by David Grann
It was both an incredible feat of exploration and a fiasco. When Pizarro discovered that Orellana had abandoned him, an act he considered mutiny, he was forced to turn back and try to retreat with his starving troops over the Andes. By the time he entered Quito in June 1542, only eighty men from his once-gallant army survived, and they were stripped almost naked. One person reportedly tried to offer Pizarro clothing, but the conquistador refused to look at him or anyone else, and simply went into his house and secluded himself.
Although Orellana went back to Spain, El Dorado still glimmered in his mind, and in 1545 it was his turn to pour all of his money into an expedition. Spanish authorities maintained that his fleet, with a crew of a few hundred people—including his wife—was unseaworthy and denied him permission to sail, but Orellana sneaked out of the harbor anyway. A plague soon swept through the crew, killing nearly a hundred people. Then a ship was lost at sea, with seventy-seven additional souls. Upon reaching the mouth of the Amazon and sailing barely a hundred leagues, fifty-seven more members of his crew perished from disease and hunger. Indians then attacked his ship, killing seventeen others. At last, Orellana collapsed on deck in a fever and muttered an order to retreat. His heart stopped, as if he could no longer bear the disappointment. His wife wrapped him in a Spanish flag and buried him on the banks of the Amazon, watching, in the words of one writer, “as the brown waters that had so long possessed his mind, now possessed his body.”
Still, the allure of this terrestrial paradise was too great to resist. In 1617, the Elizabethan poet and explorer Walter Raleigh, convinced that there was not only one gilded man but thousands of them, set out on a ship named the Destiny with his twenty-three-year-old son to locate what he called “more rich and bewtifull cities, more temples adorned with golden Images, more sepulchers filled with treasure, then either Cortéz found in Mexico or Pazzaro in Peru.” His son—“more desirous of honour than of safety,” as Raleigh put it—was promptly killed during a clash with the Spanish along the Orinoco River. In a letter to his wife, Raleigh wrote, “God knows, I never knew what sorrow meant till now . . . [M]y brains are broken.” Raleigh returned to England with no evidence of his kingdom, and was beheaded by King James in 1618. His skull was embalmed by his wife and occasionally displayed to visitors—a stark reminder that El Dorado was, if nothing else, lethal.
Other expeditions that searched for the kingdom descended into cannibalism. A survivor of a party in which two hundred and forty men died confessed, “Some, contrary to nature, ate human meat: one Christian was found cooking a quarter of a child together with some greens.” On hearing of three explorers who had roasted an Indian woman, Oviedo exclaimed, “Oh, diabolical plan! But they paid for their sin, for those three men never reappeared: God willed that there should be Indians who later ate them.”
Financial ruin, destitution, starvation, cannibalism, murder, death: these seemed to be the only real manifestations of El Dorado. As a chronicler said of several seekers, “They marched like madmen from place to place, until overcome by exhaustion and lack of strength they could no longer move from one side to the other, and they remained there, wherever this sad siren voice had summoned them, self-important, and dead.”
. . .
WHAT COULD FAWCETT learn from such madness?
By the early twentieth century, most historians and anthropologists had dismissed not just the existence of El Dorado but even most of what the conquistadores claimed to have witnessed during their journeys. Scholars believed these chronicles were products of fervid imaginations, and had been embellished to excuse to monarchs the disastrous nature of the expeditions—hence the mythological woman warriors.
Fawcett agreed that El Dorado, with its plethora of gold, was an “exaggerated romance,” but he was not ready to dismiss the chronicles altogether, or the possibility of an ancient Amazonian civilization. Carvajal, for instance, was a respected priest, and others in the expedition had affirmed his account. Even the Amazon warriors had some basis in reality, Fawcett thought, for he had encountered women chiefs along the Tapajós River. And if some details in the accounts were embellished, it did not mean that all of them were. Indeed, Fawcett viewed the chronicles as a generally accurate portrait of the Amazon before the European onslaught. And what the conquistadores described, in his opinion, was a revelation.
During Fawcett’s era, the banks of the Amazon River and its major tributaries contained little more than small, scattered tribes. The conquistadores, however, uniformly reported vast and dense indigenous populations. Carvajal had noted that some places were so “thickly populated” that it was dangerous to sleep on land. (“All that night we continued to pass by numerous and very large villages, until the day came, when we had journeyed more than twenty leagues, for in order to get away from the inhabited country our companions did nothing but row, and the farther we went, the more thickly populated and the better did we find the land.”) When Orellana and his men went ashore, they saw “many roads” and “fine highways” leading into the interior, some of which were “like royal highways and wider.”
