The Atlantis Blueprint (12 page)

On his way back to Bahia, Dias discovered that the King had no intention of keeping his half of the bargain. When he persuaded an officer to let him see the sealed patent of nobility, he was infuriated to discover that the document would merely confer the rank of captain in the army. Dias knew that he was in a dangerous position. If he refused to hand over the silver mines, he would be imprisoned by the governor, Dom Francisco de Souza, a haughty aristocrat who disliked being
frustrated. So Dias played for time, and led the governor’s expedition on a wild-goose chase. The governor, finally realising he had been outwitted, threw Dias into prison, where he remained for two years until he managed to buy his freedom. He died shortly thereafter, and the location of the mines of Muribeca remained a secret.

Many adventurers set off into the wilderness in search of the lost silver mines, and the government also sponsored expeditions called bandeiras, or ‘flags’, the members of which were known as bandeiristas. In 1753, more than a century after the death of Roberio Dias, a group of six Portuguese bandeiristas set out on a well-equipped expedition with black slaves, native guides, and pack animals. They went inland, into the state of Minas Geraes, then made for the Central Plateau. There they vanished for many years, but Manuscript No. 512 describes their adventures in some detail. A full translation can be found in
Mysteries of Ancient South America
(1956) by Harold Wilkins.
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After years of wandering, the party eventually encountered a cordillera (mountain chain) largely composed of a mineral whose crystals glittered in the sun. At close quarters, the mountains were seen to consist of bare rock, with white streams plunging from the heights. They seemed to be practically impenetrable until one of the slaves saw a white deer that fled into a cleft. Pursuing it, he came across a road, which seemed to have been man-made. He fetched the others, and soon they were all ascending it, dazzled by the crystalline splendour of the mountains above them.

At the summit of the pass, they were able to look down on an open plain, and there, about 3 miles away, they saw a great city, so impressive that they assumed it must be connected with the court of Brazil. Afraid that they had been seen against the skyline and that the inhabitants might be hostile, they descended as quickly as possible to the valley then decided to wait to see what would happen. After two days of silence, they sent one of the natives on a scouting expedition. He returned
saying that he had seen no one, not even a footprint. The rest of the scouts then went ahead to investigate, and came back with the same story. The city seemed to be uninhabited.

At daybreak the next day, the whole party advanced cautiously and prepared for an ambush. The road led them to three great archways; the one in the centre, the tallest, had unknown letters engraved on it far above their heads. Beyond the arches was a wide road, with great houses whose facades were ‘blackened with age’. Everything was silent and deserted. There were broken pillars, with parasitic vegetation growing from the cracks, and the buildings were roofed with stone slabs. When the bandeiristas ventured inside the rooms, they found that the floors were covered with debris and bat droppings to a depth that suggested that these buildings had been abandoned many centuries ago.

In the middle of the city they came to a vast square, in the centre of which was a black stone column with a statue of a man who pointed towards the north. Carved obelisks of black stone stood at each corner of the square. On one side of the plaza was a magnificent building, whose roof had partly collapsed. Ruined steps ran up to a wide hall, and the walls showed traces of coloured frescoes. This place was also full of bats, and the smell of their droppings made them cough.

Beyond the main square, the city was a ruin, with mounds of earth and chasms in the ground. It was obvious that this place had been devastated by an earthquake. The city was bounded by a deep and wide river, on the far side of which were green fields with many flowers. They could also see lakes with flocks of geese.

They decided to follow the river downstream, and after three days came to a huge waterfall, beyond which the river spread so wide that it ‘appeared to be a great ocean’. There were several tree-covered islands and an abundance of game. They also saw big anacondas and poisonous snakes.

To the east of the river they found great holes that could have been mine shafts, and one was covered with a huge
flagstone with certain symbols carved into it. Near the ‘mines’ they found some abandoned bars of silver.

There was also a ruined temple with more of the strange letters above its portico, as well as the ruins of a ‘country house’. Looking inside, they found a stairway built of coloured stone leading to a large hall, with rooms opening out from it. Each of these rooms contained the remains of a fountain.

They continued downriver, and the narrator became convinced that they were in the vicinity of rich mines – perhaps the legendary mines of Muribeca. A scouting party ventured on for nine days, and at a place where the river spread out so wide that it was like ‘a great bay’ they saw a canoe manned by ‘two white persons with long, flowing black hair, dressed like Europeans…’ When they fired a gunshot to attract attention, the canoers paddled off in the opposite direction.

The narrator mentioned that one of their company, a man called Joao Antonio, found a large gold coin with an image of a kneeling youth on one side. No doubt, he said, there were other such coins to be found under the rubble of the dead city.

The party decided that they had better make their way back to civilisation. At the Paraguassu River, the narrator wrote their story – and presumably sent an Indian messenger ahead with it. He concluded by begging the governor to keep its contents secret, lest someone else should mount an expedition before they could.

What happened to the group of Portuguese and their slaves and guides is unknown; all that we know is that the manuscript disappeared into the archives, became partly eaten by insects, and was found eventually by a Brazilian archivist in 1841, almost a century after it had been written.
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Harold Wilkins, a British author who wrote in a pleasantly old-fashioned style but whose books were excellently researched, obtained his transcript of the document in 1939 with the help of the American consul-general in Rio de

Janeiro, W. G. Burdett. Colonel Fawcett had seen it at least twenty years earlier, and concluded that it was a truthful and accurate account.

A reader’s first reaction to the tale of a journey to a lost city is that it is probably fiction, but both Fawcett and Wilkins saw the manuscript, and the travel writer Peter Fleming, who tried to follow in Fawcett’s footsteps (and describes it in
Brazilian Adventure,
1933),
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quoted its archive reference, No. 512.

