Rather than admiration and enthusiasm, what usually comes over someone beholding the Amazon at the point where the Tajapuru’s vibrant confusion flows full into the great river is a sense of disillusionment. To be sure, the sheer volume of water is unmatched and therefore capable of inducing that wonderment of which Wallace speaks. But since, from early on in life, each of us has drawn an ideal Amazonia in our minds thanks to the remarkably lyrical pages left us by the countless travelers, from Humboldt down to today, who have contemplated the prodigious hylean rain forest with almost religious awe, we experience a common psychological reaction when we come face to face with the real Amazon: we see it as somehow lacking with respect to the subjective image we have long held of it. Beyond that, as a strictly artistic phenomenon—that is, as a place on earth overflowing with images susceptible of being harmoniously fused into an awe-inspiring synthetic sense—it is decidedly inferior to countless other sites in our own country. In this regard, the entire Amazonian region cannot match, for example, the stretch of our coastline that runs from Cabo Frio to Ponta de Munduba.
It is, nonetheless, doubtless the greatest sight in the land. That sight, however, is one restricted to the horizontal plane, for, much like the last remnants of an enormous, broken frame, the sandstone Monte Alegre range and the granite mountains of the Guianas now rise so little as to provide but a scant touch of relief on one side. And because of this lack of the vertical dimension, essential to imparting a sense of life to a landscape, within a few hours the observer tires in the face of an unbearable monotony and begins to notice that their gaze is less and less frequently directed to that endless horizon as empty and undefined as that of the sea.
The overwhelming impression I conceived—perhaps corresponding to a positive truth—is this: humankind is still an impertinent interloper here. We have arrived uninvited and unprepared for, while nature was still in the process of setting up this vast, magnificent salon. Here we encounter disorder on a lavish scale… the rivers are still not fixed in their courses. They seem to search vainly for equilibrium by wandering off aimlessly in unstable meanders that curve into the form of lakes called sacados with isthmuses that repeatedly break down and recombine in the futile creation of islands and lakes of only six months’ duration. They even produce new topographic forms of jumbled island and lake. Or they extend in cross channels called furos that anastomose between the courses of river and tributary in an atypical network fashion, until it is impossible to decide if the area is a river basin or a sea profusely segmented by straits.
A single flood season would completely destroy the work of a hydrographer.
The flora display this same imperfect grandeur. During the silent middays (the nights are fantastically noisy) one who might walk the forest does so with their gaze exhausted by the green-black of the foliage and, repeatedly encountering the arborescent ferns, which rival palm trees in height, and trees with straight, almost bare trunks, does so with the disquieting sense that they have returned to a much earlier time, as though they had invaded the recesses of one of those mute Carboniferous forests the existence of which is known to us through the retrospective gaze of the geologist.
That sensation of extreme antiquity is completed by the set of singular, and monstrous, fauna, where the amphibian dominates by dint of sheer size—all of which adds yet further to the Paleozoic impression. And one who might wander along the rivers not infrequently encounters animals that exist, imperfectly, as abstract types or mere links upon the evolutionary ladder. The hideous bird called the cigana, for example, which perches on the flexible boughs of the oirana willows bearing beneath wings capable of only short-distance flight a reptilian claw.
Thus is nature portentous but at the same time incomplete. It is a stupendous construct lacking in internal coherence. We must bear in mind that, if the calculations of Wallace and of Hartt are correct, the Amazon region may well be the world’s newest land. It was born of the last geogenic upheaval, which raised the Andes and has barely finished its evolutionary process with the Quaternarian plains that are still forming and are preponderant within its unstable topography.
It contains everything and at the same time lacks everything, because it lacks that linking-together of phenomena developed within a rigorous process that produces the well-defined truths of art and of science—and which bespeaks the grand unconscious logic of things.
Hence this peculiar singularity: in all America, Amazonia is the region most studied and simultaneously least well known. From Humboldt to Emilio Goeldi—from the dawn of the past century to our own day—the best minds have scrutinized it intently. Read them. You will see that none ever ventured beyond the great vertebrating valley. And even there each took refuge in the shelter of a specialization that absorbed him. Wallace, Mawe, W. Edwards, d’Orbigny, Martius, Bates, Agassiz, to cite merely those who occur to me in first order, were in effect reduced to brilliant monograph writers.
