by David Grann
The new powers of science to harness invisible forces often made these beliefs seem more credible, not less. If phonographs could capture human voices, and if telegraphs could send messages from one continent to the other, then why couldn’t science eventually peel back the Other World? In 1882, some of England’s most distinguished scientists formed the Society for Psychical Research. Members soon included a prime minister and Nobel Prize laureates, as well as Alfred Tennyson, Sigmund Freud, and Alfred Russel Wallace, who, along with Darwin, developed the theory of evolution. Conan Doyle, who in Sherlock Holmes had created the embodiment of the rationalist mind, spent years trying to confirm the existence of fairies and sprites. “I suppose I am Sherlock Holmes, if anybody is, and I say that the case for spiritualism is absolutely proved,” Conan Doyle once declared.
While Madame Blavatsky continued to practice the arts of a medium, she gradually turned her attention to more ambitious psychic frontiers. Claiming that she was a conduit for a brotherhood of reincarnated Tibetan mahatmas, she tried to give birth to a new religion called Theosophy, or “wisdom of the gods.” It drew heavily on occult teachings and Eastern religions, particularly Buddhism, and for many Westerners it came to represent a kind of counterculture, replete with vegetarianism. As the historian Janet Oppenheim noted in The Other World, “For those who wanted to rebel dramatically against the constraints of the Victorian ethos—however they perceived that elusive entity—the flavor of heresy must have been particularly alluring when concocted by so unabashed an outsider as H. P. Blavatsky.”
Some Theosophists, taking their heresy even further, became Buddhists and aligned themselves with religious leaders in India and Ceylon who opposed colonial rule. Among these Theosophists was Fawcett’s older brother, Edward, to whom Percy had always looked up. A hulking mountain climber who wore a gold monocle, Edward, who had been a child prodigy and published an epic poem at the age of thirteen, helped Blavatsky research and write her 1893 magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine. In 1890, he traveled to Ceylon, where Percy was stationed, to take the Pansil, or five precepts of Buddhism, which includes vows not to kill, drink liquor, or commit adultery. An Indian newspaper carried an account of the ceremony under the headline “Conversion of an Englishman to Buddhism”:
The ceremony commenced at about 8:30 p.m., in the sanctum sanctorum of the Buddhist Hall, where the High Priest Sumangala examined the candidate. Satisfied with the views of Mr. Fawcett, the High Priest . . . said that it gave him the greatest pleasure to introduce Mr. Fawcett, an educated Englishman . . . Mr. Fawcett then stood up and begged the High Priest to give him the “Pansil.” The High Priest assented, and the “Pansil” was given, Mr. Fawcett repeating it after the High Priest. At the last line of the “Five Precepts” the English Buddhist was cheered vociferously by his co-religionists present.
On another occasion, according to family members, Percy Fawcett, apparently inspired by his brother, took the Pansil as well—an act that, for a colonial military officer who was supposed to be suppressing Buddhists and promoting Christianity on the island, was more seditious. In The Victorians, the British novelist and historian A. N. Wilson noted, “At the very time in history when the white races were imposing Imperialism on Egypt and Asia, there is something gloriously subversive about those Westerners who succumbed to the Wisdom of the East, in however garbled or preposterous a form.” Other scholars point out that nineteenth and early twentieth century Europeans—even the most benignly motivated—exoticized the East, which only helped to legitimize imperialism. At least in Fawcett’s mind, what he had been taught his whole life about the superiority of Western civilization clashed with what he experienced beyond its shores. “I transgressed again and again the awful laws of traditional behavior, but in doing so learned a great deal,” he said. Over the years, his attempt to reconcile these opposing forces, to balance his moral absolutism and cultural relativism, would force him into bizarre contradictions and greater heresies.
