The Lost City of Z

by David Grann

  As the expedition pushed onward, its members gazed at the jungle. “It was one of the gloomiest journeys I had made, for the river was threatening in its quiet, and the easy current and deep water seemed to promise evils ahead,” Fawcett wrote months after leaving Riberalta. “The demons of the Amazonian rivers were abroad, manifesting their presence in lowering skies, downpours of torrential rain and somber forest walls.”

  Fawcett enforced a strict regimen. According to Henry Costin, a former British corporal who went on several later expeditions with Fawcett, the party woke at first light with one person calling reveille. Then the men rushed down to the river, washed, brushed their teeth, and packed, while the person on breakfast duty started a fire. “We lived simply,” Costin recalled. “Breakfast would usually be porridge, tinned milk, lots of sugar.” Within minutes, the men were on their way. Collecting the extensive data for Fawcett’s RGS reports—including surveys, sketches of the landscape, barometric and temperature readings, and catalogs of the flora and fauna— required painstaking work, and Fawcett toiled furiously. “Inactivity was what I couldn’t stand,” he once said. The jungle seemed to exaggerate his fundamental nature: his bravery and toughness, along with his irascibility and intolerance of others’ weakness. He allowed his men only a brief pause for lunch—a snack of a few biscuits—and trekked up to twelve hours a day.

  Just before sundown, he would finally signal to his men to set up camp. Willis, the cook, was in charge of preparing supper and supplemented their powdered soup with whatever animals the group had hunted. Hunger turned anything into a delicacy: armadillos, stingrays, turtles, anacondas, rats. “Monkeys are looked on as good eating,” Fawcett observed. “Their meat tastes rather pleasant; but at first the idea revolted me because when stretched over a fire to burn off the hair they looked so horribly human.”

  While moving through the forest, Fawcett and his men were more susceptible to predators. Once, a pack of white-lipped wild pigs stampeded toward Chivers and the interpreter, who fired their guns in every direction as Willis scampered up a tree to avoid being shot by his companions. Even frogs could be deadly to the touch: a Phyllobates terribilis, which is found in the Colombian Amazon, has enough toxins in it to kill a hundred people. One day Fawcett stumbled upon a coral snake, whose venom shuts down the central nervous system of its victim, causing the person to suffocate. In the Amazon, Fawcett marveled, the animal kingdom “is against man as it is nowhere else in the world.”

  But it wasn’t the big predators that he and his companions fretted about most. It was the ceaseless pests. The sauba ants that could reduce the men’s clothes and rucksacks to threads in a single night. The ticks that attached like leeches (another scourge) and the red hairy chiggers that consumed human tissue. The cyanide-squirting millipedes. The parasitic worms that caused blindness. The berne flies that drove their ovipositors through clothing and deposited larval eggs that hatched and burrowed under the skin. The almost invisible biting flies called piums that left the explorers’ bodies covered in lesions. Then there were the “kissing bugs,” which bite their victim on the lips, transferring a protozoan called Trypanosoma cruzi; twenty years later, the person, thinking he had escaped the jungle unharmed, would begin to die of heart or brain swelling. Nothing, though, was more hazardous than the mosquitoes. They transmitted everything from malaria to “bone-crusher” fever to elephantiasis to yellow fever. “[Mosquitoes] constitute the chief single reason why Amazonia is a frontier still to be won,” Willard Price wrote in his 1952 book The Amazing Amazon.

  Fawcett and his men wrapped themselves in netting, but even this was insufficient. “The piums settled on us in clouds,” Fawcett wrote. “We were forced to close both ends of the [boat’s] palm-leaf shelter with mosquito-nets, and to use head-veils as well, yet in spite of that our hands and faces were soon a mass of tiny, itching blood-blisters.” Meanwhile, polvorina, which are so small they resemble powder, hid in the hair of Fawcett and his companions. Often, all that the men could think about was insects. They came to recognize the different pitch of each insect’s wings rubbing together. (“The Tabana came singly, but advertised their presence by a probe like the thrust of a needle,” Fawcett said.) The bugs tormented the explorers to the point of madness, as a diary of a naturalist who went on a later expedition with Fawcett showed:

  10/20: Attacked in hammocks by tiny gnat not over 1 /10; inch in length; mosquito nets no protection; gnats bite all night allowing no sleep.

