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 71

cious drugs, dyes, balsams and perfumes constituted the elite Amazonian exports, while
ship provisions of rice, turtle oil, dried fish, and a kind of nauseating confit of manatee
suppliedthesailingtrade.ThingswerechangingrapidlyinAmazonCountrybythenine-
teenth century, all of which would shape the contours of the Scramble: the emergence
scientific and broader imperial interests in terms of both “enlightenment” knowledge
and resource espionage; better land survey techniques, training for “geography milit-
ant,” 7 and the revamping of transportation systems, from wind and rowing vessels to
the modern steamship. Nineteenth-century Amazonia resided at the intersection of am-
bitious dreams of empires and new republics; it was embedded in old mercantile com-
modity circuits as well as an emergent globalized capitalism that relied on tropical raw
materials for machinery, medicine, and industrial outputs for new markets of mass con-
sumption. 8 Scoresoftravelers spreadoutoveritsterrains, asI(anddaCunha)discussin
much more detail in later chapters.
Geography Militant
While elements of the Amazonian lowlands were of economic interest (rubber, cacau,
drugs, and gold) and certainly the place was scientifically compelling, the economic
news and traveler exploits hardly captured the geographical complexity or the accuracy
required by states to actually claim these areas. Information on the bends in the rivers
and their actual names were often the purview of geographers sponsored by the British
Royal Geographical Society like William Chandless in the upper Amazonian tributaries,
Robert Schomburgk in the Guianas, and Percy Fawcett on the Rio Verde (all contested
border areas), as well as armies of lesser known military surveyors, unglamorous and
mostly unsung, who carried out the technical business of survey exploration. Latin
AmericanmilitaryschoolslikePraiaVermelhawereincubatorsforhome-grownsurvey-
ors such as da Cunha and Acrean rebel José Plácido de Castro. The fate of huge ter-
ritories often hung on anonymous scribblings and sketch maps. An expedition with a
decent (or at least convincing) cartographer might well achieve more than armies and
fortresses. 9 The extent to which these played out in boundary events is eloquently and
humorously spelled out by historian Graham Burnett's Masters of All They Surveyed , a
paean to the lonely, poorly rewarded, but highly effective craft of colonial survey. 10
The controls on navigation and international trade that had prevailed on the interior
rivers for centuries had kept outside explorers and espionage at bay in Amazonia until
the middle of the nineteenth century. There was also the perennial and irksome problem
of finding and keeping rowers—a subject of continuous complaint in the pre-steam era.
The most august of travelers could find themselves marooned. Even the ruling magis-
trateoftheAmazon,FranciscoMendonçaFurtado(brothertothecrown'sforeignminis-
tertheMarquisofPombal),wasonceditched,alongwiththerestofhisentourage,byhis