The Lost City of Z (5 page)

As Charles Mann notes in his book
1491,
the anthropologist Allan R. Holmberg helped to crystallize the popular and scientific view of Amazonian Indians as primitives. After studying members of the Sirionó tribe in Bolivia in the early 1940s, Holmberg described them as among “the most culturally backward peoples of the world,” a society so consumed by the quest for food that it had developed no art, religion, clothes, domesticated animals, solid shelter, commerce, roads, or even the ability to count beyond three. “No records of time are kept,” Holmberg said, “and no type of calendar exists.” The Sirionó didn’t even have a “concept of romantic” love. They were, he concluded, “man in the raw state of nature.” According to Meggers, a more sophisticated civilization from the Andes had migrated down to Marajó Island, at the mouth of the Amazon, only to slowly unravel and die out. For civilization, the Amazon was, in short, a death trap.

While looking into Z, I discovered that a group of revisionist anthropologists and archaeologists have increasingly begun to challenge these long-standing views, believing that an advanced civilization could have in fact emerged in the Amazon. In essence, they argue that the traditionalists have underestimated the power of cultures and societies to transform and
transcend their natural environments, much the way humans are now creating stations in outer space and growing crops in the Israeli desert. Some contend that the traditionalists’ ideas still carry a taint of the racist views of Native Americans, which had once infused earlier reductive theories of environmental determinism. The traditionalists, in turn, charge that the revisionists are an example of political correctness run amok, and that they perpetuate a long history of projecting onto the Amazon an imaginary landscape, a fantasy of the Western mind. At stake in the debate is a fundamental understanding of human nature and the ancient world, and the feud has pitted scholars viciously against each other. When I called Meggers at the Smithsonian Institution, she dismissed the possibility of anyone discovering a lost civilization in the Amazon. Too many archaeologists, she said, are “still chasing El Dorado.”

One acclaimed archaeologist from the University of Florida, in particular, disputes the conventional interpretation of the Amazon as a counterfeit paradise. His name is Michael Heckenberger, and he works in the Xingu region where Fawcett is believed to have vanished. Several anthropologists told me that he was the person I should talk to, but warned that he rarely emerges from the jungle and avoids any distractions from his work. James Petersen, who in 2005 was head of the anthropology department at the University of Vermont and had trained Heckenberger, told me, “Mike is absolutely brilliant and on the cutting edge of archaeology in the Amazon, but I’m afraid you’re barking up the wrong tree. Look, the guy was the best man at my wedding and I can’t get him to respond to any of my communications.”

With the University of Florida’s help, I eventually succeeded in reaching Heckenberger on his satellite phone. Through static and what sounded like the jungle in the background, he said that he was going to be staying in the Kuikuro village in the Xingu and, to my surprise, would be willing to meet me if I made it that far. Only later, as I began to piece together more of the story of Z, did I discover that this was the very place where James Lynch and his men had been kidnapped.

. . .

“YOU’RE GOING TO
the Amazon to try to find someone who disappeared two hundred years ago?” my wife, Kyra, asked. It was a January night in 2005, and she was standing in the kitchen of our apartment, serving cold sesame noodles from Hunan Delight.

“It was only eighty years ago.”

“So you’re going to look for someone who vanished
eighty
years ago?”

“That’s the basic idea.”

“How will you even know where to look?”

“I haven’t quite figured that part out yet.” My wife, who is a producer at
60 Minutes
and notably sensible, put the plates on the table, waiting for me to elaborate. “It’s not like I’ll be the first to go,” I added. “Hundreds of others have done it.”

“And what happened to them?”

I took a bite of the noodles, hesitating. “Many of them disappeared.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

I promised her that I would not rush into the Xingu, at least until I knew where to begin my route. Most recent expeditions had relied on the coordinates for Dead Horse Camp contained in
Exploration Fawcett,
but, given the colonel’s elaborate subterfuge, it seemed strange that the camp would be that easy to find. While Fawcett had taken meticulous notes about his expeditions, his most sensitive papers were believed to have been either lost or kept private by his family. Some of Fawcett’s correspondence and the diaries of members of his expeditions, however, had ended up in British archives. And so, before plunging into the jungle, I set out to England to see if I could uncover more about Fawcett’s zealously guarded route and the man who, in 1925, had seemingly vanished from the earth.

P
ercy Harrison Fawcett had rarely, if ever, felt so alive.

It was 1888, and he was a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant in the Royal Artillery. He had just received a month’s leave from his garrison in the British colony of Ceylon and was decked out in a crisp white uniform with gold buttons and a spiked helmet strapped under his chin. Even with a rifle and a sword, though, he looked like a boy—“the callowest” of young officers, as he called himself.

He went into his bungalow at Fort Frederick, which overlooked the shimmering blue harbor in Trincomalee. Fawcett, who was an inveterate dog lover, shared his room with seven fox terriers, which, in those days, often followed an officer into battle. He searched among the local artifacts cluttering his quarters for a letter he had stashed. There it was, with strange curling characters scrawled across the front in sepia ink. Fawcett had received the note from a colonial administrator, who had been given it by a village headman for whom he had done a favor. As Fawcett later wrote in his journal, a message, in English, was attached to the mysterious script and said that in the city of Badulla, in the interior of the island, was a
plain covered at one end with rocks. In Sinhalese, the spot was sometimes called Galla-pita-Galla—“Rock upon Rock.” The message went on:

Although Ceylon (today Sri Lanka) was renowned as “the jewel box of the Indian Ocean,” the colonial administrator had placed little credence in such an extravagant tale and passed the documents to Fawcett, who he thought might find them interesting. Fawcett had no idea what to make of them—they might well be poppycock. But, unlike most of the aristocratic officer corps, he had little money. “As an impecunious Artillery lieutenant,” he wrote, “the idea of treasure was too attractive to abandon.” It was also a chance to escape from the base and its white ruling caste, which mirrored upper-class English society—a society that, beneath its veneer of social respectability, had always contained for Fawcett a somewhat Dickensian horror.

