The Lost City of Z (18 page)

He recalled how he had told his son, James, Jr., to try to sleep, and how he, too, eventually collapsed from exhaustion. He wasn’t sure how long he had nodded off, he said, when he opened his eyes and saw, in the morning sunlight, the tip of a spear flickering in the forest.

He turned around and saw another gleaming point, as more and more Indian men, all armed, emerged from the forest. There were over a hundred of them. James, Jr., who had also been woken up by the noise, whispered, “They’re everywhere.”

“I told him everything was going to be okay, though I knew it wasn’t,” Lynch recalled.

As the tribesmen formed a circle around Lynch and his son, five older Indians, who appeared to be chiefs, sat down on wooden stumps in front of the group. “That’s when I knew our fate was about to be determined,” Lynch said.

The young Indian who had led the original assault stepped forward and argued angrily before what appeared to be a council; occasionally, after he made a point, several Indians pounded their wooden clubs in assent.

Others addressed the chiefs, and every so often an Indian, who spoke some broken Portuguese, translated for the benefit of Lynch and his group, explaining that they were being accused of trespassing. The negotiations went on for two days. “There would be these endless hours of debate, and we didn’t know what was going on,” Lynch recalled, “and then this translator would sum up everything in a single sentence. It was, like,
bam,
‘They will tie you over the river and let the piranhas eat you.’ Or,
bam,
‘They shall cover you in honey and let the bees sting you to death.’ ”

Just then the door to Lynch’s office opened and a young man walked in. He had a round, handsome face. “This is my son, James, Jr.,” Lynch said.

He was now twenty-five and engaged to be married. When James, Jr., learned that we were discussing the Fawcett expedition, he said, “You know, I had a lot of romantic notions about the jungle and this kind of finished that.”

Lynch said that the tribe began to target his son, touching and taunting him, and Lynch thought about telling him to bolt into the forest, though death there was no less certain. Then Lynch noticed that four of the chiefs seemed to defer to a fifth one, who appeared to be the least swayed by the violent exhortations. As several Indians indicated that they intended to tie up his son and kill him, Lynch rose anxiously and approached the fifth chief. Relying on the Indian translator, Lynch said that he was sorry if his men had offended his people in any way. Assuming the role of a chief, Lynch said, he began to negotiate directly with him and agreed to hand over his group’s boats and equipment in exchange for the party’s release. The elderly chief turned and spoke to the council for several minutes, and, as he did, the Indians became more riled. Then the council fell quiet, and the commanding chief said something to Lynch in an unflinching voice. Lynch waited for the translator, who seemed to struggle to find the words. Finally, he said, “We accept your gifts.”

Before the council could change its mind, Lynch obtained his radio, which had been confiscated by the tribe, to send an SOS with his coordinates,
and a bush plane was dispatched to rescue them. The value of the ransom came to thirty thousand dollars.

Lynch said that he was the last member of the party to be released and that it wasn’t until he boarded the plane and was safely in the air that he thought about Colonel Fawcett again. He wondered if Fawcett and his son had also been taken hostage, and if they had tried and failed to proffer a ransom. Looking out the airplane window, Lynch recalled, he could see the embankment where he and his team had been held for three days. The Indians were gathering their things, and Lynch watched as they faded into the forest.

“I don’t think anyone will ever solve the mystery of Fawcett’s disappearance,” Lynch said. “It’s impossible.”

On a computer on Lynch’s desk, I noticed a satellite image of jagged mountains. To my surprise, it was for Lynch’s next expedition. “I leave in two days. We’re going to the top of the Andes.”

“Not me,” James, Jr., said. “I have a wedding to plan.”

James, Jr., said goodbye to me and left the room, and Lynch talked about his upcoming adventure. “We’re looking for this plane that crashed in the Andes in 1937,” he said. “No one’s ever been able to find the thing.” He sounded excited, when, in the midst of his explanation, he stopped and said, “Don’t tell my son, but I wouldn’t mind tagging along with you. If you find anything about Z, you must tell me. Please.”

