I sat down on the couch in the living room. There was a book for almost every year from 1906 (his first expedition) to 1921 (his penultimate trip); he had obviously carried a diary on each of his expeditions, jotting down observations. Many of them were replete with maps and surveying calculations. On the inside covers were the poems he had copied down in order to read in the jungle when he was alone and desperate. One seemed meant for Nina:
Oh love, my love! Have all your will—
I am yours to the end.
Fawcett had also scribbled down lines from Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s “Solitude”:
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a long and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.
Many of the diaries were filled with the mundane, from someone with no expectation of history: “9 July . . . Sleepless night. . . Much rain and wet through by midday . . . 11 July . . . Heavy rain from midnight. Reached [camp] on trail, caught fish . . . 17 July . . . swimming across for balsa.” Then, suddenly, a casual remark revealed the harrowing nature of his existence: “Feel very bad . . . Took 1 [vial] of morphine last night to rest from foot pain. It produced a violent stomachache and had to put finger down throat to relieve.”
A loud noise sounded in the other room and I looked up. It was Isabelle playing a video game on the computer. I picked up another of the books. It had a lock to protect the contents. “That’s his ‘Treasure Book,’ ” Rolette said. The lock was unfastened, and inside were stories Fawcett had collected of buried treasures, like Galla-pita-Galla, and maps of their suspected locations: “In that cave is a treasure, the existence of which is known to me and to me alone.”
In later diaries, as he developed his case for Z, Fawcett made more archaeological notations. There were drawings of strange hieroglyphics. The Botocudo Indians, now virtually extinct, had told him a legend of a city “enormously rich in gold—so much so as to blaze like fire.” Fawcett added, “It is just conceivable this may be Z.” As he seemed to be nearing his goal, he became more secretive. In the 1921 log, he outlined a “code” he had apparently devised, with his wife, to send messages:
78804 Kratzbank = Discoveries much as described
78806 Kratzfuss = Rich, important and wonderful
78808 Kratzka = Cities located—future now secure
Poring through the log, I noticed a word on the margins of one page: “DEAD.” I looked at it more closely and saw two other words alongside it. They spelled out “DEAD HORSE CAMP.” Underneath them were coordinates, and I quickly flipped through my notebook where I had scribbled down the position of the camp from Exploration Fawcett. They were significantly different.
For hours, I went through the diaries, taking notes. I thought there was nothing left to glean, when Rolette appeared and said that she wanted to show me one more item. She vanished into the back room, and I could hear her rummaging through drawers and cabinets, muttering to herself. After several minutes, she emerged with a photograph from a book. “I don’t know where I put it,” she said. “But I can at least show you a picture of it.”
It was a photograph of Fawcett’s gold signet ring, which was engraved with the family motto, “Nee Áspera Terrent”—essentially, “Difficulties Be Damned.” In 1979, an Englishman named Brian Ridout, who was making a wildlife film in Brazil, heard rumors that the ring had turned up at a store in Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso. By the time Ridout tracked down the shop, the proprietor had died. His wife, however, searched through her possessions and found Colonel Fawcett’s ring. “It’s the last concrete item we have from the expedition,” Rolette said.
She said that she had been desperate to learn more and had once shown the ring to a psychic.
“Did you learn anything?” I asked.
She looked down at the picture, then up at me. “It had been bathed in blood.”
THE
GREEN HELL
Are you game?” Fawcett asked.
He was back in the jungle not long after his previous expedition, trying to persuade his new second-in-command, Frank Fisher, to explore the Rio Verde, along the Brazilian and Bolivian border.
Fisher, who was a forty-one-year-old English engineer and a member of the RGS, hesitated. The boundary commission had not contracted with the party to explore the Verde—it had asked the men to survey a region in southwest Brazil near Corumbá—but Fawcett insisted on also tracing the river, which was in such uncharted territory that nobody even knew where it began.
Finally, Fisher said, “Oh, I’ll come,” though he added, “Surely the contracts don’t call for it.”
