3. Empty spaces, aviation and the Brazilian nation: the metaphor of conquest in narratives of Edu Chaves’s cross-country flights in 1912*

Leonie Schuster

Introduction

Aircraft provide new ways to traverse space, differing from those of other transport technologies. Taking advantage of the so-called third dimension (or airspace), flying machines can, with seeming ease, overcome what would be obstacles in the natural landscape if they were travelling over ground. With the arrival of the ‘air age’ at the beginning of the twentieth century in the form of engine-driven and completely steerable airships and aeroplanes, such technological possibilities inspired numerous dreams and visions, nourishing a wide range of spatial imaginations across cultures.¹ In Brazil, from the 1910s onwards aviation was considered a way to deal with the challenging geography and vast spaces of the heartland, which were devoid of substantial settlement, infrastructure or state control, and thus perceived as empty by the advocates of nationwide modernization. By contributing to the physical and symbolic integration of the Brazilian territory, aviation became a key component in thinking about the nation.²

This chapter, taking Brazil as an example, focuses on the relationship between aviation, empty spaces and the nation. With the publication of Benedict Anderson’s influential study on nationalism in 1983, historical scholarship came to understand nations as neither natural nor timeless entities, but rather as ‘imagined communities’ that have been constructed, challenged, modified or restated by historical actors over time.³ After transitioning from a Portuguese colony to an independent Brazilian empire in 1822, and then from monarchy to republic in 1889, the young Brazilian republic addressed with fervour the question of the nation. The elite project of nation-building was more than just the pulling together of a culturally and socially heterogeneous population. Struggling with the legacy of the Portuguese empire’s strong coastal focus, Brazilian nation builders also strove for the consolidation of their extensive and uneven national territory.⁴ As several studies show, the topic of territorial conquest and thus the category of space (rather than ‘time’ or ‘history’) have played an important role in contemporaneous Brazilian concepts of the nation.⁵

In this context, the concept of empty spaces – understood as spaces which at certain historical moments, applying varying discursive and representational strategies, were socially constructed and conceived of as vacant – becomes very powerful.⁶ Based on narratives arising out of the occasion of the first cross-country flights over Brazilian territory in 1912, this chapter analyses how the process of gradually filling allegedly empty spaces not only with new air routes, but particularly with symbolic meaning, was depicted in press reports and images. The chapter focuses on widely circulating press media originating in the urban centres of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro that, while operating as a voice of the local elite, at the same time adjusted to the expectations of a larger national readership.⁷ It argues that the conquest of these supposedly empty spaces by means of aviation was accompanied by a metaphorical framework which related it to myths of colonial conquest. At the same time, this metaphor evoked spatial ideas of the nation that referred to previous moments in Brazilian history. Analysing the correlation of narratives of colonial conquest and contemporary aerial conquest shows how overcoming emptiness, which has been a key idea in Brazilian nation-building, has been reinforced on a symbolic level.

First, it is necessary to reflect upon the relationship between aviation and the idea of empty spaces. What chronological and cultural continuities exist in both the understanding of emptiness and in the ways in which emptiness has been overcome in the imagination via aviation? What factors are specific to the historical timeframe and locality considered here? How are imaginations of empty spaces and the Brazilian nation related and what explains the great importance attached to aviation in Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century? The second part of this chapter focuses on the aeronautical setting in Brazil between 1910 and 1912 and considers the terms used to refer to flights at that time. Studying how these terms emerged and were applied makes it possible to trace a shift in the Brazilian perception of the spatial dimension of aviation and, consequently, in the national significance attributed to it. This turning point connects to the national aspiration of overcoming empty spaces on the ground and is strongly linked to the aeronautical activities of the Brazilian airman Eduardo Pacheco Chaves (or Edu Chaves for short (1887–1975)).⁸

The third section turns to Brazilian media coverage in the 1910s in order to examine the metaphorical framework through which empty spaces were constructed. In particular, this section analyses narratives, caricatures and cartographical representations published on the occasion of the first longer-distance flights through Brazilian territory, undertaken by Edu Chaves in 1912. What continuities can be traced between colonial conquest and the ‘conquest of the air’ and how do both relate to empty spaces? By correlating the spatial processes of different historic moments, these textual and pictorial discourses evoke and negotiate the manifold relations between aviation technology, the conception of empty spaces and ideas of the nation. As this chapter shows, not emptiness as such, but rather its overcoming – be it by colonial expeditions or by modern means of aviation – constituted a key idea in Brazilian national discourses at the beginning of the twentieth century. Based on this idea, aviation pioneers such as Edu Chaves were elevated to heroes of the nationalist cause.

Aviation and empty spaces: cross-cultural dimensions and local meanings in Brazil

In analytical terms, aviation is related to the idea of empty spaces in two ways. The first refers to airspace. Having overcome Aristotelian spatial imaginations which dominated the Christian world view throughout the middle ages, in European spatial conceptions the sky has become conceivable as an endless, three-dimensional, empty space.⁹ Starting with the first manned balloon ascents in the eighteenth century, followed by experiments with steerable airships and gliders in the nineteenth century and culminating in the definitive breakthrough of powered flight in the first decade of the twentieth century, the air was conquered little by little – both in terms of physical access and technical and scientific mastery.¹⁰ In the words of R. Wohl: ‘The sky was no longer a limit, but a frontier to be explored and mastered’.¹¹

Human beings and machines thus entered a space initially devoid of them, occupied only by birds and religious and mythological figures. The first step in this process consisted of the development and successful practical implementation of aviation technology. Soon after, based on technological advances, spatial expansion increased: aeroplanes flew higher and further and – taking into account the category of time – faster and for longer. This technical triumph over what was thought of as spatial (or even spatiotemporal) limitations found its linguistic match in the term ‘conquest of the air(s)’. The vast extension and power of this phrasing in numerous languages – at least, the Romance and Germanic languages – indicates the cross-cultural dimension of this spatial imagination.¹² The physically unexplored and, for many centuries, technologically uncontrollable airspace hence made the advent of this technology particularly fruitful for spatial readings.

Beyond the cross-epochal and cross-cultural dimension, aviation was, second, linked to the concept of empty spaces in another way, which, depending on local geography, produced varying meanings. Taking advantage of the third dimension, aviation provided the possibility of traversing nearly any type of natural space on the ground – such as wastelands, oceans, forests or mountains – which, contemplated through the increasingly powerful lens of modernity, in many respects seemed to represent emptiness. In so doing, the aeroplane facilitated the connection of remote areas, while minimizing spatial isolation.

To understand the great significance attributed to aviation in Brazil at the beginning of the century, it is necessary to consider the perceptions of national space predominant at that time. In the eyes of many Brazilian intellectuals, geographically, demographically and socially Brazil contained an internal opposition between the densely populated coastal region that faced Europe (the ‘litoral’) and the sparsely inhabited heartland (‘sertão’ or interior) that lacked immediate links to national urban centres and the north Atlantic world and thus access to what Brazilian elites of the time considered the embodiment of ‘civilization’.¹³ These interior spaces appeared to urban observers as a huge gap that ought to be filled with knowledge, (non-indigenous) settlement and infrastructure. As a consequence, geologists, engineers, the military and scientists explored the hinterland and, while creating the basis for further action, they reinforced this bipolar spatial understanding and the conception of the ‘sertão’ as a counter-image to the desired notion of what the nation (at least in their perspective) should be like. Closely tied to the European paradigm of progress, which Brazilian elites strove to translate to Brazil, the ‘sertão’ was more than a geographic category. It was largely conceived of as a dominion of ignorance, a space not yet filled up by colonization and ‘civilization’. In sum, it was understood as an expansive, multifaceted empty space devoid of national content.¹⁴

This division into ‘two Brazils’¹⁵ became apparent not least in the condition of the transportation infrastructure. Unlike other physically large nations in the hemisphere, at the beginning of the twentieth century Brazil lacked a nation-wide transportation network.¹⁶ As was true for several Latin American nations, the Brazilian railway network was not at all extensive – at least compared to those of Europe and North America.¹⁷ In addition, according to J. Wolfe, the incoherent and coastal-centred railroads ‘did more to connect coffee regions to their ports than to unify the nation’.¹⁸ Hence, their construction was driven more by external export interests than by the internal criterion of national territorial unification. For a long time automobile travel faced similar problems. Most roads connected big cities with their surrounding areas, but few existed to link main cities to one another or even the interior to the coast. The first viable motor route between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro was constructed in the 1920s; larger connections into the interior were built only in the 1950s.¹⁹ River navigation could only partially compensate for the lack of connections and insufficient access to the hinterlands, as the course and navigability of the rivers depended on topographical conditions and seasonal water levels. Water routes alongside the coast (and its prolongation to Europe) were the only ones that were well developed.²⁰

