Cunha, Euclides da On December 11, 1888, for his role in the protest, he was expelled Through the efforts of Major Solon Ribeiro, a prominent republican, and others, there was an amnesty for those who had protested against the emperor, and da Cunha was readmitted to the military school He graduated in the following year and was commissioned second lieutenant In that year he also married Ana, the daughter of Ribeiro In 1891 da Cunha went to the Escola de Guerra (War School) and was quickly promoted to first lieutenant He then worked as a military engineer in the Brazilian army but left to study civil engineering, although he was soon working as a journalist In 1896–97 he went, on behalf of the magazine O Estado de São Paulo, with the army to Canudos, a village in Bahia state in eastcentral Brazil, where Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel “Conselheiro” (“the Counselor”) and his supporters had established their own “empire.” Some 30,000 people moved to Canudos with the promise of freedom for escaped slaves and impoverished Indians The Conselheiro also promised the return of the Portuguese late medieval king, Sebastian There were five army expeditions over three years to Bahia in what became known as the War of Canudos It took three generals, 19 guns, and 10,000 men to conquer the place, with the rebels fighting to the death for their messianic leader Da Cunha’s first article on the rebellion had been published in March 1897 as “A Nossa Vendéis”; this led to his becoming a reporter attached to the general staff He spent the period from August to October 1, 1897, writing about what he saw in the rebellion and the subsequent reprisals This was to form the basis of his historical narrative, Os Sertões (1902), the first major work that championed the rights of Brazil’s Indi- 73 ans On September 21, 1903, da Cunha was elected to the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters) On December 13 of the same year he established the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico (Historical and Geographic Institute) In 1907 da Cunha was appointed to head a commission to deal with problems in Amazonia, and he spent December 1904 and much of 1905 traveling down the Amazon In early 1909 da Cunha was appointed chairman and professor of logic at the Colégio Pedro II, a public secondary school in Rio de Janeiro Euclides da Cunha was a keen amateur geographer and geologist and spent the last years of his life visiting remote parts of Brazil and writing about the Indian tribal people he met He also was influenced by the Darwinian aspects of naturalism He was the author of Contrastes e confrontos (Contrasts and confrontations, 1907), and Peru versus Bolívia (1907) On August 15, 1909, da Cunha was killed in a duel by a young army lieutenant, Dilermando de Assis, who was having an affair with his wife He died at Piedade, Rio de Janeiro He is commemorated by the Brazilian education department, and in August each year they observe a Semana Euclideana (Euclides Week) in his honor The Euclides da Cunha Foundation in Brazil commemorates the historian and the role he played in the education system Further reading: Levine, R M Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893–1897 Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; Vargas Llosa, Mario The War of the End of the World London: Faber and Faber, 1985 Justin Corfield