Within weeks of its unveiling, the Society had attracted nearly five hundred members. “[It] was composed almost entirely of men of high social standing,” a secretary of the institution later remarked, adding, “It may thus be regarded as having been to some extent a Society Institution to which everybody who was anybody was expected to belong.” The original list of members included acclaimed geologists, hydrographers, natural philosophers, astronomers, and military officers, as well as dukes, earls, and knights. Darwin became a member in 1838, as did one of his sons, Leonard, who in 1908 was elected president of the Society.
As the Society launched more and more expeditions around the world, it drew into its ranks not just adventurers, scholars, and dignitaries but also eccentrics. The Industrial Revolution, in addition to producing appalling conditions for the lower classes, had engendered unprecedented wealth for members of the middle and upper classes in Britain, who could suddenly afford to make leisurely pursuits such as travel a full-time hobby. Hence the rise of the amateur in Victorian society. The Royal Geographical Society became a haven for such people, along with a few poorer members, like Livingstone, whose exploits it helped to finance. Many of its members were odd even by Victorian standards. Richard Burton espoused atheism and defended polygamy so fervently that, while he was off exploring, his wife inserted into one of his manuscripts the following disclaimer: “I protest vehemently against his religious and moral sentiments, which belie a good and chivalrous life.”
Not surprisingly, such members produced a fractious body. Burton recalled how at a meeting attended by his wife and family he grew so agitated after an opponent had “spoken falsely” that he waved his map pointer at members of the audience, who “looked as if a tiger was going to spring in amongst them, or that I was going to use the stick like a spear upon my adversary, who stood up from the benches. To make the scene more lively, my wife’s brothers and sisters were struggling in the corner to hold down their father, an old man, who had never been used to public speaking, and who slowly rose up in speechless indignation at hearing me accused of making a misstatement.” Years later, another member conceded, “Explorers are not, perhaps, the most promising people with whom to build a society. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men.”
Debates raged within the Society over the course of rivers and mountains, the boundaries of cities and towns, and the size of the oceans. No less intense were the disputes over who deserved recognition, and the subsequent fame and fortune, for making a discovery. And the discussions often involved the most fundamental questions of morality and human existence: Were newly discovered tribes savages or civilized? Should they be converted to Christianity? Did all of humanity stem from one ancient civilization or from many? The struggle to answer such questions frequently pitted the so-called “armchair” geographers and theoreticians, who pored over incoming data, against the rough-and-tumble explorers, who worked in the field. One official of the Society reprimanded an African explorer for his suppositions, telling him, “What you can do, is state accurately what you saw, leaving it to stay-at-home men of science to collate the data of very many travelers, in order to form a theory.” The explorer Speke, in turn, denounced those geographers “who sit in carpet slippers, and criticise those who labour in the field.”
Perhaps the most vicious feud was over the source of the Nile. After Speke claimed in 1858 that he had discovered the river’s origin, at a lake he christened Victoria, many of the Society’s members, led by his former traveling companion Burton, refused to believe him. Speke said of Burton, “B is one of those men who never can be wrong, and will never acknowledge an error.” In September of 1864, the two men, who had once nursed each other back from death on an expedition, were supposed to square off in a public meeting. The London Times called it a “gladiatorial exhibition.” But, as the meeting was about to begin, the gatherers were informed that Speke would not be coming: he had gone hunting the previous day, and was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. “By God, he’s killed himself!” Burton reportedly exclaimed, staggering on the stage; later, Burton was seen in tears, reciting his onetime companion’s name over and over. Although it was never known for certain if the shooting was intentional, many suspected, like Burton, that the protracted feud had caused the man who had conquered the desert to take his own life. A decade later, Speke’s claim to having discovered the Nile’s source would be proved correct.
During the Society’s early years, no member personified the organization’s eccentricities or audacious mission more than Sir Francis Galton. A cousin of Charles Darwin’s, he had been a child prodigy who, by the age of four, could read and recite Latin. He went on to concoct myriad inventions. They included a ventilating top hat; a machine called a Gumption-Reviver, which periodically wet his head to keep him awake during endless study; underwater goggles; and a rotating-vane steam engine. Suffering from periodic nervous breakdowns—“sprained brain,” as he called it—he had a compulsion to measure and count virtually everything. He quantified the sensitivity of animal hearing, using a walking stick that could make an inconspicuous whistle; the efficacy of prayer; the average age of death in each profession (lawyers: 66.51; doctors: 67.04); the exact amount of rope needed to break a criminal’s neck while avoiding decapitation; and levels of boredom (at meetings of the Royal Geographical Society he would count the rate of fidgets among each member of the audience). Notoriously, Galton, who like so many of his colleagues was a profound racist, tried to measure levels of intelligence in people and later became known as the father of eugenics.