I said I would. Before I left, Lynch offered some advice. “First, you need a top-notch guide, someone who has ties to the tribes in the area,” he said. “Second, you need to go in as quietly as possible. Fawcett was right: too big a party only calls attention to itself.” He warned me to be careful. “Remember: My son and I were lucky. Most of these Fawcett expeditions never come back.”

T
here was no epiphany, no bolt of lightning. Rather, the theory developed over time, with a clue here and a clue there, in fits and starts and with unexpected turns, the trail of evidence reaching as far back as his days in Ceylon. At Fort Frederick, Fawcett had first learned that it was possible for a great kingdom to seclude itself in the jungle and, after time had taken its inexorable toll, for its palaces and thoroughfares to vanish under creeping vines and roots. But the notion of Z—of a lost civilization concealed in the Amazon—began truly to take hold when Fawcett encountered the hostile Indians he had been warned to avoid at all costs.

In 1910, he was riding in canoes with Costin and several other companions, exploring an unknown part of the Heath River in Bolivia, when seven-foot-long poisonous arrows started to rain down, boring into the side of the canoe. A Spanish friar once described watching a companion who had been hit by such a weapon: “The moment that it struck him he felt a great pain . . . for the foot in which he had been wounded turned very black, and the poison gradually made its way up through the leg, like a living thing, without its being possible to head it off, although they applied
many cauteries to it with fire . . . and when it had mounted to his heart, he died, being in great pain until the third day, when he gave his soul to God, who had created it.”

A member of Fawcett’s team dived into the water, shouting, “Retire! Retire!” But Fawcett insisted on pulling the boats to the opposite bank, as arrows continued to cascade from the sky. “One of these came within a foot of my head, and I actually saw the face of the savage who fired it,” Costin later recalled. Fawcett ordered his men to drop their rifles, but the barrage of arrows persisted. And so Fawcett instructed one of the men, as further demonstration of their peaceful intentions, to pull out his accordion and play it. The rest of the party, commanded to stand and face their deaths without protest, sang along as Costin, first in a trembling voice, then more fervently, called out the words to “The Soldiers of the Queen”: “In the fight for England’s glory, lads / Of its world wide glory let us sing.”

Fawcett then did something that shocked Costin so much that he would recall it vividly even as an old man: the major untied the handkerchief around his neck and, waving it above his head, waded into the river, heading directly into the fusillade of arrows. Over the years, Fawcett had picked up scraps of Indian dialects, scribbling the words in his logbooks and studying them at night, and he called out the few fragments of vocabulary he knew, repeating
friend, friend, friend,
not sure if the word that he was shouting was even right, as the water from the river rose to his armpits. Then the arrows ceased. For a moment, no one moved as Fawcett stood in the river, hands above his head, like a penitent being baptized. According to Costin, an Indian appeared from behind a tree and came down to the edge of the river. Paddling out toward Fawcett in a raft, he took the handkerchief from Fawcett’s hand. “The Major made signs for him to be taken across,” Costin later recounted in a letter to his daughter, and the Indian “poled back to his side with Fawcett kneeling on his flimsy craft.”

“On climbing the opposite bank,” Fawcett said, “I had an unpleasant anticipation of receiving a shot in the face or an arrow in the stomach.”

The Indians led him away. “[Fawcett] disappeared into the forest,
and we were left wondering!” Costin said. The party feared that its leader had been slaughtered until, nearly an hour later, he emerged from the jungle with an Indian cheerfully wearing his Stetson.

In such fashion, Fawcett made friends with a group of Guarayos. “[They] helped us to make camp, remaining in it all night and giving us yucca, bananas, fish, necklaces, parrots, and in fact of all they had,” Fawcett wrote in one of his dispatches.