Faced with infrastructural deficiencies on the one hand and economic and geopolitical challenges on the other, Brazilian politicians deemed the social and geographical division to be an obstacle to national cohesion and raised voices in favour of an ‘integration’ of the national territory, to be accomplished by governmental action. Among other measures, this nationalist project would aim at the construction of a nationwide transport system that would allow the vast spaces of the interior to be entered and populated while also incorporating them into the national economy and guaranteeing their military control.²¹ What the telegraph had recently made possible for communication, the aeroplane promised for transportation.²²

In the aeroplane, whose spatial range was not greatly complicated or limited by natural topography (and in that respect it differed significantly from other modern transport technologies like automobiles or railways), political elites saw the possibility of quickly unifying the immense, geographically disconnected territory.²³ More than a concrete means of transportation, the aeroplane, which in many parts of the world was considered a symbol of modernity, would not only overcome geographical separation, but also bring these remote regions into contact with ‘progress’ and pave the way for further processes of colonization and ‘civilization’.²⁴ In other words, in the eyes of Brazilian elites aviation was a suitable solution for dealing with empty spaces on the ground and, by so doing, for addressing the question of the geographically and culturally (as yet un-) unified nation.

The extensive territory that, due to topographic, demographic and economic conditions, had not yet been opened up and, at different levels, was conceived of as inaccessible and empty by the advocates of a nationwide modernization offers an explanation of why aviation became particularly relevant for Brazil (and, to a lesser degree, also for other Latin-American nations facing similar challenges).²⁵ One significant aspect of the national importance attributed to aviation in Brazil stems, therefore, from the way aviation technology promised to deal with seemingly empty spaces on the ground.

Aeronautical context and aviation terminology in Brazil, 1910–12: from the conquest of the airspace to overcoming empty spaces on the ground

The two fundamental links between aviation and the idea of empty spaces – that is, the conquest of empty airspace and the possibility of overcoming spaces conceived of as empty on the ground – are more than retrospective analytical classifications. Rather, these temporally overlapping and consecutive processes were perceived and defined conceptually by contemporaries, as the first years of aviation history in Brazil and the related terminology show.

On 8 January 1910 two São Paulo newspapers printed the same headline: ‘Aviation in São Paulo’, referring to what was probably the first motorized flight not only in this town, but also in the country and on the subcontinent.²⁶ With this success, Brazil as a location (or at least its urban centres) was transformed from an audience who until then primarily participated in air technology from a distance to an arena within which modern flight technology was developed or at least applied. Many attempts at flying followed, along with dozens of commercial shows with ‘sensational’ flights performed mainly by foreign (for the most part European and North American) pilots in local horse-racing venues in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and thus embedded in the tradition of spectator sport and spectacle.²⁷ Both the flying experiments and the public demonstrations were meaningful less in terms of their flight performance and more in terms of the procurement of technological equipment and for being the ‘first’ to present the new technology in Brazilian localities.

Early flights were aimed, simply, at taking off from the ground (and maybe looping a loop or flying over parts of the city), but not at traversing large distances. Consequently, aeroplanes took off and landed at the same place. Technically and physically they conquered the empty space of the air – or at least tried to²⁸ – but could not be related to the conquest of empty spaces on the ground. This principally vertical orientation is reflected in the terms contemporaries adopted to describe this type of aeronautical event. In addition to concepts that refer to the objective of testing²⁹ or demonstrating the technology,³⁰ or to the competitive character,³¹ there are numerous expressions like ‘ascent’ (‘subida’),³² ‘(high) altitude flights’ (‘vôos de altitude’³³ / ‘vôos de altura’³⁴ / ‘vôos em altura’³⁵) and ‘ascensions’ (‘ascenções’)³⁶ that express the vertical trajectory defined by the aeroplanes.

The quality of – and also terms for – aeronautical activities changed with Edu Chaves. Simultaneously, this turning point underscored a new, strongly national significance for aviation. In 1912 the Brazilian airman performed one of the first longer-distance flights across Brazilian territory. For his debut on 9 March 1912, together with the French pilot Roland Garros, he managed a distance of about thirty miles in a direct flight from the coastal town of Santos to his hometown, São Paulo. A few weeks later, on 28 April 1912, he planned to fly in two stages from São Paulo to the capital Rio de Janeiro – a revolutionary distance of more than 220 miles. In the headlines of newspaper articles about Chaves’s flights between these important urban centres a term emerged, borrowed from English, which had hardly appeared so far in Brazilian reports of local aeronautical events. In the words of his contemporaries, Chaves performed a ‘raid’³⁷ from Santos to São Paulo and then again from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro – even though he did not actually make it to Rio de Janeiro (Chaves crashed into the sea in a coastal town some sixty miles from the capital and, for the time being, the rest of the venture was cancelled).³⁸

The Brazilian use of ‘raid’ reflects not only linguistic cosmopolitanism in aeronautics but also a new spatial understanding of flight that emphasized its horizontal dimension. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in Brazil as in France and elsewhere, this anglicism was first used in the context of military or sporting activities marked by the achievement of certain distances.³⁹ Similarly, the first Brazilian cross-country drives went down in the history of automobilism as ‘raids’.⁴⁰ In accordance with present-day Brazilian definitions, analogically, in the area of aviation ‘raid’ designated a flight over a certain distance with pioneering or competitive characteristics.⁴¹ This in turn reinforces Wohl’s suggestion with reference to European aviation history, namely that the the first (air) raids corresponded to the ‘creation of an aeronautical variant on a theme already developed by explorers, bicyclists, motor-car drivers, and balloonists – but one that was especially suited to the new technology of aviation’.⁴²

From 1910 onwards the use of the term ‘raid’ increased greatly within Brazilian news coverage concerning aviation,⁴³ suggesting that this was more than a temporary fashion. Rather, the use of the term ‘raid’ reflects a change in the application of aviation technology and, along with it, the meanings associated with aviation, especially with regard to the ‘integration’ of the national territory. Whereas a simple ‘flight’ or ‘ascension’ could only be related to the empty space of the air, a ‘raid’ that travelled some distance and explored new routes went beyond that, dealing simultaneously with spaces on the ground, part of which were conceived of as empty in the Brazilian understanding of the time.

According to an examination of Brazilian contemporary press coverage, the use of the term ‘raid’ as a designation for domestic flight activities set in with, and was thus strongly linked to, aeronautical ventures carried out by Edu Chaves.⁴⁴ Even if earlier flights, like the forty-eight-kilometre flight over Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay undertaken by the French pilot Edmond Plauchut on 22 October 1911,⁴⁵ went down in national aviation history as the ‘first raid of/in Brazil’,⁴⁶ this expression is not evident in contemporary newspaper reports.⁴⁷ Rather, this flight was referred to as an ‘aviation contest’⁴⁸ or simply as a ‘flight’.⁴⁹ Hence it is the new horizontal dimension of flight, the overcoming of (great) distances, the revolutionized relationship between aviation and (partially supposedly empty) spaces on the ground – brought to perfection by Edu Chaves – that was expressed in the term ‘raid’.

Edu Chaves – ‘bandeirante of the air(s)’: the colonial and aeronautical conquest of empty spaces

The metaphor of conquest in Brazilian aviation narratives

The dual relationship between aviation and empty spaces is reflected not only in contemporary terms adopted to denote aeronautical activities but also within a more complex metaphorical framework. Referring to the spatial dimensions of flight, Brazilian narratives recalled myths of colonial conquest. In a variety of sources dating from the first decades of the twentieth century, aviation as a tool for dealing with allegedly empty spaces both in the air and on the ground was represented as a continuation of the colonial conquest of other kinds of historical empty spaces.

This link to the past was established not only by the ambiguous term ‘conquest’ but, above all, in the way aviation pioneers and their ventures (or better adventures) were depicted and constructed as heroic. This becomes evident in the caption to an illustration that shows Chaves flying over coastal mountains: ‘… he broke the record for audacity in this type of sport, doing the crossing from S. Paulo to Rio through seas no man had ever sailed before and above inhospitable lands and precipices and very dangerous mountain ranges’.⁵⁰ The caption quotes the Portuguese national epic poem The Lusiads by the Portuguese poet Luís de Camões, who once sang of the Portuguese sailors who found new routes through other empty spaces, namely the ‘seas no man had ever sailed before’,⁵¹ and finally arrived in Brazil. As the caricaturist of the humorous magazine O Malho insinuates with a twinkle in his eye, the audacious Edu Chaves not only penetrated aerial oceans and conquered an aeronautical ‘New World’, but also hazarded the consequences of involuntarily crashing into the sea. In a double sense Chaves was depicted as a heroic combatant and thus as a worthy successor to those epic figures of colonial conquest.

