In early 1906, Goldie summoned Fawcett, who, since his Morocco trip, had been stationed in several military garrisons, most recently in Ireland. Goldie was not someone to trifle with. Famous for his keen intelligence and volatile temper, he had almost single-handedly imposed the British Empire’s control over Niger, in the 1880s and 1890s. He had shocked Victorian society by running off to Paris with a governess, and was an unrepentant atheist who championed Darwin’s theory of evolution. “[He] was lashed into frenzies of impatience by stupidity, or incompetence,” one of his biographers wrote. “Never did man suffer fools less gladly.”
Fawcett was led into the RGS to see Goldie, whose blue eyes seemed to “bore holes into one,” as a subordinate once put it. Goldie, who was nearly sixty, always carried in his pocket a tube of poison, which he planned to take if he ever became physically handicapped or incurably ill. As Fawcett recalled, Goldie asked him, “Do you know anything about Bolivia?”
When Fawcett said no, Goldie continued, “One usually thinks of Bolivia as a country on the roof of the world. A great deal of it is in the mountains; but beyond the mountains, to the east, lies an enormous area of tropical forest and plains.” Goldie reached into his desk and pulled out a large map of Bolivia, which he spread before Fawcett like a tablecloth. “Here you are, Major—here’s about as good a map of the country as I have! Look at this area! It’s full of blank spaces.” As Goldie traced his finger over the map, he explained that the area was so unexplored that Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru could not even agree on their borders: they were simply speculative lines sketched through mountains and jungles. In 1864, boundary disputes between Paraguay and its neighbors had erupted into one of the worst conflicts in Latin American history. (About half the Paraguayan population was killed.) Because of the extraordinary economic demand for rubber—“black gold”—which was abundant in the region, the stakes over the Amazon delimitation were equally fraught. “A major conflagration could arise out of this question of what territory belongs to whom,” Goldie said.
“All this is most interesting,” Fawcett interrupted. “But what has it got to do with me?”
Goldie said that the countries had established a boundary commission and were seeking an impartial observer from the Royal Geographical Society to map the borders in question—beginning with an area between Bolivia and Brazil that comprised several hundred miles in nearly impassable terrain. The expedition would take up to two years, and there was no guarantee that its members would survive. Disease was rampant in the region, and the Indians, who had been attacked mercilessly by rubber trappers, murdered interlopers. “Would you be interested in taking it on?” Goldie asked.
Fawcett later said that he felt his heart pounding. He thought about his wife, Nina, who was pregnant again, and his son, Jack, who was almost three years old. Still, he didn’t hesitate: “Destiny intended me to go, so there could be no other answer!”
THE CRAMPED, DIRTY hold of the SS Panama was filled with “toughs, would be toughs, and leather faced old scoundrels,” as Fawcett put it. Prim in his starched white collar, Fawcett sat beside his second-in-command for the expedition, a thirty-year-old engineer and surveyor named Arthur John Chivers, whom the Royal Geographical Society had recommended. Fawcett passed the time by studying Spanish, while other passengers sipped whiskey, spit tobacco, played dice, and slept with whores. “They were all good fellows in their way,” Fawcett wrote, adding, “To [Chivers] and myself it served as a useful introduction to an aspect of life we had not hitherto known, and much of our English reserve was knocked off in the process.”
The ship docked in Panama, where the construction of the canal— the most audacious attempt yet by man to tame nature—was under way, and the project gave Fawcett the first inkling of what he was about to encounter: stacked on the pier were dozens of coffins. Since the canal’s excavation began, in 1881, more than twenty thousand laborers had died from malaria and yellow fever.
