by David Grann
A month after the explorers left Cuiabá, and after what Fawcett described as “a test of patience and endurance for the greater trials” ahead, the men arrived at Bakairí Post. The settlement consisted of about twenty ramshackle huts, cordoned off by barbed wire, to protect against aggressive tribes. (Three years later, another explorer described the outpost as “a pinprick on the map: isolated, desolate, primitive and God forsaken.”) The Bakairí tribe was one of the first in the region that the government had tried to “acculturate,” and Fawcett was appalled by what he called “the Brazilian methods of civilizing the Indian tribes.” In a letter to one of his sponsors in the United States, he noted, “The Bakairís have been dying out ever since they became civilized. There are only about 150 of them.” He went on, “They have in part been brought here to plant rice, manioc . . . which is sent to Cuiabá, where it fetches, at present, high prices. The Bakairís are not paid, are raggedly clothed, mainly in khaki govt. uniforms, and there is a general squalor and lack of hygiene which is making the whole of them sick.”
Fawcett was informed that a Bakairí girl had recently fallen ill. He often tried to treat the natives with his medical kit, but, unlike Dr. Rice, his knowledge was limited, and there was nothing he could do to save her. “They say the Bacairys are dying off on account of fetish [witchcraft], for there is a fetish man in the village who hates them,” Jack wrote. “Only yesterday a little girl died—of fetish, they say!”
The Brazilian in charge of the post, Valdemira, put the explorers up in the newly constructed schoolhouse. The men soaked themselves in the river, washing away the grime and sweat. “We have all clipped our beards, and feel better without them,” Jack said.
Members of other remote tribes occasionally visited Bakairí Post to obtain goods, and Jack and Raleigh soon saw something that astonished them: “about eight wild Indians, absolutely stark naked,” as Jack wrote to his mother. The Indians carried seven-foot-long bows with six-foot arrows. “To Jack’s great delight we have seen the first of the wild Indians here—naked savages from the Xingu,” Fawcett wrote Nina.
Jack and Raleigh hurried out to meet them. “We gave them some guava cheese,” Jack wrote, and “they liked it immensely.”
Jack tried to conduct a rudimentary autopsis. “They are small people, about five feet two inches in height, and very well built,” he wrote of the Indians. “They eat only fish and vegetables—never meat. One woman had a very fine necklace of tiny discs cut from snail shells, which must have required tremendous patience to make.”
Raleigh, whom Fawcett had designated as the expedition’s photographer, set up a camera and took pictures of the Indians. In one shot, Jack stood beside them, to demonstrate “the comparative sizes;” the Indians came up to his shoulders.
In the evening, the three explorers went to the mud hut where the Indians were staying. The only light inside was from a fire, and the air was filled with smoke. Fawcett unpacked a ukulele and Jack took out a piccolo that they had brought from England. (Fawcett told Nina that “music was a great comfort ‘in the wilds,’ and might even save a solitary man from insanity.”) As the Indians gathered around them, Jack and Fawcett played a concert late into the night, the sounds wafting through the village.
On May 19, a fresh, cool day, Jack woke up exhilarated—it was his twenty-second birthday. “I have never felt so well,” he wrote to his mother. For the occasion, Fawcett dropped his prohibition against liquor, and the three explorers celebrated with a bottle of Brazilian-made alcohol. The next morning, they prepared the equipment and the pack animals. To the north of the post, the men could see several imposing mountains and the jungle. It was, Jack wrote, “absolutely unexplored country.”
The expedition headed straight for terra incognita. Before them were no clear paths, and little light filtered through the canopy. They struggled to see not just in front of them but above them, where most predators lurked. The men’s feet sank in mud holes. Their hands burned from wielding machetes. Their skin bled from mosquitoes. Even Fawcett confessed to Nina, “Years tell, in spite of the spirit of enthusiasm.”
Although Raleigh’s foot had healed, his other one became infected, and when he removed his sock a large patch of skin peeled off. He seemed to be unraveling; he had already suffered from jaundice, his arm was swollen, and he felt, as he put it, “bilious.”