However, the caption relates Edu Chaves not only to maritime conquest but also to the heroic overcoming of natural obstacles on the ground, namely inhospitable lands, precipices and mountain ranges. Adopting colonialist and imperialist ways of seeing space for specifically national purposes, Brazilian discourses of the 1910s compared aeronautical achievements less with the conquest of the Atlantic Ocean or the ‘New World’ by Iberian seafarers than with subsequent internal colonization. In so doing, these narratives were embedded within a more national than transatlantic or (neo-) colonial framework. More precisely, by depicting Chaves as a ‘bandeirante of the air(s)’⁵² newspapers and poems recalled the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century conquest of the wastelands of the Brazilian (and former Portuguese-American) interior carried out by armed expedition troops (in hindsight named ‘bandeirantes’) that set off from the São Paulo region into the hinterlands on the hunt for Indian slaves and precious metals.⁵³

Unexplored, unmapped, inaccessible and unmastered spaces

The continuity between those historic actors and the Brazilian pilot was primarily based on imaginations of space, predominant not in the era of the bandeirantes’ ventures but rather at the time of Chaves’s flights. In nineteenth-and twentieth-century national historiography, the bandeirantes were raised to the status of heroes for having entered the unexplored and unmapped interior of the continent. By so doing, they had not only enabled the occupation of these allegedly empty spaces but also expanded the effective borders of Brazilian territory.⁵⁴ Of course, these spaces were not empty at all – if they had been, the bandeirantes would not have searched for indigenous slaves there.⁵⁵ However, in terms of colonial occupation and cartographic knowledge they – at least retrospectively – appeared as nothingness. Calling on emptiness as a common trope of colonial occupation, especially in relation to interior hinterlands,⁵⁶ these spaces were written into national historical narratives as devoid of national content, made Brazilian by the bandeirantes’ conquest.

With his flights through Brazilian aeronautical no-man’s-land Edu Chaves conquered a space which, like that traversed by the bandeirantes, could also be depicted as empty. Lacking any kind of navigational instruments except for a compass, he depended on terrestrial maps and points of reference on the ground, such as railway tracks, towns and the coastline.⁵⁷ In addition, as no one had flown through these spaces before there was no existing knowledge from which he could benefit. Furthermore, the territory was devoid of prepared landing strips.⁵⁸ Both Edu Chaves and the historical bandeirantes thus entered spaces conceived of as formerly unexplored, as empty spaces.

Figure 3.1. Alfredo Storni, ‘Casos da semana’, O Malho, 16 March 1912, p. 28 (Collection Fundação Santos Dumont/former Museu de Aeronáutica de Santos).

The space overcome by Edu Chaves was characterized as empty in another respect, one closely linked to the perception of national territory prevalent at that time. The challenges of national topography become apparent in a 1912 illustration that depicts Chaves’s flight from Santos to São Paulo (Figure 3.1).⁵⁹

The representation of the three-dimensional relief with toponyms of Santos, São Paulo and Cubatão, visualized as viewed from a great height, is influenced not only by cartography but also by an aerial perspective of terrestrial space.⁶⁰ Like many other illustrated responses to Chaves’s flights, it is made up of two basic topographical elements: the coast on one hand and the abysmal rocky mountains of the Serra do Mar and the São Paulo Plateau on the other.⁶¹ Both the flight from Santos to São Paulo and the flight from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro had to pass over the coastal mountains (Serra do Mar).

Unlike what is suggested by the image of Chaves sailing sovereignly through the clear sky, the crossing of the precipitous Serra do Mar by aeroplane was a challenge due to constant fog patches over the mountain forests and changing weather conditions.⁶² In press coverage it was referred to as a ‘risky crossing’⁶³ and Chaves was labelled a ‘brave’ or ‘audacious’ pilot for completing it.⁶⁴ Both the historical bandeirantes and their aeronautical derivatives thus exhibited audacity, considered a necessary condition for penetrating unexplored territories and defying nature.⁶⁵ Hence not just the topographical obstacles but particularly their heroic overcoming by the audacious Chaves recalled the historical bandeirantes.

The illustration depicts the coastal mountains as an impermeable dividing wall. Even if railway and automobile transport systems crossing the Serra were constructed in the nineteenth century, they were not plotted on the image.⁶⁶ In other words, by exaggerating the facts the caricature represents the space that had been traversed by Edu Chaves as inaccessible, owing both to topographical obstacles and the apparent lack of transportation infrastructure. While abundant in environmental components and full of material challenges, when referring to technology the predominant narrative and representation of the national natural spaces was one of emptiness. Falling back on existing imaginaries of tropical nature, which emphasized its inherent risks and threats, the Serra was presented as adverse to the desired process of ‘civilization’.⁶⁷ To be transformed by man and machine, the Serra and, by extension, Brazilian nature were depicted under the perspective of deficiency. Presenting topographical obstacles as untouched natural features lacking human mastery and, in this sense, as empty spaces, the caricature alluded to the call for ‘national integration’, complicated by local topography.⁶⁸

Consistent with the national dimension of the challenge to achieve territorial ‘integration’, the cartoon’s solution is also inserted into a national framework. Pictured without his French colleague Roland Garros, who joined him on this flight, Chaves, the aeroplane carrying his name and the oversized Brazilian flag powerfully symbolize the new national hope found in aviation. Followed by a rising star, Chaves symbolically announces a promising future for the nation. It is thus the empty space and, moreover, its heroic overcoming by means of aviation that conferred national significance on Brazilian aviation pioneers like Edu Chaves. Taken as a whole, the illustration highlights the national significance of Chaves’s flight, and of aviation in general, in surmounting topographical obstacles on the ground which were regarded as spaces devoid of infrastructure and human domination and which therefore represented a barrier to ‘national integration’.

‘Route-spaces’ and their cartographic representation

Like the bandeirantes, Edu Chaves not only entered into but also moved through – and over – empty spaces. In this sense, the representation of what Rau in her attempt to systematize spatial formations calls ‘route-spaces’ or ‘itinerary-spaces’⁶⁹ is a significant element of visual discourses accompanying the news coverage of Chaves’s pioneering flight from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro. This becomes evident in many large-size cartographic representations published in contemporary newspaper reports.⁷⁰ More than mere illustrations or true pictures of a geographic territory drawn to scale, they can be understood, like cartography, as ‘interpretation or representation’⁷¹ of space, as ‘graphic texts’⁷² or a ‘system of signs’⁷³ that reveal – and also shape – the perception of space prevailing at that time. While we cannot know how these maps were actually received by the public, both the selection of featured items and the modes of their representation unfold spatial concepts shared by both the mapper and the intended readers of the images.⁷⁴

Figure 3.2. ‘O maior “raid” da America do Sul. De S. Paulo ao Rio de Janeiro’, Gazeta de Noticias, 29 Apr. 1912, p. 1 (Collection Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira/Fundação Biblioteca Nacional–Brasil, <http://memoria.bn.br> [accessed 30 June 2016]).

The message inherent in these maps can be decoded by focusing mainly on two features, the first being the map section, which, in nearly all examples, corresponds to the territory flown over (Figures 3.2, 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6) or at least a segment of it (Figure 3.3). This is true both for maps designed specifically for this occasion (in particular Figures 3.3 and 3.4) and for those reliant on existing templates. Thus, in a cartographic representation of Chaves’s flight based on a map of the Brazilian railroad network the original representation was reduced to the relevant parts, as determined by the territory crossed by Edu Chaves (Figure 3.2).⁷⁵

Just as the territory that was flown over defines the map section, the air route, plotted as a line (or a broken line), constitutes, second, a special element of the cartographic representation. Chaves’s route through airspace, in reality invisible, becomes cartographically visualized through its relationship to terrestrial space.⁷⁶ Furthermore, the line symbol representing the air route is the only cartographic symbol explained in some image captions, conferring even more significance on it.

Some maps do not completely correspond to the conventional northern orientation of western maps.⁷⁷ Rather, they place the north-west at the top of the map, assuring a custom-fit and central position of the air route in the cartographic image (especially Figures 3.4 and 3.6).⁷⁸ Another map achieves the same effect by assembling two separate map sections of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in a disjointed way, as if the route proceeded on a horizontal (and not diagonal) line. The cut surface, which becomes evident in the disjointed latitudes, is covered by the pilot’s portrait (Figure 3.5).

