The Lost City of Z

by David Grann

  Over time, this became Fawcett’s signature approach. “Whenever he came upon the savages,” Costin said, “he would walk slowly towards them . . . with hands stretched in the air.” As with his method of traveling in radically small parties, without protection from armed soldiers, his means of establishing relations with tribes, some of which had never before seen a white man, struck many as both heroic and suicidal. “I know, from persons who have informed me, how he crossed the river in front of a whole tribe of hostile savages, and simply by his bravery induced them to cease firing, and accompanied them to their village,” a Bolivian official reported to the Royal Geographical Society of Fawcett’s meeting with the Guarayos. “I must say they are indeed very hostile, because I have been among them myself, and in 1893 General Pando not only lost some of his men, but also lost his nephew, and the engineer, Mr. Muller, who, tired of the journey, decided to cross from one of the rivers up to the Modeidi, and up to this day we have not heard anything about them.”

  Fawcett’s ability to succeed where so many others failed contributed to a growing myth of his invincibility, which he himself began to believe. How could one explain, he wondered, “standing deliberately in front of savages with whom it was vital to make friends, arrows fixing past one’s head, between one’s legs, even between arm and body, for several minutes, and yet being untouched”? Nina also thought that he was indestructible.

  Once, after he had approached a hostile Indian tribe with his modus operandi, she informed the RGS, “His encounter with the savages and the way he handled them is one of the bravest episodes I have ever heard of— and I am glad he behaved as he did—personally, I have no fears whatever regarding his safety, for I am so certain that on occasions like that he will do the right thing.”

  Costin wrote that on their five expeditions Fawcett invariably made friends with the tribes they met. There was, however, one exception. In 1914, Fawcett sought out a group of Maricoxis in Bolivia, of whom the other Indians in the area had told him to be wary. When he made his usual overtures, the Indians reacted violently. As they came in for the kill, Fawcett’s men pleaded for permission to use their guns. We must fire, Costin yelled.

  Fawcett hesitated. “He did not wish to do so, for we had never fired before,” Costin recalled. But at last Fawcett relented. Later, Fawcett said that he had ordered his men to fire only at the ground or in the air. But, according to Costin, “we could see that one [Indian] at least had been hit in the stomach.”

  If Costin’s account is correct, and there is little reason to doubt it, then it was the one time Fawcett violated his own edict, and he was apparently so mortified that he doctored his official reports to the RGS and concealed the truth his entire life.

  ONE DAY, WHILE staying with a tribe of Echojas in the Bolivian region of the Amazon, Fawcett stumbled across further evidence that seemed to contradict the prevailing notion that the jungle was a death trap in which small bands of hunter-gatherers led a miserable existence, abandoning and killing their own to survive. Fawcett had reinforced this image with accounts of his own harrowing journeys, and he was stunned to find that, like the Guarayos, the Echojas had stockpiled mass quantities of food. They often used the Amazonian floodplains, which were more fertile than terra firma, to grow crops, and they had developed elaborate ways of hunting and fishing. “Food problems never bothered them,” Fawcett said. “When hungry, one of them would go off into the forest and call for game; and I joined him on one occasion to see how he did it. I could see no signs of an animal in the bush, but the Indian plainly knew better. He set up ear-piercing cries and signed to me to keep still. In a few minutes a small deer came timidly through the bush . . . and the Indian shot it with bow and arrow. I have seen them draw monkeys and birds out of the trees above by means of these peculiar cries.” Costin, an award-winning marksman, was equally amazed to watch the Indians succeed where he, with his rifle, failed again and again.

