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 82

“founding treaties” such as the spectacularly contestable Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494
but also, later, the equally questionable lines of the Idelfonso, and in Amapá, the ambi-
guity about the location of Rio Vincent Pinzon, and the endless sequences of boundary
revisions.Thefactthatnooneknewwhereanythingwas,thatthemapswereaslikely to
document imaginary terrain as real places, helped his cases a great deal. That such treat-
ies often ended up favoring Brazil had everything to do with the emphasis on Brazilian
de facto occupation, versus the de jure constructions that other South American legal-
ists favored. Rio Branco was ready to reinvent tradition and recast treaties, relying on a
relaxed view of diplomatic precedent when it served him. While treaty boundaries may
have been open to question, modern survey lines were less so, and so he insisted on rap-
id demarcations in his adjudications. Next, Rio Branco used his historical scholarship
extremely pragmatically, and he generally chose to make his arguments by focusing on
current polities rather than on precedents developed by earlier colonial administrations.
By insisting on superseding all previous claims and surveying the contested territories
at once, Rio Branco was able to definitively consolidate Brazil's boundaries using the
politics of existing states rather than archaic polities and extinct empires.
Third, when possible, “discovery” was itself an important component of claim. “New
lands and new stars” was a catchphrase for the early Portuguese imperial exploration.
This involved finding “new lands” and describing celestial means to navigate to
them—that is, the navigational “software” of exploration to situate routes and places.
ThesewereahallmarkofLusoimperialism.RioBrancowassuccessfulinhiscarefuluse
of Brazil's modalities of claiming, including early Luso-Brazilian expeditionary data,
which were much more precise and “scientific” than comparable imperial enterprises of
other European states due to Portugal's deep navigational history and technologies. 30
While planting crosses and saying to uncomprehending populations that the interior of
the continent belonged to a European ruler was helpful in its way, the actual determin-
ation of location and the extension of the colonial “footprint” were key elements in this
form of “conquest,” and the Portuguese and their master pilots were its best practition-
ers. 31 Thus, the 1638 expedition by Pedro Teixeira to Quito, with rowers and astrolabes,
toclaim theAmazonian terrainstwothousandkilometers uptheAmazonRiverwaspre-
cise in siting locations and placing markers, especially compared to the earlier careen-
ing excursion down the Amazon by Francisco Orellana (1541-42), where distances had
been basically counted in days.
But mere “discovery” and geolocation would not, on their own, carry the day in the
nineteenth century. Rio Branco's fourth guiding principle, inspired by his father and Al-
exandre Gusmão, was that physical occupation meant sovereignty. De facto settlement
would, in his view, be more powerful on that big continent than all the lawyers and ly-
ing maps that could be generated in national capitals. Centuries of relentless movement