“Events that perhaps lacked a historian” - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 318

greed, so even their towns are provisional. Where settlement and agriculture occur, it
is the result of native effort and ownership—Amahuaca women and Campa chiefs. In
short, there is “not a glimmer of social cohesion.” This contrast will become more thor-
oughly elaborated in da Cunha's imperial ethnography, provided in the next chapter.
Populating the Purús: From the Mouth to the Headwaters
Reading the “news of the voluntary reduction of the fierce Mura nation in peace and harmony” in the
years1784to1786,andreadingthelengthycorrespondencebetweenLieutenantColonelJoãoBatista
Mardel and João Caldas on how to deal with the people “who inhabit the channel and the lakes from
the Purús to the Juruá,” reveals a venerable and persistent interest in the settlement of those regions.
But an appraisal of the ancient documents would be tedious. It is enough to know that in 1787, after
an extraordinary campaign in which no weapons were employed other than the preferred gifts of the
natives, the aborigines of those areas were pacified, entirely captured by civilized people. The Purús
especially, with its incomparable richness in precious spices, was thus opened to the disordered and
primitive regime that still rules Amazonia. This is revealed in one act of the last governor of the Rio
Negro Capitancy, Manoel Joaquim do Paco; it is eloquent in its extravagance. In 1818 he closed the
river; he prohibited those seeking the drogas do sertão —backland botanicals—to travel it: “They set
outwiththeireyesblindedbytheirlustforpreciousfruits.Theywantabovealltomaketheirfortunes
with the profusion of their product.” The governing junta of Pará soon revoked this curious resolu-
tion, which was after all quite indicative of the importance that the great river had already assumed
by that time.
Unfortunately, the years of adventures into the Purús and its hinterlands left little documentation.
We catch glimpses, though, in the fragile and disjointed reminiscences of its most aged inhabitants,
which inspire little confidence. Only in 1854 do the first really certain data in reference to the Purús
appear with the report of the president of Amazonas, Hercules Pena, in which there are references to
the mission on the Purús (São Luiz de Gonzaga) entrusted to Father Pedro de Ciariana.
Fromthatdateforward,theoccupationwascontinuousandpalpable,sothatbySeptember7,1858,
another president, Francisco Mendonça Furtado, could justify in his reports the need for establishing
regular navigation to those outposts. In fact, the population increased, but as it was still precarious
and wandering through unmarked territory, there was no way to remotely approximate its numbers.
One conjectures that residents didn't decrease only by the circumstance of the creation in June 1857,
near Guajaraba, of a health post for those victimized by the pernicious fevers that infest those shores.
Amongthose early occupants wasaman whoseownethnic background prepared him forfounding
a new society in these newly discovered lands: Manoel Urbano de Encarnacão. We have already de-
scribedhisadmirableroleasaconquerorofthewilderness.Buthisactivitiesasthefounderofvillages
are more important. Even today, his scruples and tenacity, matched only by his integrity and natural
generosity, are part of the folklore of the Purús.
He was the mediator between the new populations searching out the Purús and the wild tribes who
occupied its banks. Remember that for centuries the Purús was perhaps the major route on which
the most remote tribes from the most distant parts of the continent continually traveled. The Muras,
nomadic and wild, who so alarmed the colonial governments, are not native—they descended from
Bolivia via the Mamoré and are perhaps relatives of the Moxos, who were in turn besieged first by
incursionsoftheIncasandthenbyothertribesfromthesouthofourcountrywhohadbeenterrorized
bythePaulistas.TheJamanadís,residingdeepintheforestandavoidingrivermargins,stillretainthe