  10/21: Another sleepless night account of blood-sucking gnats.

  10/22: My body mass of bumps from insect bites, wrists and hands swollen from bites of tiny gnats. 2 nights with almost no sleep—simply terrible . . . Rain during noon, all afternoon and most of night. My shoes have been soaked since starting . . . Worst ticks so far.

  10/23: Horrible night with worst biting gnats yet; even smoke of no avail.

  10/24: More than half ill from insects. Wrists and hands swollen. Paint limbs with iodine.

  10/25: Arose to find termites covering everything left on the ground . . . Blood-sucking gnats still with us.

  10/30: Sweat bees, gnats and “polverinahs” (blood-sucking gnats) terrible.

  11/2: My right eye is sadly blurred by gnats.

  11/3: Bees and gnats worse than ever; truly “there’s no rest for the weary.”

  11/5: My first experience with flesh and carrion-eating bees. Biting gnats in clouds—very worst we have encountered—rendering one’s food unpalatable by filling it with their filthy bodies, their bellies red and disgustingly distended with one’s own blood.

  Six months into the expedition, most of the men, including Chivers, were sick with fever. They were overcome with insatiable thirst, skull-splitting headaches, and uncontrollable shivering. Their muscles throbbed so much that it was hard to walk. They had contracted, in most cases, either yellow fever or malaria. If it was yellow fever, what the men feared most was spitting up mouthfuls of blood—the so-called black vomit— which meant that death was near. When it was malaria—which, according to one estimate, more than 80 percent of the people then working in the Amazon contracted—the men sometimes experienced hallucinations, and could slip into a coma and die. At one point, Fawcett shared a boat with four passengers who fell ill and perished. Using paddles, he helped to dig their graves along the shore. Their only monument, Fawcett noted, was “a couple of crossed twigs tied with grass.”

  One morning Fawcett noticed a trail of indentations on a muddy bank. He bent down to inspect them. They were human footprints. Fawcett searched the woods in the vicinity and discovered broken branches and trampled leaves. Indians were tracking them.

  Fawcett had been told that the Pacaguara Indians lived along the banks of the Abuná River and had a reputation for kidnapping trespassers and carrying them into the forest. Two other tribes—the Parintinin, farther to the north, and the Kanichana, in the southern Mojo plains—were said to be cannibalistic. According to a missionary in 1781, “When [the Kanichana] captured prisoners in their wars they either kept them forever as slaves or roasted them to devour them in their banquets. They used as drinking cups the skulls of those whom they had killed.” Although Westerners were fixated on cannibalism (Richard Burton and some friends had started a soiree called the Cannibal Club) and often exaggerated its extent in order to justify their conquest of indigenous people, there is no question that some Amazonian tribes practiced it, either for ritualistic reasons or for vengeance. Human meat was typically prepared two ways: roasted or boiled. The Guayaki, who practiced ritualistic cannibalism when members of the tribe died, cut bodies into quarters with a bamboo knife, severing the head and the limbs from the trunk. “The head and the intestines are not treated according to the same ‘recipe’ as the muscular parts or the internal organs,” explained the anthropologist Pierre Clastres, who spent time studying the tribe in the early 1960s. “The head is first carefully shaved . . . then boiled, as are the intestines, in ceramic cooking pots. Regarding the meat proper and the i
nternal organs, they are placed on a large wooden grill under which a fire is lit. . . The meat is roasted slowly and the fat released by the heat is absorbed gradually with the koto [brush]. When the meat is considered ‘done’ it is divided among all those present. Whatever is not eaten on the spot is set aside in the women’s baskets and used as nutriment the next day. As far as the bones are concerned, they are broken and their marrow, of which the women are particularly fond, is sucked.” The Guayaki’s preference for human skin is the reason that they call themselves Aché Kyravwa—“Guayaki Eaters of Human Fat.”

