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ical imaginaries and possibilities. 7 These utopian writings themselves had afterlives as
“colonization manuals” in many cases. 8
The “black legend,” by contrast, evokes ecological intractability, disease, moral cor-
rosion, too much sex (often perverse, or so described by the Inquisition), 9 cannibalism,
savagery, an unpleasant and catastrophic climate, laziness and obdurate resistance to the
allurements of civilization, or corruption by civilization. The “true nature” of the tropics
in this view is a green hell, a festival of horrors. The “green luxuriance” is a deceiving
mantle for the essence of the tropics: a place of treachery, falsity, a counterfeit paradise
nursing a fundamental debility—agriculture fails, forests don't grow back well or grow
back too well, the soil degrades, and people quickly die. The imagery of rot and corrup-
tion, whether biological or moral, underpins what is seen initially as fertility. The deep
roots of this idea lay in the work of Georges Louis le Clerc, Comte de Buffon, and be-
came widely popularized by this natural historian and encyclopedist. These savage trop-
ics and their inhabitants express a stubborn resistance to higher civilizational possibilit-
ies, a stillborn fecundity masking a deeper narrative of peril.
Theclimateseemsagreeablebutexhalesfatalmiasmasorproducedlethalstorms;and
ifitisnot,asmedicinehaditatthetime,suckingoxygenoutfromone'slungs,ithastens
depravity and moral erosion. Elsworth Huntington in 1905 echoed the earlier views of
the Inquisition in Brazil: “Any young man with red blood in his veins is in more danger
ofdeteriorating incharacter andefficiency because ofthewomenofthetropicsthanany
single cause.” And indeed there was the broader “moral climatology” embraced in the
urgency of being temperate. 10
This issue of essence, of what the tropics are , shapes “tropicalism” and the set of “de-
velopment” practices directed at them. For temperate-zone analysts of da Cunha's day
there were intrinsic biotic and socio-racial limits to the autochthonous development of
tropical “civilization” that inhered in both the “white' and the “black” legends: popu-
lations too innocent or too evil (and too dark in color), too degenerate or too frail and
undeveloped to support colonial modernities—“land that could hardly bear the weight
ofcivilization.”Theseproblemsofhumannaturewerecompoundedby“opulentnature”
that quelled the thirst for enterprise, or “intractable nature” that simply overwhelmed.
Tropical nature was insufficiently worked by the local populations in their nomadic cir-
cuits, or dominated the indolent locals or wilted under the practices of plunder. Thus
the equatorial world was an appropriate arena for colonial action, based on other, better,
economies, comportments, and rationalities—and the persons—of the Northern mission
civilizatrice .
Northern and Mediterranean Claiming
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