by David Grann
The Maxubis, in particular, showed evidence of a sophisticated culture, he thought. They made exquisite pottery and had names for the planets. “The tribe is also exceedingly musical,” Fawcett noted. Describing their songs, he added, “In the utter silence of the forest, when the first light of day had stilled the nightlong uproar of insect life, these hymns impressed us greatly with their beauty.” It was true, he wrote, that he had encountered some tribes in the jungle that were “intractable, hopelessly brutal,” but others, like the Maxubis, were “brave and intelligent,” “utterly refuting the conclusions arrived at by ethnologists, who have only explored the rivers and know nothing of the less accessible places.” What’s more, many of these tribes told legends about their ancestors who lived in settlements that were even grander and more beautiful.
THERE WERE OTHER clues. On rocks throughout the jungle, Fawcett had observed what appeared to be ancient paintings and carvings of human and animal figures. Once, while climbing a desolate mound of earth above the floodplains of the Bolivian Amazon, he noticed something sticking out of the ground. He scooped it into his hand: it was a shard of pottery. He started to scour the soil. Virtually everywhere he scratched, he later informed the RGS, he turned up bits of ancient, brittle pottery. He thought the craftsmanship was as refined as anything from ancient Greece or Rome or China. Yet there were no inhabitants for hundreds of miles. Where had the pottery come from? To whom had it once belonged?
Even as the mystery seemed to deepen, some patterns were emerging. “Wherever there are ‘alturas,’ that is high ground above the plains” in the Amazon basin, Fawcett told Keltie, “there are artifacts.” And that wasn’t all: extending between these alturas were some sort of geometrically aligned paths. They looked, he could almost swear, like “roads” and “causeways.”
AS FAWCETT WAS developing his theory of an ancient Amazonian civilization, he was conscious of growing competition from other explorers, who were racing into the interior of South America to survey one of the last uncharted realms. They were an eclectic, fractious, monomaniacal bunch, each with his own pet theory and obsession. There was, for instance, Henry Savage Landor, who had attracted worldwide renown for his travelogues in which he told of nearly being executed in Tibet, of climbing the Himalayas without ropes and clamps, and of crossing the deserts of Persia and Baluchistan by camel, and who was now wandering through parts of the Amazon dressed as if he were heading off to a luncheon in Piccadilly Circus (“I did not masquerade about in fancy costumes such as are imagined to be worn by explorers”) while his men mutinied and nearly shot him. There was the Brazilian colonel and part-Indian orphan Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, who had helped to lay telegraph lines across the jungle, lost a toe to piranhas, and started the Indian Protection Service. (Its motto, like his, was “Die if you must, but never kill.”) There was Theodore Roosevelt, who, after being defeated in the 1912 presidential election, sought refuge in the Amazon and surveyed with Rondon the River of Doubt. (By the end of the journey, the former president, who had advocated “the strenuous life,” was reduced to near death from hunger and fever, and kept repeating the opening lines to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree.”)
But perhaps the rival Fawcett most feared was Alexander Hamilton Rice, a tall, debonair American doctor who, like Fawcett, had trained under Edward Ayearst Reeves at the Royal Geographical Society. In his late thirties, with a barrel chest and bushy mustache, Rice had graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1904. An interest in tropical diseases led him to the Amazon, where he investigated lethal parasites by dissecting monkeys and jaguars and where he soon became obsessed with the region’s geography and ethnology. In 1907, while Fawcett was conducting his first surveying expedition, Dr. Rice was trekking over the Andes with a then-unknown amateur archaeologist named Hiram Bingham. Later, Dr. Rice descended into the northern basin of the Amazon, searching for the sources of several rivers and studying the native inhabitants. In a letter to a friend, Dr. Rice wrote, “I am going very slowly, studying everything carefully, and coming only to conclusions after long meditation. If I am in doubt about anything, I return to work over it again.”
