Cultural backdrop of the Rio Madeira basin

Abstract

The Rio Madeira basin was not an easy region to explore. There appear to have been five factors that mitigated against its early exploration, namely, its length and the length of its tributaries, cataracts, geographical isolation from the Atlantic littoral, malaria, and probably — though the historical evidence is not conclusive — a relative small Amerind population that would have attracted, as it were, more Portuguese slavers and traders. The first significant document that we have of a major expedition into the Rio Madeira basin dates to the mid-seventeenth century when the Portuguese trailblazer (bandeirante), Antonio Tavares Raposo, under the auspices of the Portuguese Crown, led his men from Sao Paulo to the Rio Guapore, and then down the Rio Mamore and Rio Madeira and on to the mouth of the Rio Amazonas (Cortesao 1958). The Tavares expedition was charged with increasing Portuguese territory in the terra incognita through which ran the Line of Tordesillas dividing South America between the Portuguese and Spanish empires. Unfortunately the Tavares expedition did not have much of a chronicler along, and thus history is robbed of the first glimpse of the Rio Madeira before the Amerinds were largely destroyed by disease and enslavement in the subsequent conquest of the region.