História de um país inexistente: O Pantanal entre os séculos XVI e XVIII

Abstract

Based on the author’s recently completed doctoral thesis at the University of São Paulo, História de um país inexistente by Maria de Fátima Costa documents the history of the world’s largest wetland, a floodplain covering more than 39,000 square miles of southwestern Brazil and northeastern Paraguay: the Pantanal. Initially christened Laguna de los Xarayes by early Spanish explorers who mistook the seasonal floodplain for a large and fabulous lake, the region would not be conceived as the Pantanal (literally “the wetland”) until the middle of the eighteenth century with the signing of the Treaty of Madrid. Costa’s book not only documents the history of the Pantanal, but more especially describes its invenção, or rather, the manner in which early explorers “invented” the region by imposing their own images, conceptions, and designs upon it (p. 22). In examining how the Pantanal was understood by the historical actors themselves, Costa draws upon sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century travel accounts as well as the iconography of the period (including various maps and sketches that have been reproduced in full-color throughout the book). Since relatively little academic work is available on this region in either Spanish or Portuguese (much less in English), Costa has supplemented her primary sources with an assortment of regional materials, including local histories from Argentina, Paraguay, and the Brazilian states of São Paulo and Mato Grosso.The book begins with a short historical synthesis of the Pantanal, from the incursion of Spanish conquistadors at the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century when royal officials demarcated the region’s borders. Following this short historical prelude, Costa turns to the heart of her work: the travel accounts of those who journeyed through the Pantanal during the colonial period. Beginning with narratives by Ulrico Schmidl, Ruy Díaz de Guzmán, and Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Costa examines how early images of the region spread throughout Europe, influencing the cartography of the period with tales of the fabulous Laguna de los Xarayes, an earthly paradise of immense wealth. Costa then contrasts these early accounts with subsequent narratives by Luso-Brazilian explorers who describe the region in pragmatic terms as they explain how to navigate through a fantastically inhospitable wetland. According to Costa, these two contrasting perspectives would briefly coexist until the second half of the eighteenth century when surveying expeditions would establish a more realistic picture of the region.A history of both the real and the imagined, Costa’s book is well researched and gracefully written, making an important contribution to the history of a region and period that have largely been neglected in the current literature.