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 72

rowers off the coast of Marajó. 11 By the mid and late nineteenth century, better survey
and steamships were transforming the possibilities of travel. Steamers could carry much
more cargo and bypassed the need for the typically recalcitrant rowers. As steamships
increasingly plied the region, so did scores of adventurers, scientists, and bureaucrats.
The opening of the Amazon to international commerce in the 1850s made issues of
boundaries, sovereignties, and information all the more urgent. A “Great Game” was
afootintheAmazon,onethatfedoffearlierglobalcompetitionsandmodernaspirations,
and there were no real frontier boundaries in place.
Uncertain Dominions
The political geography that the Baron and Euclides ultimately confronted had long,
contentious,andillustriousrootsanchoredinambiguoustreatiesandmythicandfantast-
icallandmarks:theLakeofXarayosatthewesternboundaryofBrazil,thecentipedelike
Lake El Dorado in the Guianas, the lake of Rogualgoalo in the headwaters of the upper
Amazon. Rivers had names in native languages but were baptized by their “discover-
ers,” and multiple uses of the same names for different places (like Rio Maria or Rio
Vermelho) compounded the confusion. A casual shift in a river course or a place-name
by a cartographer meant that tens of thousands of hectares could change nationality with
the flick of a pen, and often did. 12 The discovery of a valuable resource or an emerging
strategic position could stir up dormant resentments and animate conflicts on the sleepy
frontiers of ultra-peripheries, suddenly subjecting them to the scrutiny and meddling of
global powers. The confusing and inventive features of cartographies was reflected in
the ambiguities of formal treaties that were meant to divide up and administrate the “un-
explored territories” of the “Lands of the Amazons,” where even today the maps are a
mess.
If there was a single truism that prevailed in tropical territorial diplomacy, it was that
treaties were made to be broken. It is not my purpose to detail the politics of the suc-
cessivepactsthatrecastallAmazonterritoriesamongthenationswhoclaimedthem,but
the Brazilian case was especially important. Brazil's boundaries involved over twelve
thousand kilometers from the Rio de la Plata north to the Amazon basin in some of the
remotest and least formally documented parts of the planet, where the DNA of compet-
ingterritorialclaimscouldinvolveextinctempires,ecclesiastical lands,theassertionsof
ex-colonies, distant republics, new utopias, financial speculations, and modern imperia.
Rio Branco, perhaps better than any scholar of his generation, knew very well the signi-
ficance of the archaic treaties and, perhaps more to the point, how to defeat them.
Slow-Motion Scramble: An Island Called Brazil