“Events that perhaps lacked a historian” - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 305

available of imaginative maps made most assertions about the place questionable. Fath-
er João Daniel, the author of Tesouro descoberto no Rio Amazonas , confined as he was
to his inquisitional cell in Europe, never traveled there, and each inaccuracy about the
Purús engendered further and wilder speculations. These errors contained the implicit
assertion that the Purús had in fact never been truly “discovered.” It was terra ignota , a
worldofsurmise,alandthateveninthenineteenth centuryhadnotundergonetheform-
alities of claiming and was subject to no authority. This lack of “geography” made the
Chandless/Urbano expedition and its maps crucially significant.
DaCunha'sreviewofthemappingofthePurústakesinthegreatnamesofexploration
history in the Upper Amazon: Pedro Teixeira (1596); his chronicler, the Jesuit Cristovão
d'Acuña; the cartographer Guillaume Lisle (1723); Portuguese naturalist Alexandre
Rodrigues Ferreira (1779); the luminaries of Anglophone nineteenth-century explora-
tion—US Navy man Lardner Gibbon (1852), naturalist Louis Agassiz (1867)—and Per-
uvian geographer Mariano Paz-Soldan (1823). All, he thought, had fallen short. None
knew the river. In da Cunha's geographic history, he lays the laurels of “discovery” at
the feet of a cafuz , the black-Indian mestizo Manoel Urbano, who in his explorations of
the rapids, the varadouros , and the natives becomes a modern version of the bandeir-
ante , the bridge between the mythical past and the modern day. It is Urbano's passages
thatmarkouttheserealmsas“Brazilian,”travelingtheconnectionsbetweentheMadeira
to the south, the Juruá and the Tefé to the north; Urbano even traveled above the head-
waters of Tefé and the Coarí in his great arc of discovery. Even today this would be a
remarkable achievement of sheer endurance, very difficult to carry out.
Urbanowould“discover”andpossesstheseareas(and,asweseelater,colonizethem)
through the tried-and-true technique of marriage into the tribes; he left a swath of chil-
dren and affines from one end of the river to the other. The significance of his travels,
their legitimation by state explorations, and their subsequent inscription into imperial
science by Silva Coutinho for the Brazilian state, 1 Chandless for the Royal Geographic-
al Society and Agassiz for the Harvard Museum became the mechanisms through which
political authority overthePurúswassymbolically rendered, precisely andscientifically
described. We have no way of knowing whether in fact the travels of Manoel Urbano
encompassedthegeographicamplitudeassertedbydaCunha,whowasbasinghisreport
on an addendum to the Chandless report, 2 but Urbano was the guide for all three exped-
itions just as the regional latex economy began to take off.
TheCoutinhoexpeditionhadaGermanbotanistandillustratorinattendance,the“first
entry of European science into those regions.” They carried out simple hydrological and
geological studies and listed the tribes, but the botanist, Wallis, unbelievably accident
proneandunlucky,neverproducedthelonged-forsketches.Heapparentlywentmadand
eventually drowned, or perhaps drowned himself. Coutinho's formal survey, though in-