Figure 3.3. ‘O maior “raid” da America do Sul’, Gazeta de Noticias, 30 Apr. 1912, p. 1 (Collection Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira/Fundação Biblioteca Nacional – Brasil, <http://memoria.bn.br> [accessed 30 June 2016]).

Figure 3.4. ‘O maior “raid” da America do Sul’, Gazeta de Noticias, 1 May 1912, p. 1 (Collection Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira/Fundação Biblioteca Nacional – Brasil, <http://memoria.bn.br> [accessed 30 June 2016]).

Both the map section and the representation of the air route emphasized the momentum of movement through space achieved by Chaves, following the tradition of the bandeirantes, and the horizontal dimension of the flight. Readers of the image could therefore not only keep track of Chaves’s flight geographically, but also figuratively capture its significance in overcoming (empty) spaces on the ground.

These visual messages are supplemented by textual and graphic elements pertaining to the same journalistic material. A headline indicates the distance covered in the flight from São Paulo to Rio, exceeding many times that of flights undertaken in Brazil until then. Through the gracing of the corresponding map with Chaves’s portrait, the author of this achievement becomes visible at a single glance (while the photo simultaneously conceals the collage technique mentioned above) (Figure 3.5). Text blocks name localities on the route whose toponyms, on the corresponding map, are highlighted by underlining (Figure 3.2). This double textual and visual accentuation of locations flown over by Chaves reminded the reader that the cross-country flight did not take place in a ‘vacuum’ but connected to and passed over earthly spaces.

Furthermore, the text block indicates respective times of landing or flight over the named places. The intersection of the categories ‘space’ and ‘time’, of little relevance in the bandeirantes discourse, reflects the transformation in perceptions of time and space caused by the acceleration in transport and communication technology at the turn of the century. With the advent of railways, steamships, the telegraph and finally aviation, distances seemed to become smaller as they could be traversed in less time.⁷⁹ As the perception of shrinking space not only referred to centres like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, which seemed to come closer to each other, but also involved the seemingly shrinking empty spaces in between, it became doubly relevant for Brazil.

Figure 3.5. ‘O vôo S. Paulo-Rio. 548 kilometros em aeroplano’, A Imprensa, 30 Apr. 1912, p. 1 (Collection Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira/Fundação Biblioteca Nacional – Brasil, <http://memoria.bn.br> [accessed 30 June 2016]).

Matching the cartographical representation – whether intentionally or not – the headline of one article is divided into two parts (Figure 3.6). The left hand box – corresponding to the past in chronological timelines, but also to the west in cartography – informs the reader about the departure in São Paulo, while the box on the right – like Rio de Janeiro’s position on the map or the future on a timeline – forecasts the arrival. The connection between these two economically, politically and culturally significant Brazilian cities, facilitated and accelerated by the use of the aeroplane, is emphasized by this double (carto-)graphical highlighting of departure and arrival points.

Different techniques of representation thus emphasized the accelerated overcoming of a revolutionarily large distance, the connection between different places on the route and, in particular, the point of departure and arrival, as well as movement through the increasingly shrinking space in between. By filling up the allegedly empty spaces not only with air routes but also with aeronautical knowledge, Chaves took the first – mainly symbolic – steps towards ‘national integration’. In short, (carto-)graphical and textual elements expressed the idea of a nation that succeeded in overcoming, exploring and dominating empty spaces and united the national space by means of aviation.

Itineraria and cartographical technique

Maps featuring the air route chosen by Chaves, plotted as a (broken) line, recall one of the oldest existing map types, the itinerarium or ‘route map’.⁸⁰ Itineraria, which represent determined connections between several localities by a certain means of transport, often supplemented by the corresponding distances between them, were ubiquitous in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brazilian cartography.⁸¹ The cartographic production of this kind of map, mostly displaying footpaths and waterways into the interior, reflected knowledge about access routes into the backlands and thus power over a sparsely populated and peripheral space, disputed between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns.⁸² By the second half of the nineteenth century, cartographic representations of railway lines and roads, and thus territorial exploration and exploitation by means of transport technologies, were given priority.⁸³ The renaissance of this type of map in relation to aeronautical ventures thus evoked questions regarding the conquest of empty spaces throughout Brazilian history. Building on this legacy, the cartographic representations presented here were more than just a means of spatial orientation that visualized the route covered and the space traversed by Chaves. Rather, they were expressions and symbols of the Brazilian aspiration not only to overcome empty spaces but also to increase geographic knowledge, power and control over national territory by means of aviation.

Figure 3.6. ‘O grande acontecimento do dia. Hoje o aviador Eduardo Chaves realiza o vôo de São Paulo ao Rio’, A Imprensa, 27 Apr. 1912, p. 1 (Collection Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira/Fundação Biblioteca Nacional – Brasil, <http://memoria.bn.br> [accessed 30 June 2016]).

All in all, the cartographic representations of Chaves’s flight expressed the relationship between aviation and empty terrestrial spaces on a dual scale. On the one hand, they emphasized the movement through space achieved by Chaves following the tradition of the bandeirantes and thus captured the significance of Chaves’s cross-country flight in overcoming empty spaces and connecting places on the ground. On the other, the technique and method of mapping as well as the special map type used here (the itinerarium) recalled the history of the conquest of the Brazilian interior by the bandeirantes and subsequent expeditions into and explorations of the hinterlands. In so doing, such images were suggestive of the future contribution of aviation to ‘national integration’.

Conclusion

With its glimpse into Brazilian aviation narratives and representations, this chapter expands the limited study of empty spaces. From its very beginning, aviation fostered a variety of spatial imaginations that, unlike those evoked by other transportation technologies, referred to both terrestrial and aerial space. In this context the idea of emptiness carried cross-cultural as well as local meanings. On the one hand, the airspace, thought of as devoid of human beings and machines, appeared as an object to be conquered in terms of physical access and technical mastery, cross-culturally referred to as the ‘conquest of the air’. On the other hand, in the eyes of Brazilian elites of the time aviation was seen as a fitting solution for dealing with allegedly empty spaces on the ground and thus for responding to calls for ‘national integration’. Hence, not emptiness as such but rather its aeronautical conquest constituted a key idea in spatial imaginations and national discourses prevalent in Brazil in the first decades of the twentieth century.

These imaginations and aspirations were closely linked to Edu Chaves’s pioneering flights through Brazilian territory undertaken in 1912. This becomes evident not only in the increasing use of the term ‘raid’ for local aeronautical activities, a word that emphasized the new horizontal dimension of distance flight that had been put into practice in definitive fashion by Chaves, but also in the metaphorical framework that correlated Chaves’s distance flights with historical processes of spatial conquest. The continuity between the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century expedition troops that set out into the hinterlands (bandeirantes) and their aeronautical derivative Chaves (‘bandeirante of the air’), was primarily based on the strong link between the category of space and concepts of the nation. Hence at the beginning of the twentieth century both the bandeirantes and Chaves were raised to the status of national heroes for having accessed spaces conceived of as (formerly) unexplored and empty and for having fostered the ‘integration’ of the national territory by doing so.

As shown in this chapter, in twentieth-century Brazilian aviation narratives the concept of empty spaces was defined mainly on three interlinked levels. First, it was perceived as a topographical and geographical category, referring to the obstacles of the natural terrain such as the coastal mountains and to the vast spaces of the Brazilian backlands (‘sertão’ or interior), both assumed to be easily traversed and thus mastered by means of aviation. Closely linked to these perceptions of the national territory, empty spaces were, second, considered inaccessible in terms of a lack of transportation infrastructure, a problem to be remedied by gradually filling them with air routes. Correlating these aeronautical measures initiated by Edu Chaves with the bandeirantes’ conquest of Brazil’s frontier regions, empty spaces, or rather the overcoming of them, appeared, third, as a recurring theme in Brazilian history, defining the Brazilian nation. Analogous to the contemporaneous understanding of empty spaces as a counterpoint to the desired image of the nation, those who engaged with this emptiness – not only the bandeirantes but also aviation pioneers like Chaves – were elevated to the status of national heroes.

Constituting not only a transportation medium that accessed unexplored or inaccessible territories, but also a symbol of heroic human mastery over topographical obstacles and nature, aviation served as both a medium and a symbol in the nation’s endeavour to deal with its supposedly empty spaces. Hardly surprisingly, these imaginings of the Brazilian nation, brought together by means of aviation, were illustrated and expressed in particular by cartographic representations. Since the era of colonial conquest cartography had been used to demonstrate spatial conquest, territorial unity and the production of knowledge about the (colonial or later national) Brazilian territory. Cartography thus constituted a crucial medium through which to symbolize the first steps towards mastering empty spaces in terms of the production of aeronautical knowledge as well as the insertion of air routes.