Despite its abundance, the scientific literature on the Amazon reflects the physical geography of Amazonia: it is amazing, highly unusual and exceedingly disjointed. Any who dare study it carefully will, at the end of that attempt, get but a small way past the threshold to a marvelous world.
Professor Hartt had a phrase for the challenge that even robust spirits feel in the face of such an enormity. As he studied Amazonian geology, he found himself so thoroughly unmoored from the concise formulas of science and so carried away in dream that he suddenly felt obliged to lower the sails driving him toward fantasy: “I am not a poet. I speak the prose of my science. Revenons!”
Thus he rededicated himself to rigorous scientific deduction. But no more than two pages farther along he could hold out no longer and he set out again on his flight of fancy. The great river, despite its sovereign monotony, evokes the marvelous so powerfully that it catches up the unpresuming chronicler, the romantic adventurer, and the careful scholar alike. In the past, Orellana’s Amazons, Guillaume de l’lsle’s titanic curriquerés, and Walter Raleigh’s Manoa del Dorado formed a fascinating mythological cycle of sorts. They are replicated today in the most imaginative of scientific hypotheses. The imagination can become hyperdeveloped when acting on a discordance in the land itself. Even the most ordered of minds can become unbalanced on inquiring into such grandeur. The results, in the area of objective research proper, are views such as Humboldt’s and the conjectures through which the entire set of notions, from Wallace’s dynamics of earthquakes to Agassiz’s formidable biblical concept of antediluvian glaciers are either set forth or contested.
It would seem, then, that the expansive discourse characteristic of the analysis must have to do with the complexity of the problems: the flight of fancy can make easy use of induction, and truths can devolve into hyperbole. From time to time we idealize uncontrollably the tangible elements of a surprising reality, and the most unbridled dreamer may well find himself in perfect company with the most dedicated scholar.
One can accompany Katzer, for example, on his project to classify, analyze, and compare ancient petrified fossils by means of a long pilgrimage of mind through the most remote points of the oldest ages. To those who deliberate on the classificatory structure and search through the Greek roots of the nomenclature, the pronouncements of science can suddenly open out into a kind of idealism. Analyses end up in marvels; a microscope unveils a past multiple times millenarian. Those who focus on the stupendous outlines of a dead geography see spread out before their eyes the indeterminate spectacle of that extinct middle Devonian ocean that swamped the entire Mato Grosso and Bolivia, covering the bulk of South America, lapping in the west the ancient Goiás highlands, last remaining shoreline of the Brazilio-Eleopic continent that once linked to Africa and made what is now the Atlantic a land mass. Then one might follow the Morgan Commission naturalists, and geological history, despite its more reliable lineaments, will not be absent a touch of grandiosity as it unfolds along the length of the two banks of the huge Tertiary channel that for ages divided the high plains of Brazil from those of Guiana, until the slow rise of the Andes in the west walled off one of its ends and transformed it into a gulf, an estuary, a river.
Finally, if we continue to follow the current facts of Amazonian physiography, there are yet multiple other active factors that greatly disturb the cold serenity of scientific observation.
This brief survey will suffice to demonstrate that even in the simplest matters the Amazon presents a clear deviation from the usual evolution of topographic forms.
All land is a kind of block that is molded by external agents, among which the great rivers are primary remodelers of natural features. Compensating for the degradation of peaks with the raising of valleys, wearing down mountains and building up plains, they in general combine constructive and destructive processes in such a manner that landscapes, in their slow, constant transfiguration, manifest the effects of a prodigious sculpting process.
In this way the Huang Ho created a delta that became a province of China. And even more significantly the Mississippi astonishes the naturalist with its ongoing monumental redeposit of earth, which will soon reach depths that will connect with the Gulf Stream. Dissolved continents are contained in their silty waters. Countries are transformed. Lands are remade. And there is so logical a set of processes in their continuous great expenditure of natural energy that to observe them sometimes suggests observation of the lineaments of an aspect of human activity: from the pages of Herodotus to those of Maspero, one can contemplate the genesis of a civilization in parallel with the genesis of a delta. The parallel is so exact as seemingly to justify the exaggerated claims of such as Metchnikoff, who sees the great rivers as the principal causes of the development of nations.