  And it wasn’t just the Indians’ ability to generate an abundant food supply—a precursor to any densely populated, sophisticated civilization— that intrigued Fawcett. Though the Echojas seemed to have no defenses against imported European diseases like measles, which is one reason Fawcett suspected their population was still small, they had developed an array of medicinal herbs and unorthodox treatments to protect themselves against the daily assault of the jungle. They were even adept at removing the maggots that had tortured Murray. “[The Echojas] would make a curious whistling noise with their tongues, and at once the grub’s head would issue from the blowhole,” Fawcett wrote. “Then the Indian would give the sore a quick squeeze, and the invader was ejected.” He added, “I sucked, whistled, protested, and even played the flute to mine, with absolutely no effect.” A Western doctor who was traveling with Fawcett considered such methods witchcraft, but Fawcett regarded them, along with an assortment of herbal cures, as a marvel. “With illness and disease so prevalent it is no wonder that herbal remedies are used,” Fawcett said. “It seems as though every disorder has its appropriate nature-cure.” He added, “Of course, the medical profession does not encourage people to make use of them. Yet the cures they effect are often remarkable, and I speak as one who has tried several with complete success.” Adopting herbal medicines and native methods of hunting, Fawcett was better able to survive off the land. “In 99 cases out of a 100 there is no need to starve,” he concluded.

  But even if the Amazon could, as he supposed, sustain a large civilization, had the Indians ever actually constructed one? There was still no archaeological evidence. There was not even evidence of dense populations in the Amazon. And the notion of a complex civilization contradicted the two main ethnological paradigms that had prevailed for centuries and that originated with the first encounter between Europeans and Native Americans, more than four hundred years earlier. Though some of the first conquistadores were in awe of the civilizations that Native Americans had developed, many theologians debated whether these dark-skinned, scantily clad peoples were, in fact, human; for how could the descendants of Adam and Eve have wandered so far, and how could the biblical prophets have been ignorant of them? In the mid-sixteenth century, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, one of the Holy Roman Emperor’s chaplains, argued that the Indians were “half men” who should be treated as natural slaves. “The Spanish have a perfect right to rule these barbarians of the New World,” Sepúlveda declared, adding, “For there exists between the two as great a difference as between . . . apes and men.”

  At the time, the most forceful critic of this genocidal paradigm was Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican friar who had traveled throughout the Americas. In a famous debate with Sepúlveda and in a series of treatises, Las Casas tried to prove, once and for all, that Indians were equal humans (“Are these not men? Do they not have rational souls?”), and to condemn those “pretending to be Christians” who “wiped them from the face of the earth.” In the process, however, he contributed to a conception of the Indians that became an equal staple of European ethnology: the “noble savage.” According to Las Casas, the Indians were “the simplest people in the world,” “without malice or guile,” “never quarrelsome or belligerent or boisterous,” who “are neither ambitious nor greedy, and are totally uninterested in worldly power.”

  Although in Fawcett’s era both conceptions remained prevalent in scholarly and popular literature, they were now filtered through a radical new scientific theory: evolution. Darwin’s theory, laid out in On the Origin of Species in 1859, suggested that people and apes shared a common ancestor, and, coupled with recent discoveries of fossils revealing that humans had been on earth far longer than the Bible stated, helped irrevocably to sever anthropology from theology. Victorians now attempted to make sense of human diversity not in theological terms but in biological ones. The manual Notes and Queries on Anthropology, which was recommended reading in Fawcett’s exploring school, included chapters titled “Anatomy and Physiology,” “Hair,” “Colour,” “Odour,” “Motions,” “Physio
gnomy,” “Pathology,” “Abnormalities,” “Reproduction,” “Physical Powers,” “Senses,” and “Heredity.” Among the questions that Fawcett and other explorers were told to answer were:

  Is there any notable peculiarity of odour attached to the persons of the tribe or people described? What is the habitual posture in sleep? Is the body well balanced in walking? Is the body erect and the leg straightened? Or do they stand and move with the knee slightly bent? Do they swing the arm in walking? Do they climb trees well? Is astonishment expressed by the eyes and mouth being opened wide, and by the eyebrows being raised? Does shame excite a blush?

  The Victorians wanted to know, in effect, why some apes had evolved into English gentlemen and why some hadn’t.

