1903 Le Cointe Map of the Middle-Lower Amazon River, Trombetas River, Brazil

This intriguing c. 1903 map of a portion of the Amazon River in Brazil's State of Pará was produced by Paul Georges Aimé Le Cointe, a naturalist and botanist active in Brazil in the early 20th century.

A Closer Look

The map covers an area around Lagoa de Sapucuá and the Trombetas River, a tributary of Amazon, near Óbidos, the point generally considered to be the transition between the middle and lower Amazon River basin. Given its innumerable islands, islets, marshes, and other bits of land intermingled with the river, this portion of the Amazon is notoriously difficult to navigate (the sinking of the ferry Sobral Santos II at Óbidos is one of the worst maritime disasters in Brazil's history). These features, which tended to change frequently, both seasonally and permanently, also have made the region very difficult to accurately map, as Le Cointe points out in the article which accompanied this map. He was extremely diligent in noting terrain, areas of elevation, settlements, mineral resources, and waterways, as well as established overland routes, the trail of his own exploratory trek, and telegraph lines, partially laid out by Le Cointe himself in 1892 - 1893.

Le Cointe is known to history as a botanist, primarily, and secondly as a sort of early conservationist. His motivations here, though somewhat oblique, included promoting European (and specifically French) immigration to this region of the Amazon. The 'colony' marked to the north of Óbidos, ephemeral if it ever materialized at all, is not much discussed in Le Cointe's article, though he does include a photograph of 'preparatory work' (felling trees) and also touts the suitability of some of the grasslands near the Amazon for raising livestock. This map was produced at the height of the Amazon rubber boom (or cycle) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when large numbers of European immigrants were arriving to work plantations along the Amazon. Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon, and Manaus, a bit upriver from the area seen here, both saw an influx of new arrivals. Óbidos did not become a metropolis like them, but it did see considerable development, including the arrival of electricity and running water, becoming the first interior city along the Amazon to have such amenities.

Publication History and Census

This map was prepared by Paul Georges Aimé Le Cointe based on surveys undertaken over several years in the 1890s, while he was engaged in work laying telegraph lines and delimiting property in the Amazon basin. It accompanied an article by Le Cointe titled 'Le Bas Amazone' published in the 61st edition of the Annales de Géographie in 1903. The map is only independently cataloged by the Boston Public Library, while the Annales de Géographie is more widely distributed in institutional collections.