In the Times of Scrambles in the Land of the Amazons - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 70

post of foreign minister in 1902, US territorial enterprise in South America was not just
“on the horizon” but already actively inside Amazonia.
For the Baron, one clear lesson of the Scramble for Africa was the crucial importance
of establishing and demarcating frontiers. For Rio Branco's Amazonian ventures, there
were specific sets of treaties that shaped his tropical diplomacy, and ideas embodied in
them that he used to great advantage to remake the outline of Brazil through the “law-
fare” and the statecraft of negotiation and adjudication courts.
Theinternationalarbitrationsinvolvedreviewofearliertreaties,whileculturalidioms
about the places were advanced along with historical maps. These diplomatic exercises
were infused with narratives of “merit” as well as lebensraum : “our language, our cus-
toms, our tastes” designed to work off the competing nationalist/imperial ideologies.
Precedent was useful but not definitive: maps and documents were often inconclusive.
The malleability of these processes was Rio Branco's greatest insight and underpinned
his phenomenal success.
At the time Rio Branco began to engage Brazilian frontiers, exploration sciences and
transportation technologies were rapidly changing, integrating “the South” into inter-
national commodity markets and European knowledge systems, at exactly the moment
whentheearlierapparatusofboundaries—thecolonialtreaties—wascrumbling.Allthis
made Amazonia an ideal place for a Scramble.
In Amazon Country
The Iberian approach to scientific and geographic knowledge about its colonies (and es-
pecially the Amazon) emphasized secrecy. Amazonia had been a separate Portuguese
colony until the early nineteenth century,andits transit andexports existed inadifferent
realm from those of southern Brazil. The scientific silence of the crown was matched
by that of the Jesuits, whose rich archives remained largely hidden from academic or
political scrutiny. 5 Although quite a bit was known about the New World tropics, the
formal literatures and reports were embargoed, and most travelers other than the eccle-
siastics were largely illiterate. This left the region full of tempting rumors and, as da
Cunha would discover, lying maps. The great South American interior was as obscure
as darkest Africa for most European powers. The charts of Amazonia's contours and
waterways were examples of creative cartography and imaginative copying. 6 The place
wasnotexactlya terra nullius (thereweremultipleclaimsontheseterritories)butrather
a land more or less “undiscovered”— no descoberto —in the sense of not yet unveiled,
with colonial boundaries, native nations, imaginary places, and ecclesiastic settlements
framing and overlapping this cartographic void.
The heart of Amazonia appeared as an amorphous space on the charts, largely taken
up by the Pays des Amazones : Amazon country. Some gold trickled out of it, and pre-