As cores da mata branca: os sertões das caatingas de Manuel Arruda da Câmara e Henry Koster (1793-1815).

Abstract

The eighteenth century was historically marked as the century of the reason, of scientific and illustrated thought. The so-called "scientific boom" reached in the European countries and consequently, in their colonies, among which we find Brazil, in different ways. The men of science, graduated in Natural History by the various Universities and Royal Academies of Science, saw in the land from overseas as a vast field for their research, thus the Portuguese colony in America, started to be visited by naturalist travelers who, besides writing their travel diaries, produced a large collection of documents, scientific reports with detailed cataloging of native plants, animals and minerals from these lands. The Brazilian nature would finally be recognized beyond the imagination of lush and exotic, becoming recognized for its environmental diversity and uniqueness of what we understand today as Brazilian biomes. The Northeastern semiarid also hosted some of these itinerants, who observed the Caatingas and its fauna and flora in times of drought and flood, thus going far beyond the ideas disseminated in the second half of the nineteenth century about the backlands, especially after the so-called "big drought of 1877", being considered almost as a synonym of drought and misery. Given these considerations, this paper aims to reflect on the images produced on the northeastern semi-arid, mainly in an attempt to show that many of these new insights about the area, that show their uniqueness, wealth and potential, have already been made in the reports of naturalists who walked these lands during the last decades of the seventeenth century and the dawn of the nineteenth century, influenced by new ideas of naturalism-utility, but also by the physiocrat concepts, still present in policies colonies, mainly in the Portuguese one. Among the numerous roving which have gone by the Brazilian land, for this research, we list the naturalist Luso-Brazilian Manuel Arruda da Câmara and his writings on botanical of the Northeastern Captaincies of the Portuguese America, or rather, the backlands of Pernambuco, Paraíba and Ceará, and the dilettante British, Henry Koster, without any pretense scientific interest, crossed the hinterland and produced a diary with rich details about the population and the culture of the region. We will try, however, to gather different fragments of descriptions of the semiarid landscape in order to establish a human and environmental scenario of the Northeastern colonial Capitanias in the late eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century, realizing the interrelationships between society/ culture and environment.