The Scramble for the Amazon and the "Lost Paradise" of Euclides da Cunha

The fortunes of the late nineteenth century s imperial and industrial powers depended on a single raw material rubber with only one source: the Amazon basin. And so began the scramble for the Amazon a decades-long conflict that found Britain, France, Belgium, and the United States fighting with and against the new nations of Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil for the forest s riches. In the midst of this struggle, Euclides da Cunha, engineer, journalist, geographer, political theorist, and one of Brazil s most celebrated writers, led a survey expedition to the farthest reaches of the river, among the world s most valuable, dangerous, and little-known landscapes.

The Scramble for the Amazon tells the story of da Cunha s terrifying journey, the unfinished novel born from it, and the global strife that formed the backdrop for both. Haunted by his broken marriage, da Cunha trekked through a beautiful region thrown into chaos by guerrilla warfare, starving migrants, and native slavery. All the while, he worked on his masterpiece, a nationalist synthesis of geography, philosophy, biology, and journalism he named the Lost Paradise. Da Cunha intended his epic to unveil the Amazon s explorers, spies, natives, and brutal geopolitics, but, as Susanna B. Hecht recounts, he never completed it his wife s lover shot him dead upon his return.

At once the biography of an extraordinary writer, a masterly chronicle of the social, political, and environmental history of the Amazon, and a superb translation of the remaining pieces of da Cunha s project, The Scramble for the Amazon is a work of thrilling intellectual ambition.