Fawcett did not carry a craniometer and relied instead on his eyes to record observations of the Indians. He had been accustomed to meeting tribes that had been conquered by whites and acculturated by force, their members weakened by disease and brutality. By contrast, these hundred and fifty or so forest Indians seemed robust. “The men are finely developed, and of a warm brown, black haired, good looking and well clothed in dyed cotton shirts, plenty of which were in course of manufacture in their huts,” Fawcett wrote. He was struck by the fact that, unlike the emaciated explorers, they had substantial resources of food. One Guarayo crushed a plant with a stone and let its juice spill into a stream, where it formed a milky cloud. “After a few minutes a fish came to the surface, swimming in a circle, mouth gaping, then turned on its back apparently dead,” Costin recalled. “Soon there were a dozen fish floating belly up.” They had been poisoned. A Guarayo boy waded into the water and picked out the fattest ones for eating. The quantity of poison only stunned them and posed no risk to humans when the fish were cooked; equally remarkable, the fish that the boy had left in the water soon returned to life and swam away unharmed. The same poison was often used for toothaches. The Indians, Fawcett was discovering, were masters of pharmacology, adept at manipulating their environment to suit their needs, and he concluded that the Guarayos were “a most intelligent race of people.”

After his 1910 expedition, Fawcett, suspecting that the Indians of the Amazon held secrets long overlooked by historians and ethnologists, started to seek out various tribes, no matter how fierce their reputation. “There are problems to solve out here . . . which shout for someone to
undertake them,” he informed the RGS. “But experience is essential. It is a folly to enter the unexplored parts without it—and in these days suicide.” In 1911, he resigned from the boundary commission to pursue inquiries into the burgeoning new field of anthropology. Once, not far from the Heath River, Fawcett was sitting with Costin and the rest of his team eating when a band of Indians encircled them with drawn bows. “Without any hesitation,” Costin wrote, “Fawcett dropped his belt and machete, to show he was unarmed, and advanced toward them, hands above his head. There was a slight pause in doubt and then one of ‘los barbaros’ [the savages] put down his arrows and walked to meet him. We had made friends with the Echojas!”

Over time, this became Fawcett’s signature approach. “Whenever he came upon the savages,” Costin said, “he would walk slowly towards them . . . with hands stretched in the air.” As with his method of traveling in radically small parties, without protection from armed soldiers, his means of establishing relations with tribes, some of which had never before seen a white man, struck many as both heroic and suicidal. “I know, from persons who have informed me, how he crossed the river in front of a whole tribe of hostile savages, and simply by his bravery induced them to cease firing, and accompanied them to their village,” a Bolivian official reported to the Royal Geographical Society of Fawcett’s meeting with the Guarayos. “I must say they are indeed very hostile, because I have been among them myself, and in 1893 General Pando not only lost some of his men, but also lost his nephew, and the engineer, Mr. Muller, who, tired of the journey, decided to cross from one of the rivers up to the Modeidi, and up to this day we have not heard anything about them.”

Fawcett’s ability to succeed where so many others failed contributed to a growing myth of his invincibility, which he himself began to believe. How could one explain, he wondered, “standing deliberately in front of savages with whom it was vital to make friends, arrows fixing past one’s head, between one’s legs, even between arm and body, for several minutes, and yet being untouched”? Nina also thought that he was indestructible.

Once, after he had approached a hostile Indian tribe with his modus operandi, she informed the RGS, “His encounter with the savages and the way he handled them is one of the bravest episodes I have ever heard of— and I am glad he behaved as he did—personally, I have no fears whatever regarding his safety, for I am so certain that on occasions like that he will do the right thing.”

Costin wrote that on their five expeditions Fawcett invariably made friends with the tribes they met. There was, however, one exception. In 1914, Fawcett sought out a group of Maricoxis in Bolivia, of whom the other Indians in the area had told him to be wary. When he made his usual overtures, the Indians reacted violently. As they came in for the kill, Fawcett’s men pleaded for permission to use their guns. We
must
fire, Costin yelled.