  Whereas Sepúlveda had argued that Indians were inferior on religious grounds, many Victorians now claimed that they were inferior on biological ones—that they were possibly even a “missing link” in the evolutionary chain between apes and men. In 1863, the Anthropological Society of London was created to investigate such theories. Richard Burton, one of the Society’s founders, postulated that Indians, like blacks, with their “quasigorillahood,” belonged to a “sub-species.” (Darwin himself, who never subscribed to the extreme racialism that emerged in his name, described the Fuegians he saw in South America—“these poor wretches. . . stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, and their gestures violent and without dignity”—as if it were hard to “believe they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world.”) Many anthropologists, including Burton, practiced phrenology—the study of the protuberances on human skulls, which were thought to indicate intelligence and character traits. One phrenologist comparing two Indian craniums with those of Europeans said that the former were marked by “firmness” and “secretiveness” and that their shape explained “the magnanimity displayed by the Indians in their endurance of torture.” Francis Galton, in his theory of eugenics, which once counted among its followers John Maynard Keynes and Winston Churchill, argued that human intelligence was inherited and immutable and that native peoples of the New World were intrinsically “children in mind.” Even many Victorians who believed in a “psychic unity to mankind” assumed that Indian societies were in a different stage of evolutionary development. By the early twentieth century, the then-popular diffusionist school of anthropologists maintained that if a sophisticated ancient civilization ever did exist in South America, its origins were either Western or Near Eastern—in the lost tribes of Israel, for example, or in seafaring Phoenicians. “There are all sorts of theories among anthropologists regarding the distribution of the human race,” Keltie, of the Royal Geographical Society, noted, adding that diffusionist anthropologists “maintain that the Phoenicians navigated the whole of the Pacific Ocean, and that many of them penetrated South America.”

  Fawcett was deeply influenced by such ideas—his writings are rife with images of Indians as “jolly children” and “ ape-like” savages. When he first saw an Indian cry, he expressed befuddlement, sure that physiologically Indians had to be stoic. He struggled to reconcile what he observed with everything he had been taught, and his conclusions were filled with convolutions and contradictions. He believed, for instance, that the jungle contained “savages of the most barbarous kind, ape-men who live in holes in the ground and come out only at night;” yet he nearly always described the Indians whom he met as being “civilized,” and often far more so than Europeans. (“My experience is that few of these savages are naturally ‘bad,’ unless contact with ‘savages’ from the outside world has made them so.”) He vigorously opposed the destruction of indigenous cultures through colonization. In the jungle, the absolutist became a relativist. After he witnessed a tribe cannibalize one of its dead as part of a religious ceremony—the body “roasted over a big fire” and “cut up and divided amongst the various families”—Fawcett beseeched Europeans not to deplore the “elaborate ritual.” He hated to classify unacculturated Indians as “savages”—then the common terminology—and he noted that the kind, decent Echojas were “plain proof of how unjustified is the general condemnation of all the wild forest people.” Along with adopting Indian mores, he learned to speak myriad indigenous languages. “He knew the Indians as few white men have ever known them, and he had the gift of tongues,” observed the adventure writer and Fawcett associate Thomas Charles Bridges. “Few men have ever possessed that gift to such a marked degree.” Costin, summing up Fawcett’s relationship with the natives of the Amazon, said simply, “He understood them better than anyone.”

  Yet Fawcett could never find his way out of what the historian Dane Kennedy has called the “mental maze of race.” When Fawcett detected a highly sophisticated tribe, he frequently tried to find racial markers—more “whiteness” or “redness”—that might reconcile the notion of an advanced Indian society with his Victorian beliefs and attitudes. “There are three kinds of Indians,” he once wrote. “The first are docile and miserable people . . . [T]he second, dangerous, repulsive cannibals very rarely seen; the third, a robust and fair people, who must have a civilized origin.”

  The notion that the Americas contained a tribe of “fair” people, or “white Indians,” had endured since Columbus claimed that he had seen several natives who were as “white as we are.” Later, conquistadores said that they had found an Aztec room filled with “men, women and children, white at birth in the face, body, hair and eyelashes.” The legend of “white Indians” had taken hold perhaps most fervently in the Amazon, where the first Spanish explorers to descend the river described female warriors as “very white and tall.” Many of these legends undoubtedly had their origins in the existence of tribes with markedly lighter skin. One group of uncommonly tall, pale Indians in eastern Bolivia were called the Yurucares, which literally means “white men.” The Yanomami of the Amazon were also known as “white Indians” owing to their lightness, as were the Wai-Wai of Guyana.