With the Amazon the opposite is the case. What is foremost in it is the prohibitive, the destructive function. Its enormous volume destroys the land. Professor Hartt, impressed by its ever-muddy waters, calculated that “if a continuous train were running non-stop day and night on a railroad and it were loaded with mud and sand, that enormous quantity of matteryp would still be less than what is in fact transported by its waters.”1
But that mass of dissolved earth is not redistributed. This greatest of rivers has no delta. Marajó Island, which supports a selective flora of plants adapted to their marismatic environment and the instability of the silt deposits, is a mirage land. If the vegetation were stripped away, all that would be left would be the scoured surface of the swampy, potholefilled mondongos stretching out to the water’s edge. Alternately, craggy peaks of hardened sandstone randomly scattered across the surface of a bay. In the light of Walter Bates’s rigorous deductions, which corroborate Martius’s prior conjecture, what exists under the cover of the forest is a ruin: the decomposed remnants of the land mass that once stretched from the coasts of Belém to the coasts of Macapá. It would have to be reconstituted in its ancient integrity to explain the identity that exists between the land fauna of northern Brazil and that of the Guianas, now separated by the great river.2
The Amazon could, however, reconstitute it in little time with the 3 million cubic meters of sediment that it bears within it every twenty-four hours. But instead it dissipates that cargo. At the end of its six-thousand-mile course, its turbid current becomes even muddier with earth breaking off from banks that continually collapse, making the shores that run from the Paru to the Araguari recede farther and farther apart. And all of it empties full into the Atlantic. What remains of the demolished islands—among them Caviana Island, which in times past had been the river’s dam and then, during historical times, came to be divided in half—are slowly dissolving and disappearing amid the watery onslaught. Thus the principal mouth of this great artery is becoming increasingly less clogged, and its turn north is becoming more pronounced as it abandons the terrain to its east over which it once passed. In the process it is leaving in land recently liberated from the bogs of Marajó tangible evidence of a lateral move of the river bed itself, in which inexpert geologists have been deceived into seeing a raising or reconstruction of the land.
Because while the land is in fact reconstituted, that reconstitution takes place very far from our shores. For this river that more than any other defies our lyrical patriotism is in fact the least Brazilian of our watercourses. It is a strange adversary, given over day and night to the task of wearing away its own land. Herbert Smith, deceived by the powerful mass of muddy water that the traveler observes at high sea even before glimpsing Brazil itself, imagined that it had a truly prodigious task: that of building a new continent. He explained as follows: the deposit of that amount of sediment on the tranquil floor of the Atlantic Ocean would create new lands in the sea, and at the end of a millennarian process the open gulf that arcs from Cape Orange to the point of the Gurupi would be filled. Thereby the lands of Pará would be considerably expanded to the northeast.3
“The king is building his monument,” the enraptured naturalist exclaimed, casting in harsh, Britannic syllables a flight of fancy that would surprise the most irrepressible of Latin souls. He did not bear in mind, however, that this most original of hydrographic systems does not stop with the land but passes Cabo do Norte and continues on without banks far into the sea in search of the equatorial current, which it joins, turning over to it that huge load of matter capable of generating lands. That matter, distributed by that immense ocean current which ends up in the Gulf Stream, emerges in concentrated doses in far-flung places from the coastlines of the Guianas, where lagoons are created, beginning in Amapá, that progressively dry into steppes advancing inland from the sea to the coastal regions of Georgia and the Carolinas in North America—regions that continue to grow in a way that cannot be explained as the effect of the short watercourses that run down the eastern slopes of the Alleghenies.
In such places the Brazilian, albeit a foreigner, would be treading Brazilian land. Which leads to an astounding perplexity: to the fiction of extraterritorial law—country without land—is counterposed another basic physical concept—land without country. Such is the marvelous effect of this other kind of telluric migration. Land abandons man. It goes in search of other climes. And the Amazon, in constructing its actual delta in such remote areas as another hemisphere, bespeaks the unrecognized voyage of earth in motion, changing with the passage of time, never stopping even for a second, and shrinking, in an uninterrupted process of deterioration, the great land surfaces over which it travels.