In Panama City, Fawcett boarded a ship for Peru, then proceeded by train up the glimmering, snowcapped Andes. When the train reached around twelve thousand feet, he switched to a boat and crossed Lake Titicaca (“How strange it is to see steamers in operation up here on the roof of the world!”), before squeezing into another jaw-rattling train, which took him across the plains to La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. There he waited more than a month for the government to provide a few thousand dollars, a sum far less than he had counted on, for provisions and travel expenses, his impatience provoking a row with local officials that had to be smoothed over by the British consul. Finally, on July 4, 1906, he and Chivers were ready to go. They loaded their mules with tea, preserved milk, Edwards’ Desiccated Soup, sardines in tomato sauce, lemonade effervescing powder, and kola-nut biscuits, which, according to Hints to Travellers, produced “a marvelous effect in sustaining strength during exertion.” They also brought surveying instruments, rifles, rappelling ropes, machetes, hammocks, mosquito nets, collecting jars, fishing lines, a stereoscopic camera, a pan for sifting gold, and gifts such as beads for tribal encounters. A medical kit was stocked with gauze bandages; iodine for mosquito bites; permanganate of potash for cleaning vegetables or arrow wounds; a pencil knife for cutting out flesh poisoned from snakebites or gangrene; and opium. In his rucksack, Fawcett stuffed a copy of Hints to Travellers and his diary with his favorite poems to recite in the wilderness. One poem he often took was Rudyard Kipling’s “The Explorer”:
“Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look
behind the Ranges—
“Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting
for you. Go!”
Fawcett and Chivers went over the Andes and began their descent into the jungle. Fawcett, wearing gabardine breeches, leather boots, a Stetson, and a silk scarf wrapped around his neck—his standard explorer’s uniform— made his way along the edges of cliffs, which fell away hundreds of feet. Traveling in a blizzard, the men could see no more than a few yards ahead, though they heard rocks slipping from under the hooves of their pack animals and cascading into the gorges. It was hard to believe, as wind whipped around twenty-thousand-foot peaks, that they were on their way to the jungle. The altitude made them dizzy and nauseated. The animals staggered forward, out of breath, their noses bleeding from a lack of oxygen. Years later, moving through the same mountains, Fawcett would lose half a convoy of twenty-four mules. “A mule’s load would often foul on jutting rocks, and knock [the animal] screaming over the precipices,” he wrote.
Occasionally, Fawcett and Chivers came upon a footbridge—strung together with palmetto slats and cables—that stretched more than a hundred yards over a gorge and swung wildly in the wind, like a shredded flag. The mules, too scared to pass, had to be blindfolded. After cajoling them across, the explorers picked their way downward around boulders and cliffs, spotting the first signs of vegetation—magnolias and stunted trees. By three thousand feet, where the heat was palpable, they encountered roots and vines creeping up the mountainside. Then Fawcett, drenched in sweat, peered into a valley and saw trees shaped like spiders and parachutes and clouds of smoke; waterways threading back and forth for thousands of miles; a jungle canopy so dark it appeared almost black—Amazonia.
Fawcett and Chivers eventually abandoned their pack animals for a raft made from sticks and twine and drifted into the Amazon frontier, a collection of Dodge-like towns with mocking names, such as Hope and Beautiful Village, that had recently been carved into the jungle by settlers who had fallen under the spell of oro negro—“black gold.” Christopher Columbus had first reported seeing Indians bouncing a ball made from the strange, sticky substance that bled from tropical trees, but it wasn’t until 1896, when B. F. Goodrich manufactured the first automobile tires in the United States, that rubber madness consumed the Amazon, which held a virtual monopoly on the highest-quality latex. In 1912, Brazil alone exported more than thirty million dollars’ worth of rubber, the equivalent today of nearly half a billion dollars. Rubber barons had tran
sformed Manaus, along the Amazon River, into one of the gaudiest cities in the world. “No extravagance, however absurd, deterred them,” the historian Robin Furneaux wrote in The Amazon. “If one rubber baron bought a vast yacht, another would install a tame lion in his villa, and a third would water his horse on champagne.” And nothing was more extravagant than the opera house, with its Italian marble, Bohemian glass, gilded balconies, crystal chandeliers, Victorian murals, and a dome bathed in the colors of the national flag. Prefabricated in Europe and costing an estimated ten million dollars in taxpayers’ money, the opera house was shipped in pieces more than a thousand miles up the Amazon River, where laborers were deployed around the clock to assemble it, working at night under Brazil’s first electric lightbulbs. It didn’t matter that almost no one from Manaus had heard of Puccini or that more than half the members of a visiting opera troupe eventually died of yellow fever. This was the apotheosis of the rubber boom.