Like his father, Jack was prone to contempt for others’ frailty, and complained to his mother that his friend was unable to share his burden of work—he rode on a horse, with his shoe off—and that he was always scared and sullen.
The jungle widened the fissures that had been evident since Raleigh’s romance on the boat. Raleigh, overwhelmed by the insects, the heat, and the pain in his foot, lost interest in “the Quest.” He no longer thought about returning as a hero: all he wanted, he muttered, was to open a small business and to settle down with a family. (“The Fawcetts can have all my share of the notoriety and be welcome to it!” he wrote his brother.) When Jack talked of the archaeological importance of Z, Raleigh shrugged and said, “That’s too deep for me.”
“I wish [Raleigh] had more brains, as I cannot discuss any of this with him as he knows nothing of anything,” Jack wrote. “We can only converse about Los Angeles or Seaton. What he will do during a year at ‘Z’ I don’t know.”
“I wish to hell you were here,” Raleigh told his brother, adding, “You know there is a saying which I believe is true: ‘Two’s company— three’s none.’ It shows itself quite often with me now!” Jack and Fawcett, he said, maintained a “sense of inferiority for others. Consequently at times I feel very ‘out of everything.’ Of course I do not outwardly show it. . . but still, as I have said before, I feel ‘awful lonesome’ for real friendship.”
After nine days, the explorers hacked their way to Dead Horse Camp, where the men could still see the “white bones” from Fawcett’s old pack animal. The men were approaching the territory of the warlike Suyás and Kayapós. An Indian once described to a reporter a Kayapó ambush of his tribe. He and a few other villagers, the reporter wrote, fled across a river and “witnessed throughout the night the macabre dance of their enemies around their slaughtered brothers.” For three days, the invaders remained, playing wooden flutes and dancing among the corpses. After the Kayapós finally departed, the few villagers who had escaped across the river rushed back to their settlement: not a single person was alive. “The women, who they thought would have been spared, lay face up, their lifeless bodies in an advanced state of putrefaction, their legs spread apart by wooden struts forced between the knees.” In a dispatch, Fawcett described the Kayapós as an aggressive “lot of stick-throwers who cut off and kill wandering individuals. . . Their only weapon is a short club like a policeman’s billy”—which, he added, they deploy very skillfully.
After passing through the territory of the Suyás and Kayapós, the expedition would turn eastward and confront the Xavante, who were perhaps even more formidable. In the late eighteenth century, many in the tribe had been contacted by the Portuguese and moved into villages, where they received mass baptisms. Devastated by epidemics and brutalized by Brazilian soldiers, they eventually fled back into the jungle near the River of Death. A nineteenth-century German traveler wrote that “from that time onwards [the Xavante] no longer trusted any white man . . . These abused people have therefore changed from compatriots into the most dangerous and determined enemies. They generally kill anyone they can easily catch.” Several years after Fawcett’s journey, members of the Indian Protection Service tried to make contact with the Xavante, only to return to their base camp and discover the naked corpses of four of their colleagues. One was still clutching in his hand gifts for the Indians.
In spite of the risks, Fawcett was confident—after all, he had always succeeded where others failed. “It is obviously dangerous to penetrate large hordes of Indians traditionally hostile,” he wrote, “but I believe in my mission and in its purpose. The rest does not worry me, for I have seen
a good deal of Indians and know what to do and what not to do.” He added, “I believe our little party of three white men will make friends with them all.”
The guides, who were already feverish, were reluctant to go any farther, and Fawcett decided that the time had come to send them back. He selected half a dozen or so of the strongest animals to keep for a few more days. Then the explorers would have to proceed with their few provisions on their backs.
Fawcett pulled Raleigh aside and encouraged him to return with the guides. As Fawcett had written to Nina, “I suspect constitutional weakness, and fear that we shall be handicapped by him.” After this point, Fawcett explained, there would be no way to carry him out. Raleigh insisted that he would see it through. Perhaps he remained loyal to Jack, in spite of everything. Perhaps he didn’t want to be seen as a coward. Or perhaps he was simply afraid to turn back without them.
