The Lost City of Z (10 page)

Y
ou can’t just go like that,” my wife said.

I looked down at the bed, where I had laid out some shorts and a pair of Adidas sneakers. “I’ve got a Swiss Army knife,” I said. “You’re not giving me a whole lot of confidence.” The next day, at her prodding, I tried to find a place where I could purchase more suitable gear. Friends directed me to one of the many stores in Manhattan that cater to the growing number of hikers, off-road bikers, extreme-sports junkies, and weekend warriors. The store was virtually the size of an industrial warehouse, and, as I stepped inside, I was overwhelmed. There were rainbow-colored tents and banana-hued kayaks and mauve mountain bikes and neon snowboards dangling from the ceilings and walls. Whole aisles were devoted to insect repellents, freeze-dried foods, lip balms, and sunscreens. A separate section existed for footwear (“Gurus can lead you to a perfect fit!” a sign said), which didn’t include an additional space for “spring loaded ratchet binding” snowshoes. There was an area for “adrenaline socks” and one for Techwick “skivvies.” Racks held magazines like
Hooked on the Outdoors
and
Backpacker: The Outdoors at Your Doorstep,
which had articles titled “Survive a Bear Attack!” and “America’s Last Wild Places: 31 Ways to Find Solitude, Adventure—and Yourself.” Wherever I turned, there were customers, or “gear heads.” It was as if the fewer the opportunities for genuine exploration, the greater the means were for anyone to attempt it, and the more baroque the ways—bungee cording, snow-boarding—that people found to replicate the sensation. Exploration, however, no longer seemed aimed at some outward discovery; rather, it was directed inward, to what guidebooks and brochures called “camping and wilderness therapy” and “personal growth through adventure.”

I was standing in bewilderment before a glass case filled with several watch-like contraptions when a young attendant with long, lean arms appeared from behind the counter. He had the glow of someone who had recently returned from Mount Everest.

“Can I help you with something?” he asked.

“What’s that thing there?” I asked.

“Oh, that rocks.” He slid open the counter door and removed the item. “It’s a little computer. See? It’ll give you the temperature wherever you are. And the altitude. It’s also got a digital compass, clock, alarm, and chronometer. You can’t beat it.”

I asked how much it was, and he said about two hundred dollars, though I wouldn’t regret it.

“And what’s that?” I asked, pointing to another gadget.

“Pretty much the same deal. Only that one monitors your heart rate, too. Plus, it’s a great logbook. It’ll store all the data you want to put in about weather, distances, rates of ascent—you name it. What kind of trip you planning anyway?”

When I explained, as best I could, my intentions, he seemed enthusiastic, and I thought of one Fawcett seeker from the 1930s who had classified people based on their reactions to his plans:

The salesman seemed like the Romantic type. He asked how long I intended to go, and I said I didn’t know—at least a month, probably more.

“Awesome. Awesome. That should let you get immersed in the place.” He seemed to be thinking of something. Then he asked if it was true that some catfish in the Amazon, called a candiru, “you know, that
it—
”

He didn’t finish his question, though he didn’t have to. I had read about the almost translucent, toothpick-like creature in
Exploration Fawcett.
More feared than piranhas, it is one of the few creatures in the world to survive strictly on a diet of blood. (It is also called the “vampire fish of Brazil.”) Ordinarily, it burrows in the gills of a fish and sucks its blood, but it also strikes human orifices—a vagina or an anus. It is, perhaps, most notorious for lodging in a man’s penis, where it latches on irrevocably with its spines. Unless removed, it means death, and in the remote Amazon victims are reported to have been castrated in order to save them. Fawcett,
who had seen a candiru that had been surgically extricated from a man’s urethra, said, “Many deaths result from this fish, and the agony it can cause is excruciating.”

When I told the salesman what I knew about the candiru, he seemed to transform from the Romantic into the Practical. Although there was little to protect someone from such a creature, he told me about one gizmo after another that was revolutionizing the art of camping: a tool that was a digital thermometer, a flashlight, a magnifying glass, and a whistle; compression sacks that shrank everything inside; Swiss Army knives with a computer flash drive to store photographs and music; water-purifying bottles that doubled as lanterns; portable solar-powered hot showers; kayaks that folded into the size of a duffel bag; a floating flashlight that didn’t need batteries; parkas that converted into sleeping bags; poleless tents; a tablet that “destroys viruses and bacteria in 15 minutes.”

The more he explained things, the more emboldened I became. I can do this, I thought, piling several of the most James Bond–like items into my basket. Finally, the salesman said, “You’ve never camped before, have you?”

He then helped me find the things that I’d really need, including comfortable hiking boots, a sturdy backpack, synthetic clothes, freeze-dried food, and a mosquito net. I also tossed in a handheld Global Positioning System just to be safe. “You’ll never get lost again,” he said.

I thanked him profusely, and when I got back to our apartment building I carried the equipment into the elevator. I hit the second-floor button. Then, as the door was about to close, I extended my hand to stop it. I got out and, hauling the stuff in my arms, walked up the stairs instead.

