The Scramble for the Amazon and the “Lost Paradise” of Euclides da Cunha by Susanna B. Hecht (review)

At the time of his death in an August 1909 shootout with his wife’s much younger lover, Euclides da Cunha was contemplating a book based on his experience at the head of the 1905 joint Peruvian-Brazilian expedition that surveyed the Purús River to the varadouro (portage) that linked it to the Ucayali River. To be entitled “O paraíso per-dido” (The Lost Paradise), it would rival his canonical Os sertões (Rebellion in the Back-lands, 1902) on the Canudos Rebellion in Brazil’s northeast in the mid 1890s. The fragments that he published in his lifetime account for about 130 pages of Susanna B. Hecht’s Scramble for the Amazon, the rest of which sets them in their contexts. These include the personal (da Cunha’s difficulties in securing a satisfactory career and his turbulent, tragic home life), the geopolitical (the Baron of Rio Branco’s successful campaign to demarcate Brazil’s frontiers and thereby seize territory claimed by many of Brazil’s neighbors), and the socioeconomic (the rubber boom that drove Amazonian states to advance their claims). A geographer by training and coauthor of the well-known The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon (1989, 2011), Hecht is at her best when analyzing the imperial conventions that shaped map-making, da Cunha’s understanding of nineteenth-century geography, the competing political and economic interests in the Amazon basin, and the social and economic differences between caucho and Hevea rubber extraction (the former involved the tree’s destruction while more sustainable tapping characterized the latter).

To advance Brazil’s claims on the basis of uti possedetis (the view that effective occupation trumped previous treaties and border demarcations), da Cunha wrote that the refugees from the drought-ridden Northeast who found their way into the Amazon, the same people whom he famously characterized the “bedrock of our race” in Os sertões, “reclaimed their national heritage in a novel and heroic way, extending the fatherland to the new territories that they occupied” (p. 446). Hecht argues that da Cunha thus created a “native anti-European colonial tropicality” (p. 430), portraying the Brazilian Amazon’s inhabitants as “modest bearers and creators of a distinct, but Brazilian, tropical civilization, and one intellectually on par with the highest levels of colonial science” (p. 351). He celebrated the relatively settled Brazilian Hevea tappers, contrasting them with the nomadic and exploitative Peruvian caucheiros, and thus used Brazil’s mixed-race population to advance his country’s claims, even as Brazil was actively recruiting European immigrants to “improve” the population. Ironically, just as Brazil triumphed in the scramble for the Amazon, the extractive rubber economy collapsed as Asian rubber plantations descended from seeds pilfered from the Amazon put an end to it. Today, the upper Purús is seen as “the Empire of nature, a land without history” (p. 483), and few remember “the world that da Cunha so movingly described” (p. 482).

This important book is not without its flaws. Jarring colloquialisms punctuate the usually elegant prose—this is the first book published by a university press in which I have seen the word “bitching” used as a synonym for complaining (p. 14)! The early chapter that provides historical background on the imperial regime is riddled with errors of fact. Scholars seeking to follow Hecht’s footsteps will be hindered by the absence of page numbers in her footnotes. The locator maps appear to have been reproduced from out-of-copyright works and are sometimes illegible.

Notwithstanding these criticisms, Scramble for the Amazon is a work that deserves a wide reading. Hecht reveals the “far more triumphal history” that da Cunha planned “to record for his sertanejos” than the final pages of Os sertões, in which “the last few vanquished dwellers of Canudos stagger through...