The river’s process cannot have enduring or fixed formations attributed to it. At places along the circuitous channel the water pools, and the earth within it settles out, along with the seeds it contains. Then the river’s productive capacity comes surprisingly to the fore. The recently formed shoal eventually breaks the surface and begins to deploy itself in an indiscernible profile. Then it defines itself forcefully; it rises higher and widens, gently redirecting the water. And on the island thus created, visibly growing and building on itself, crowded with cabucho vines that twist and stretch out over the surface like the tentacles of some prodigious organism, a struggle among plant species plays out that is so vital and so dramatic that the confusion of twisting stalks, stems, and boughs comprises all the movements in an enormous, silent conflict. They stretch out, convulsively intermingling, intertwining. From the patches of dumb cane that hold together the amorphous clay with their networking rhizomes, to the mangroves that supplant the dumb cane, pushing it off to the edges with violent and tumultuous activity, to the vertical palms that in turn crowd out the mangroves, relegating them to the swampy margins and taking control of the solider high ground.
Cururu Island, with an area of two square kilometers, recently came into being in this very manner. So too are built all the islands that one can see above the Breves channels.
But they are thus formed only to be destroyed or ceaselessly relocated. Worn away by the very currents that produced them, the islands are decomposed upstream and reconstituted farther down, slowly navigating downstream like monstrous, mastless pontoons with long, shrunken prows and high sterns, traveling night and day at an imperceptible rate of speed. Eventually they come apart and end. The island of Urucuritiba lasted in that manner for ten years, from 1840 to 1850, thanks to its enormous surface area. It came to its end in a season of high water.
The same process takes place on the shores. The Amazon’s banks do not channel its powerful flow. They are instead banks that avoid the river. They normally remain at the edge of its vast plain dotted with “solid ground lakes,” which compensatorily mitigate the violence of the flood during high water. Here there can develop a kind of large-scale earthworks construction. The river, which runs in multiple courses and eddies during high water, overflows its banks and discharges itself onto the welcoming plains. It uproots entire forests, piling tree trunks and brush in the numerous depressions in the flatland. The calm water deposits the debris in a widely generalized settling-out process across the watery flood plain, or várzea. When the water recedes, one sees that the land has visibly increased. It gains height from one high-water season to the next, the tall “walls” rising, the marshlands and sloughs drying up, to define the rising lands called firmes, which are then invaded by the triumphant flora… until, at a new high water, this entire lateral delta is torn down again in a single assault.
On the night of July 29, 1866, the “fallen land” along the left bank of the Amazon constituted a continuous line fifty leagues in length.
It is an ancient, invariable process manifest over the short course of our history. The high embankment of the ancient shores of the Paru, where the legendary Amazons appeared to Orellana’s mercenaries, is today reduced to a degraded shoal visible only at extreme low water.
The river’s extreme variability is also profiled in its endless, maddeningly confused twists and turns. They resemble the uncertain path that might be taken by a lost wanderer guessing at directions, turning every which way, suddenly throwing himself along a course arbitrarily chosen. Thus has the river cast itself through the stifling Obidos narrows in total abandonment of its ancient bed, which can be glimpsed today in the immense marismatic plain of Vila Franca, gangliated with ponds. In other places it flows into its own great tributaries through the unpredictable furos, thereby, illogically becoming a tributary of its own tributaries. Ever disorganized, turbulent, vacillating, tearing down, building up, rebuilding and leveling, devastating in an hour what it spent decades building—with the eagerness, the agony, and the exasperation of a monstrous artist ever unsatisfied, taking up again, redoing, perpetually beginning anew a painting without end.
Such is the river, then, and such its history: tumultuous, disorganized, incomplete.