After that expedition, Dr. Rice, realizing that he lacked sufficient technical training, enrolled at the School of Astronomy and Surveying at the Royal Geographical Society. Upon graduating in 1910 (“We look upon him, in a very special degree, as a child of our Society,” an RGS president later noted), he returned to South America to explore the Amazon basin. Whereas Fawcett was impetuous and daring, Dr. Rice approached his mission with the calm precision of a surgeon. He did not so much want to transcend the brutal conditions as transform them. He assembled teams of as many as a hundred men, and was fixated on gadgetry—new boats, new boots, new generators—and on bringing the latest methods of modern science into the wild. During one expedition, he paused to perform emergency surgery on a native suffering from anthrax and on an Indian with an abscess near her liver. The RGS noted that the latter procedure was “probably the first surgical operation under chloroform carried out in this primeval wilderness.” Although Dr. Rice did not push his men the way Fawcett did, on at least one occasion they mutinied, deserting him in the jungle. During that same expedition, Dr. Rice’s leg became so infected that he took his surgical blade and plunged it into his flesh to remove part of the tissue, operating on himself while he was still conscious. As Keltie told Fawcett, “He is a medical man and very clever in all his work.”
Fawcett may have been confident that no one could surpass his abilities as an explorer, but he knew that his chief rival had an advantage that he could never match: money. Dr. Rice, who was the wealthy grandson of a former mayor of Boston and governor of Massachusetts, had married Eleanor Widener, the widow of a Philadelphia tycoon who had been one of the richest men in America. (Her first husband and her son were on the Titanic when it sank.) With a fortune worth millions of dollars, Dr. Rice and his wife—who donated the Widener Library at Harvard University in memory of her late son—helped to finance a new lecture hall at the Royal Geographical Society. In the United States, Dr. Rice often showed up at appointments in his chauffeured blue Rolls-Royce, dressed in a full-length fur coat. He was, one newspaper wrote, “as much at home in the elegant swirl of Newport society as in the steaming jungles of Brazil.” With unlimited money to bankroll his expeditions, he could afford the most advanced equipment and the best-trained men. Fawcett, meanwhile, was constantly begging foundations and capitalists for financial support. “Explorers are not often those happy and irresponsible rovers which fancy paints,” he once complained in a letter to the RGS, “but are born without the proverbial silver spoon.”
Despite the vastness of the Amazon, it seemed unable to accommodate all of these explorers’ egos and ambitions. The men tended to eye one another hawkishly, jealously guarding their routes for fear of being beaten to a discovery. They even conducted reconnaissance on each other’s activities. “Keep your ears open as to any information about the movements of Landor,” the RGS advised Fawcett in a communiqué in 1911. Fawcett needed no prodding: he maintained the paranoia of a spy.
At the same time, the explorers were quick to cast doubt upon, and even denigrate, a rival’s accomplishments. After Roosevelt and Rondon announced that they had explored for the first time a nearly thousand-mile-long river—renamed Rio Roosevelt in the president’s honor—Landor told reporters it was impossible that such a tributary existed. Branding Roosevelt a “charlatan,” he accused the former president of plagiarizing events from the narrative of Landor’s own journey: “I see he even has had the same sickness as I experienced and, what is more extraordinary, in the very same leg I had trouble with. These things happen very often to big explorers who carefully read the books of some of the humble travelers who preceded them.” Roosevelt snapped back that Landor was “a pure fake, to whom no attention should be paid.” (It was not the first time Landor had been called a fake: after
he ascended a peak in the Himalayas, Douglas Freshfield, one of the most distinguished climbers of his day and a future president of the RGS, said that “no mountaineer can accept the marvelous feats of speed and endurance Mr. Landor believes himself to have accomplished” and that his “very sensational tale” affects “the credit, both at home and on the Continent, of English travellers, critics and scientific societies.”) Dr. Rice, for his part, initially found Roosevelt’s account “unintelligible;” but after Roosevelt furnished him with more details he apologized. Though Fawcett never doubted Roosevelt’s discovery, he dismissed it tartly as a good journey “for an elderly man.”