It was only Fawcett’s second South American expedition, but it would prove critical to his understanding of the Amazon and to his evolution as a scientist. With Fisher and seven other recruits, he set out from Corumbá, trekking northwest more than four hundred miles, before shoving off on two makeshift wooden rafts. The rapids, fueled by rains and by steep descents, were intense, and the rafts were propelled over precipices before tumbling down into the foam and rocks—the grinding roar—as the men hollered to hold on and Fawcett, eyes flashing, Stetson cocked, steered with a bamboo pole held to one side, so it wouldn’t spear his chest. Whitewater rafting was not yet a sport, but Fawcett anticipated it: “When . . . the enterprising traveler has to construct and manage his own balsa [raft], he will realize an exhilaration and excitement that few sports provide.” Still, it was one thing to ride the rapids of a familiar river, and another to descend unmarked chutes that might at any moment drop hundreds of feet. If a member of the party fell overboard, he could not grab onto a raft without capsizing it. The only honorable course was to drown.
The explorers paddled past the Ricardo Franco Hills, eerie sandstone plateaus that rose three thousand feet. “Time and the foot of man had not touched those summits,” Fawcett wrote. “They stood like a lost world, forested to their tops, and the imagination could picture the last vestiges of an age long vanished.” (Conan Doyle reportedly based the setting of The Lost World at least partly on these tablelands.)
As Fawcett and his team wound through the canyon, the rapids became impassable.
“What’ll we do now?” one of the men asked.
“There’s no help for it,” Fawcett said. “We must leave all we can’t carry on our back and follow the river’s course by land.”
Fawcett ordered the men to keep only their essential items: hammocks, rifles, mosquito nets, and surveying instruments.
What about our stores of food? Fisher asked.
Fawcett said they’d bring only enough rations for a few days. Then they’d have to live off the land, like the Indians whose fire they had seen burning in the distance.
Despite cutting, chopping, pulling, and pushing through jungle from morning till night, they usually advanced no more than half a mile per day. Their legs sank in mud. Their shoes disintegrated. Their eyes blurred from a tiny species of bee that is drawn to sweat, and that invaded their pupils. (Brazilians called the bees “eye lickers.”) Still, Fawcett counted his paces and crawled up banks to better see the stars and to fix their position, as if reducing the wilderness to figures and diagrams might enable him to overcome it. His men didn’t need such signposts. They knew where they were: the green hell.
The men were supposed to conserve their rations, but most broke down and consumed them quickly. By the ninth day of marching, the expedition had run out of food. It was now that Fawcett discovered what explorers since Orellana had learned and what would become the basis of the scientific theory of a counterfeit paradise: in the world’s thickest jungle, it was hard to find a morsel to eat.
Of all the Amazon’s tricks, this was perhaps the most diabolical. As Fawcett put it, “Starvation sounds almost unbelievable in forest country, and yet it is only too likely to happen.” Scrounging for food, Fawcett and his men could make out only buttressed tree trunks and cascades of
vines. Chemical-laced fungi and billions of termites and ants had stripped bare much of the jungle floor. Fawcett had been taught to scavenge for dead animals, but there were none to be found: every corpse was instantly recycled back into the living. Trees drained even more nutrients from a soil already leached by rain and floods. Meanwhile, vines and trees stampeded over each other as they strove to reach the canopy, to absorb a ray of light. One kind of liana called the matador, or killer, seemed to crystallize this competition: it wrapped itself around a tree, as if offering a tender embrace, then began to strangle it, stealing both its life and its place amid the forest.
Although this death struggle for the light above created a permanent midnight below, few mammals roamed the jungle floor, where other creatures could attack them. Even those animals that Fawcett and his party should have been able to see remained invisible to their untutored eyes. Bats hid in tents of leaves. Armadillos burrowed in the ground. Moths looked like bark. Caimans became logs. One kind of caterpillar had a more frightening deception: it transformed its body into the shape of a deadly pit viper, with an enlarged, swaying triangular head and big gleaming eyes. As the writer Candice Millard explained in The River of Doubt, “The rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary, but rather the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day.”
