus they immobilized themselves by the appearance of an illusory progress, as in the
retreats and advances of the adventurer who sets out, goes to the end of the earth, but explores and
returns on the same trail, monotonously renewing the same itineraries. . . . In their short but very act-
ivehistory,theregion'snewstagingpoints,exceptforafewminorvariants,continuetopresssteadily
along those routes already opened to the southwest: three or four risks, three or four river voyages,
and the uncharted oceans of the forest.
This discouraging social consequence, created by what had seemed so auspicious a natural feature,
namely the great arterial rivers, corrects itself by a series of transverses connecting its valleys. The
idea was not original. It began with our Paulistas. 22 It is the path, the shortcut, that goes from one
fluvial slope to the next. At first tortuous and short, suffocating, down in the forest's thickness, the