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 75

luco *1 bandeirantes from São Paulo rapidly colonized the area with their mining slaves,
areas far to the west of the Tordesillas line. Though small in numbers, once beyond the
gold rush town of Cuiabá, gold strikes— garimpos —were soon sprinkled along the ri-
parian landscapes, giving an impression of greater numbers and settlement than actu-
ally existed. The region also became a refuge for large numbers of quilombos as min-
ing slaves fled up the tributaries. By linking the mines of Cuiabá by river travel on the
Guaporé and the Madeira, then into the main Amazon channel to the port of Belém, or
sailing on the the Paraguay/Paraná and connecting the savanna goldfields of Goyaz to
these rivers via rough overland mule routes, 17 the Portuguese of the eighteenth century
indeed possessed a diffuse El Dorado in the midst of the huge tropical interior, bounded
by the Amazon and Paraguayan river systems.
The town of Cuiabá was quickly founded in 1727, and the capital of the new Cap-
taincy of Mato Grosso, Vila Bela, was established on the banks of the Guaporé two dec-
ades later, as the state rapidly interceded in order to politically validate the territorial
claimsofthefreelancersofthePortugueseempire.TothewestwerenolowlandSpanish
colonies to speak of, only the missions of the Moxos and Chiquitania, which were in-
dependent although under crown protection. 18 These mission territories in what is mod-
ern Bolivia had functioned as a “bulwark state” between Portuguese gold and the Span-
ish silver mines of the Andes. 19 The missions became an increasingly militarized buffer
zone at the interface between Spanish and Portuguese colonial territorial interests and,
at least as importantly, protected native labor from the chattel demands of encomienda
and mita on the Spanish side and slavery on the Brazilian. These communities, formerly
ultra-backwaters, trading in cattle hides, cacau, herbal teas, and tree oils, found them-
selves on the front lines of imperial contest by the time of the Treaty of Madrid in 1750.
The architect of this treaty and the strategies that underpinned it was the Brazilian-
born Portuguese overseas secretary Alexandre Gusmão (1695-1753), whose negoti-
ations emphasized actual territorial occupation. Historical geographer Jaime Cortesão
hasemphasizedfourmainreasonsthatGusmão'sideaofBrazilasan“island”—bounded
to the west by the Paraguay and to the north by the Amazon basin—had such appeal and
infused early territorial ideologies. 20 First, if the tropical “northwest passage” could be
found from the Paraguay River through the giant swamp today known as the Pantanal
into the Amazon territories, an extraordinary linkage of massive river routes was pos-
sible and could be controlled by Brazil, an issue of great geopolitical interest.
Next, the idea of an “island” would make sovereignty over Brazil's interior and the
transfer of Amazon lands to Brazil geographically logical and would significantly un-
dermine any claims Spain made to the lands to the east of the Paraguay and south of
the Amazon River, to which it was in fact entitled under the original provisions of the
Tordesillas line. In administrative terms, it would help unite the Portuguese colonies,