The Lost City of Z (13 page)

W
hen 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 out 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.”

I sat down on the couch in the living room. There was a book for almost every year from 1906 (his first expedition) to 1921 (his penultimate trip); he had obviously carried a diary on each of his expeditions, jotting down observations. Many of them were replete with maps and surveying calculations. On the inside covers were the poems he had copied down in order to read in the jungle when he was alone and desperate. One seemed meant for Nina:

Fawcett had also scribbled down lines from Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s “Solitude”:

Many of the diaries were filled with the mundane, from someone with no expectation of history: “9 July . . . Sleepless night. . . Much rain and wet through by midday . . . 11 July . . . Heavy rain from midnight. Reached [camp] on trail, caught fish . . . 17 July . . . swimming across for balsa.” Then, suddenly, a casual remark revealed the harrowing nature of his existence: “Feel very bad . . . Took 1 [vial] of morphine last night to rest from foot pain. It produced a violent stomachache and had to put finger down throat to relieve.”

A loud noise sounded in the other room and I looked up. It was Isabelle playing a video game on the computer. I picked up another of the books. It had a lock to protect the contents. “That’s his ‘Treasure Book,’ ” Rolette said. The lock was unfastened, and inside were stories Fawcett had collected of buried treasures, like Galla-pita-Galla, and maps of their suspected locations: “In that cave is a treasure, the existence of which is known to me and to me alone.”

In later diaries, as he developed his case for Z, Fawcett made more archaeological notations. There were drawings of strange hieroglyphics. The Botocudo Indians, now virtually extinct, had told him a legend of a city “enormously rich in gold—so much so as to blaze like fire.” Fawcett added, “It is just conceivable this may be Z.” As he seemed to be nearing his goal, he became more secretive. In the 1921 log, he outlined a “code” he had apparently devised, with his wife, to send messages:

Poring through the log, I noticed a word on the margins of one page: “DEAD.” I looked at it more closely and saw two other words alongside it. They spelled out “DEAD HORSE CAMP.” Underneath them were coordinates, and I quickly flipped through my notebook where I had scribbled down the position of the camp from
Exploration Fawcett.
They were significantly different.

For hours, I went through the diaries, taking notes. I thought there was nothing left to glean, when Rolette appeared and said that she wanted to show me one more item. She vanished into the back room, and I could hear her rummaging through drawers and cabinets, muttering to herself. After several minutes, she emerged with a photograph from a book. “I don’t know where I put it,” she said. “But I can at least show you a picture of it.”

It was a photograph of Fawcett’s gold signet ring, which was engraved with the family motto,
“Nee Áspera Terrent”—
essentially, “Difficulties Be Damned.” In 1979, an Englishman named Brian Ridout, who was making a wildlife film in Brazil, heard rumors that the ring had turned up at a store in Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso. By the time Ridout tracked down the shop, the proprietor had died. His wife, however, searched through her possessions and found Colonel Fawcett’s ring. “It’s the last concrete item we have from the expedition,” Rolette said.

She said that she had been desperate to learn more and had once shown the ring to a psychic.

“Did you learn anything?” I asked.

She looked down at the picture, then up at me. “It had been bathed in blood.”

A
re you game?” Fawcett asked.

He was back in the jungle not long after his previous expedition, trying to persuade his new second-in-command, Frank Fisher, to explore the Rio Verde, along the Brazilian and Bolivian border.

Fisher, who was a forty-one-year-old English engineer and a member of the RGS, hesitated. The boundary commission had not contracted with the party to explore the Verde—it had asked the men to survey a region in southwest Brazil near Corumbá—but Fawcett insisted on also tracing the river, which was in such uncharted territory that nobody even knew where it began.

Finally, Fisher said, “Oh, I’ll come,” though he added, “Surely the contracts don’t call for it.”

It was only Fawcett’s second South American expedition, but it would prove critical to his understanding of the Amazon and to his evolution as a scientist. With Fisher and seven other recruits, he set out from Corumbá, trekking northwest more than four hundred miles, before shoving off on two makeshift wooden rafts. The rapids, fueled by rains and by
steep descents, were intense, and the rafts were propelled over precipices before tumbling down into the foam and rocks—the grinding roar—as the men hollered to hold on and Fawcett, eyes flashing, Stetson cocked, steered with a bamboo pole held to one side, so it wouldn’t spear his chest. Whitewater rafting was not yet a sport, but Fawcett anticipated it: “When . . . the enterprising traveler has to construct and manage his own balsa [raft], he will realize an exhilaration and excitement that few sports provide.” Still, it was one thing to ride the rapids of a familiar river, and another to descend unmarked chutes that might at any moment drop hundreds of feet. If a member of the party fell overboard, he could not grab onto a raft without capsizing it. The only honorable course was to drown.

The explorers paddled past the Ricardo Franco Hills, eerie sandstone plateaus that rose three thousand feet. “Time and the foot of man had not touched those summits,” Fawcett wrote. “They stood like a lost world, forested to their tops, and the imagination could picture the last vestiges of an age long vanished.” (Conan Doyle reportedly based the setting of
The Lost World
at least partly on these tablelands.)

As Fawcett and his team wound through the canyon, the rapids became impassable.

“What’ll we do now?” one of the men asked.

“There’s no help for it,” Fawcett said. “We must leave all we can’t carry on our back and follow the river’s course by land.”

Fawcett ordered the men to keep only their essential items: hammocks, rifles, mosquito nets, and surveying instruments.

What about our stores of food? Fisher asked.

Fawcett said they’d bring only enough rations for a few days. Then they’d have to live off the land, like the Indians whose fire they had seen burning in the distance.

Despite cutting, chopping, pulling, and pushing through jungle from morning till night, they usually advanced no more than half a mile per day. Their legs sank in mud. Their shoes disintegrated. Their eyes blurred from
a tiny species of bee that is drawn to sweat, and that invaded their pupils. (Brazilians called the bees “eye lickers.”) Still, Fawcett counted his paces and crawled up banks to better see the stars and to fix their position, as if reducing the wilderness to figures and diagrams might enable him to overcome it. His men didn’t need such signposts. They knew where they were: the green hell.

The men were supposed to conserve their rations, but most broke down and consumed them quickly. By the ninth day of marching, the expedition had run out of food. It was now that Fawcett discovered what explorers since Orellana had learned and what would become the basis of the scientific theory of a counterfeit paradise: in the world’s thickest jungle, it was hard to find a morsel to eat.