Now, though, the tension merely fueled his fascination with explorers like Richard Francis Burton and David Livingstone, who had been esteemed by Victorian society, even worshipped by it, and yet were able to live outside it. Fawcett devoured accounts of their adventures in the penny presses, which were being churned out by new steam-powered printing machines. In 1853, Burton, disguised as a Muslim pilgrim, had managed to sneak into Mecca. Four years later, in the race to find the source of the Nile, John Speke had gone nearly blind from an infection and almost deaf from stabbing a beetle that was boring into his ear canal. In the late 1860s, the missionary David Livingstone, also searching for the Nile’s source, vanished into the heart of Africa, and in January 1871, Henry Morton Stanley set out to find him, vowing, “No living man . . . shall stop me. Only death can prevent me.” Incredibly, ten months later, Stanley succeeded, famously greeting him, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Livingstone, intent on continuing his search, refused to return with him.
Suffering from a clot in his artery, disoriented, bleeding internally, and hungry, he died in northeast Zambia in 1873; in his last moments, he had been kneeling in prayer. His heart, as he requested, was buried there, while the rest of his body was carried by his followers across the continent, borne aloft as if he were a saint, and transported back to England, where throngs of people paid tribute to him at Westminster Abbey.
Fawcett later became friendly with the novelist who most vividly conjured up this world of the Victorian adventurer-savant: Sir Henry Rider Haggard. In 1885, Haggard published King Solomon’s Mines, which was advertised as “THE MOST AMAZING BOOK EVER WRITTEN.” Like many quest novels, it was patterned on folktales and myths, such as that of the Holy Grail. The hero is the iconic Allan Quatermain, a no nonsense elephant hunter who searches for a hidden cache of diamonds in Africa with a map traced in blood. V. S. Pritchett noted that, whereas “E. M. Forster once spoke of the novelist sending down a bucket into the unconscious,” Haggard “installed a suction pump. He drained the whole reservoir of the public’s secret desires.”
Yet Fawcett did not have to look so far to see his desires spilled on the page. After abandoning Theosophy, Fawcett’s older brother, Edward, remade himself into a popular adventure novelist who for a time was hailed as the English answer to Jules Verne. In 1894, he published Swallowed by an Earthquake, which tells the story of a group of friends who are plunged into a subterranean world where they discover dinosaurs and a tribe of “wild-man that eats men.”
It was Edward’s next novel, however, that most acutely reflected his younger brother’s private fantasies—and, in many ways, chillingly foretold Percy’s future. Called The Secret of the Desert and published in 1895, the novel appeared with a blood-red cover that was engraved with a picture of an explorer wearing a pith helmet who was dangling from a rope over a palace wall. The tale centers on an amateur cartographer and archaeologist named Arthur Manners—the very personification of the Victorian sensibility. With funding from a scientific body, Manners, the “most venturesome of travellers,” abandons the quaint British countryside to explore the perilous region of central Arabia. Insisting on going alone (“possibly thinking that it would be just as well to enjoy what celebrity might be in store for him unshared”), Manners wanders into the depths of the Great Red Desert in search of unknown tribes and archaeological ruins. After two years elapse without any word from him, many in England fear that he has starved or been taken hostage by a tribe. Three of Manners’s colleagues launch a rescue mission, using an armor-plated vehicle that one of them has constructed—a futuristic contraption that, like Verne’s submarine in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, reflects both the progress and the terrifying capabilities of European civilization. The expedition picks up reports that Manners headed in the direction of the fabled Oasis of Gazelles, which is said to contain “strange ruins, relics of some race once no doubt of great renown, but now wholly forgotten.” Anyone who has attempted to reach it has either vanished or been killed. As Manners’s friends make toward it, they run out
of water and fear that “we would-be rescuers are ourselves lost men.” Then they spot a shimmering pool—the Oasis of Gazelles. And beside it are the ruins of a temple laden with treasure. “I was overcome with admiration for the forgotten race that had reared this astounding fabric,” the narrator says.
The explorers discover that Manners is being held prisoner inside the temple and spirit him away in the high-speed tank. Without time to bring any artifacts to prove to the world their discovery, they must rely on Manners to persuade the “skeptics.” But a member of the expedition, planning to return and excavate the ruins before anyone else, says of Manners, “He won’t, I hope, be very particular about mentioning the exact latitude and longitude.”
