“Events that perhaps lacked a historian” - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 324

“Brasilieros”: Peruvians and the Hidden History of Brazil
Da Cunha's other descriptions of Peruvian occupation, derogatory as they were, were
perhaps too controversial to include in the final report and so ended up in essays upon
his return in the Jornal do Comércio in 1907, and hastily reappeared in the chaotically
compiled À margem da história. Thisessay,“Brasilieros,”comparedtheeffectivenessof
settlement of Brazilians and Peruvians and drew a dispiriting conclusion: Peruvian en-
terpriseshadoftenfollowedonBrazilianefforts,andmosthadbeenpatheticfailures.Da
CunharecountstheentranceofPeruvianadministrativeeffortsinAmazonia.Hereviews
the quinine industry and the collapse of the largest Peruvian Amazon industry before
caucho . From the remote forests of Peru and Amazonia, the drugs from “secret” forests,
developedbynativesandfurtherelaboratedbytheJesuits,wereinfranticdemandasim-
perial economies extended into malarial lands, and as colonial armies died in droves. 34
Thedesperateneedtocontrolfeverswaskeyinnineteenth-centurymedicine.Quinine
was used to treat not just “intermittent agues” but almost any fever. Gustave Flaubert's
adoredsister Caroline, sufferingfromchildbirth fever,wasgivenmassive dosesofquin-
ine, which of course did not save her. More than a million and half US soldiers in the
CivilWarwerediagnosedwithmalaria,andasPhilipCurtinhasshownsoeloquentlyfor
colonial troops in west Africa, mortality among temperate-zone troops who found them-
selvesinthetropicswasveryhigh. 35 “Theague”affectedmilitarymenandcolonialgov-
ernmentseverywhereandwasdecisiveinmanycolonialwars,ashistorianJ.R.McNeill
has shown so conclusively. Clements Markham, one of the great scholars of the Andean
zone, claimed the biopiracy coup that transferred cinchona bark to Kew. Unfortunately,
his specimens had low levels of quinine in them and were ineffective. The seeds of the
powerful antimalarial strain were actually collected by Charles Ledger with the help of
a native friend. Kew Gardens, when presented with the seeds, refused to purchase them.
The Dutch did, however, and proceeded to plant them in their colony in Java, thus dom-
inating the trade in this most valuable medicine until the Second World War. 36
Da Cunha's essay on Peruvian Amazonian occupation revisits his first essays on the
culture of the region and what he sees as the central dichotomy between Peru's coastal
culture and the potentialities of the Amazon. Even unhinged caudillos could assess the
economic allurements of the lowlands. Da Cunha emphasizes the emergence of an im-
mense state apparatus mobilized to support a new tropical economy to animate Peru's
national identity, but the “Jesuits' bark”—quinine—on which the whole enterprise was
predicatedvanishedovernightasaviablecommodity,leavinginitswakethemostabject
abandonment; the region was left to stagnate with only “panama hats” and a few gold
nuggets to define its commerce. This first attempt at a tropical Peruvian civilization,
aborted in the geopolitics of plant theft, was saved, according to da Cunha, by Brazili-
ans who helped develop the industry of caucho and steam travel. The rest of the essay