The accounts seemed to describe what Fawcett had seen, only on a grander scale. When the Spaniards invaded one village, Carvajal said, they discovered a “great quantity of maize (and there was also found great quantity of oats), from which the Indians make bread, and very good wine resembling beer, and this is to be had in great aplenty. There was found in this village a dispensing place for this wine, [a thing so unusual] that our companions were not a little delighted, and there was found a very good quality of cotton goods.” Villages overflowed with maniocs, yams, beans, and fish, and there were thousands of turtles cultivated in pens for food. The Amazon seemed to sustain large civilizations, and highly complex ones. The conquistadores observed “cities that glistened in white,” with temples, public squares, palisade walls, and exquisite artifacts. In one settlement, Carvajal wrote, “there was a villa in which there was a great deal of. . .. plates and bowls and candelabra of this porcelain of the best that has ever been seen in the world.” He added that these objects were “all glazed and embellished with all colors, and so bright that they astonish, and, more than this, the drawings and paintings which they make on them are so accurately worked out that [one wonders how] with [only] natural skill they manufacture and decorate all these things [making them look just] like Roman [articles].”
The failure of Victorian explorers and ethnographers to find any similar settlements reinforced the belief that the conquistadores’ accounts were “full of lies,” as one historian had earlier described Carvajal’s report. Yet why had so many of the chroniclers provided such similar testimony? Recounting a German-led expedition, for instance, a sixteenth-century historian wrote:
Both the General and all the rest saw a town of disproportionate size, quite close . . . It was compact and well-ordered and in the middle was a house that greatly surpassed the rest in size and height. They asked the chief they had as a guide: “Whose house was that, so remarkable and eminent among the others?” He answered that it was the house of the chief, called Qvarica. He had some golden effigies or idols the size of boys, and a woman all made of gold who was their goddess. He and his subjects possessed other riches. But a short distance beyond, there were other chiefs who exceeded that one in the number of subjects and quantity of riches.
A soldier on another expedition later recalled that “they had seen very large towns, of such an extent that they were astounded.”
Fawcett wondered where all these people had gone. He speculated that the “introduction of small-pox and European disease wiped out the indigenes by millions.” Still, the Amazon’s populations seemed to collapse so swiftly and so completely that he contemplated whether something more dramatic had occurred, even a natural disaster. The Amazon, he’d begun to believe, contained “the greatest secrets of the past yet preserved in our world of today.”
THE
LOCKED BOX
Iam afraid there is no way for you to see th
e document. It’s locked in a vault.”
I had arrived in Rio de Janeiro and was speaking on the phone to a university student who had been helping me track down one more manuscript, what Fawcett considered the final piece of evidence supporting his theory of a lost civilization in the Amazon. The manuscript was in Brazil’s National Library in Rio, and was so old and in such poor condition that it was kept in a safe. I had filed formal requests and made appeals by e-mail. Nothing worked. Finally, as a last effort, I had flown to Rio to make my case in person.
Situated downtown in a beautiful neoclassical building with Corinthian columns and pilasters, the library contains more than nine million documents—the largest archive in Latin America. I was escorted upstairs into the manuscript division, a chamber lined with books that climbed several stories toward a stained-glass ceiling, where a faint light seeped through, revealing, amid the room’s grandeur, a hint of disrepair—dilapidated wooden desks and dusty lightbulbs. The area was quiet, and I could hear the soles of my shoes clapping against the floor.
I had arranged an appointment with the head of the manuscript division, Vera Faillace, an erudite woman with shoulder-length dark hair and glasses. She greeted me at the security gate, and when I inquired about the document she said, “It is, without question, the most famous and sought-after item we have in the manuscript division.”
“How many manuscripts do you have?” I asked, surprised.
“Around eight hundred thousand.”
She said that scientists and treasure hunters from all over the world have wanted to study this particular document. After it became known that Fawcett had drawn on the manuscript for his theory, she said, his devotees have treated it almost like a religious icon. Apparently, it was the Holy Grail for the Fawcett freaks.
I had rehearsed everything I planned to say to persuade her to let me see the original document, including how important it was for me to assess its authenticity and how I promised not to touch it—a speech that began soberly enough but grew, in my desperation, more abstract and grandiose. Yet before I could start Faillace waved me through the security gate. “This must be very important to you to come all this way without knowing you’d be able to see the document,” she said. “I’ve put it on the table for you.”
And there, only a few feet away, opened like a Torah, was the roughly sixteen-inch-by-sixteen-inch manuscript. Its pages had turned almost a golden brown; its edges had crumbled. “This paper is not parchment,” Faillace explained. “It was from before wood pulp was added to paper. It’s a kind of fabric.”
Scrawled across the pages, in black ink, was beautiful calligraphy, but many sections had been washed out or eaten through by worms and insects.
I looked at the title on the top of the first page. It said in Portuguese, “Historical account of a large, hidden, and very ancient city . . . discovered in the year 1753.”
“Can you make out the next sentence?” I asked Faillace.
She shook her head, but farther down more words became legible, and a librarian who spoke fluent English helped me to slowly translate them. They had been written by a Portuguese bandeirante, or “soldier of fortune.” (His name was no longer decipherable.) He described how he and his men, “incited by the insatiable greed of gold,” had set out into the interior of Brazil in search of treasure: “After a long and troublesome peregrination . . .. and almost lost for many years . . . we discovered a chain of mountains so high that they seemed to reach the ethereal regions, and they served as throne for the Wind or for the Stars themselves.” Eventually, the bandeirante said, he and his party found a path between the mountains that appeared to have been “cut asunder by art rather than by nature.” When they reached the top of the path, they looked out and saw a spellbinding vista: below them were the ruins of an ancient city. At dawn, the men loaded their weapons and crept down. Amid swarms of bats, they discovered stone archways, a statue, roads, and a temple. “The ruins well showed the size and grandeur which must have been there, and how populous and opulent it had been in the age when it flourished,” the bandeirante wrote.