His father, Captain Edward Boyd Fawcett, was a Victorian aristocrat who had been a member of the Prince of Wales’s inner circle and one of the empire’s great batsmen in cricket. But as a young man he had degenerated into alcoholism—his nickname was Bulb, because his nose had become so bulbous from liquor—and, in addition to philandering, he squandered the family’s wealth. Years later, a relative, straining to describe him in the best light, wrote that Captain Fawcett “possessed great abilities which found no true application—a good man gone wrong . . . A Balliol scholar and fine athlete . . . yachtsman, charmer and wit, equerry to the Prince of Wales (later to succeed Queen Victoria as Edward VII), he dissipated two substantial fortunes at court, neglected his wife and children . . .
and, in consequence of his dissolute ways and addiction to drink at the end of his short life, died of consumption aged forty-five.”

Percy’s mother, Myra Elizabeth, provided little refuge from this “disturbed” environment. “Her unhappy married life caused her much frustration and embitterment, inclining her to caprice and injustice, particularly towards her children,” the family member wrote. Percy later confided to Conan Doyle, with whom he corresponded, that his mother was all but “hateful.” Still, Percy tried to protect her reputation, along with his father’s, by alluding to them only obliquely in
Exploration Fawcett:
“Perhaps it was all for the best that my childhood . . . was so devoid of parental affection that it turned me in upon myself.”

With what money they had left, Fawcett’s parents sent him to Britain’s elite public schools—including Westminster—which were notorious for their harsh methods. Though Fawcett insisted that his frequent canings “did nothing to alter my outlook,” he was forced to conform to the Victorian notion of a gentleman. Dress was considered an unmistakable index of character, and he often wore a black frock coat and a waistcoat and, on formal occasions, tails and a top hat; immaculate gloves, prepared with stretcher and powder machines, were so essential that some men went through six pairs in a day. Years later, Fawcett complained that “the memorable horror of [such garments] still lingered from drab days at Westminster School.”

Reclusive, combative, and hypersensitive, Fawcett had to learn to converse about works of art (though never to flaunt his knowledge), to waltz without reversing himself, and to be unerringly proper in the presence of the opposite sex. Victorian society, fearful that industrialization was eroding Christian values, was obsessed with mastery over bodily instincts. There were crusades against obscene literature and “masturbatory disease,” and abstinence pamphlets disseminated in the countryside instructing mothers to “keep a watchful eye on the hayfields.” Doctors recommended “spiked penile rings” to restrain uncontrolled urges. Such
fervor contributed to Fawcett’s view of life as a never-ending war against the physical forces surrounding him. In later writings, he warned of “craving for sensual excitement” and “vices and desires” that are too often “concealed.”

Gentlemanliness, though, was about more than propriety. Fawcett was expected to be, as one historian wrote of the Victorian gentleman, “a natural leader of men . . . fearless in war.” Sports were considered the ultimate training for young men who would soon prove their mettle on distant battlefields. Fawcett became, like his father, a top-notch cricket player. Local newspaper accounts repeatedly hailed his “brilliant” play. Tall and lean, with remarkable hand-eye coordination, he was a natural athlete, but spectators noticed an almost maniacal determination about his style of play. One observer said that Fawcett invariably showed the bowlers that “it takes something more than the ordinary to dislodge him when once set.” When he took up rugby and boxing, he displayed the same stubborn ferocity; in one rugby match, he plowed through his opponents, even after his front teeth had been knocked out.

Already uncommonly tough, Fawcett was made even more so when he was dispatched, at the age of seventeen, to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, or “the Shop,” as it was known. Although Fawcett had no desire to be a soldier, his mother apparently forced him to go because she liked the splendid uniforms. The coldness of the Shop supplanted the coldness of his home. “Snookers”—new cadets like Fawcett—underwent hours of drills, and if they violated the code of a “gentleman cadet” they were flogged. Older cadets often made the younger ones “look out for squalls,” which meant sticking their naked arms and legs out an open window in the cold for hours. Or snookers were ordered to stand on two stacked stools balanced on top of a table as the bottom legs were kicked out from under them. Or their skin was pressed against a scalding poker. “The fashion of torture was often ingenious, and sometimes worthy of the most savage races,” a historian of the academy stated.

By the time Fawcett graduated, almost two years later, he had been
taught, as a contemporary put it, “to regard the risk of death as the most piquant sauce to life.” More important, he was trained to be an apostle of Western civilization: to go forth and convert the world to capitalism and Christianity, to transform pastures into plantations and huts into hotels, to introduce to those living in the Stone Age the marvels of the steam engine and locomotive, and to ensure that the sun never set on the British Empire.

N
OW, AS
F
AWCETT
slipped away from the secluded base in Ceylon with his treasure map in hand, he suddenly found himself amid verdant forests and crystalline beaches and mountains, and people dressed in colors that he had never seen before, not funereal blacks and whites like in London, but purples and yellows and rubies, all flashing and radiating and pulsating—a vista so astonishing that even the arch cynic Mark Twain, who visited the island around the same time period, remarked, “Dear me, it is beautiful!”