Euclides da Cunha addressed himself to two regions considered inhospitable to man: the backlands of Bahia and the Amazon jungle. In 1897, he wrote articles about the battle of Canudos for the O Estado de S. Paulo, publishing Os sertões in 1902. After exploring the Purus River in 1905, he composed the essays on the Amazon collected in Contrastes e confrontos (1907) and À margem da história (1909). In his writings on these regions, Cunha uses images of the desert to characterize both jungle and backlands as territories not yet explored by science.
Euclides da Cunha; battle of Canudos; Amazon; sertão; backlands