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age heart of these barbarian realms. What is chastening in these pages is not so much the prodigious
labors of colonial medicine to adapt the colonial to the environment but rather the unraveling of the
most tenacious efforts.
InIndochina'salmosttemperateclimate,Franceapplied15yearsofceaselesslabortoovercomeits
dreadful mortality. This experience and the advice of their best scientists persuaded them not to take
up the arduous task of systematic occupation of equatorial Africa. It was the same with the English,
German, and Belgian colonies. A three-year tour of duty by colonial district officers became the rule.
The return home was necessary to restore their enfeebled bodies. In spite of the great sacrifices, vast
expenditures, and monuments of civil engineering that transformed the rough topography of new loc-
alities into a truly artful geography, the final result was frail colonies inhabited by a society of eternal
convalescents, living only by maintaining exacting medical and dietary regimens.
Comparethispatternofrigorousbutineffectivecolonialsupervisionwiththeturbulentandrandom
occupation of Acre—so surprising in its outcome. It does not require a detailed review to see that this
regularly denounced style of occupation is startlingly superior not only when set against most other
areas of colonial expansion but even when compared to the great majority of countries that have been
inhabited by their own native populations.
There is no more striking historical example of such anarchic immigration, and certainly not one
so disrupting to the vulgar clichés of climatic determinism. From 1879 to today, in successive waves
backlands populations between Paraíba and Ceará were thrust to that far-flung corner of Amazonia.
The very antithesis of ordered and dignified migrations, these departures lacked the most minimal
administrative supervision. The occupation of Acre is a historic case, entirely “accidental” and far
removed from the orderly aegis of Brazil's watchword, “Progress.” Its origins were borne of Calam-
ity: the periodic droughts of our Northeastern backlands that occasioned the exodus en masse of the
flagelados
—the scourged ones. Here was no crisis of growth, no excess of population flooding to-
ward the frontiers, marching to fresh horizons, noembodiment ofthe triumphant March ofthe Races.
Rather, it reflected dearth and utter defeat by natural catastrophe. Its trajectory was one of stumbling,
disordered flight. In the very inverse of natural selection, all the weak, the useless, the worn-out, the
sick, and the suffering were sent off willy-nilly to that wilderness.
When the great droughts of 1879-80, 1889-90, and 1900-1901 blasted over the scorched back-
lands,thecoastal cities ofthelittoral weresoonfloodedbyanewpopulationofterrifyingstarvelings,
burning with fevers and pox. The sole concern of the authorities was to free themselves as quickly as
possibleoftheinvasionofthesemoribundsavagescloggingroadsandwaterwayswiththeoppressive
mien of the doomed. So they sent them off to Amazonia—vast, empty, largely unknown, an exile in
their own country. The martyred multitudes lost their rights, even the comforts of kinship, shattered
in the hasty departures, leaving for those frontiers with only a letter “to whom it may concern.” They
left, famished, febrile, and poxed, thus liable to infect and corrupt the most salubrious place in the
world. But once having carried out this purge, the government took no further interest. No govern-
ment agent, no doctor accompanied the exiles, whose sole and painful mission was to disappear.
But they didn't disappear. On the contrary, in less than thirty years the State of Acre, which had
beennothingmorethanavaguegeographiclabel,aswampywildernessstretchinginterminablytothe
southwest, defined itself out of the blue, surging forward in economic stature. The capital, a city ten
yearsoldbutestablishedonresidueoftwocenturies,transformeditselfintothemostimportantinland
navigational metropole in South America. And in the mysterious extreme southwest of the Amazo-
nas,wheretheremarkableWilliamChandlesspenetratedmorethan3,200mileswithoutarrivingatits
limit, 100,000 frontiersmen, yes, a legion of 100,000 men, risen from the dead, sprang from nowhere
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