“Events that perhaps lacked a historian” - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 307

pointless minutiae and rarely lifted his eyes beyond his field instructions. And this is why, in general,
explorerslimitedtheirvoyagestothemainchannel,withvariantsontheRioNegroortheRioBranco,
and stayed there. The great majority of narrators, distant from occurrences elsewhere, ignored them;
and though perhaps of lesser magnitude, these might have contributed substantially to a more pro-
found integration of processes and events that are still poorly defined, fragmentary, and dissonant.
Be that as it may, tracing an irregular line from the northern hills of Amazonia to the east and then
tracking south at the head of the Napo, and descending from the Amazonas to Pará, one has sketched
practically all the geographies of Amazonian scholarship. The south, excluding the Madeira (which
was historically linked to Mato Grosso by the audacious sallies of the Paulista expansion), remains
the wilderness: “a waste of waters,” as William Hadfield wrote in 1877, 5 repeating the regrettable
exaggerations of the old fantasies that gloss those landscapes with the luster of the arcane and mys-
terious.
The Purús, in particular, since the beginning, has been the victim of old chroniclers. It entered his-
tory for the first time with a singular and fantastic imprint. Really, all the facts suggest that this was
the remarkable “River of the Giants” to which Father Cristovão d'Acuña refers:
. . . A renowned River which the Indians call Cuchiguara. It is navigable even though some ports
haverocks.. . .Therearealotoffish,manyturtles,andanexceptionalabundanceofmanioc,maize
and everything necessary to facilitate exploration of it.
He refers later to its population and cites among others the Curú-Curú, corrupted obviously from the
Purú-Purús, and of the Curiqueres:
Giants 17 hands tall, very brave, who are naked: they carry great disks of gold in their ears and
noses, and to arrive at their villages two months of continuous walking from the mouth of the
Cuchiguara are required . . .
Thus was launched the mythical geography of the Purús, so it is no surprise that shortly thereafter,
a mapmaker largely responsible for the continuing cartographic eccentricities, Guillame de Lisle, the
first geographer of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, summed up in 1703 then-current notions
about Brazil and gave the great river a capricious depiction. His map shows the Purús under another
name, “River of the Omepalens,” stretching in a sharp line to the south to 18 degrees latitude, where
it branches out into imaginary headwaters somewhere past La Paz. And from these beginnings, there
is a short explanatory note about the new and singular beings:
The Mutuanís, or Giants rich in gold, these inhabitants are two months from the mouth of the river
. . .
Thus persisted, as we see, the fictions of the credulous chronicler of Captain Pedro Teixeira. *1
Among these errors, nothing more is revealed than the propensity for the marvelous, a feature par-
ticular to those times. Padre João Daniel, in the same volume from which we extracted out earlier
phrase provides the Purús with so a true description, that he appears entirely innocent of hyperbole of
everything in the 18th century:
The Rio Purús is so big that it has thirty days of good navigation because it hasn't many cataracts
. . .
Thesetwoelements,thenatureandextentofthechannel,suggesttheexistenceofearlierexplorations,
forays to the area that perhaps lacked a historian.