The wild Amazonian region has always had the gift of impressing far-off civilization. From the earliest years of the colony the most imposing of expeditions and most solemn of pastoral visits have sought its unknown lands preferentially. To it have come the most venerable bishops, elegant captains, and lucid scientists. From the tilling of a soil to cultivate exotic crops to developing the aborigine to raise him to the highest destiny, the distant metropole outdid itself in efforts to open up this land that above all others would compensate it for the lost, prodigious India.
Efforts all in vain. The demarcation parties, the apostolic missions, the government voyages with their hundreds of canoes and their astronomers supplied with complex instruments, and their prelates, and their warriors intermittently penetrated these solitary recesses and set up on the flatlands atop the “walls” the sumptuous tents of civilization at travel. They promulgated rules for cultivation, for civilizing of the people, and for beautification of the land.
Then they went on to other parts, or back home… and in their malocas the locals, transfigured for a moment, abruptly fell away, returning to their original brutishness.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira made a “philosophical voyage” along the main course of the great river and found himself traveling amid ruins. In the village of Barcelos, capital of that remote district, he encountered the tangible image of a typically Amazonian progress in the proud Palace of the Demarcations: grand, imposing, monumental, and covered with cogongrass! It was symbolic. Everything is vacillating, ephemeral, paradoxical in this strange land where the cities are as nomadic as the people, ever relocating as the ground beneath them continually disappears, undermined by the currents or collapsing in “fallen lands.”
Century after century passes with intolerable sameness: stubborn attempts later aborted. The most lucid observers’ impressions remain the same, ever discouraging in the face of the spectacle of a deplorable present in comparison with the illusion of a glorious past.
In 1852, when the province of Amazonas was created, Tenreiro Aranha assumed leadership of it. In a retrospective assessment referring to the extinct industry of “high-quality manufacture,” he tells us of the extraordinary progress that was lost:
cotton, indigo, manioc, and coffee were cultivated in such a way that local consumption was supported and there was a remainder for export. Hence the indigo manufactories, the establishments making palm rope, the mills producing yarn, cloth, and net out of cotton, straw, and feathers; the tiles and masonry; civil and naval construction, with able workers building temples, palaces, or imposing ships.
If we go back another century in search of that wonderful time, however, we discover with great disappointment, in a report produced by another illustrious governor, Captain-General Furtado de Mendonça, that the “captaincy was reduced to the utmost ruin.” Thus evaluations stand at odds with each other while registering the same disappointment. Or they can be seen as resoundingly agreeing on the subject of the decadence of the area’s bizarre inhabitants. In 1762, the bishop of Grão-Pará, the remarkable Brother João de São José—Voltairean Benedictine whose writing style possessed the pyrotechnics of a Padre Vieira—inventoried the people and things “so as to establish that the root cause of the vices of this land is sloth.” He described summarily the inhabitants with these discouraging words: “lasciviousness, drunkenness, and thievery.” If one wished to know if the state of affairs had improved a hundred years later, one might merely leaf through the austere pages of Wallace and note that they seem merely to translate, all but literally, the astute Benedictine’s words: what the astonished scholar sees pass before his eyes is an undisciplined society based on “drinking, gambling, and lying” amid a lack of awareness about life.
Thus sinful indifference to the higher attributes, systematic rejection of scruples, and a heart all too given to error are centuries old here and arise from a painful historical apprenticeship that runs from the casa do paricá to the huts of the rubber tappers. Read through our old chroniclers, especially the imaginative Father João Daniel, and you will see the impediments to physical and moral motivation that have long served to weaken the character of the people living here. And read Tenreiro Aranha, José Veríssimo, and scores of others. Those books contain fragmentary scenes of some of history’s greatest dramas of dissolution.
Then there is the intractable factor of physical destiny. Sovereign and brutal nature in full application of its energies is an adversary to the human being. In that perpetual steam bath to which Bates refers, one can easily understand the tendency toward a vegetative life of ease and risk avoidance. It is harder to imagine here that intricate resonance of a spirit involved in the dynamic of ideas or that superior tension of will that takes place in acts that derive from impulses other than the merely egotistical. I do not exaggerate. A talented Italian physician, Dr. Luigi Buscalione, recently spent some time in the Amazon and characterized the effects of climate on the outsider as, first, hyperexcitement of the psychic and sensual functions and, second, an accompanying slow weakening of all the faculties, starting with the most noble.4
But in this appeal to the classic concept of climatic influence he omitted, as have many others, the weight—likely of secondary importance but hardly negligible—of the very transitoriness of the physical foundations on which the society stands.