On this battlefield, Fawcett and his men found themselves outmatched. For days, Fawcett, a world-class hunter, scoured the land with his party, only to turn up a handful of nuts and palm leaves. The men tried fishing, which they were sure, given how many piranhas and eels and dolphins were in other Amazonian rivers, would provide sustenance, but to the explorers’ amazement they could not catch a single fish. Fawcett speculated that something had polluted the waters, and indeed some trees and plants produce tannic acids that poison rivers in the Amazon, creating what the biologists Adrian Forsyth and Kenneth Miyata have called “the aquatic equivalents of desert.”
And so Fawcett and his party were forced to wander hungry through the jungle. The men wanted to turn back, but Fawcett was determined to find the Verde’s source. They stumbled forward, mouths open, trying to capture every drop of rain. At night, chills swept through their bodies. A tocandira—a poisonous ant that can cause vomiting and intense fever—had infected Fisher, and a tree had fallen on the leg of another member of the party, so that his load had to be dispersed among the others. Nearly a month after they started on foot, the men reached what appeared to be the source of the river, Fawcett insisting on taking measurements, even though he was so depleted that he had trouble moving his limbs. The party paused momentarily for a photograph: they looked like dead men, their cheeks whittled to the bones, their beards matted against their faces like growth from the forest, their eyes half-mad.
Fisher muttered that they were going to “leave our bones here.” Others prayed for salvation.
Fawcett tried to find an easier route back, but each time he chose a path, the expedition ended up at a cliff and was forced to turn around. “How long could we carry on was the vital question,” Fawcett wrote. “Unless food was obtained soon, we should be too feeble to make our way out by any route.” They had gone for more than a month with almost no food, and were starving; their blood pressure plummeted, and their bodies consumed their own tissue. “The voices of the others and the sounds of the forest seemed to come from a vast distance, as though through a long tube,” Fawcett wrote. Unable to think about the past or the future, about anything other than food, the men became irritable, apathetic, and paranoid. In their weakened state, they were more susceptible to disease and infection, and most of them had developed severe fevers. Fawcett feared mutiny. Had they begun to look at one another differently, not as companions but as meat? As Fawcett wrote about cannibalism, “Starvation blunts one’s finer feelings,” and he told Fisher to collect the other men’s guns.
Fawcett soon noticed that one of the men had vanished. He eventually came upon him sitting collapsed against a tree. Fawcett ordered the man to get up, but he begged Fawcett to let him die there. He refused to move, and Fawcett took out his knife. The blade gleamed before the man’s eyes; Fawcett ached with hunger. Waving the knife, Fawcett forced him to his feet. If we die, Fawcett said, we’ll die walking.
As they staggered on, many of the men, inured to their fate, no longer tried to slap at the pestilent mosquitoes or keep watch against the Indians. “[An ambush], in spite of its moment of terror and agony, is quickly over, and if we regard these matters in a reasonable way it would be considered merciful” compared with starvation, Fawcett wrote.
Several days later, as the group was slipping in and out of consciousness, Fawcett caught sight of a deer, almost out of range. He had one shot, then it would be gone. “For God’s sake don’t miss, Fawcett!” one of the men whispered. Fawcett unslung his rifle; his arms had atrophied, and his muscles strained to hold the barrel steady. He inhaled and pulled the trigger. The report echoed through the forest. The deer seemed to vanish, as if it had been a figment of their delirium. Then, as they stumbled closer, they saw it on the ground, bleeding. They cooked it over a fire, eating every bit of flesh, sucking every bone. Five days later, they came across a settlement. Still, five of Fawcett’s men—more than half his team—were too weak to recover and soon died. When Fawcett returned to La Paz, people pointed and stared at him—he was a virtual skeleton. He sent off a telegram to the Royal Geographical Society. It said, “Hell Verde Conquered.”
DEAD HORSE
CAMP
There,” I said to my wife, pointing at a satellite image of the Amazon on my computer screen. “That’s where I’m going.”