After the expedition returned to civilization, the bandeirante had sent the document with this “intelligence” to the viceroy, “in remembrance of the much that I owe to you.” He urged his “Excellency” to dispatch an expedition to find and “utilize these riches.”
It is not known what the viceroy did with the report, or if the bandeirante ever tried to reach the city again. Fawcett had uncovered the manuscript when he was scouring for documents in the National Library of Brazil. For more than a century after the manuscript was written, Fawcett said, it had been “pigeonholed” in bureaucratic archives. “It was difficult for an administration steeped in the narrow bigotry of an all-powerful Church to give much credence to such a thing as an old civilization,” Fawcett wrote.
The librarian pointed to the bottom of the manuscript. “Look at that,” she said.
There were several strange diagrams that resembled hieroglyphics. The bandeirante said that he had observed the images carved into some of the ruins. They seemed familiar, and I realized that they were identical to drawings I had noticed in one of Fawcett’s diaries—he must have copied them after seeing the document.
The library was closing, and Faillace came to retrieve the ancient scroll. As I watched her carefully transport it back into the vault, I understood why Brian Fawcett, seeing the document years after his father and brother vanished, had proclaimed, “It feels genuine! It must be genuine!”
THE WHOLE
WORLD IS MAD
F awcett had narrowed down the location. He was sure that he had found proof of archaeological remains, including causeways and pottery, scattered throughout the Amazon. He even believed that there was more than a single ancient city—the one that the bandeirante described was most likely, given the terrain, near the eastern Brazilian state of Bahia. But Fawcett, consulting archival records and interviewing tribesmen, had calculated that a monumental city, along with possibly even remnants of its population, was in the jungle surrounding the Xingu River in the Brazilian Mato Grosso. In keeping with his secretive nature, he gave the city a cryptic and alluring name, one that, in all his writings and interviews, he never explained. He called it simply Z.
In September of 1914, after a yearlong reconnaissance trip with Manley and Costin, Fawcett was ready to launch an expedition in search of the lost city. Yet when he emerged from the jungle he was greeted with the news that, more than two months earlier, the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand—who was the unlikely catalyst for Fawcett and Nina’s first meeting in Ceylon—had been assassinated. World War I had begun.
Fawcett and his two British companions immediately set sail for England. “Of course experienced men like you are very much wanted: there is a great deficiency of trained officers,” Keltie told Fawcett in a letter that December. “We have had tremendous losses, as you see, at the front, far more in proportion, I should think, than has ever been among officers before.” Though Fawcett was forty-seven years old and a “renegade” from European life, he felt compelled to volunteer. He informed Keltie that he had his “finger on important discoveries” in the Amazon, but was obliged by “the patriotic desire of all able-bodied men to squash the Teuton.”
Most of Europe was gripped by a similar zeal. Conan Doyle, who churned out propaganda that portrayed the war as a clash of chivalrous knights, wrote, “Fear not, for our sword will not be broken, nor shall it ever drop from our hands.”
After a brief visit with his family, Fawcett made his way to the western front, where, as he told Keltie, he would soon be “in the thick of it.”
As a major in the Royal Field Artillery, Fawcett was placed in charge of a battery of more than a hundred men. Cecil Eric Lewis Lyne, a twenty-two-year-old second lieutenant, recalled when the Amazon explorer arrived in his dark khaki uniform, carrying his revolver. He was, Lyne wrote in a diary, “one of the most colorful personalities I ever encountered”—a man of “magnifice
nt physique and great technical ability.”
As always, Fawcett was an electric and polarizing figure, and his men fell into two camps: the Costins and the Murrays. The Costins gravitated toward him, relishing his daring and élan, while the Murrays despised his ferocity and unforgivingness. An officer among the Murrays said that Fawcett “was probably the nastiest man I have ever met in this world and his dislike of me was only exceeded by my dislike of him.” Yet Lyne was a Costin. “Fawcett and I, despite the disparity of our ages, became great friends.”
Along with their men, Fawcett and Lyne dug trenches—sometimes only a few hundred yards from the Germans—in the area around Ploegsteert, a hamlet in western Belgium, near the border of France. One day Fawcett spotted a suspicious-looking figure in the village wearing a long fur coat, a French steel helmet three sizes too small for his head, and a shepherd’s smock—“queer garments,” as Fawcett put it. Fawcett overheard the man saying, in a guttural voice, that this area would be ideal for an observation post, even though it struck Fawcett as “a bloody awful place.” German spies were rumored to be infiltrating British lines dressed as Belgian civilians, and Fawcett, who knew what it meant to be a secret agent, rushed back to headquarters and reported, “We’ve got a spy in our sector!”