Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- A Note on Translations
- 1 Introduction: Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon
- 2 The Jungle Like a Sunday at Home: Rafael Uribe Uribe, Miguel Triana, and the Nationalization of the Amazon
- 3 Hildebrando Fuentes’s Peruvian Amazon: National Integration and Capital in the Jungle
- 4 Contested Frontiers: Territory and Power in Euclides da Cunha’s Amazonian Texts
- 5 ‘Splendid testemunhos’: Documenting Atrocities, Bodies, and Desire in Roger Casement’s Black Diaries
- 6 A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The Cauchero of the Amazonian Rubber Groves
- 7 Endless Stories: Perspectivism and Narrative Form in Native Amazonian Literature
- 8 Malarial Philosophy: The Modernista Amazonia of Mário de Andrade
- 9 The Politics of Vegetating in Arturo Burga Freitas’s Mal de gente
- 10 Filming Modernity in the Tropics: The Amazon, Walt Disney, and the Antecedents of Modernization Theory
- 11 The ‘Western Baptism’ of Yurupary: Reception and Rewriting of an Amazonian Foundational Myth
- 12 Photography, Inoperative Ethnography, Naturalism: On Sharon Lockhart’s Amazon Project
- 13 Nostalgia and Mourning in Milton Hatoum’s Órfãos do Eldorado
- Editors and Contributors
- Index
6 - A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The Cauchero of the Amazonian Rubber Groves
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- A Note on Translations
- 1 Introduction: Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon
- 2 The Jungle Like a Sunday at Home: Rafael Uribe Uribe, Miguel Triana, and the Nationalization of the Amazon
- 3 Hildebrando Fuentes’s Peruvian Amazon: National Integration and Capital in the Jungle
- 4 Contested Frontiers: Territory and Power in Euclides da Cunha’s Amazonian Texts
- 5 ‘Splendid testemunhos’: Documenting Atrocities, Bodies, and Desire in Roger Casement’s Black Diaries
- 6 A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The Cauchero of the Amazonian Rubber Groves
- 7 Endless Stories: Perspectivism and Narrative Form in Native Amazonian Literature
- 8 Malarial Philosophy: The Modernista Amazonia of Mário de Andrade
- 9 The Politics of Vegetating in Arturo Burga Freitas’s Mal de gente
- 10 Filming Modernity in the Tropics: The Amazon, Walt Disney, and the Antecedents of Modernization Theory
- 11 The ‘Western Baptism’ of Yurupary: Reception and Rewriting of an Amazonian Foundational Myth
- 12 Photography, Inoperative Ethnography, Naturalism: On Sharon Lockhart’s Amazon Project
- 13 Nostalgia and Mourning in Milton Hatoum’s Órfãos do Eldorado
- Editors and Contributors
- Index
Summary
Janus incarnated in the rubber boom
In the contemporary bibliography on the early twentieth-century Amazonian rubber boom, the rubber baron is a mystifying character. He is usually portrayed as a generous godfather, who is rich, strict, smart, but also indifferent, immoral, hypocritical, and, above all, dangerous. Some authors think of him as a sophisticated gentleman, others as a cold-blooded killer. Whichever characterization of the rubber baron one may encounter, none is more appropriate to understanding his modus operandi than that of the man who is always above the law. In fact, an authentic rubber baron was expected to write his own ‘laws’. To comprehend his psyche and behavior is to explore the depth of the soul and culture of the social environment that engendered him. My intention in this essay is thus to explore a set of cultural traits that are recurrent in descriptions of this figure.
We owe one the most enduring descriptions of the rubber baron to Euclides da Cunha, who early recognized the perverse Janus-like duplicity in the rubber baron: “The savagery is a mask that he puts on and takes off at will”. His characterization of this ethical type is extraordinarily precise. Not content with an abstract description, Euclides looks back in history to find someone who could embody the contradictory attributes of the archetypical rubber baron he scrutinizes in his essay “The caucheros”. And that person had to be Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, the Peruvian rubber baron who exploited rubber along the Madre de Dios River around 1892 (Figure 4).
Euclides's portrait of this rubber baron serves to confirm patterns of refinement, cynicism, duplicity, and brutality, all combined in Fitzcarrald. According to the Brazilian writer, in a brief encounter between Fitzcarrald and some members of the Mashco tribe, who the Peruvian rubber baron was attempting to capture, he made their chieftain see
the advantages of the alliance he was being offered, in contrast to the perils that would attend a disastrous battle. The Mashco's only response was to ask about the arrows Fitzcarrald brought with him. And Fitzcarrald, smiling, handed him a Winchester cartridge. The savage looked it over for a long while, absorbed with the smallness of the projectile. He tried in vain to wound himself, pushing the bullet hard against his chest. Not achieving what he desired, he took up one of his own arrows and plunged it dramatically into his other arm.
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- Information
- Intimate FrontiersA Literary Geography of the Amazon, pp. 113 - 127Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2019