  In Fawcett’s day, the “white Indian question,” as it was called, gave credence to the diffusionists’ theory that Phoenicians or some other Westerners, such as the Atlanteans or the Israelites, had migrated into the jungle thousands of years earlier. Fawcett was initially skeptical of the existence of “white Indians,” calling the evidence “weak,” but over time they seemed to give him a way out of his personal mental maze of race: if the Indians had descended from Western civilization, there could be no doubt that they could build a complex society. Fawcett could never take the final leap of a modern anthropologist and accept that complex civilizations were capable of springing up independently of each other. As a result, while some anthropologists and historians today consider Fawcett enlightened for his era, others, like John Hemming, depict him as a “Nietzschean explorer” who spouted “eugenic gibberish.” In truth, he was both. As much as Fawcett rebelled against Victorian mores—becoming a Buddhist who lived like an Indian warrior—he could never transcend them. He escaped virtually every kind of pathology in the jungle, but he could not rid himself of the pernicious disease of race.

  What is consistent in his writings is the growing belief that the Amazon and its people were not what everyone assumed them to be. Something was amiss. He had seen during his autopses too many tribes that did not resemble the general European ethnology.

  . . .

  IN 1914, FAWCETT was traveling with Costin and Manley in a remote corner of the Brazilian Amazon, far from any major rivers, when the jungle suddenly opened into a huge clearing. In the burst of light, Fawcett could see a series of beautiful dome-shaped houses made of thatch; some were seventy feet high and a hundred feet in diameter. Nearby were plantings of maize, yucca, bananas, and sweet potato. There didn’t seem to be anyone in the vicinity, and Fawcett signaled to Costin to look into one of the houses. When Costin reached the entrance, he saw a solitary old woman leaning over a fire, cooking a meal. The scent of yucca and potatoes wafted toward h
im, and, overcome with hunger, he found himself being pulled inside, despite the danger. Fawcett and Manley smelled the aroma as well, and followed him. The men motioned to their stomachs, and the startled woman handed them bowls of food. “Probably none of us had ever tasted anything so good,” Fawcett later recalled. As the explorers were eating, paint-streaked warriors began to appear all around them. “They slipped in by various entrances not previously noticed, and through the doorway beside us we could see the shadows of more men outside,” Fawcett wrote. Their nostrils and mouths were pierced with wooden pegs; they carried drawn bows and blowpipes.

  Fawcett whispered to Costin and Manley, “Don’t move!”

  According to Costin, Fawcett slowly untied the handkerchief around his neck and placed it on the ground, as a gift, before a man who appeared to be the chief. The man picked it up and examined it in stern silence. Fawcett told Costin, You must give them something.

  “I myself made a blunder,” Costin later recalled. “I not only produced a match, but struck it.”

  There was a flutter of panic, and Fawcett quickly delved in his pocket for another gift—a glittering necklace. A member of the tribe, in turn, handed to its visitors gourds full of nuts. “Our friendship was now accepted,” Fawcett wrote, “and the chief himself sat down on a curved stool and shared the peanuts with us.” They had befriended a previously unknown group of Indians that Fawcett classified as the Maxubis. And, while staying there, Fawcett discovered something he had never seen before: a large population numbering in the several thousands. Moreover, the village was surrounded by indigenous settlements with thousands more people. (Fawcett’s discovery of so many previously unknown Indians prompted a president of the American Geographical Society to proclaim, “We do not know of anything so amazing in the history of recent exploration.”) It dawned on Fawcett that in regions far from the major rivers, where most European travelers and slave raiders went, tribes were healthier and more populous. Physically, they were less decimated by diseases and alcoholism; culturally, they remained vibrant. “Perhaps this is why the ethnology of the continent has been built on a misconception,” Fawcett said.