Denying Sovereignties: Empires, Maps, and Runaway Indigenous People and Maroons in Amazonian Borderlands (1777-1800)

Located on the Atlantic coast of the Amazon’s northernmost reaches, the North Cape was a remote but resource-rich region in halfway between the French colonial outpost of Cayenne and the Portuguese port city of Belém. In between these imperial jurisdictions, Indigenous groups and maroons’ communities flourished with independent productivity and mobility, demonstrating the limits of empires’ oversight. Most scholarship on French-Portuguese disputes over Amazonian territories has centered on how statesmen and high-ranking figures defined these borderlands through diplomatic accords. Yet inter-imperial contexts and cartographical discourses they generated wholly depended on the geographical knowledge of captured runaways. Indeed, Portuguese officials were routinely thrown into confusing by these autonomous communities they depended on for knowing the region. Ultimately, Portuguese officials promoted the displacement of the North Cape’s inhabitants, since imperial authorities feared to lose these communities to French Guiana’s lures