Percy Harrison Fawcett, born in Devon in 1867, joined the Royal Artillery and in his twenties served at Trincomallee, in Ceylon, where he became interested in Buddhism and spent his leaves in a search for the lost treasure of the Kandyan kings. On the whole Fawcett disliked the army, so when, in 1906, the President of the Royal Geographical Society asked him how he felt about the idea of going to Bolivia to map the north-eastern frontier, Fawcett accepted eagerly on condition that the army would agree to lend him to the Bolivian government. His story of these adventurous years was told in his posthumous book
Expedition Fawcett,
edited by his son Brian.
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He described encounters with poisonous spiders, snakes, vampire bats, even wild bulls, which they were forced to kill. Searching for the source of the River Verde, the whole party ran out of food and starved for twenty-three days. They were all close to death when a deer suddenly appeared. Fawcett was so weak he could scarcely lift his rifle, but by what he regarded as a miracle he killed it. They ate the whole deer, including the fur and skin.

It was during this expedition that Fawcett tried to take a short cut over flat-topped hills covered with forest, but he was finally forced to return to the valley. It was his story of this forest-covered plateau that inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write
The Lost World.
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Fawcett returned to England to serve in Intelligence during the First World War, emerging with a Distinguished Service Order; then he went back to South America, hot on the trail of
the lost city of the bandeiristas. In 1920 floods caused him to turn back from an expedition into the Matto Grosso (Great Forest) of Brazil.

Fawcett had no doubt of the existence of Atlantis. Although he accepted that the continent had sunk beneath the waves, as Plato describes, he was convinced that many of the inhabitants had escaped to South America. He wrote in
Exploration Fawcett:

Fawcett stated his belief – remarkable for that time – that ‘the curse of a great cataclysm’13 fell on South America, and he seemed to accept that this was the catastrophe that destroyed Plato’s Atlantis. ‘There can be little doubt that a cataclysm of such dimensions produced tidal waves and minor catastrophes throughout the world.’ It caused ‘the rising of the Andes’ and brought to South America a people who were ‘expert in the arts of civilisation’. Fawcett’s conclusions were remarkably similar to those we have reached in this book.

The survivors also built cities like the one discovered by the 1743 expedition. ‘The existence of the old cities I do not for a moment doubt,’ says Fawcett. ‘How could I? I myself have seen a portion of one of them – and that is why I observed that it was imperative for me to go again. The remains seemed to be those of an outpost of one of the biggest cities…’
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This raises an interesting question. Why does he seem unsure? It seems likely that the rest of the city was completely covered by the jungle, like those lost Mayan cities discovered by Stephens and Catherwood in the 1830s. This means, in turn, that Fawcett knew where to look for a lost city, although
it emerges from his book that he thought there were many of them.

He determined to go and find at least one of them, but his objective on that last expedition was not apparently the deserted city of 1753 discovered by the bandeiristas. He had heard of ‘clothed natives of European appearance’, who avoided all contact with the outside world. ‘Our destination on the next expedition – I call it “Z” for the sake of convenience – is a city reputed to be inhabited, possibly by some of these timid people…’ This implies three different cities: the deserted city of 1753, the city whose outskirts he observed, and ‘Z’. No wonder Fawcett was determined to return to Brazil.

He left England for South America once more, spending the years from 1921 to 1924 raising the money for the expedition. When an American ‘fund-raiser’ squandered most of this on a six-week orgy of drunkenness, Fawcett set to work again, and finally had sufficient funds to continue.

It was not to be an elaborate expedition; there was only Fawcett, his twenty-one-year-old son Jack and a young Devon friend of Jack called Raleigh Rimell. They had to be prepared to carry their equipment on their backs.

The greatest danger would be after they had reached Cuyaba (now spelled Cuiaba), the capital of the Matto Grosso, by boat, then made their way north to the unknown region between the rivers Xingu and Araguaya. Fawcett believed ‘Z’ lay to the east of this. In the manuscript later published by his son, Fawcett left fairly exact directions: first of all, he explained, he wanted to visit an ancient stone tower, to solve the mystery of why its doors and windows were lit up at night, terrifying the local Indians.

Although Fawcett gave the precise latitude and longitude of the ‘deserted city’ of the bandeiristas, his son Brian, in a footnote, added: ‘I have personally investigated the bearings he gives for the 1753 city, and can state authoritatively that it is not there.’16 It would seem that, for whatever reason, Fawcett gave the wrong co-ordinates – an odd mistake for a man who was so meticulous.

By 20 May 1925 they had reached the village of the Bacairy, north of Cuiabo.
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They were still experiencing inconvenience rather than danger – the man who had sold them mules had cheated them, and Jack’s leg had swelled with a tick bite, so they had to stay at the farm of a friend to recover. The chief of the Bacairy told them that he had always hoped to make the journey to the ‘great waterfall’.

Then, after staying in a village of the Nafqua – where Fawcett had in 1920 presented the chief with a uniform case18 – they went by river to a village of the Kalapalo on the River Kuluene. And there, on 29 May 1925, their trail comes to an end. The Kalapalo later claimed that Fawcett’s party had struck out across country to the east, and that the smoke of their camp fires had been visible for five days, but in 1951 the chief of the Kalapalo, Izarari, made a deathbed confession to killing Fawcett and his companions. He claimed that Fawcett had slapped his face when he had refused carriers,
and that he had clubbed him to death; the other two, he said, had been killed defending Fawcett.