In another age, Galton’s monomania with quantification might have made him a freak. But, as the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once observed, “no man expressed his era’s fascination with numbers so well as Darwin’s celebrated cousin.” And there was no place that shared his fascination more than the Royal Geographical Society. In the 1850s, Galton, who had inherited enough money to enable him to avoid the burden of a conventional career, became a member of the Society and, with its endorsement and guidance, explored southern Africa. “A passion for travel seized me,” he wrote, “as if I had been a migratory bird.” He mapped and documented everything that he could: latitudes and longitudes, topography, animals, climate, tribes. Returning to great fanfare, he received the Royal Geographical Society’s gold medal, the field’s most prestigious honor. In 1854, Galton was elected to the Society’s governing body, on which, for the next four decades, he served in varying capacities, including honorary secretary and vice president. Together, Galton and this collection of men—they were all men until a divisive vote at the end of the nineteenth century admitted twenty-one women—began to attack, as Joseph Conrad put it of such militant geographers, “from north and south and east and west, conquering a bit of truth here and a bit of truth there, and sometimes swallowed up by the mystery their hearts were so persistently set on unveiling.”
“WHAT MATERIALS are you looking for?” one of the archivists asked me.
I had gone down into the small reading room in the basement.
Bookshelves, illuminated under fluorescent lights, were crammed with travel guides, atlases, and bound copies of the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. Most of the Society’s collection of more than two million maps, artifacts, photographs, and expedition reports had been moved in recent years from what had been called “Dickensian conditions” to climate-controlled catacombs, and I could see staff flitting in and out of them through a side door.
When I told the archivist that I was looking for Fawcett’s papers, she gave me a quizzical look. “What is it?” I asked.
“Well, let’s just say many people who are interested in Fawcett are a little . . .” Her voice trailed off as she disappeared into the catacombs. While I was waiting, I skimmed through several accounts of expeditions backed by the Society. One d
escribed an 1844 expedition led by Charles Sturt and his second-in-command, James Poole, which searched the Australian desert for a legendary inland sea. “So great is the heat that. . . our hair has ceased to grow, our nails have become brittle as glass,” Sturt wrote in his diary. “The scurvy shows itself upon us all. We are attacked by violent headaches, pains in the limbs, swollen and ulcerated gums. Mr. Poole became worse and worse: ultimately the skin over his muscles became black, and he lost the use of his lower extremities. On the 14th he suddenly expired.” The inland sea never existed, and these accounts made me aware of how much of the discovery of the world was based on failure rather than on success—on tactical errors and pipe dreams. The Society may have conquered the world, but not before the world had conquered its members. Among the Society’s long list of those who were sacrificed, Fawcett filled a distinct category: neither alive nor dead—or, as one writer dubbed him, “the living dead.”
The archivist soon emerged from the stacks carrying a half-dozen mottled folders. As she placed them on the table, they released purplish dust. “You’ll have to put these on,” she said, handing me a pair of white gloves. After I slipped them over my fingers, I opened the first folder: yellowed, crumbling letters spilled out. On many of the pages were impossibly small, slanting words that ran together, as if written in code. It was Fawcett’s handwriting. I took one of the pages and spread it in front of me. The letter was dated 1915 and began “Dear Reeves.” The name was familiar, and I opened one of the books on the Royal Geographical Society and scanned its index. Edward Ayearst Reeves had been the map curator of the institution from 1900 to 1933.
The folders contained more than two decades of correspondence between Fawcett and officials at the Society. Many of the letters were addressed to Reeves or to Sir John Scott Keltie, who was the RGS secretary from 1892 to 1915 and later its vice president. There were also scores of letters from Nina, government officials, explorers, and friends concerning Fawcett’s disappearance. I knew it would take me days, if not weeks, to go through everything, and yet I felt delight. Here was a road map to Fawcett’s life as well as to his death.
I held one of the letters up to the light. It was dated December 14, 1921. It said, “There is very little doubt that the forests cover traces of a lost civilization of a most unsuspected and surprising character.”
I opened my reporter’s pad and started to take notes. One of the letters mentioned that Fawcett had received “a diploma” from the RGS. I had never seen any reference to the Society having given out diplomas, and I asked the archivist why Fawcett had been awarded one.
“He must have enrolled in one of the Society’s training programs,” she said. She walked over to a bookshelf and began to riffle through journals. “Yes, right here. He apparently took a course and graduated around 1901.”
“You mean he actually went to school to become an explorer?”
“I guess you could call it that.”
THE DISCIPLE
Fawcett didn’t want to be late. It was February 4, 1900, and all he had to do was get from his hotel in Redhill, Surrey, to No. 1 Savile Row, in the Mayfair district of London, but nothing in the city moved— or, more accurately, everything seemed to be moving. Billboard men. Butcher boys. Clerks. Horse-drawn omnibuses. And that strange beast which was invading the streets, scaring the horses and pedestrians, breaking down on every curb: the automobile. The law had originally required drivers to proceed at no more than two miles per hour with a footman walking ahead waving a red flag, but in 1896 the speed limit had been raised to fourteen miles per hour. And everywhere Fawcett turned the new and the old seemed to be at war: electric lights, scattered on the fancier granite streets, and gas lamps, lodged on most cobblestoned corners, glowing in the fog; the Tube bolting through the earth like one of Edward Fawcett’s science-fiction inventions, and bicycles, only a few years earlier the smartest thing on the footpaths and now already fusty. Even the smells seemed at odds: the traditional stench of horse dung and the newer whiff of petrol. It was as if Fawcett were glimpsing the past and the future at once.
