“Events that perhaps lacked a historian” - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 315

agreements, the doubts, and even the greatest errors that for so long so confused the understanding of
the origins of the three great rivers. 18
Populating and Depopulating the Purús
ThenextsupplementproducedbydaCunhawashisdiscussionofadministrativehistory,
titled “Populating the Purús,” which is also about Amerindian depopulations. This sec-
tion describes an “absent-minded imperialism,” one that doesn't exactly oversee but re-
acts to the immense historical changes occurring in remote Amazon forests. This seg-
mentwasanarrativeofBraziliantriumphalism,mostlyreadthroughformalbureaucratic
events outlined in native decline and the explosive entrance of rubber tappers into the
watershed. The tale begins with the defeat of the nomadic Mura Indians and the dis-
placement and loss of countless tribes, and ends with the landscape of desertion of the
Peruvian caucheiros . As da Cunha tells it, it is the imperial arc of Civilization versus
Barbary, settlement versus nomadism, that shapes the region from a native redoubt into
an enriched and enriching frontier. “From the Mouth to the Headwaters” documents the
rush of northeasterners, while “At the Headwaters” describes the Peruvian version of
this saga. This analysis was hardly immune to da Cunha's derogatory views on Peruvi-
ans and were meant to sway negotiations as the writing increasingly took on the histor-
ical themes of sertanejo triumph and the emergence and energizing nationhood of a new
Luso-tropical civilization.
Vanishing Indians
At the turn of the century, Brazil's natives were either swathed in a romantic naturalism
that had them conveniently absent in daily life but mythically vibrant in an undefined
national past, or subjected to various forms of slavery, hunted down, and massacred in
the interior provinces of the country. 19 Da Cunha's measured, elegiac statements are un-
usual for the time. His abiding closeness to Cândido Rondon since their days together at
Praia Vermelha affected his views of Indians. 20 Rondon, a Terena Indian, was an unre-
lenting positivist, Brazil's first indigenist and seminal designer of its native legislation,
and almost its president. 21 Da Cunha's surprisingly knowledgeable discussion of abori-
ginal groups and migrations suggests a modulated, well-informed reading of native his-
tory, quite unusual for the time.
The Upper Amazon, the famous zone “between the Madeira and the Javari,” was
hardly empty of cultural history. Da Cunha was correct in saying that the banks had
teemed with natives. The first European observers of the mouth of the Purús found it so
densely inhabited that they were afraid to stop. They noted statues “like those of Cuzco”
and many roads leading back to terra firma. 22 The region was, as da Cunha points out,