The changeability of the river infects the human being. In the Amazon, what generally takes place is the following: the observer who wanders the basin in search of its varied perspectives, at the end of hundreds of miles, derives the impression that they have circled about in a closed loop filled with the same beaches and walls and islands, the same forests and stagnant sloughs called igapós stretching out to empty horizons farther than the eye can see. By contrast, the observer who stays at the margins is intermittently astonished by unexpected transformations. Scenes that are repetitive in the realm of space change over time. To the eyes of the person in motion nature is stable; to the eyes the sedentary person whose project it may be to subject that nature to the stability of human cultivation, it seems frighteningly changeable and fragile, and the appearance of that mutability occasionally overwhelms him. It almost always ends up terrifying him and driving him away.
Adaptation is exercised through nomadism. Hence, in great part, the paralysis, simultaneously disordered and sterile, of the people who for three centuries have wandered here.
To its collective psychology today, the Amazon should refer back, in its entirety, to the old dolorous aphorism created by Barleaus in colonial times to describe its excesses: “Away from the equator I never sinned.”
Amazonians perceive this in their being. At the entrance to Manaus lies beautiful Marapatá Island. The island, however, has an alarming function. It is the most original of quarantine stations—a quarantine station for the soul! They say that the new arrival leaves their conscience there… Let the implications of that product of popular fancy be well measured. That island across from the mouth of the Purus has lost its old geographical name and is simply called Conscience Island. The same occurs with a similar island at the mouth of the Juruá. On entering through the two portals that lead to the diabolical paradise of the rubber tracts, man abdicates the highest of the qualities with which he is born and laughingly condemns himself with that formidable irony. In fact, within the exuberant climes of the rubber-producing trees there awaits him the most heinous organization of labor ever conjured up by human egotism unbound.
The rubber tapper—I do not mean the wealthy owner but rather the actual practitioner subject to the realm of the “paths” along which he harvests—engages in a portentous anomaly: he is the man who toils in order to enslave himself.
Some cold, reliable numbers reveal the enormity of the situation.
Behold the following account of the selling of a man.
On the very day he sets out from Ceará the rubber tapper goes into debt: he owes the cost of his passage in steerage to Pará (35,000 reis) and the advance he has received for the trip (150,000). Then comes the cost of travel, in whatever craft is available, from Belém to the distant outpost for which he is bound: on average, another 150,000. Add roughly 800,000 for standard utensils: one large funnel jar, one basin, a thousand small bowls, an iron ax, a saber, a Winchester carbine and two hundred bullets, two plates, two spoons, two cups, two pots, a coffee pot, two spools of linen thread, and a needle case. Just those things and nothing more. The man is now arrived at the owner’s headquarters, or barracão, soon to leave for the individual hut in the forest that will be assigned him. He is a greenhorn—someone who has not yet learned how to cut trees. And he already owes 1,135,000 reis. He will go out to his solitary post, to be followed by a transport that will bring the baggage and supplies, his name scrupulously inscribed on them, that will have to last him three months: three panniers of mandioc flour, one sack of beans, another (small) of salt, twenty kilos of rice, thirty of jerky, twenty-one of coffee, thirty of sugar, six tins of lard, eight pounds of tobacco, and twenty grams of quinine. All this costs him approximately 750,000 reis. He has not yet put a hatchet mark on a single tree, he is still the unskilled greenhorn mocked by the experienced manso, and he has already invested 2,090,000 reis.
Let us now presume a set of favorable conditions, which almost never actually occur: (1) our rubber tapper is single; (2) he gets to his post in May, at the beginning of the tapping season; (3) he does not fall ill, for then he would have to be brought back to the barracão for treatment, at the cost of 10,000 reis a day; (4) he buys nothing beyond the aforementioned supplies—and he is serious, tenacious, incorruptible: stoically embarked on fortune’s road with a clear eye to a long, painful penitence. Let us go even further: let us allow that, despite his lack of experience, he manages to extract 350 kilos of high-quality latex and 100 kilos of the coarse sernambi over the year—which is difficult, at least in the Purus area.