ONE DAY FAWCETT set out from Fort Frederick, trekking inland through a morass of vines and brambles. “Everywhere about me there was sound—the sound of the wild,” he wrote of Ceylon’s jungle. After hours, he came upon what he was looking for: a half-buried wall carved with hundreds of images of elephants. It was a remnant of an ancient temple, and all around it Fawcett could see adjoining ruins: stone pillars and palace archways and dagobas. They were part of Anuradhapura, a city that had been built more than two thousand years earlier. Now, as a contemporary of Fawcett’s put it, “the city has vanished like a dream . . . Where are the hands which reared it, the men who sought its shelter in the burning heat of noon?” Later, Fawcett wrote a friend that the “old Ceylon is buried under forest and mould . . . There are bricks and vanishing dagobas and inexplicable mounds, pits, and inscriptions.”
Fawcett was no longer a boy; he was in his thirties, and he could not bear to spend the rest of his life sequestered in one military garrison after another, entombed in his imagination. He wanted to become what Joseph Conrad had dubbed “a geography militant,” someone who, “bearing in his breast a spark of the sacred fire,” discovered along the secret latitudes and longitudes of the earth the mysteries of mankind. And he knew that there was only one place for him to go: the Royal Geographical Society, in London. It had launched Livingstone and Speke and Burton and given birth to the Victorian age of discovery. And Fawcett had no doubt that it would help him realize what he called “my Destiny.”
BLANK SPOTS
ON THE MAP
Here you go, the Royal Geographical Society,” the taxi driver said, as the cab let me out in front of the entrance, across from Hyde Park, on a February morning in 2005. The building resembled an extravagant manor, which it had been before the Society, in need of a larger space, purchased it in 1912. Three stories high, it had redbrick walls, sash windows, Dutch pilasters, and an overhanging copper roof that came together, along with several chimneys, at various jumbled points, like a child’s vision of a castle. Along the outer wall were life-size statues of Livingstone, with his trademark cap and walking stick, and of Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer, bundled in scarves and wearing boots. At the entrance, I asked a guard for the location of the archives, which I hoped would shed further light on Fawcett’s career as an explorer, and on his last voyage.
When I had first called John Hemming, a former director of the Royal Geographical Society and a historian of the Brazilian Indians, to ask about the Amazon explorer, he said, “You’re not one of those Fawcett lunatics, are you?” The Society had apparently become wary of people who were consumed by Fawcett’s fate. Despite the passage of time and the diminished likelihood of finding him, some people seemed to grow more rather than less fanatical. For decades, they had pestered the Society for information, concocting their own bizarre theories, before setting out into the wilderness to effectively commit suicide. They were often called the “Fawcett freaks.” One person who went in search of Fawcett in 1995 wrote in an unpublished article that his fascination had mutated into a “virus” and that, when he called upon the Society for help, an “exasperated” staff person said of Fawcett hunters, “I think they’re mad. These people are completely obsessed.” I felt slightly foolish descending upon the Society to request all of Fawcett’s papers, but the Society’s archives, which contain Charles Darwin’s sextant and Livingstone’s original maps, had been opened to the general public only in the previous few months, and could prove invaluable.
A guard at the front desk gave me a card authorizing me to enter the building, and I walked down a cavernous marble corridor, passing an old smoking lounge and a walnut-paneled map room where explorers like Fawcett had once gathered. In recent years, the Society had added a modern glass pavilion, but the renovation could not dispel the anachronistic air that hung over the institution.
Yet in Fawcett’s day the Society was helping to engineer one of the most incredible feats of humankind: the mapping of the world. Perhaps no deed, not the building of the Brooklyn Bridge or the Panama Canal, rivals its scope or human toll. The endeavor, from the time the ancient Greeks laid out the main principles of sophisticated cartography, took hundreds of years, cost millions of dollars, and claimed thousands of lives, and, when it was all but over, the achievement was so overwhelming that few could recall what the world looked like before, or how the feat had been accomplished.
In a corridor of the Royal Geographical Society’s building, I noticed on the wall a gigantic seventeenth-century map of the globe. On the margins were sea monsters and dragons. For ages, cartographers had no means of knowing what existed on most of the earth. And more often than not these gaps were filled in with fantastical kingdoms and beasts, as if the make-believe, no matter how terrifying, were less frightening than the truly unknown.
