Notes - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 413

22. Tavares Bastos helped a great deal with the logistics of the Agassiz and Morgan expeditions to
the Amazon.
23. Maury never traveled in the Amazon but based his book on Herndon. Maury, Amazon and the
Atlantic Slopes of South America .
24. The Brazilian names are those of the governors and administrators. Silva Coutinho is especially
important because of his travels on the Purús.
25. Viscount James Bryce was a liberal British diplomat who was posted in the United States and
had written in 1888 a well-known book, The American Commonwealth , about US development.
26. Garfield, “Continent Apart from the Rest of the World”; Craig, Recollections of an Ill-Fated Ex-
pedition ; Ferreira, Ferrovía do diabo .
27. Da Cunha to Luis Cruls, Lorena, February 20, 1903.
28. Da Cunha to Vicente de Carvalho, Guarujá, April 24, 1904.
29. Da Cunha to Coelho Neto, Rio de Janeiro, April 22, 1904.
30. Da Cunha to Veríssimo, Guarujá, June 24, 1904.
31. Burns, Unwritten Alliance .
32. Da Gama, “Euclides da Cunha.”
33. Da Cunha to Veríssimo, Rio de Janeiro, June 6, 1904.
34. Da Cunha to Manuel da Cunha, Rio de Janeiro, October 10, 1904.
Chapter 12
*1. “The eternal woman in white, who sees without eyes, and laughs without lips . . .”
*2. An igarapé is a creek or small river.
1. Da Cunha to Manuel da Cunha, Manaus, December 30, 1904.
2. Da Cunha, “Amazônia: A gestão do mundo” (fragment of his speech given at his inception into
the Brazilian Academy of Letters); da Cunha and Tocantins, Um paraíso perdido.
3. He is referring here to the endless portraits of Alexander von Humboldt.
4. A suburb of Rio de Janeiro.
5. The Araceae are probably best known to temperate zone readers through the house plant known as
philodendron.
6. The local names that da Cunha uses in the text are unfamiliar to most temperate zone readers but
he felt the metropole should learn the language of the tropics. In that spirit I have retained them, but a
glossary at the end of the topic will also help clarify. His use of the popular plant names and his atten-
tion to them echo his use of plant names as metaphors in Os Sertões and creates a more general evoca-
tion of place and authenticity. These local names are more rhythmic and beautiful words than their
translations:
aninga: Philodendron speciosum
canaranas: aquatic grasses, mainly a native Amazonian Paspalum , often forming floating islands
aturias: the leguminous shrubs Machaerium lunatum and Drepanocarpus ferox
burití: Mauritia flexuosa , one of the most common and widely used palms throughout Amazonia
7. Da Cunha to Veríssimo, Manaus, January 13, 1905.
8. The Christie Question refers to the 1864 blockading of Rio de Janeiro by Britain as a means of in-
terfering with Brazil's slave trade. This came at an especially inconvenient moment of the Paraguayan
War.