“Events that perhaps lacked a historian” - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 317

da Cunha is correct to begin with their dramatic capitulation: administrators and cler-
ics of the region were stunned at the sudden surrender of this warlike tribe. But disease
along with internecine and protracted warfare with the Mundurukú made the missions'
and Brazilian garrisons' promise of protection against their arch enemies appealing. 30
The Mura were not destined to survive this alteration of circumstances, even as thou-
sands thronged to missionary ormilitary settlements. There they succumbed to the usual
maladies, and a few short years later they lost their missionary interlocutors when the
Pombaline reforms exiled ecclesiastics throughout the New World. Mission lands and
theirnativechargeswerelefttothedepredationsoftheft,death,andslaverybylocaldir-
ectorates. 31
Da Cunha describes the more famous of the Purús tribes but also recounts their “dis-
placement or absorption” in the unfolding of events more than half a century later in
whatwasactuallyafarlessbenignprocess.Infourteenyears,bydaCunha'scalculation,
native settlement had declined by two-thirds. But the real story is the economic dynam-
ism that “perhaps lacked a historian.” What is clear in da Cunha's narrative is that the
Purús was always a rich river, whether thronged with natives or not. Freelancers were
plunderingitsgiftstosuchextremesthattheriverhadtobeembargoedearlyinthenine-
teenth century. The Purús always had the attention of Brazilian administrators, whether
Jesuit or imperial, and indeed was so important that it became the first Upper Amazon
site for regular steam travel: this began in 1869 and opened the floodgates of spontan-
eousBraziliancolonizationinquestofsarsaparilla,turtlemeat,andoilfortheexpanding
world of sea travel and the burgeoning rubber economy. The flood of immigrants “un-
yielding,undeflectable,andcommittedtostabledominion,”articulatedtheBrazilianim-
perialdiscourse:attachingmantothelandthroughusefultoil,asdescribedbydaCunha,
in the exemplary urbanism of the town of Lábrea. But more to the point, four-fifths of
the river was populated by Brazilians along its length “without the hiatus or blemish of
one abandoned area linking all the seringais .” This paean to a peasantry and a process
mimics, at least in da Cunha's ideological framing, US yeoman expansion and manifest
destiny. Though he acknowledged the problem of latifundias and elsewhere the horrors
of the rubber estates, these, he felt, could ultimately be ameliorated by state actions and
greater political integration with the rest of the nation.
The Brazilian context stands in contrast to the Peruvian case as da Cunha explains
it, with the international negotiations firmly in mind. Unlike Brazilian engagement (as
earlyastheeighteenthcentury),thePeruvianswererecentarrivalsonthePurús,refugees
fromtheUcayali,insinuatingthemselvesintoBrazilianlandswithcompleteindifference
to place. No national feeling animates them: they are unwilling to die for the patria and
happily abandon their posts under military pressure. Their occupation is ephemeral, pre-
dicated on the abuse of natives, sexually immoral. They incarnate only the ambition of