The image revealed the cracks in the earth where the massive river and its tributaries had ruthlessly carved the land. Later, I was able to show her the coordinates more clearly using Google Earth, which was unveiled in the summer of 2005 and allowed anyone, in seconds, to zoom within meters of virtually every place on the globe. First, I typed in our Brooklyn address. The view on the screen, which had shown a satellite image of the earth from outer space, zoomed, like a guided missile, toward a patchwork of buildings and streets, until I recognized the balcony of our apartment. The level of clarity was incredible. Then I typed in Fawcett’s last published coordinates and watched the screen race over images of the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean, past a faint outline of Venezuela and Guyana, before zeroing in on a blur of green: the jungle. What was once blank space on the map was now visible in an instant.
My wife asked how I knew where to go, and I told her about Fawcett’s diaries. I showed her on the map the location that everyone assumed was Dead Horse Camp and then the new coordinates, more than a hundred miles south, which I had found in Fawcett’s logbook. Then I revealed a copy of a document with the word “CONFIDENTIAL” printed on it, which I had discovered at the Royal Geographical Society. Unlike other documents written by Fawcett, this one was neatly typed. Dated April 13, 1924, it was titled “Case for an Expedition in the Amazon Basin.”
Desperate for funding, Fawcett had seemingly relented to the Society’s demand that he be more forthcoming about his plans. After nearly two decades of exploring, he said, he had concluded that in the southern basin of the Amazon, between the Tapajós and the Xingu tributaries, were “the most remarkable relics of ancient civilization.” Fawcett had sketched a map of the region and submitted it with a proposal. “This area represents the greatest area of unexplored country in the world,” he wrote. “Portuguese exploration, and all subsequent geographical research by Brazilians or foreigners, has been invariably confined to waterways.” Instead, he planned to blaze a path overland between the Tapajós and the Xingu and other tributaries, where “none has penetrated.” (Conceding how much more dangerous this course was, he requested extra money to “get the survivors back to Englan
d,” as “I may be killed.”)
On one page of the proposal, Fawcett had included several coordinates. “What are they for?” my wife asked.
“I think they’re the direction he headed in after Dead Horse Camp.”
The next morning I stuffed my gear and maps in my backpack, and said goodbye to my wife and infant son. “Don’t be stupid,” my wife said. Then I headed to the airport and boarded a plane for Brazil.
IN THE HANDS
OF THE GODS
Oh, the “glorious prospect of home,” Fawcett wrote in his diary. Streets paved and neatly aligned, thatched cottages covered in ivy, pastures filled with sheep, church bells tolling in the rain, stores crammed with jellies and soups and lemonades and tarts and Neapolitan ices and wines, pedestrians jostling in the streets with buses and trams and taxis. Home was all Fawcett could think about on the boat ride back to England at the end of 1907. And now he was back in Devon with Nina and Jack, Jack as big as could be, running and talking, already four years old, and little Brian staring at the man in the doorway as if he were a stranger, which he was. “I wanted to forget atrocities, to put slavery, murder and horrible disease behind me, and to look again at respectable old ladies whose ideas of vice ended with the indiscretions of so-and-so’s housemaid,” Fawcett wrote in Exploration Fawcett. “I wanted to listen to the everyday chit-chat of the village parson, discuss the uncertainties of the weather with the yokels, pick up the daily paper on my breakfast-plate. I wanted, in short, to be just ‘ordinary.’ ” He bathed in warm water with soap and trimmed his beard. He dug in the garden, tucked his children into bed, read by the fire, and shared Christmas with his family—“as though South America had never been.”
But before long he found himself unable to sit still. “Deep down inside me a tiny voice was calling,” Fawcett said. “At first scarcely audible, it persisted until I could no longer ignore it. It was the voice of the wild places, and I knew that it was now part of me for ever.” He added, “Inexplicably—amazingly—I knew I loved that hell. Its fiendish grasp had captured me, and I wanted to see it again.”