Chaves’s accomplishments were just the beginning of a larger project. It was not until the late 1920s that regular air routes through the whole national territory were opened up. They would foster further settlement, economic integration and state control, and would thus break down the perceived emptiness of the hinterland to a certain extent. Notwithstanding this, in defeating the obstacle of the coastal mountains and accomplishing his revolutionary longer-distance flights, Chaves took the first steps towards mastering emptiness. By so doing, his flights inspired and restored powerful imaginations and visions related to the spatial dimensions of the national territory. Empty spaces not only gained visibility on maps and illustrations, for instance, but were also reinforced on a symbolic level. Hence, while on the one hand Chaves’s flights can be considered the basis for further aeronautical penetration of spaces conceived of as empty, on the other, narratives relating to his flights nourished and perpetuated the very idea of emptiness. Concrete steps to deal with empty spaces and the symbolic representation of emptiness were thus two sides of the same coin that can be reconstructed by reading aviation narratives. This double-edged relationship to emptiness constitutes the key to understanding the crucial significance attributed to aviation pioneers like Edu Chaves and to aviation in general within Brazilian nation-building in the first decades of the twentieth century.

* This chapter is based on part of a doctoral thesis about aviation pioneers and ideas of Brazil and its place in the world between 1900 and 1922, submitted and defended at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2017 (see L. Schuster, Brasilianische Höhenflüge. Luftfahrtpioniere und Imaginationen von Nation und Welt in Brasilien, 1900–1922 (Stuttgart, 2018)). Special thanks are due to the former Museu de Aeronáutica de Santos and the curator responsible for its collections, Commander Arnaldo Oliveira Maciel, who in 2012 facilitated access to the wonderful collection of the Fundação Santos Dumont, no longer open to the public, and now in charge of the Quarto Comando Aéreo Regional (Cambuci, São Paulo). Thanks to generous authorization from the Centro de Comunicação Social da Aeronáutica it has been possible to reprint the press cutting below (Figure 3.1). I am also grateful to the Biblioteca Nacional, which with its comprehensive digital database (Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira) provides a treasure trove for Brazil-focused historical research. Special thanks also to the organizing committee of the Empty Spaces conference and to Tricia Cusack, who helped with the English in this chapter.

¹ For a cross-cultural and cross-epochal survey of dreams of flying in connection with concrete technical developments in the sector of aviation, see W. Behringer and C. Ott-Koptschalijski, Der Traum vom Fliegen. Zwischen Mythos und Technik (Frankfurt am Main, 1991). For the contemporaneous perception of an ‘air age’, see A. B. Van Riper, Imagining Flight: Aviation and Popular Culture (College Station, Tex., 2004), p. 1.

² For a concise introduction to the relationship between geography, nation-building and technology in the young Brazilian republic, see J. Wolfe, Autos and Progress: the Brazilian Search for Modernity (Oxford and New York, 2010), pp. 4–8.

³ B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York, 2006). For scholarship referring to Latin America, see the review by N. Miller, ‘The historiography of nationalism and national identity in Latin America’, Nations and Nationalism, xii (2006), 201–21, doi: 10.1111/j.1469–8129.2006.00237.x.

⁴ For the historical context, see T. E. Skidmore, Brazil: Five Centuries of Change (New York, 1999); and E. B. Burns, A History of Brazil (New York, 1993). The geographical enormity of Brazil is well depicted in map form in Burns, A History of Brazil, p. 14, map 3; also reproduced in Skidmore, Brazil, p. 2.

⁵ See L. L. Oliveira, ‘A conquista do espaço: sertão e fronteira no pensamento brasileiro’, História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, v (1998), 195–215, doi: 10.1590/S0104-59701998000400011, unpag.; M. Velloso, ‘A brasilidade verde-amarela: nacionalismo e regionalismo paulista’, Revista Estudos Históricos, vi (1993), 89–112 <http://bibliotecadigital.fgv.br/ojs/index.php/reh/article/view/1952> [accessed 30 June 2016], at pp. 101, 108–10; S. L. Raimundo, ‘Terra conquistada: A pátria de alma bandeirante’, Terra Brasilis [Online], ii (2000), doi: 10.4000/terrabrasilis.303, at pp. 4–5; S. L. Raimundo, ‘Bandeirantismo e identidade nacional. Representações geográficas no Museu Paulista’, Terra Brasilis [Online], vi (2004), 1–16, doi: 10.4000/terrabrasilis.375, at p. 2.

⁶ For a comprehensive survey of historical research on spaces and spatial conceptions throughout history, see S. Rau, Räume: Konzepte, Wahrnehmungen, Nutzungen (Frankfurt am Main, 2013). Works on the impact on arts and architecture of the spatial revolution launched by aviation include C. Asendorf, Super Constellation-Flugzeug und Raumrevolution. Die Wirkung der Luftfahrt auf Kunst und Kultur der Moderne (Vienna and New York, 1997); and, with a focus on wide-ranging forms of cultural expression, S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass., 2003). There are also studies on the role of aviation in sparsely populated areas: e.g., B. Jürgens, ‘Die Erschliessung Südamerikas durch den Luftverkehr’ (unpublished Christian-Albrechts-Universität, Kiel, PhD thesis, 1950). In the case of Brazil, Porto presents a history of the ‘integration of the Brazilian (empty) spaces of the interior by means of aviation and emphasizes the concrete process of establishing airlines from 1930 onwards: N. M. L. Porto, História do Transporte Aéreo no Centro-Oeste Brasileiro, 1930–1960 (Goiânia, 2005). However, the majority of these case studies (in contrast to the present study) do not apply a constructivist perspective to empty spaces.

⁷ On the press in Brazil, see the anthology História da Imprensa no Brasil, ed. A. L. Martins and T. R. de Luca (São Paulo, 2008).

⁸ At the time, and thus in the historical sources, spelled Edú (with accent, in newspapers also with an inverted comma: Edu’). In accordance with current orthographical conventions, the following text will use the spelling Edu (without the accent).

⁹ See M. Wertheim, Die Himmelstür zum Cyberspace. Eine Geschichte des Raumes von Dante zum Internet, trans. I. Strasmann (Zurich, 2000), pp. 102–10, 121–4 and 161. An English version is available: M. Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace. A History of Space from Dante to the Internet (New York, 1999), pp. 99–106, 116–8 and 149.

¹⁰ On the history of the invention of flight, see R. P. Hallion, Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age from Antiquity through the First World War (Oxford, 2003).

¹¹ R. Wohl, ‘Republic of the air’, The Wilson Quarterly, xvii (1993), 106–17, also <http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/essays/republic-air> [accessed 30 June 2016], at p. 110.

¹² For instance, Portuguese: innumerable references for ‘conquista do ar’ in published titles (e.g., Anon., A conquista do ar pelo aeronauta brasileiro Santos-Dumont (Paris, 1901), available as a facs. with commentary in H. L. de Barros, Santos-Dumont e a Invenção do Vôo (Rio de Janeiro, 2003), pp. 141–80), musical pieces (e.g., E. das Neves, ‘A conquista do ar’ (1902), in Barros, Santos-Dumont e a Invenção do Vôo, pp. 66–7), and journal articles (e.g., ‘Navegacao aerea’, Brazil-Ferro-Carril, 15 Aug. 1913, p. 351); English: ‘conquest of the air’, in the title of several works dating from the 1910s and 1920s (for an overview search the HathiTrust Digital Library <https://www.hathitrust.org> [accessed 30 June 2016]); German: ‘Die Eroberung der Luft’ or ‘Die Eroberung der Lüfte’ (e.g., ‘Die Eroberung der Luft. Ein Kerbelgespräch des Kalendermannes’, in Koseritz’ Deutscher Volkskalender für Brasilien auf das Jahr 1910 (Porto Alegre, 1909 [?], pp. 165–80); French: ‘La conquete des airs’ or ‘la conquete de l’air’ (e.g., as the title for Roger de la Fresnaye’s painting La conquête de l’air (1913) <http://www.moma.org/collection/works/79181?locale=de> [accessed 30 June 2016]). See also a newspaper article about Wilbur Wright’s flight in 1908 with the headline and a postcard with the title ‘La conquete de l’air’, both reproduced in R. Wohl, A Passion for Wings. Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–1918 (New Haven, Conn., 1994), p. 272 (Fig. 321) and p. 258 (Fig. 312).

¹³ In 1900 almost 84% of the Brazilian population lived in the two coastal areas in the south-east and the north-east. Most state capitals bordered on the sea (‘Exhibit 4–4. Distribution of Brazilian population by major regions, 1772–1991’ and running text in Skidmore, Brazil, p. 79).