The prospect of fortune had enticed thousands of illiterate workers into the wilderness, where they quickly became indebted to rubber barons who had provided them with transportation, food, and equipment on credit. Wearing a miner’s lamp to help him see, a trapper would hack through jungle, toiling from sunrise to sundown, searching for rubber trees, then, upon his return, hungry and feverish, would spend hours hunched over a fire, inhaling toxic smoke as he cooked the latex over a spit until it coagulated. It often took weeks to produce a single rubber ball large enough to sell. And it was rarely enough to discharge his debt. Countless trappers died of starvation, dysentery, and other diseases. The Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha called the system “the most criminal organization of labour ever devised.” He noted that the rubber trapper “actually comes to embody a gigantic contradiction: he is a man working to enslave himself!”
The first frontier town that Fawcett and Chivers came to was Rurrenabaque, in northwest Bolivia. Although it appeared in capital letters on Fawcett’s map, it consisted of little more than a strip of mud with bamboo huts, and with vultures circling overhead. “My heart sank,” Fawcett wrote in his journals, “and I began to realize how truly primitive this river country was.”
The region was removed from any center of power or ruling authority. In 1872, Bolivia and Brazil had attempted to build a railroad through the jungle, but so many workers died from disease and from Indian attacks that the project became known as the Railroad of the Dead. It was said that one man died per tie. When Fawcett arrived, more than three decades later, the railway was under construction by a third firm; still, only five miles of track had been laid—or, as Fawcett put it, it ran “from ‘nowhere’ to ‘nowhere.’ ” Because the Amazon frontier was so isolated, it was governed by its own laws and, as one observer put it, made the American West seem by comparison “as proper as a prayer meeting.” When a British traveler passed through the region in 1911, he reported one resident telling him, “Government? What is that? We know no government here!” The area was a haven for bandits, fugitives, and fortune hunters who carried guns on each hip, lassoed jaguars out of boredom, and killed without hesitation.
As Fawcett and Chivers descended deeper into this world, they reached the distant outpost of Riberalta. There, Fawcett watched a boat pulling along the bank. A worker yelled, “Here come the cattle!”—and Fawcett saw guards with whips driving a chain of about thirty Indian men and women onshore, where buyers began to inspect them. Fawcett asked a customs officer who these people were. Slaves, the officer replied.
Fawcett was shocked to learn that, because so many workers died in the jungle, rubber barons, in order to replenish their labor supply, dispatched armed posses into the forest to kidnap and enslave tribes. In one instance along the Putumayo River in Peru, the horrors inflicted on the Indians became so notorious that the British government launched an investigation after it was revealed that the perpetrators had sold shares in their company on the London Stock Exchange. Evidence showed that the Peruvian Amazon Company had committed virtual genocide in attempting to pacify and enslave the native population: it castrated and beheaded Indians, poured gasoline on them and lit them afire, crucified them upside down, beat them, mutilated them, starved them, drowned them, and fed them to dogs. The company’s henchmen also raped women and girls and smashed children’s heads open. “In some sections such an odour of putrefying flesh arises from the numerous bodies of the victims that the places must be temporarily abandoned,” said an engineer who visited the area, which was dubbed the “devil’s paradise.” Sir Roger Casement, the British consul general who led the investigation, estimated that some thirty thousand Indians had died at the hands of this one rubber company alone. A British diplomat concluded, “It is no exaggeration to say that this information as to the methods employed in the collection of rubber by the agents of the company surpass in horror anything hitherto reported to the civilized world during the last century.”