That night, after I put my son, Zachary, to sleep, I laid out all the things I planned to take on the trip and began to pack them. Among the items was a file I had made with copies of the most important Fawcett documents and papers. As I flipped through them, I paused at a letter that
detailed something, in Brian Fawcett’s words, so “ hush-hush” that his father “never spoke of its objects” to anyone. After receiving his diploma from the Society, the letter said, Fawcett had been given his first assignment, in 1901, from the British government. He was to go to Morocco— not as an explorer but as a spy.

I
t was the perfect cover. Go in as a cartographer, with maps and telescope and high-powered binoculars. Survey your target the way you surveyed the land. Observe everything: people, places, conversations. In his diary, Fawcett had jotted down a list of things that his British handler—someone he called simply “James”—had asked him to assess: “nature of trails . . . villages . . . water . . . army and organization . . . arms and guns. . . political.” Wasn’t an explorer really just an infiltrator, someone who penetrated alien lands and returned with secrets? In the nineteenth century, the British government had increasingly recruited agents from the ranks of explorers and mapmakers. It was a way not only to sneak people into foreign territories with plausible deniability but also to tap recruits skilled in collecting the sensitive geographical and political data that the government most coveted. British authorities transformed the Survey of India Department into a full-time intelligence operation. Cartographers were trained to use cover stories and code names (“Number One,” “The Pundit,” “The Chief Pundit”), and, when entering lands forbidden to Westerners, to wear elaborate disguises. In Tibet, many surveyors dressed
as Buddhist monks and employed prayer beads to measure distances (each sliding bead represented a hundred paces) and prayer wheels to conceal compasses and slips of paper for notations. They also installed trapdoors in their trunks to hide larger instruments, like sextants, and poured mercury, essential for operating an artificial horizon, into their pilgrim’s begging bowls. The Royal Geographical Society was often aware of, if not complicit in, such activities—its ranks were scattered with current and former spies, including Francis Younghusband, who served as president of the Society from 1919 to 1922.

In Morocco, Fawcett was participating in an African version of what Rudyard Kipling, referring to the colonial competition for supremacy over central Asia, called “the Great Game.” Scribbling in his secret scrolls, Fawcett wrote that he “chatted” with a Moroccan official who was “full of information.” When venturing beyond the main desert routes, where tribes kidnapped or murdered foreign trespassers, Fawcett later noted, “some sort of Moorish disguise is considered necessary, and even then the journey is attended with very great risk.” Fawcett managed to insinuate himself into the royal court to spy on the sultan himself. “The Sultan is young and weak in character,” he wrote. “Personal pleasure is the first consideration, and time is passed bicycle trick riding, at which he is a considerable adept, in playing with motorcars, mechanical toys, photography, billiards, pig sticking on bicycles, feeding his menagerie.” All this information Fawcett delivered to “James” and then returned to England in 1902. It was the only time Fawcett acted as an official spy, but his cunning and powers of observation caught the attention of Sir George Taubman Goldie, a British colonial administrator who in 1905 became president of the Royal Geographical Society.

In early 1906, Goldie summoned Fawcett, who, since his Morocco trip, had been stationed in several military garrisons, most recently in Ireland. Goldie was not someone to trifle with. Famous for his keen intelligence and volatile temper, he had almost single-handedly imposed the British Empire’s control over Niger, in the 1880s and 1890s. He had
shocked Victorian society by running off to Paris with a governess, and was an unrepentant atheist who championed Darwin’s theory of evolution. “[He] was lashed into frenzies of impatience by stupidity, or incompetence,” one of his biographers wrote. “Never did man suffer fools less gladly.”

Fawcett was led into the RGS to see Goldie, whose blue eyes seemed to “bore holes into one,” as a subordinate once put it. Goldie, who was nearly sixty, always carried in his pocket a tube of poison, which he planned to take if he ever became physically handicapped or incurably ill. As Fawcett recalled, Goldie asked him, “Do you know anything about Bolivia?”

When Fawcett said no, Goldie continued, “One usually thinks of Bolivia as a country on the roof of the world. A great deal of it is in the mountains; but beyond the mountains, to the east, lies an enormous area of tropical forest and plains.” Goldie reached into his desk and pulled out a large map of Bolivia, which he spread before Fawcett like a tablecloth. “Here you are, Major—here’s about as good a map of the country as I have! Look at this area! It’s full of blank spaces.” As Goldie traced his finger over the map, he explained that the area was so unexplored that Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru could not even agree on their borders: they were simply speculative lines sketched through mountains and jungles. In 1864, boundary disputes between Paraguay and its neighbors had erupted into one of the worst conflicts in Latin American history. (About half the Paraguayan population was killed.) Because of the extraordinary economic demand for rubber—“black gold”—which was abundant in the region, the stakes over the Amazon delimitation were equally fraught. “A major conflagration could arise out of this question of what territory belongs to whom,” Goldie said.

“All this is most interesting,” Fawcett interrupted. “But what has it got to do with me?”

Goldie said that the countries had established a boundary commission and were seeking an impartial observer from the Royal Geographical Society to map the borders in question—beginning with an area between
Bolivia and Brazil that comprised several hundred miles in nearly impassable terrain. The expedition would take up to two years, and there was no guarantee that its members would survive. Disease was rampant in the region, and the Indians, who had been attacked mercilessly by rubber trappers, murdered interlopers. “Would you be interested in taking it on?” Goldie asked.