¹⁴ N. T. Lima, Um Sertão chamado Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1999) and Oliveira, ‘A conquista do espaço’. In Os sertóes (1902) (English: Rebellion in the backlands, trans. S. Putnam (Chicago, Ill. and London, 2010)), E. da Cunha depicted the vast lands in the Brazilian interior as a void, a gap, a blank space to be filled, in short, as an empty space (e.g., the chapter ‘Terra ignota’, pp. 9–11; c.f. Oliveira, ‘A conquista do espaço’). In this foundational text of the nation E. da Cunha pleaded for the transformation of the totality of the territory into a national space (Oliveira, ‘A conquista do espaço’).

¹⁵ For the contemporary concept of ‘two Brazils’, see Skidmore, Brazil, pp. 79–80.

¹⁶ Wolfe, Autos and Progress, pp. 5–6, gives an overview of existing transport networks in the US, Canada and Mexico at that time. On the relatively dense railway network in the central and northern part of Argentina, see the maps in Nueva Historia del Ferrocarril en la Argentina. 150 Años de Política Ferroviaria, ed. M. J. López and J. E. Waddell (Buenos Aires, 2007), pp. 54, 101.

¹⁷ On the comparative view on the length of worldwide rail networks, see ‘Table 4.5. World railroad mileage, by continent, 1840–1945 (in thousands of miles)’, in S. C. Topik and A. Wells, ‘Commodity chains in a global economy’, in A World Connecting. 1870–1945, ed. E. S. Rosenberg (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 593–812, at p. 643. According to the numbers given there, in 1910 Latin America (including Mexico) boasted 60,700 miles (9.5%) of the worldwide rail networks compared to 212,100 miles (33.3 %) in Europe including Russia and 265,800 kilometres (41.5%) in North America.

¹⁸ Wolfe, Autos and Progress, p. 7. The relationship between Brazil’s export economy and the unconnected transportation network is recapped by Wolfe, Autos and Progress, pp. 5–7 and J. L. A. Natal, ‘Transporte, ocupação do espaço e desenvolvimento capitalista no Brasil: historia e perspectivas’ (unpublished Universidade Estadual de Campinas PhD thesis, 1991) <http://www.bibliotecadigital.unicamp.br/document/?code=vtls000037113> [accessed 30 June 2016], pp. 57–60, 62–3, 68. On the construction of railway lines in Brazil since the second half of the 19th century, see Natal, ‘Transporte’, pp. 54–7, 73–4.

¹⁹ Wolfe, Autos and Progress, pp. 5 and 30. On the history of automobilism and road-building in Brazil, see Wolfe, Autos and Progress, pp. II, 27, 33–8.

²⁰ There are no broad recent studies on river navigation in Brazil. A good overview is given by R. S. B. dos Santos, ‘Aspectos da hidrografia brasileira’, Revista Brasileira de Geografia, xxiv (1962), 327–76 <http://biblioteca.ibge.gov.br/visualizacao/periodicos/115/rbg_1962_v24_n3.pdf> [accessed 30 June 2016], at pp. 362–6. Further indications can be found in N. G. Reis Filho, ‘Urbanização e modernidade: entre o passado e o futuro (1808–1945)’, in Viagem Incompleta: A Experiência Brasileira (1500–2000): A Grande Transação, ed. C. G. Mota (São Paulo, 2000), pp. 83–118, at pp. 95–6. On the coastal water routes, see Burns, A History of Brazil, pp. 59–60.

²¹ On the topic and idea of ‘national integration’ (Portuguese: ‘integração nacional’) in Brazilian history from the 19th century onwards, see Natal, ‘Transporte’, pp. 48–52 and 69–74; and D. M. de Sá, M. R. Sá and N. T. Lima, ‘Telegraphs and an inventory of the territory of Brazil: the scientific work of the Rondon Commission (1907–1915)’, História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, xv (2008), 779–811 <http://www.scielo.br/pdf/hcsm/v15n3/en_.pdf> [accessed 30 June 2016], at pp. 781–3.

²² On the significance of the telegraph in Brazilian nation-building, see T. A. Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation. Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon and the Construction of a Modern Brazil, 1906–1930 (Durham, N.C. 2004); as well as de Sá, Sá and Lima, ‘Telegraphs and an inventory of the territory of Brazil’.

²³ Porto, História do Transporte Aéreo, p. 29.

²⁴ On the aeroplane and aviation as symbols of modernity, see Van Riper, Imagining Flight, pp. 6, 12–3; and Wohl, A Passion for Wings. On the role of modern technologies as precursors of further development in Brazil’s hinterlands, see Natal, ‘Transporte’, p. 61; and Porto, História do Transporte Aéreo, p. 159.

²⁵ For a case study on Peru, see W. Hiatt, The Rarefied Air of the Modern. Airplanes and Technological Modernity in the Andes (New York, 2016). On the use of the aeroplane as a solution for unsolved transport problems in South America and the relationship between the conditions of terrestrial transport and the implementation of airlines on the subcontinent, see Jürgens, ‘Die Erschliessung Südamerikas’, pp. 1–3, 123–7.

²⁶ Original title: ‘A aviação em S. Paulo’ (O Estado de S. Paulo, 8 Jan. 1910, p. 7); all translations of Portuguese quotations – unless otherwise specified – are provided by the author. The same headline is found in Correio Paulistano, 8 Jan. 1910, p. 2. Both articles are reproduced and transcribed in S. Alexandria and S. Nogueira, 1910. O Primeiro Voo do Brasil (São Paulo, 2010), pp. 80–3, 84–6. On the history of Sensaud de Lavaud’s first flight on 7 Jan. 1910, see the same volume.

²⁷ On the early venues for flight performances, see T. A. de Souza Vicente, ‘O Campo dos Afonsos e o amanhecer da aviação no Rio de Janeiro: análise dos artigos na revista Careta 1911–1914’, Revista da UNIFA, xxv (2012), 92–100 <https://www.unifa.aer.mil.br/site/novo_portal/revista/31/31_edicao_2_202.pdf> [accessed 30 June 2016], at p. 96; Alexandria and Nogueira, 1910, pp. 96–7; Instituto Histórico-Cultural da Aeronáutica, História Geral da Aeronáutica Brasileira (4 vols., Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro, 1988–2005), i: Dos Primórdios até 1920, pp. 365–6. On aeronautical activities in Brazil from 1910 onwards, see Instituto Histórico-Cultural da Aeronáutica, História Geral, i. 368–70, 376–7; for Rio de Janeiro, see Souza Vicente ‘Campo dos Afonsos’.

²⁸ In the beginning of aviation, successfully taking off from the ground was by no means a given. The frustration caused by the flop of the first announced demonstrations of flight in Rio de Janeiro comes across in the cynical title ‘Aviation on the sand’ (‘Aviação na Areia’). Instead of through airspace, more than once the aircraft moved merely on the sand (read: on the ground) (Careta, 31 Dec. 1910, p. 7 and Careta, 7 Jan. 1911, p. 3).

²⁹ Like ‘experiencias’ (‘experiences’) or ‘tentativas’ (‘attempts’). Due to the scope of this chapter only a few examples of these concepts and those cited below are given. On ‘experiencia’, see ‘Balões e aeroplanos’, Brazil-Ferro-Carril, Feb. 1911, p. II; on ‘tentativa’, see ‘Um domingo de aviação’, O Malho, 31 Dec. 1910, p. 15.

³⁰ Like ‘demonstrações’ (‘demonstrations’), ‘evoluções’ (‘evolutions’), ‘espectaculos’ (‘spectacle’) or ‘vôos de fantasia’ (‘fantasy flights’). On ‘demonstrações’, see ‘Progressos da aviação’, O Malho, 25 Nov. 1911, p. 44; on ‘evoluções’, see ‘Aviação no Rio de Janeiro’, O Malho, 27 Jan. 1912, p. 51; on ‘espectaculo’, see ‘Balões e aeroplanos’, Brazil-Ferro-Carril, Feb. 1911, p. II; on ‘vôos de fantasia’, see the headline ‘Garros effectua no Prado Fluminense lindos vôos de fantasia’, Gazeta de Noticias, 12 Jan. 1912, p. 3.

³¹ Like ‘prova’ (‘contest’) (cf. the headline ‘As provas de hoje’, Gazeta de Noticias, 18 Jan. 1912, p. 3).

³² Cf. caption in ‘Semana de aviação no Rio de Janeiro’, O Malho, 20 Jan. 1912, p. 22.

³³ ‘A aviação no Rio’, Jornal do Brasil, 18 Jan. 1912, p. 9.