Fawcett finished his last letters and dispatches. He wrote that he would try to get out other communiqués in the coming year or so, but added that it was unlikely. As he noted in one of his final articles, “By the time this dispatch is printed, we shall have long since disappeared into the unknown.”
After folding up his missives, Fawcett gave them to the guides. Raleigh had earlier written to his “dearest Mother” and family. “I shall look forward to seeing you again in old Cal when I return,” he said. And he told his brother bravely, “Keep cheerful and things will turn up alright as they have for me.”
The explorers gave a final wave to the Brazilians, then turned and headed deeper into the jungle. In his last words to his wife, Fawcett wrote, “You need have no fear of any failure.”
THE LAST
EYEWITNESS
Can you get the GPS to work?” Paolo asked.
I was sitting in the backseat of a four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi truck, fiddling with a Global Positioning System in an attempt to obtain readings of our coordinates. We were heading north—that much I knew—with a driver whom we had hired when we rented the pickup. Paolo had told me that we would need a powerful truck and a professional driver if we were to have any chance of completing our journey, especially in the rainy season. “This is the worst time of year,” he said. “The roads are—how do you say in English?—shit.”
When I explained my mission to our driver, he asked me when the British colonel had disappeared.
“Nineteen twenty-five,” I said.
“And you want to find him in the jungle?”
“Not exactly.”
“Are you one of his descendants?”
“No.”
He seemed to think about this for a long moment, then said, “Very well,” and began cheerfully to load our gear, which included hammocks, rope, mosquito netting, water-purifying tablets, a satellite phone, antibiotics, and malarial pills. On our way out of Cuiabá, we also picked up a friend of Paolo’s, a descendant of a Bakairí chief named Taukane Bakairí. (In Brazil, the last names of Indians are typically the same as that of their tribe.) Taukane, who was in his mid-forties and had a handsome, round face, wore Levi’s and a baseball cap. He had been educated by missionaries, and though he now lived mostly in Cuiabá, he continued to represent his tribe’s political interests. “I am what you might call an ambassador,” he told me. And, in exchange for a “gift” of two tires for a communal tractor, he had agreed to take us to his village, the last place that Fawcett had incontrovertibly been seen. (“If it were up to me, I would take you for free,” Taukane said. “But all Indians must now be capitalists. We have no choice.”)
Upon leaving the city, we entered the central plains of Brazil, which mark the transition from dry forest to rain forest. After a while, a plateau came into view: Martian red in color, it spanned more than two thousand square miles, an endless tabletop that reached into the clouds. We stopped at its base, and Paolo said, “Come, I show you something.”
We left the truck and climbed a steep, rocky slope. The ground was moist from a recent rainstorm, and we used our hands and knees to ascend, crawling over holes where snakes and armadillos had burrowed.
“Where are we going?” I asked Paolo, who had another cigarette clamped between his teeth.
“You Americans are always impatient,” he said.
Lightning streaked the sky and a thin mist descended, making the ground more slippery. Rocks gave way under our feet, clapping as they hit the ground, fifty yards below.
“Almost there,” Paolo said.
He helped to pull me up a ledge, and as I got to my feet, covered in mud, he pointed at another ridge, a few yards away, and said, “Now you see!”
Jutting into the sky was a cracked stone column. I blinked in the rain—in fact, there was not just one but several columns in a row, as in a Greek ruin. There was also a large archway, both sides of it intact, and behind it was a dazzlingly large tower. They looked like what the bandeirante had described in 1753.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Stone city.”
“Who built it?”
“It is—how do you say?—an illusion.”
“That?” I said, pointing to one of the columns.
“It was made by nature, by erosion. But many people who see it think it is a lost city, like Z.”
In 1925, Dr. Rice had seen similarly eroded cliffs, in Roraima, Brazil, and thought they looked like “ruined architecture.”