  Fawcett studied the forest around him, looking for Indian warriors. Amazon tribes were expert at stalking their enemies. While some liked to announce their presence before an attack, many used the forest to enhance their stealth. They painted their bodies and faces with black charcoal and with red ointments distilled from berries and fruits. Their weapons—blow darts and arrows—struck silently, before anyone had time to flee. Certain tribes exploited the very things that made the forest so hazardous to Fawcett and his men—dipping the points of their weapons in the lethal toxins from stingrays and dart frogs or using biting soldier ants to suture their wounds in battle. In contrast, Fawcett and his party had no experience in the jungle. They were, as Costin confessed during his first journey, “greenhorns.” Most were sick and debilitated and hungry—the perfect prey.

  That night, Fawcett and his men were all on edge. Before they set off, Fawcett had made each of them agree to a seemingly suicidal edict: they were not to fire their weapons on Indians under any circumstances. When the Royal Geographical Society learned of Fawcett’s instructions, one member familiar with the region warned that such a method would “court assassination.” Fawcett conceded that his nonviolent approach involved “mad risks.” Yet he argued that it was not just the moral course; it was also the only way for a small and easily outnumbered party to demonstrate its friendly intentions to tribes.

  As the men now lay in their hammocks, a small fire crackling, they listened to the tumult of the forest. They tried to distinguish each sound: the plopping of a nut in the river, the rubbing of branches, the whine of mosquitoes, the roar of a jaguar. Occasionally, the jungle would seem silent, then a screech would shatter the darkness. While the men couldn’t see anyone, they knew they could be seen. “It was trying to the nerves, knowing all the time that our every movement was watched, yet seeing almost nothing of those who were watching,” Fawcett wrote.

  On the river one day the boats came to a series of rapids, and a pilot went inland to look for a place to circumvent them. A long time elapsed with no word from him, so Fawcett went with several men to find him. They hacked through the forest for half a mile and suddenly came upon the pilot’s body, pierced with forty-two arrows.

  The men were beginning to panic. At one point, drifting on the boat toward the rapids, Willis yelled, “Savages!”—and there they were standing on the banks. “Their bodies [were] painted all over,” Fawcett wrote, and “their ears had pendulous lobes, and quills were thrust from side to side through their nostrils.” He wanted to try to establish contact, but the other men on board were shouting and paddling frantically away. The Indians took aim with six-foot bows and fired their arrows. “One ripped through the side of the boat with a vicious smack—through wood an inch and a half in thickness,” Fawcett said. The boat then slipped down a chute of rapids, leaving, for the moment, the tribe behind.

  Even before this confrontation, Fawcett had noticed his men, especially Chivers, unraveling. “I had observed his gradual break-up,” Fawcett wrote. He decided to relieve Chivers of his duties and sent him and several other members of the party back to the frontier. Still, two of the men died of their fevers. Fawcett himself longed for his family. What kind of a fool was he, Fawcett wondered, to exchange the comfort of his previous postings for such conditions? His second son, Brian, had been born in his absence. “I was tempted to resign and return home,” Fawcett wrote. Yet, unlike his men, Fawcett was in good health. He was hungry and wretched, but his skin wasn’t yellow and his temperature was normal and he wasn’t vomiting blood. Later, John Keltie, the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, wrote a letter to Fawcett’s wife, saying, “Unless he had an exceptional constitution, I do not see how he could survive.” Fawcett noted that in these parts “the healthy person was regarded as a freak, an exception, extraordinary.”

