A Quilombo Called Canudos - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 43

Figure 4.1. View of Canudos sketched by da Cunha.
Climates and Catastrophe
The imaginary world of isolated and tranquil backland settlements, enclosed landscapes
outside of history, is extremely inaccurate for the Bahian Sertão, where catastrophic El
Niño droughts would unfold each decade with such severity that most of the population
would have to migrate through the moribund countryside to places where water could
be found, or else leave the backlands altogether. 3 As early as 1559-61, Jesuits recorded
horrible droughts. Other chroniclers noted serious rain shortages in 1603, 1605-7, 1645,
1652, 1692. The eighteenth century had a severe E1 Niño in 1721-26, and the drought
of 1777-78 killed seven-eighths of the cattle in the Northeast. 4
The nineteenth century was also afflicted with devastating droughts in 1817, 1827-9,
and 1858-60, 5 but the epochal years were 1877-79, 1888-91 (just prior to the period
when Canudos was established by Antonio Conselheiro), and 1896-7, the years of the
battles of Canudos. The young aristocratic naturalists Johann Baptist von Spix and Carl
Friedrich von Martius, who traveled through this area during the drought of 1817, re-
corded the desperation of the fleeing populace (whose anxiety and dread they shared)
huddled near slimy-green blackened springs or pits excavated in streambeds to imbibe
alkali or pestilent water. Typhoid and other waterborne diseases were added to the af-
flictions that dogged these hordes migrating to the coast or one of the few remaining
watered outposts. These fluids were so vile and toxic that the mules hauling the exiles'
gearwoulddrinkitonlywhenheavilylacedwith rapadura —molasses-ladenbrownsug-
ar. 6 The drought in 1829 marked the first Northeastern migration to the Purús watershed
six thousand miles to the west in the Amazon, which gives an idea of the immensity of
thedroughtdiasporaseventhisearlyon. 7 In1858-60theBritishconsulreporteddrought
so severe that “many families were willing to sell household slaves at any price.” 8 The
1877 catastrophe would coincide with the dramatic colonization of the Amazon rubber
forests. The drought of the 1880s was studied by da Cunha's friend and main scientific
source on the Bahian backland, Téodoro Sampaio, who described the waters this way:
“thick, turbid, with the reek of urine and the repugnant aspect of putrid liquids; none of
us were pleased to drink this noxious fluid in spite of the thirst that tormented us in our
arid and empty crossing”. 9
In the El Niño of 1877-78 (one of the worst of the nineteenth century) at least half
a million people died, and hundreds of thousands of flagelados , drought refugees, mi-
grated to the coastal cities or to the banks of the São Francisco, or gave themselves over
to debt peonage in the Amazon rubber forests. 10 Epidemics of cholera, yellow fever,
and smallpox increased the mortality of the starving hordes. The assets of the poor, their