“I do not wish to deprecate other exploration work in South America,” Fawcett told the RGS, “only to point out the vast difference between river journeys with their freedom from the great food problem, and forest journeys on foot—when one has perforce to put up with circumstances and deliberately penetrate Indian sanctuaries.” Nor was Fawcett impressed by Landor, whom he considered “a humbug from the first.” Fawcett told Keltie that he had no desire to be “counted in with the Savage Landors and Roosevelts of the so-called exploring fraternity.”
Fawcett had often expressed admiration for Rondon, but eventually he grew suspicious of him, too. Fawcett argued that Rondon sacrificed too many lives by traveling in large parties. (In 1900, Rondon embarked on an expedition with eighty-one men and returned with only thirty—the rest had either died or been hospitalized, or had deserted.) Rondon, a proud, deeply patriotic man, did not understand why Fawcett—who told the RGS he preferred in his parties English “gentlemen, owing to greater powers of endurance and enthusiasm for adventure”—always resisted taking Brazilian soldiers on expeditions. A colleague of Rondon’s said that the colonel disliked “the idea of a foreigner’s coming here to do what he said Brazilians could do for themselves.”
Despite Fawcett’s imperviousness to the most brutal conditions in the jungle, he was hypersensitive to the smallest personal criticism. An official from the RGS advised Fawcett, “I think you worry yourself a great deal too much as to what people say about you. I should not trouble myself about it if I were you. Nothing succeeds like success.”
Still, as Fawcett pieced together his evidence of a lost civilization in the Amazon, he worried that someone like Dr. Rice might be on the same trail. When Fawcett hinted to the RGS the new direction of his anthropological inquiries, Keltie wrote back saying that Dr. Rice was “sure to go out again” and might be “disposed to take up the task which you indicate.”
In 1911, the cohort of South American explorers, along with the rest of the world, was astounded by the announcement that Hiram Bingham, Dr. Rice’s old traveling companion, had, with the aid of a Peruvian guide, uncovered the Incan ruins of Machu Picchu, nearly eight thousand feet above sea level, in the Andes. Although Bingham had not discovered an unknown civilization—the Incan empire and its monumental architectural works were well documented—he had helped to illuminate this ancient world in remarkable fashion. National Geographic, which devoted an entire issue to Bingham’s find, noted that Machu Picchu’s stone temples and palaces and fountains—most likely a fifteenth-century retreat for Incan nobility—may “prove to be the most important group of ruins discovered in South America.” The explorer Hugh Thomson subsequently called it “the pin-up of twentieth-century archeology.” Bingham was catapulted into the stratosphere of fame; he was even elected to the U.S. Senate.
The discovery fired Fawcett’s imagination. It undoubtedly stung, too. But Fawcett believed that the evidence he had gathered suggested something potentially more momentous: remnants of a yet unknown civilization in the heart of the Amazon, where for centuries the conquistadores had searched for an ancient kingdom—a place they called El Dorado.
EL DORADO
T he chronicles were buried in the dusty basements of old churches and libraries, and scattered around the world. Fawcett, exchanging his explorer’s uniform for more formal clothing, searched everywhere for these scrolls, which recounted the early conquistadores’ journeys into the Amazon. The papers were often neglected and forgotten; some, Fawcett feared, had been lost altogether, and when he discovered one he would copy critical passages from it into his notebooks. The process was time-consuming, but slowly he pieced together the legend of El Dorado.
“THE GREAT LORD . . . goes about continually covered in gold dust as fine as ground salt. He feels that it would be less beautiful to wear any other ornament. It would be crude and common to put on armour plates of hammered or stamped gold, for other rich lords wear those when they wish. But to powder oneself with gold is something exotic, unusual, novel and more costly—for he washes away at night what he puts on each morning, so that it is discarded and lost, and he does this every day of the year.”
So, according to the sixteenth-century chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, began the story of El Dorado. The name means “the gilded man.” Indians told the Spaniards about this ruler and his glorious land, and the kingdom became synonymous with the man. Another chronicler reported that the king slathered himself in gold and floated on a lake, “gleaming like a ray of the sun,” while his subjects made “offerings of gold jewelry, fine emeralds and other pieces of their ornaments.” If these reports were not enough to excite the conquistadores’ acquisitive hearts, it was believed that the kingdom contained vast swaths of cinnamon trees— a spice that was then nearly as precious as gold.
