Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
It is very difficult for us to imagine what transpired in those forgotten forests in now
forgotten times. For Amazonia, the death of the metastasizing rubber economy had been
foretold in the seeds stolen for Clements Markham in 1876 by Henry Wickham a full
thirty years before da Cunha's travels. Markham structured the institutional mechanisms
that underpinned the “empire of botany,” and as quinine had before, rubber would now
shape the global economy. These shifts, as da Cunha had noted, had “stolen the future,”
or at least one kind of future, from the Amazon.
The seeds that had been planted out with varying success were now trees swaying in
the breezes of Ceylon plantations. In 1906, as da Cunha was poring over his maps and
reports for Baron Rio Branco, Sir Henry Blake hosted the first ever rubber exhibition in
Ceylon, with products from India and Java as well. Planting and processing techniques
were discussed in detail, and within the decade, Asian rubber would eclipse the wild
product, collapsing the world that da Cunha so movingly described. The language and
ideologies of nationalism that were developed for a particularly Amazonian context by
Rio Branco's mandarins would, by 1912, have lost their salience as Malaysian rubber
flooded world markets and the New World latex economy faded into torpid obscurity.
In any case, the rest of the world was having other scrambles: World War I would
reinforce the dissolution of the Russian, Hapsburg, and Ottoman empires, modern and
civilized Europe would descend into its own barbarity in the trenches of Flanders and
Verdunwithitsmustardgasandbombdroppingairplanes,thelastwarwherehorseswere
usedinpatheticcavalrychargesintomachine-gunfire.Inthisnoisyanddesperateworld,
with Europe's own imperial reconfiguration, the plights of some debt peons on a far-
flung tropical tributary and battles over Creole empires lost their fascination. Yet the
maps we have today would look very different without the definitive Brazilian triumph
in the Amazon Scramble, one that, at the end of the day (and certainly compared with
the blood lust of Europe), seemed stately and civilized in its quiet adjudications.
The area would depopulate and revert to the simple rural producers who had been its
slaves in earlier times. A hundred years later, the history and drama of the place would
be excised and forgotten. The Upper Purús was inscribed in the twenty-first century as
the Empire of Nature, a land without history.
DaCunha'sassessmentsofAmazoniawereeclipsedbythedurabletriumphof
OsSer-
tões
and the frisson of scandal that surrounded his death. What is clear is that the fates
of millions all over the globe had been inextricably woven into the tropical biologies of
latex trees, whose influences had already figured in complex ways in Latin American
history.
The great estates that flourished along the Purús, the vast commodity chain stretched
the from the Rothschild banking houses to oozing saps that had ignited the avarice of
British, French, US, and Belgian imperial ambitions and galvanized traditional New
Search WWH ::
Custom Search