³⁴ ‘A aviação no Rio’, Jornal do Brasil, 4 March 1911, p. 6.

³⁵ ‘A primeira semana de aviação no Rio’, Gazeta de Noticias, 18 Jan. 1912, p. 3.

³⁶ ‘Aeronautica’, Brazil-Ferro-Carril, March 1911, p. 14.

³⁷ In Brazilian sources the term mostly appears in italics and/or quotation marks. On Santos-São Paulo, see ‘Um novo raid de Edú Chaves’, A Tribuna, 9 March 1912, unpag.; on São Paulo-Rio de Janeiro, see ‘O maior “raid” da America do Sul’, Gazeta de Noticias, 29 Apr. 1912, p. 1.

³⁸ Chaves lost orientation, took a detour and ran out of fuel. As a result, he crashed into the bay of Mangaratiba. See Instituto Histórico-Cultural da Aeronáutica, História Geral, i. 382–3 and the contemporary news coverage (e.g., ‘O vôo de Edú Chaves’, O Estado de S. Paulo, 1 May 1912, p. 1). This chapter follows the contemporary terminology and refers to this flight as ‘raid São Paulo – Rio de Janeiro’, since the spatial imaginations, national dreams and visions focused on here stem to a greater degree from the intended rather than the actual route. It is worth noting that two years later, on 5 July 1914, Chaves was the first to accomplish a non-stop flight between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

³⁹ Cf. statistical analysis of the archival database of the journal O Estado de S. Paulo. The 76 matches for the search term ‘raid’ between 1900 and 1909 refer for the most part to announcements for military (infantry) and sporting activities (automobilism, riding) <http://acervo.estadao.com.br/procura/#!/raid/Acervo/acervo//11900//> [accessed 30 June 2016]. From an etymological point of view, the component of overcoming distances is still present in the related English words ‘road’ or ‘to ride’ (‘Raide’, in A. Houaiss, M. de Salles Villar and F. M. de Mello Franco, Dicionário Houaiss da Lingua Portuguesa (Rio de Janeiro, 2001), p. 2378). For the use of the term ‘raid’ at that time in France, see Wohl, A Passion for Wings, p.294.

⁴⁰ Brazil’s first important car ‘raid’ took place in 1908 (Wolfe, Autos and Progress, p. 29).

⁴¹ Cf. the entries ‘Raide’ in the following relevant Brazilian dictionaries: G. Teixeira, M. F. da Costa and S. P. da Silva, Grande Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa (Porto, 2004), p. 1294; and Houaiss, Salles Villar and de Mello Franco, Dicionário Houaiss da Língua Portuguesa, p. 2378. In accordance with modern orthography the word is usually spelled ‘reide’ or ‘raide’, even though nowadays the term is rarely applied. The contemporary Brazilian use of the term meets the western understanding of ‘raid’ as a ‘flight between two well-known points of reference, usually major cities, that had never been successfully completed before’ (Wohl, A Passion for Wings, p. 66).

⁴² Wohl, A Passion for Wings, pp. 65–6.

⁴³ See, e.g., the occurrences of the term in articles in the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo. The decade 1910–19, with its 228 matches, marks an indisputable peak <http://acervo.estadao.com.br/procura/#!/raid/Acervo/acervo//1/1910/> [accessed 30 June 2016].

⁴⁴ A spot-check on the chronology of the Brazilian use of the term ‘raid’ for aviation matters was carried out using available Brazilian newspaper databases and making a selection of those media that guaranteed the best digital search capability through optical character recognition and thus a low error rate. In both the newspapers O Estado de S. Paulo and A Noite and the magazine Fon-Fon, the term ‘raid’ (with reference to the field of aviation) appeared first in 1910 and 1911 respectively and referred to flight activities in foreign countries (Argentina, the US or European countries). All these publications first used the term ‘raid’ to refer to domestic flight activities with Edu Chaves’s flight from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro in 1912. See the archival database of O Estado de S. Paulo <http://acervo.estadao.com.br/procura/#!/raid/Acervo/acervo//1/1910/> [accessed 30 June 2016]; and the database of the Biblioteca Nacional <http://memoria.bn.br> [accessed 30 June 2016]. The close correlation in timing between the three publications suggests a similar chronology in the use of the term in other Brazilian media.

⁴⁵ This first short-distance flight in Brazil and other flights from Rio de Janeiro to several surrounding towns carried out in Jan. 1912 by Garros and other foreign pilots are cited in Instituto Histórico-Cultural da Aeronáutica, História Geral, i. 372–4, 377.

⁴⁶ Cf. the image caption ‘Fig. 97 – Plauchut realiza o I^o reide do Brasil …’, in Instituto Histórico-Cultural da Aeronáutica, História Geral, i. 373; and the quotation ‘o voo de Plauchut … foi o primeiro raid no Brasil’ (italics in original), in Souza Vicente, ‘Campo dos Afonsos’, p. 95.

⁴⁷ The database of Biblioteca Nacional (<http://memoria.bn.br> [accessed 30 June 2016]) includes the most important press organs of the time. However, there was no positive result for Rio de Janeiro’s press for the time frame in question and the search term ‘Plauchut raid’.

⁴⁸ Portuguese: ‘concurso de aviação’ or ‘prova de aviação’ (‘O concurso de aviação …’, OEstado de S. Paulo, 23 Oct. 1911, p. 2).

⁴⁹ Portuguese: ‘vôo’ (‘Uma prova de aviação no Rio de Janeiro’, O Malho, 28 Oct. 1911, p. 15).

⁵⁰ In Portuguese: ‘bateu o record da audacia nesse genero de sport, fazendo a travessia de S. Paulo ao Rio por mares nunca dantes navegados e por cima de terras inhospitas e de precipicios e serras perigossisimas’ (italics in original) (A. Storni, ‘Salada da Semana’, O Malho, 4 May 1912, p. 27).

⁵¹ In Portuguese: ‘Por mares nunca dantes navegados’ (L. de Camões, Os Lusíadas (Lisboa, 1644 [1572]), Canto I). For the English translation, see L. V. de Camões, The Lusiads, trans. W. C. Atkinson (London, 2007).

⁵² In Portuguese: ‘bandeirante do ar’ or ‘bandeirante dos ares’. The evidence for ‘bandeirante do ar’ includes: title of an illustration: ‘O Bandeirante do Ar’ (B. Coelho, ‘O Voador’, Jornal do Brasil, 5 May 1912, p. 7); newspaper article naming him ‘Bandeirante do ar’ (‘A aviação no Brasil. Uma entrevista com Edu’ Chaves’, [Jornal de Noticias, March 1913], unpag.); on ‘bandeirante dos ares’ see, e.g., ‘O Centro dos Chronistas Sportivos, offereceu, hontem, um almoço a Edú Chaves’, Gazeta de Noticias, 6 May 1912, p. 2.

⁵³ B. Weinstein, ‘Racializing regional difference: São Paulo versus Brazil, 1932’, in Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, ed. N. P. Appelbaum, A. S. Macpherson and K. A. Rosemblatt (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), pp. 237–62, at p. 244; and Skidmore, Brazil, pp. 9–10. The term is only documented from the 18th century onwards, when the peak of bandeirantes’ activity had already been reached (R. L. de Souza, ‘A mitologia bandeirante: construção e sentidos’, História Social, xiii (2007), 151–71 <http://www.ifch.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/rhs/article/view/215> [accessed 30 June 2016], at p. 152).

⁵⁴ Oliveira, ‘A conquista do espaço’. For the construction of the bandeirante mythology between 1870 and 1940 in historiography, literature, arts, commemorative culture and museology, see Souza, ‘A mitologia bandeirante’; Raimundo, ‘Bandeirantismo e identidade nacional’; A. C. Ferreira, A Epopéia Bandeirante: Letrados, Instituições, Invenção Histórica (1870–1940) (São Paulo, 2002); E. D. G. de Oliveira, ‘Instituições, arte e o mito bandeirante: uma contribuição de Benedito Calixto’, Saculum – Revista de História, xix (2008), 127–48 <http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs/index.php/srh/article/view/11411/6525> [accessed 30 June 2016].

⁵⁵ Souza points out that the space to be conquered could only be conceived of as empty because its former indigenous inhabitants (and their enslavement by the bandeirantes) found no place in the bandeirantes mythology (Souza, ‘A mitologia bandeirante’, p. 157).

⁵⁶ With regard to African and Australian hinterlands, see D. Kennedy, The Last Blank Spaces. Exploring Africa and Australia (Berlin and Cambridge, 2013).