As fanciful as these stories seemed, there was precedent for finding magnificent cities in the New World. In 1519, Hernán Cortés marched across a causeway and into the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, which floated amid a lake and shimmered with pyramids, palaces, and ornaments. “Some of our soldiers even asked whether the things we saw were not a dream?” the chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote. Fourteen years later, Francisco Pizarro conquered Cuzco, the capital of the Incas, whose empire once encompassed nearly two million square kilometers and included more than ten million people. Echoing Díaz, Gaspar de Espinosa, the governor of Panama, said that the Incan civilization’s riches were “like something from a dream.”
In February of 1541, the first expedition in search of El Dorado was launched by Gonzalo Pizarro, Francisco’s younger half brother and the governor of Quito. He wrote to the king of Spain, saying, “Because of many reports which I received in Quito and outside that city, from prominent and very aged chiefs as well as from Spaniards, whose accounts agreed with one another, that the province of La Canela [Cinnamon] and Lake El Dorado were a very populous and very rich land, I decided to go and conquer and explore it.” Daring and handsome, greedy and sadistic—a prototypical conquistador—Gonzalo Pizarro was so confident that he would succeed that he sank virtually his entire fortune into assembling a force, which surpassed even the one that had captured the Incan emperor.
Marching in the procession were more than two hundred soldiers mounted on horses and outfitted like knights, with iron hats, swords, and shields; and four thousand enslaved Indians, clad in animal skins, whom Pizarro had kept shackled until the day of departure. In their wake came wooden carts pulled by llamas and loaded with some two thousand squealing pigs, followed by nearly two thousand hunting dogs. To the natives, the scene must have been as amazing as any vision of El Dorado. The expedition headed eastward from Quito over the Andes, where a hundred Indians died from the cold, and into the Amazon basin. Hacking through the jungle with swords, sweating in their armor, thirsty, hungry, wet, and miserable, Pizarro and his men came across several cinnamon trees. Oh, the stories were true: “Cinnamon of the most perfect kind.” But the trees were scattered over territories so vast that it would be fruitless to try to cultivate them. They were another of the Amazon’s pitiless cons.
Shortly after, Pizarro encountered several Indians in the jungle and demanded to know where the kingdom of El Dorado was. When the Indians looked at him blankly, Pizarro had them strung up and tortured. “The butcher Gonzalo Pizarro, not content with burning Indians who had c
ommitted no fault, further ordered that other Indians should be thrown to the dogs, who tore them to pieces with their teeth and devoured them,” the sixteenth-century historian Pedro de Cieza de León wrote.
Meanwhile, the expedition, less than a year after it had set out, was in tatters. The llamas perished from the heat, and before long the pigs, horses, and even most of the dogs were eaten by the famished explorers. Moreover, almost all of the four thousand Indians whom Pizarro had forced into the jungle died of disease or hunger.
By a vast meandering river, Pizarro decided to split the surviving members of the party into two groups. While the majority continued to scour the shore with him, his second-in-command, Francisco de Orellana, took fifty-seven Spaniards and two slaves downriver on a boat they had built, in hopes of finding food. The Dominican friar Gaspar de Carvajal, who was with Orellana, wrote in his diary that some in the party were so weak that they crawled on all fours into the jungle. Many, Carvajal said, were “like mad men and did not possess sense.” Rather than return to find Pizarro and the rest of the expedition, Orellana and his men decided to continue down the massive river until, as Carvajal put it, they would “either die or see what there was along it.” Carvajal reported passing villages and coming under attack by thousands of Indians, including female Amazon warriors. During one assault, an arrow struck Carvajal in the eye and “went in as far as the hollow region.” On August 26, 1542, the men’s boat was finally expelled into the Atlantic Ocean, and they became the first Europeans to travel the length of the Amazon.