During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, maps depicted fowl in Asia that tore humans apart, a bird in Germany that glowed in the dark, people in India with everything from sixteen toes to dog heads, hyenas in Africa whose shadows rendered dogs mute, and a beast called a “cockatrice” that could kill with a mere puff of its breath. The most dreaded place on the map was the land of Gog and Magog, whose armies, the book of Ezekiel had warned, would one day descend from the north to wipe out the people of Israel, “like a cloud to cover the land.”
At the same time, maps expressed the eternal longing for something more alluring: a terrestrial paradise. Cartographers included as central landmarks the Fountain of Youth, for which Ponce de León scoured Florida in the sixteenth century, and the Garden of Eden, which the seventh-century encyclopedist Isidore of Seville reported was filled “with every kind of wood and fruit-bearing tree, having also the tree of life.”
In the twelfth century, these feverish visions were inflamed when a letter appeared in the court of the emperor of Byzantium, purportedly written by a king named Prester John. It said, “I, Prester John, who reign supreme, exceed in riches, virtue, and power all creatures who dwell under heaven. Seventy-two kings pay tribute to me.” It continued, “Honey flows in our land, and milk everywhere abounds. In one of our territories no poison can do harm and no noisy frog croaks, no scorpions are there, and no serpents creep through the grass. No venomous reptiles can exist there or use their deadly power.” Though the letter was likely written as an allegory, it was taken as proof of paradise on earth, which mapmakers placed in the unexplored territories of the Orient. In 1177, Pope Alexander III dispatched his personal physician to extend “to the dearest son in Christ, the famous and high king of the Indians, the holy priest, his greetings and apostolic benediction.” The doctor never returned. Still, the Church and royal courts continued for centuries to send emissaries to locate this fabulous kingdom. In 1459, the learned Venetian cartographer Fra Mauro created one of the most exhaustive maps of the world. At last, Prester John’s mythic kingdom was wiped from Asia. Instead, in Ethiopia, Mauro had written, “qui il Presto Janni fa residential principal”—“here Prester John makes his principal residence.”
Even as late as 1740, it was estimated that fewer than a hundred and twenty places on the planet had been accurately mapped. Because precise portable clocks did not exist, navigators had no means of determining longitude, which is most easily measured as a function of time. Ships plow
ed into rocks and shoals, their captains convinced that they were hundreds of miles out to sea; thousands of men and millions of dollars’ worth of cargo were squandered. In 1714, Parliament announced that “the Discovery of the Longitude is of such Consequence to Great Britain for the safety of the Navy and Merchant-Ships as well as for the improvement of Trade” that it was offering a twenty-thousand-pound prize—the equivalent today of twelve million dollars—for a “Practical and Useful” solution. Some of the greatest scientific minds tried to solve the problem. Most hoped to use the position of the moon and stars to fix time, but in 1773 John Harrison was recognized as the winner with his more feasible solution: a three-pound, diamond-and-ruby-laden chronometer.
Despite its success, Harrison’s clock could not overcome the main problem that had bedeviled mapmakers: distance. Europeans had not yet traveled to the farthest ends of the earth—the North and South Poles. Nor had they surveyed much of the interior of Africa, Australia, or South America. Cartographers scrawled across these areas on the map a single haunting word: “Unexplored.”
Finally, in the nineteenth century, as the British Empire was increasingly expanding, several English scientists, admirals, and merchants believed that an institution was needed to create a map of the world based on observation rather than on imagination, an organization that detailed both the contours of the earth and everything that lay within them. And so, in 1830, the Royal Geographical Society of London was born. According to its mission statement, the Society would “collect, digest and print. . . new interesting facts and discoveries;” build a repository of “the best books on geography” and “a complete collection of maps;” assemble the most sophisticated surveying equipment; and help launch explorers on their travels. All this was part of its mandate to chart every nook and cranny of the earth. “There was not a square foot of the planet’s surface to which Fellows of this Society should not at least try to go,” a later president of the institution vowed. “That is our business. That is what we are out for.” While the Society would serve as a handmaiden of the British Empire, what it was out for represented a departure from the previous age of discovery, when conquistadores, like Columbus, were dispatched strictly in pursuit of God, gold, and glory. In contrast, the Royal Geographical Society wanted to explore for the sake of exploration—in the name of the newest god, Science.