As we returned to the car and headed north, toward the jungle, Paolo said we would find out soon if Z were such a mirage. We eventually turned onto BR-163, one of the most treacherous roads in South America. Built in 1970 by the Brazilian government in an effort to open up the country’s interior, it extends more than a thousand miles, from Cuiabá to the Amazon River. It was designated on our map as a major highway, but almost all the asphalt from its two lanes had been washed away during the rainy season, leaving behind a combination of ditches and puddle-filled gullies. Our driver sometimes chose to ignore the road altogether and steer along the rocky banks and fields, where herds of cattle occasionally parted in our midst.
As we passed the Manso River, where Fawcett had gotten separated from the rest of the group and where Raleigh had been bitten by ticks, I kept looking out the window, expecting to see the first signs of a fearsome jungle. Instead, the terrain looked like Nebraska—perpetual plains that faded into the horizon. When I asked Taukane where the forest was, he said, simply, “Gone.”
A moment later, he pointed to a fleet of diesel-belching trucks heading in the opposite direction, carrying sixty-foot logs.
“Only the Indians respect the forest,” Paolo said. “The white people cut it all down.” Mato Grosso, he went on, was being transformed into domesticated farmland, much of it dedicated to soybeans. In Brazil alone, the Amazon has, over the last four decades, lost some two hundred and seventy thousand square miles of its original forest cover—an area bigger than France. Despite government efforts to reduce deforestation, in just five months in 2007 as much as two thousand seven hundred square miles were destroyed, a region larger than the state of Delaware. Countless animals and plants, many of them with potential medicinal purposes, have vanished. Because the Amazon generates half its own rainfall through moisture that rises into the atmosphere, the devastation has begun to change the region’s ecology, contributing to droughts that destroy the jungle’s ability to sustain itself. And few places have been as ravaged as Mato Grosso, where the state governor, Blairo Maggi, is one of the largest soybean producers in the world. “I don’t feel the slightest guilt over what we are doing here,” Maggi told the New York Times in 2003. “We’re talking about an area larger than Europe that has barely been touched, so there is nothing at all to get worried about.”
The latest economic boom, meanwhile, has produced another of the Amazon’s convulsions of violence. The Brazilian Transport Ministry has said that loggers along BR-163 employ “the highest concentration of slave labor in the world.” Indians are frequently driven off their land, enslaved, or murdered. On February 12, 2005, while
Paolo and I were making our journey into the jungle, several gunmen, allegedly on the payroll of a rancher in the state of Pará, approached a seventy-three-year-old American nun who defended the rights of Indians. As the men aimed their guns, she removed her Bible and began to read from the Gospel of Saint Matthew: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied.” The gunmen unloaded six bullets into her, leaving her body facedown in the mud.
James Petersen, the distinguished scientist from the University of Vermont who had trained the archaeologist Michael Heckenberger and had been extremely helpful in planning my trip, told me when we had last spoken, a few months earlier, that he was excited because he was heading into the Amazon to conduct research near Manaus. “Maybe you can visit me after the Xingu,” he said. That would be wonderful, I responded. But I soon discovered that in August, while he was with the Brazilian archaeologist Eduardo Neves at a restaurant in a village along the Amazon River, a pair of bandits, allegedly working for a former police officer, stormed in to rob the place. One of the thieves opened fire, hitting Petersen in the stomach. He fell to the ground and said, “I can’t breathe.” Neves told him he would be okay, but by the time they arrived at a hospital, Petersen had died. He was fifty-one years old.
From BR-163, we veered onto a smaller dirt road, which went east, toward Bakairí Post. We passed close to where Fawcett had stayed with the cattle rancher Galvão, and we decided to see if we could find his manor. In letters, Fawcett had said that the ranch was known as Rio Novo, and that name was marked on several current maps. After nearly four hours of bone-jarring bumps, we came upon a rusty sign at a fork in the road—“Rio Novo”—with an arrow pointing left.
“Look at that,” Paolo said.
We crossed a wobbly, wooden-slatted bridge over a river. The bridge creaked under the weight of the truck, and we looked down at the torrent of water, fifty feet below.