  Despite his yearnings for home, Fawcett continued with Willis and the interpreter to survey the border between Bolivia and Brazil, hacking for miles through the jungle. In May 1907, he completed his route and presented his findings to members of the South American boundary commission and the RGS. They were incredulous. He had redefined the borders of South America—and he had done it nearly a year ahead of schedule.

  THE

  SECRET PAPERS

  When I was in England, I tried to track down Fawcett’s descendants, who, perhaps, could tell me more about the explorer and his route to Z. Fawcett’s wife and children had died long ago, but in Cardiff, Wales, I located one of his grandchildren, Rolette de Montet-Guerin, whose mother was Fawcett’s only daughter, Joan. She lived in a single-story house, with stucco walls and wood frame windows—an unassuming place that seemed somehow at odds with all the fanfare that had once surrounded her family. She was a petite, energetic woman in her fifties, with short black hair and glasses, who referred affectionately to her grandfather by his initials, PHF. (“That’s what my mum and everyone in the family always called him.”) Fawcett’s wife and children, after years of being hounded by reporters, had retreated from the public eye, but Rolette welcomed me into the kitchen. As I told her about my plans to trace Fawcett’s route, she said, “You don’t look much like an explorer.”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, you best be well fed for the jungle.”

  She started to open cupboards, taking out pots and pans, and turned on the gas stove. The kitchen table was soon laden with bowls of risotto, steamed vegetables, homemade bread, and hot apple crumb cake. “It’s all vegetarian,” she said. “PHF believed it gave you greater stamina. Plus, he never liked to kill animals unless he had to.”

  As we sat down to eat, Rolette’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, Isabelle, appeared. She had shorter hair than her mother’s and eyes that held some of her great-grandfather’s intensity. She was a pilot for British Airways. “I envy my great-grandfather, really,” Isabelle said. “In his day, you could still go marching off and discover some hidden part of the world. Now where can you go?”

  Rolette placed an antique silver chalice in the center of the table. “I brought that out especially for you,” she said. “It was PHF’s christening cup.”

  I held it up to the light. On one side were engraved flowers and buds, on the other was inscribed the number 1867, the year Fawcett was born.

  After we ate and chatted for a while, I asked her something I had long pondered—whether, in determining my route, I should rely, like so many other parties, on the coordinates for Dead Horse Camp cited in Exploration Fawcett.

  “Well, you must be careful with those,” Rolette said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “PHF wrote them to throw people off the trail. They were a blind.”

  The news both astounded and unsettled me: if true, it meant that many people had headed, possibly fatally, in the wrong direction. When I asked why Brian Fawcett, who had edited Exploration Fawcett, would have perpetrated the deception, she explained that he had wanted to honor the wishes of his father and brother. The more she spoke, the more I realized that what for many was a tantalizing mystery was for her family a tragedy. As we finished supper, Rolette said, “When someone disappears, it’s not like an ordinary death. There is no closure.” (Later she told me, “You know, when my mother was dying, I said to her, ‘At least you’ll finally know what happened to PHF and Jack.’ ”) Now Rolette paused for a long time, as if trying to make up her mind about something. Then she said, “You really want to find o
ut what happened to my grandfather?”

  “Yes. If it’s possible.”

  “I want to show you something.”

  She led me into a back room and opened a large wooden trunk. Inside were several leather-bound books. Their covers were worn and tattered, their bindings breaking apart. Some were held together only by strings, tied in bows.

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “PHF’s diaries and logbooks.” She handed them to me. “You can look through them, but you must guard them carefully.”

  I opened one of them, marked 1909. The cover left a black stain on my fingertips—a mixture, I imagined, of Victorian dust and jungle mud. The pages almost fell out when I turned them, and I held them gingerly between my index finger and thumb. Recognizing Fawcett’s microscopic handwriting, I felt a strange sensation. Here was something that Fawcett had also held, something that contained his most private thoughts and that few had ever seen. The writer Janet Malcolm once compared a biographer to a “professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.”