Since he had left England for Ceylon fourteen years earlier, London seemed to have become more crowded, more dirty, more modern, more rich, more poor, more everything. With over four and a half million people, London was the biggest city in the world, larger than Paris or New York. Flower girls yelled, “All a growin’ and all a blowin’!” Newspaper boys cried, “ ’Orrible murder!”
As Fawcett pushed his way through the crowds, he no doubt struggled to keep his clothes free of the soot from coal furnaces that had mixed with fog to form London’s own species of grime, a tenacious black mixture that penetrated everything; even the keyholes on houses had to be sheathed with metal plates. Then there was the horse manure—“the London mud,” as it was politely called—which, though swept up by street urchins and sold door-to-door as garden fertilizer, was virtually everywhere Fawcett stepped.
Fawcett turned onto an elegant street in Burlington Gardens, away from brothels and blacking factories. On the corner was a handsome stone house with a portico. It was No. 1 Savile Row. And Fawcett could see the bold sign: ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY.
As Fawcett entered the three-story house—the Society had not yet moved near to Hyde Park—he was aware that he was stepping into an enchanting place. Over the front door was a half window in the shape of a hemispherical lantern; each pane represented the parallels and meridians of a globe. Fawcett would have walked past the office of the chief clerk and his two assistants, past a stairwell that led to a council room, until he arrived at a glass-roofed chamber. Sunlight filtered in, illuminating, through dusty shafts, globes and chart tables. It was the map room, and usually sitting at the far end, on a dais, was the man Fawcett was looking for: Edward Ayearst Reeves.
In his late thirties, with a receding hairline, beakish nose, and neatly trimmed mustache, Reeves was not only the map curator but also the chief instructor of surveying—and the person primarily charged with turning Fawcett into a gentleman explorer. A skilled draftsman, Reeves had started working at the Society in 1878, at the age of sixteen, as an assistant to the previous curator, and he never seemed to forget that sense of awe that newcomers felt upon arrival. “How well I remember it all,” he wrote in his autobiography, The Recollections of a Geographer. “With what pride, and yet with what fear and trembling I first entered the precinct of this wonderful place of which I had read in books, and from which explorers had been sent out to all parts of the world and returned to tell of their marvelous discovery and heroic adventures.” Unlike many of the bellicose, wild-eyed members of the Society, Reeves had a warm, gentle manner. “He had an innate capacity for teaching,” a colleague said. “He knew exactly how to put a point so that the most obtuse student could grasp it.”
Fawcett and Reeves eventually went up to the third floor, where the classes were held. Francis Galton had advised each recruit that he would soon find himself admitted into “the society of men with whose names he had long been familiar, and whom he had reverenced as his heroes.” Taking the surveying course about the same time as Fawcett was Charles Lindsay Temple, who could regale his colleagues with stories of his time in the Civil Service in Brazil; Lieutenant T. Dannreuther, who was obsessed with collecting rare butterflies and insects; and Arthur Edward Seymour Laughton, who was gunned down by Mexican bandits in 1913, at the age of thirty-eight.
Reeves got down to business. If Fawcett and the other students heeded his instructions, they could become the next generation of great explorers. Reeves would teach them what cartographers had not been able to do for most of history: fix their position anywhere. “If you could blindfold a man, and take him to any spot on the earth’s surface, say somewhere in the middle of Africa, and then remove the bandage from his eyes, he could [if properly trained] show you on a map, in a short time, the exact spot upon which he stands,” Reeves said. Moreover, if Fawcett and his colleagues dared to climb the highest peaks and penetrate the deepest forest, they could
chart the world’s remaining undiscovered realms.
Reeves displayed a series of strange objects. One looked like a telescope attached to a circular metal wheel, with various screws and chambers. Reeves explained that it was a theodolite, which could determine the angle between the horizon and celestial bodies. He demonstrated more tools—artificial horizons, aneroids, and sextants—and then led Fawcett and the others up to the roof of the building, to test the equipment. The fog often made it hard to observe the sun or the stars, but now they could see well enough. Latitude, Reeves said, could be found by measuring the angle of the noon sun above the horizon or the height of the North Star, and each of the students tried to use the devices to fix his position, an extremely difficult task for a beginner. As Fawcett took his turn, Reeves watched in astonishment. “He was extremely quick at learning anything new,” Reeves recalled. “And, although he never used a sextant and artificial horizon before for star observation, I remember the first night he tried he brought the stars down into the artificial horizon, and took excellent altitude right away without any difficulty. Anyone who has attempted this will know that as a rule it is only done after considerable practice.”