Long before the Casement report became public, in 1912, Fawcett denounced the atrocities in British newspaper editorials and in meetings with government officials. He once called the slave traders “savages” and “scum.” Moreover, he knew that the rubber boom had made his own mission exceedingly more difficult and dangerous. Even previously friendly tribes were now hostile to foreigners. Fawcett was told of one party of eighty men in which “so many of them were killed with poisoned arrows that the rest abandoned the trip and retired;” other travelers were found buried up to their waists and left to be eaten alive by fire ants, maggots, and bees. In the journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Fawcett wrote that “the wretched policy which created a slave trade, and openly encouraged a reckless slaughter of the indigenous Indians, many of them races of great intelligence,” had imbued the Indians with a “deadly vengeance against the stranger” and constituted one of “the great dangers of South American exploration.”
On September 25, 1906, Fawcett left Riberalta with Chivers, accompanied by twenty desperadoes and native guides he had recruited on the frontier. Among them was a Jamaican prospector named Willis, who, despite a penchant for liquor, was a first-rate cook and fisherman (“He could smell out food and drink as a hound smells out a rabbit,” Fawcett quipped), and a Bolivian former military officer who spoke fluent English and could serve as an interpreter. Fawcett had made sure that the men understood what they were getting themselves into. Anyone who broke a limb or fell sick deep in the jungle would have little chance of survival. To carry the person out would jeopardize the welfare of the entire party; the logic of the jungle dictated that the person be abandoned—or, as Fawcett grimly put it, “He has his choice of opium pills, starvation, or torture if he is found by savages.”
Using canoes that they built from trees, Fawcett and his men meandered westward on their planned route of nearly six hundred miles along the frontier between Brazil and Bolivia. The river was barricaded with fallen trees, and from the canoes Chivers and Fawcett tried to slash through them with machetes. Piranhas were abundant, and the explorers were careful not to let their fingers skim the river’s surface. Theodore Roosevelt, after exploring an Amazon tributary in 1914, called the piranha “the most ferocious fish in the world.” He added, “They will rend and devour alive any wounded man or beast; for blood in the water excites them to madness. . . The head, with its short muzzle, staring malignant eyes and gaping, cruelly armoured jaws, is the embodiment of evil ferocity.”
When bathing, Fawcett nervously checked his body for boils and cuts. The first time he swam across a river, he said, “there was an unpleasant sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.” In addition to piranhas, he dreaded candirus and electric eels, or puraques. The latter—about six feet long, with eyes set so far forward on their flattened heads that they nearly rested on their upper lips—were living batteries: they sent up to six hundred and fifty volts of electricity coursing through the bodies of their victims. They could electrocute a frog or a fish in a tank of water without ever touching it. The German explorer-scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who trav
eled along the Orinoco River in the Amazon at the beginning of the nineteenth century, drove, with the help of Indians holding harpoons, thirty horses and mules into a bog of water filled with electric eels to see what would happen. The horses and mules—manes erect, eyes inflamed—reared in terror as the eels surrounded them. Some horses tried to jump out of the water, but the Indians forced them back with the harpoons. Within seconds, two horses had drowned, while the rest eventually broke through the Indians’ blockade and collapsed to the ground, exhausted and numb. “One shock is sufficient to paralyze and drown a man—but the way of the puraque is to repeat the shocks to make sure of its victim,” Fawcett wrote. He concluded that a person must do things in these parts that “carry no hope of epitaph—done in cold blood, and too often with an aftermath of tragedy.”
One day Fawcett spied something along the edge of the sluggish river. At first it looked like a fallen tree, but it began undulating toward the canoes. It was bigger than an electric eel, and when Fawcett’s companions saw it they screamed. Fawcett lifted his rifle and fired at the object until smoke filled the air. When the creature ceased to move, the men pulled a canoe alongside it. It was an anaconda. In his reports to the Royal Geographical Society, Fawcett insisted that it was longer than sixty feet (“Great Snakes!” blared one headline in the British press), though much of the anaconda was submerged and it was surely smaller: the longest officially recorded one is twenty-seven feet nine inches. (At that length, a single anaconda can still weigh over half a ton and, because of its elastic jaw muscles, swallow a deer whole.) Staring at the motionless snake in front of him, Fawcett removed his knife. He tried to slice off a piece of its skin, to put it in a specimen jar, but as he cut into the anaconda it jolted toward Fawcett and his party—sending them fleeing in fear.