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 74

General History of Castillian Activities in the Islands and Countries of the Ocean Sea
(derivedinitsessentialsfromAlvarNuñezCabezadeVaca's Shipwrecks and Comment-
aries ) had provided the most widely known assessment: “There is a huge lake they call
the Xayaros formed of many rivers that arise from the heights of the Andes. They form
the river Paranaguazu and with this said lake, communicate with the Amazonas.” 13 The
Lago de Xarayos, named after the highly civilized and soon extinct Indian group, was
seenasapivotbetweenthetwogreatdrainagesandthesourceofbothRíoParaguayand
the Amazon, thus suggesting that Brazil might incarnate itself from the Platine estuary
to the mouth of the Amazon as a giant, continental-scale island, a sort of New World
Australia. From the beginning of the 1600s, the possibility of a connection between the
Paraguayan and Amazon drainages was an inspiration for territorial expansion beyond
the Tordesillas line. To transform indistinct frontiers into the outline of a new nation re-
quired discursive and geographic imagination. While the myth of El Dorado as reality
and metaphor stimulated explorations and expeditions over the vast interior, the spatial
conception that nourished a Brazil with a large interior was “Island Brazil,” a geograph-
ical image that ultimately galvanized colonial diplomacy.
As the seventeenth century wore on, the diligent mapmakers moved the Brazilian
“Tordesillas” limits farther west, where the link to Amazonia corresponded increasingly
to the Madeira and Paraguay River basins, 14 capturing, at least by the map, millions of
hectares, most of what was called the “Pays de Amazones” and occupied by large in-
digenous nations. This cartographic nimbleness was matched by an equal agility with-
in the landscape itself. A number of expeditions moved from Mato Grosso through the
missions in the Moxos plains and then on to the Rio Madeira, taking the measure of the
terrain and populations. These forays may well have been secret, but soon they were a
major clandestine circuit for the spoils of gold mining and native slaving. 15 The route
was probably far more widely known in pre-Columbian times via the connections from
the extensive indigenous Moxos plains to the Xingu River polities, so the rumored in-
tegration of the watershed was probably informed by earlier trade and travel routes that
wouldcertainlyhavebeenactiveinsixteenth-centuryexpeditionsofCabezadeVacaand
Sebastian Cabot, early speculators on such links. 16
Inventing the Interior: Island Brazil
Theinventionofthe“interior”ofBrazilbyitsmostlycoastalpopulationwasmademore
appetizing by the discovery of rich veins of gold in the early eighteenth century in the
Guaporé basin, in what is today known as Mato Grosso, and the territories of the Cap-
taincy of Goyáz, between the Sao Francisco River and the Araguaia-Tocantins. Gold
needed slaves to find and to mine it, so whenever the luminous metal appeared, captive
labor was soon applied to it, later followed by freelancers of various kinds. The mame-