Notes - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 412

Chapter 11
*1. A huaca is a ritual or sacred site, a monumental place in Inca culture.
*2. Flooded forests.
*3. Sluices.
*4. These are Northeast festivals that often include akindofrhyming andinsult competition. Today's
improvisational hip-hop competitions are analogues.
*5. This announced the free navigation of the Amazon.
1. Da Cunha to Machado Assis, Santos, Februrary 15, 1904.
2. Pontes, Vida dramática de Euclides da Cunha .
3. See Ventura, Barreto de Santana, and Carvalho, Retrato interrompido .
4. Ibid.
5. These include the essays “Contrastes e confrontos,” “Conflito inevitável,” “Contra os caucheiros,”
and “Entre a Maderia e a Javari” in da Cunha, Contrastes e confrontos .
6. Euclides had made comments about the tropical climate in Mato Grosso and Pará in Os Sertões ,
but these were by way of a regional geographic background for the Sertão.
7. Rio Branco pressured for rapid publication essays in a small volume that could be easily distrib-
uted. See da Cunha to da Gama, November 18, 1905.
8. This conflict persisted throughout the twentieth century and was finally resolved only in 1998.
9. Needell, Tropical Belle Époque .
10. Ibid.
11. Burns, Nationalism in Brazil ; Burns, Unwritten Alliance .
12. These included Getulio Vargas; see Garfield, “Continent Apart from the Rest of the World”; Gol-
bery de Couto e Silva, Geopolítica do Brasil and Geopolítica e poder ; Freyre, Perfil de Euclydes e
otros perfís .
13. Freyre notes that several of the Baron's top diplomatic posts were given to prominent writers:
Oliveira Lima, Assis-Brasil, da Gama, and Joaquim Nabuco, as well as da Cunha.
14. Hecht, “Last Unfinished Page of Genesis.”
15. Da Cunha is referring to forests of the Amazon.
16. Freyre, Order and Progress ; Freyre, Perfil de Euclydes e otros perfís .
17. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial models, nomadism was more primitive than settled
agriculture, and an emblem of barbarism. The idea of extraction and nomadism thus places the Peruvi-
an national character at a lower order than the settled agriculture of Brazilian development. Historical
ecologists have critiqued this theme: Cormier, “Between the Ship and the Bulldozer”; Rival, “Amazo-
nian Historical Ecologies”; Rival, Trekking through History . Also: Whitehead, Histories and Histor-
icities in Amazonia .
18. C. Weiner was a diplomat to Chile in the 1880s who intimated the existence of Machu Picchu
before its discovery by Hiram Bingham. Markham, Incas of Peru .
19. Maldonado met his end in the rapids of the Rio Madeira in 1861.
20. Breman et al., Imperial Monkey Business ; Dickens, Social Darwinism .
21. By 1905, about half the population of São Paulo was composed of white immigrants, whose cul-
ture (as well as genomes) would, in da Cunha's view, swamp the true Brazilian culture. See Graham et
al., Idea of Race in Latin America ; Schwarcz, Spectacle of the Races ; Skidmore, Black into White ; Ste-
pan, Hour of Eugenics .