Euclides da Cunha

Born on 20 January, 1866, in Santa Rita do Rio Negro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Died on 15 August, 1909 (aged 43), in Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Euclides Rodrigues Pimenta da Cunha was born into a family of Portuguese and Bahian extraction. He attended the Colégio Aquino in Rio, where one of his teachers was the republican ideologist Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães, a follower of Auguste Comte and one of the leaders of the movement to depose the emperor and install the First Republic in 1889. It was at the school that da Cunha started his political writing, in a youth publication titled the "Democrat". His virulent republicanism provoked him to insult the imperial minister of war by throwing down his sword in front of him during a formal ceremony at the military school in Praia Vermelha, where he had been enrolled since 1886. He was expelled from the school after a stint in São Paulo as a journalist, he returned to Rio in 1889 to resume studies at the Escola Politécnica. He finished his education at the War College in 1892, with a university degree in mathematics, physical and natural sciences, and engineering and the rank of first lieutenant. In 1890 he married Ana Sólon Ribeiro (later Ana de Assis), the daughter of General Frederico Sólon Ribeiro, one of the founders of the Brazilian Republic, who in 1889 was assigned the task of issuing Pedro II his exile orders. He left the military in 1896 and worked as a civil engineer for the state of São Paulo. When the death of Antônio Moreira César became national news in 1897, da Cunha accepted the invitation of O Estado de São Paulo to accompany the fourth expedition of the Canudos campaign as a war journalist embedded with the São Paulo Battalion. He left for Bahia on August 4, 1897, and his field notes, published posthumously as "Diary of an Expedition", became the basis for his great work, "Os sertões" (Backlands). His other works include "The Amazon: Land without History" (1906), "Contrastes e confrontos" (1907), and "Peru versus Bolivia." Da Cunha died from a gunshot wound delivered by his wife's lover.