Notes - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 426

Teddy Roosevelt's trip on the “River of Doubt”). See Coutinho, Rondon ; Diacon, Stringing Together a
Nation ; Millard, River of Doubt .
22. De Carvajal et al., Discovery of the Amazon .
23. Hill and Santos-Granero, Comparative Arawakan Histories ; Santos-Granero, “Boundaries Are
Made to Be Crossed.”
24. Lathrap, Upper Amazon .
25. The anthropogenic landscapes of the Purus are described in chapter 14 , “In the Realm of Rub-
ber.”
26. See Balée and Erickson, Time and Complexity ; Chirif, Etnicidad y ecología ; Denevan, Aborigin-
al Cultural Geography ; Denevan, Cultivated Landscapes .
27. Xerez, Verdadera relación de la conquista del Perú .
28. See de Acuña and Kane, Nuevo descubrimiento del Gran Rio de las Amazonas . The interactive
area between Andean cultures and Amazonian ones was also noted by the mercenary soldier Ulrich
Schmeidl.
29. For overviews of regional indigenous politics that emphasize the Mura and their conflicts, see
Manuela da Cunha, História dos índios no Brasil ; Hemming, Amazon Frontier ; Porro, O povo das
águas .
30. See Hemming, Red Gold . The explorers von Spix and von Martius also saw them after their ca-
pitulation.
31. Hemming, Red Gold ; MacLachlan, “Indian Directorate.”
32. Leonel de Almeida was also one of the heroes in the Peruvian skirmishes. Some of this early his-
tory is captured in a selection of newspaper articles from the Lábrea newspaper Gazeta do Purús .
33. Venâncio was a significant character on the Purús and one of its important political headmen. An
Ashinika leader who worked as a contractor for Carlos and Delfim Fitzcarraldo, he and his kinsmen
migrated from the Ucayali over to the Purús in the dry season to collect caucho on the Cujar. Venâncio
also worked for Carlos Scharff; the elaborately attired chief with the towering headdress shown in fig-
ure 17.2 may be Venâncio. Peter Gow argues that the ability to mobilize and move his kinsmen set
Venâncio up as a privileged labor supplier who delivered his affines into the rubber economy through
the bonds of blood rather than iron shackles, and himself became a patron of the Madre de Dios and
Manú Rivers. Da Cunha met Venâncio, and indeed the native leader was regularly sought out by au-
thorities of both Peru and Brazil as well as ecclesiastics of various stripes. Gow, “Gringos and Wild In-
dians”; Santos-Granero and Barclay, Tamed Frontiers .
34. The South American history of science and ethnobiology is enjoying a boom. In part this reflects
the increased attention to indigenous knowledge systems that began in the mid-1980s, the biological
turn in colonial studies and the promotion of pharmaceuticals as means of saving rain forests through
bioprospecting. Iconic for ethnobotany in this regard are Balick, Elisabetsky, and Laird, Medicinal Re-
sources of the Tropical Forest ; Markham, Peruvian Bark ; Renner, History of Botanical Exploration in
Amazonian Ecuador .
35. Curtin, Disease and Empire ; Curtin, Migration and Mortality in Africa and the Atlantic World ;
Faust, This Republic of Suffering ; McNeill, Mosquito Empires .
36. Gramiccia, Life of Charles Ledger ; Rocco, Miraculous Fever Tree . A revisionist history now
holds that Markham's mission ultimately failed through a lack of indigenous knowledge of the effect-
iveness of local varietals.
37. These ports, especially Mollendo, were important export platforms for the Ucayali and Madre de
Dios latexes, especially caucho .