“Events that perhaps lacked a historian” - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 306

complete,placedthequestionofthePurúsfirmlywithininternationalgeopolitics.Itpre-
ceded Chandless's expedition by a year and was probably stimulated by the rumblings
around the “Madre de Dios question.”
It is quite likely that Chandless used the Urbano/Coutinho map as a template, and he
used Urbano as a guide as his Bolivian rowers oared up almost three thousand kilomet-
ers of waterway. The Chandless/Urbano map had symbolic value well beyond its mark-
ings. It had the merits of the modern mapping exercises that defined colonial trajector-
ies throughout the tropics in the nineteenth century, and it had the virtues of scientif-
ic production. But it also resonated with earlier forms of claiming that were decisively
Portuguese. In the heyday of Portugal's seaborne empire, its rituals of territorial posses-
sion claimed dominion through navigation—using numeric orientations—and “fixing”
the place on the earth by the position of the sun in the sky. 3 This ability to accurately
locate, to provide means to navigate the realms of “new skies and stars,” was a key Por-
tuguese expression of territorial authority. 4 Chandless may have been sent out by the
Royal Society, but he oriented his points with a mixed-blood Brazilian guide to whom
he gave full credit for the success and caliber of the mission. Urbano's explorations, as
theyaredescribedbydaCunha,integratethemyths,semiotics,andpracticesof bandeir-
antes , the state, science, sexual conquest, and ceremony as forms of claiming political
rights over the Purús. This effort, instantiated in the maps and, as da Cunha underscores,
itsdifficulty,waslaterundonebylazyandcasualcopiesthatrelegatedthemuchsuperior
field study to cartographic oblivion while regional cartographic fictions exploded (and
by extension, the questionable nature of maps advanced to Argentinean arbitration by
the Peruvians). Da Cunha speaks, naturally, with the authority of one who has traveled
the river.
Here is his review of the mythical and practical historical geography of the Purús,
which becomes, true to his erudition, both a history of speculations on place and nation
building and documentation of the actual expeditions.
Real and Mythical Geographies: From the Mouth to the Headwaters
Like the great majority of tributaries on the right side of the Amazon River, the Purús appears com-
pletely foreign to our history. The phrase of Padre João Daniel in his imaginative Tesouro descoberto
sums up the knowledge of the old chroniclers: “Between the Madeira and Javari, a distance greater
than 200 leagues, is no one, no whites, nor tapuyas , nor Missions.”
The emptiness is informed less by real conditions than by lamentable gaps in our knowledge. Our
chroniclers, on the whole, blinkered by their narrow itineraries or particular objectives, lacked any
vision that would have allowed them to embrace more expansive interconnections. We can cite nu-
merous examples that reveal all the idiosyncratic aspects into which they divided and disjointed the
annals of Amazonia. Whether the rigorous data of the astronomers or the ingenuous narratives of the
missionaries, all were shackled to the regime that guided them. Even Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira,
the greatest polymath of the colonial era, in his Philosophical Voyage reined in his noble spirit with