⁵⁷ On the history of aerial navigation, see S. Fehr, ‘Unsichtbare Verkehrswege. Vom Sichtflug der Pioniere zum internationalen Luftstrassensystem’, Wege und Geschichte, ii (2011), 35–40 <http://www.researchgate.net/publication/236462344_Unsichtbare_Verkehrswege._Vom_Sichtflug_der_Pioniere_zum_internationalen_Luftstrassensystem> [accessed 30 June 2016]. Hints at the conditions of navigation during Edu’s flight are found in several articles, e.g., Vol-Taire [Leal de Souza], ‘Almanach das Glorias. Eduardo Chaves’, Careta, 19 Apr. 1913, p. 11.

⁵⁸ Only at the end of 1912, with the establishment of national aviation schools, were airfields sui generis built up, such as the Campo dos Afonsos near Rio de Janeiro, used to this day by the Brazilian air force (Souza Vicente, ‘Campo dos Afonsos’).

⁵⁹ A. Storni, ‘Casos da semana’, O Malho, 16 March 1912, p. 28.

⁶⁰ See ‘Perspective/Panoramic map’, in Cartographical Innovations: An International Handbook of Mapping Terms to 1900, ed. H. M. Wallis and A. H. Robinson (Tring, 1987), pp. 41–3.

⁶¹ On other illustrated responses to Chaves’s flights, see A. Storni, ‘Salada da Semana’, O Malho, 4 May 1912, p. 27; Voltolino [J. P. L. Lemmi], ‘O Vôo do Edú’, O Pirralho, 5 May 1912, p. II.

⁶² ‘O maior “raid” da America do Sul. De S. Paulo ao Rio de Janeiro’, Gazeta de Noticias, 29 Apr. 1912, p. 1; and ‘O maior “raid” da America do Sul’, Gazeta de Noticias, 30 Apr. 1912, p. 1. On the difficulties, see Instituto Histórico-Cultural da Aeronáutica, História Geral, i. 379.

⁶³ There are numerous examples and wordings. For ‘arriscada travessia’, see ‘Um novo raid de Edú Chaves’, A Tribuna, 9 March 1912 (for the flight Santos – São Paulo); as a variation also ‘arriscadissimo raid S. Paulo – Rio’ (‘A aviação no Brazil’, O Malho, 4 May 1912, p. 12 (for the raid São Paulo – Rio de Janeiro)).

⁶⁴ There are several examples and variations to express this idea. The most common term is ‘intrepido’, e.g., ‘O Homem do Dia’, Gazeta de Noticias, 3 May 1912, p. 3.

⁶⁵ de Oliveira, ‘Instituiçōes, arte e o mito bandeirante’, pp. 144–5. On the discursive link between audacity and the triumph over nature, see ‘A aviação no Brasil. Raid S. Paulo – Rio’, O Estado de S. Paulo, 7 May 1912, p. 2; J. do Amaral Neddermeyer, ‘Voando’, São Paulo, 7 May 1910 [1912?].

⁶⁶ From as early as colonial times, trails and mule tracks with indigenous origins connected the coastal region with the high plains. Transportation was facilitated for carts and carriages and later automobiles by a road constructed in the 1840s. From 1867 onwards a railway line linked Santos with São Paulo (Reis Filho, ‘Urbanização e modernidade’, pp. 94–5; and M. E. Austregésilo, ‘Estudo sôbre alguns tipos de transporte no Brasil Colonial’, Revista de História, i (1950), 495–516, doi: 1O.11606/issn.2316–9141.v1i4p495-516, at pp. 500, 509–13).

⁶⁷ For different imaginations of nature in Brazilian traditions of thought, see Oliveira, ‘A conquista do espaço’.

⁶⁸ For the impediments in the construction of telegraph lines due to the challenging terrain, see Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation, pp. 9, 16.

⁶⁹ In German: ‘Wege-Räume’ (Rau, Räume, p. 143).

⁷⁰ The maps analysed here are published with the following newspaper reports: ‘O maior “raid” da America do Sul. De S. Paulo ao Rio de Janeiro’, Gazeta de Noticias, 29 Apr. 1912, p. 1 (see Figure 3.2); ‘O maior “raid” da America do Sul’, Gazeta de Noticias, 30 Apr. 1912, p. 1 (see Figure 3.3); ‘O maior “raid” da America do Sul’, Gazeta de Noticias, 1 May 1912, p. 1 (see Figure 3.4); ‘O vôo S. Paulo-Rio. 548 kilometros em aeroplano’, A Imprensa, 30 Apr. 1912, p. 1 (see Figure 3.5); ‘O grande acontecimento do dia. Hoje o aviador Eduardo Chaves realiza o vôo de São Paulo ao Rio’, A Imprensa, 27 Apr. 1912, p. 1 (see Figure 3.6).

⁷¹ J. Dym and K. Offen, ‘Introduction, in Mapping Latin America, ed. J. Dym and K. Offen (Chicago, Ill. and London, 2011), pp. 1–18, at p. 8 (emphasis in original). See also pp. 6–7 for a more extensive understanding of maps.

⁷² Dym and Offen, ‘Introduction, p. 1.

⁷³ In German: ‘Zeichensystem’ (Rau, Räume, p. 127).

⁷⁴ U. Schneider, Die Macht der Karten. Eine Geschichte der Kartographie vom Mittelalter bis heute (Darmstadt, 2004), pp. 7–9. See also Dym and Offen, ‘Introduction’, pp. 3, 8, 14.

⁷⁵ The original template map of the railroad network is titled ‘As linhas da ‘Central do Brasil’ em 1898’ and reproduced in IBGE / CNG, I Centenário das ferrovias brasileiras (Rio de Janeiro, 1954), p. 30 <http://vfco.brazilia.jor.br/ferrovias/mapas/1898redeEFCB.shtml> [accessed 30 June 2016].

⁷⁶ Unlike road or railway networks but like sea traffic, aeroplanes – at least in the early days of aviation – did not require fixed routes. For this reason flight routes varied, were nearly infinite and not continuously visible (Jürgens, ‘Die Erschliessung Südamerikas’, p. 2; Fehr, ‘Unsichtbare Verkehrswege’, pp. 37–9).

⁷⁷ See ‘Orientation’, in Wallis and Robinson, Cartographical Innovations, pp. 196–9.

⁷⁸ This explains why the toponyms in Figure 3.4 appear not on a horizontal but on a diagonal alignment. Apparently, the template map was south-north-oriented. For a similar choice of orientation for the purpose of centring in a 19th-century railway map, see Dym and Offen, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–2.

⁷⁹ D. Harvey called that transformation ‘time-space-compression’ (D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, 1990)); S. Kern uses the concept of ‘simultaneity’ (Kern, The Culture of Time and Space). In his study Kern gives various examples of technologies from railway to telegraph to steamship and aeroplane that fostered this changing perception.

⁸⁰ On the itineraria, see ‘Route Map’, in Wallis and Robinson, Cartographical innovations, pp. 57–8.

⁸¹ See, e.g., the following maps: ‘Intinerário [sic] de São Paulo à Cuyabá’ (1838); ‘Mapa das Capitanias de Mato Grosso, Goiás e São Paulo em que se notam os caminhos de São Paulo para Cuiabá’ (1853); ‘Carta do Continente das Capitanias de Mato Grosso, de Goiáz e de S. Paulo, com huma configuração de todos os rios, e serras, com os dois caminhos de S. Paulo para Cuyaba, hum pelas margens dos rios, outro por terra’ (1764) (Leituras Cartográficas Históricas e Contemporâneas, ed. R. Bertani and A. M. Claro (São Paulo, 2003), pp. 56, 60, 64).

⁸² On the significance of cartography in the process of colonization and conquest, see Bertani and Claro, Leituras cartográficas históricas e contemporâneas, p. 10. On the role of cartographic production in the context of border disputes between Portuguese and Spanish America in the 18th and 19th centuries, see Bertani and Claro, Leituras cartográficas históricas e contemporâneas, p. II; and L. Trigo, Fundação Biblioteca Nacional and Safra Instituto Cultural, Biblioteca Nacional (São Paulo, 2004), p. 277. For the numerous maps produced on the occasion of border negotiations with Spanish-America in the 18th and 19th centuries, see ‘Mapa dos Confins do Brasil …’ (1749) and ‘Carta do Império do Brasil’ (1875) (Trigo et al., Biblioteca Nacional, pp. 284–5).

⁸³ A. G. Costa, ‘Dos roteiros de todos os sinais da costa até a carta geral: um projeto de cartografia e os mapas da América portuguesa e do Brasil Império’, in Roteiro Prático de Cartografia: da América Portuguesa ao Brasil Império, ed. A. G. Costa (Belo Horizonte, 2007), pp. 83–224, at p. 175.