When the harvest is over, this tenacious, stoical man, this rare individual, is still a debtor. According to the terms of the standard contract, it is the owner who sets the price of the product and does the accounts. The 350 kilos, purchased on the spot at 5,000 a kilo, bring 1,750,000 reis. The 100 kilos of sernambi, at 2,500 a kilo, 250,000. Total: 2,000,000 reis.
Our tapper is still a debtor and is unlikely ever to get free of that status. The next season he will be a manso. He will have learned the ins and outs of the job and can extract 600 to 700 kilos. But he will have been inactive throughout the high-water season from November to May—seven months in which simple subsistence costs more than twice what he has in supplies: in round figures, 1,500,000 reis. In the second year let us assume that he does not need to replace any equipment or clothing and does not become ill. Even in this rarest of cases, unusual is the harvester who is able to earn his way out.
Now look at the real situation. That kind of fighter is exceptional. The man usually brings to these lands the lack of foresight typical of our race. He often brings his family along, which compounds his burden; he almost always falls ill because of the general incontinence.
In addition to all this is the disastrously one-sided contract the owner imposes. The regulations of the rubber tracts are painfully indicative in this regard. To read them is to witness the rebirth of a crude, humiliating feudalism. The owner sets forth, obstinately, with stupendous grammatical inflexibility, some astonishing decrees. For example, the following heinous crimes bring with them the onerous fine of 100,000 reis:
a. Making a cut in the tree shallower than the width of the hatchet blade
b. Taking the plug out of the wood when cutting it
c. Tapping with hatchets that have a handle more than four palms long
In addition, the worker can make purchases only at the headquarters store, being “prohibited from making purchases elsewhere under penalty of a 50-percent fine upon the total amount of the purchase.” Let us be done once and for all with such brutal pronouncements! Compared to this, Caliban’s terrible stammer is almost musical.
At the end of some years this contract laborer, or freguês, will be irretrievably lost. His debt will have risen to alarming levels: 3, 4, 5, sometimes 10 million reis, which he will never be able to repay. He then finds himself in the dead end of unprotected indentured servitude. The relevant regulation is pitiless: “no freguês or negotiator will be allowed to leave without paying in full all of his commercial transactions.” Flee? Don’t even think it. The immense distance to be traversed is forbidding. Find another barracão? The owners have an agreement among themselves not to take another’s employee until that employee’s debts have been satisfied in full. In the Acre not long ago there was a widely attended meeting held to systematize that alliance, in which it was decided that any owner who might show recalcitrance on this score would himself be subject to heavy fines.
Now tell me, what does the intrepid sertanejo attracted to these climes in search of riches have left at the end of a five-year period?
He is not even allowed to put down roots in the land. An article in the same infamous regulations makes him an eternal guest in his own house. Let me cite it in its grotesque, savage and imbecilic formulation: All improvements performed on said property by one whose contract has been terminated will be forfeit upon his departure.
Hence the painful appearance that the small huts present. The traveler who looks for them can barely make out the faint path leading through the wild banana trees to the dwelling half choked by the bush. The man who dwells there invests no effort to improve a place from which he can be expelled at any time with no right of appeal.
Although painful examples could be adduced to accompany this overview, going through them would be useless. What comes definitively to the fore is the urgent need for measures to rescue this hidden, abandoned culture: a work law that ennobles human effort; an austere justice that curbs excesses; and some form of homestead provision that definitively links man and land.
1. Charles Frederick Hartt, “A geologia do pará,” Diário do Grão Pará, 1870.
2. Walter Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazon (London, 1892), 55–56.
3. Herbert Smith, The Amazons and the Coast (New York, 1879), 2-3.
4. Luigi Buscalione, Una escursione botanica nell’amazzonia (Roma, 1901). Republication of “Escursione botanica in Brasile,” Bollettino della Societá Geografica Italiana (Rome) 4, no. 2 (1901): 1, 3, 4—5.