The Lost City of Z (6 page)

Fawcett hopped a ride on a cramped sailing vessel that, alongside the British battleships, was only a speck of wood and canvas. As the boat left the inlet, he could see Fort Frederick high on the bluff, its outer wall pocked with cannon holes from the late eighteenth century, when the British had tried to seize the promontory from the Dutch, who had previously seized it from the Portuguese. After traveling some eighty miles down the country’s eastern seaboard, the boat pulled in to port at Batticaloa, where canoes circulated around incoming ships. Sinhalese traders, shouting above the splash of the oars, would offer precious stones, especially to a sahib who, wearing a top hat and with a fob watch dangling from his vest, no doubt had pockets filled with sterling. Upon disembarking, Fawcett would have been surrounded by more merchants: some Sinhalese, some Tamils, some Muslims, all crowded in the bazaar, hawking fresh produce. The air was suffused with the aroma of dried tea leaves, the sweet scent of vanilla and cacao, and something more pungent—dried fish, only not with the usual rancid odor of the sea but laden with curry. And
there were people: astrologers, peddlers, dhobis, jaggery sellers, goldsmiths, tom-tom beaters, and beggars. To reach Badulla, about a hundred miles inland, Fawcett took a bullock cart, which rattled and groaned as the driver’s whip lashed against the bull’s flanks, prodding the beast up the mountain road, past rice fields and tea plantations. In Badulla, Fawcett asked a British plantation owner if he had heard of a place called Galla-pita-Galla.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything,” Fawcett recalled him saying. “There’s a ruin up there they call the ‘King’s Bath,’ which may once have been a tank [reservoir] or something, but as for rocks—why, dammit, it’s all rocks!” He recommended that Fawcett talk to a local headman named Jumna Das, a descendant of the Kandyan kings who ruled the country until 1815. “If anyone can tell you where Galla-pita-Galla is, it’s him,” the Englishman said.

That evening, Fawcett found Jumna Das, who was tall and elderly, with an elegant white beard. Das explained that the treasure of the Kandyan kings was rumored to have been buried in this region. There was no doubt, Das went on, that archaeological remains and mineral deposits lay around the foothills to the southeast of Badulla, perhaps near Galla-pita-Galla.

Fawcett was unable to locate the treasure, but the prospect of the jewels still glimmered in his mind. “Did the hound find its greatest pleasure in the chase or in the killing of its quarry?” he wondered. Later, he set out again with a map. This time, with the help of a team of hired laborers, he discovered a spot that seemed to resemble the cave described in the note. For hours, the men dug as mounds of earth formed around them, but all they uncovered were shards of pottery and a white cobra, which sent the workers scattering in terror.

Fawcett, despite his failure, relished his flight from everything he knew. “Ceylon is a very old country, and ancient peoples had more wisdom than we of today know,” Das told Fawcett.

That spring, after reluctantly returning to Fort Frederick, Fawcett
learned that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a nephew of the Austro-Hungarian emperor, was planning to visit Ceylon. A gala party was announced in Ferdinand’s honor, and many of the ruling elite, including Fawcett, turned out. The men wore long black dress coats and white silk cravats, the women billowing bustle skirts, with corsets pulled so tight they could barely breathe. Fawcett, who would have worn his most ceremonial dress, was a commanding and charismatic presence.

“He obviously did exert some fascination on women,” a relative observed. Once, at a charity event, a reporter noted that “the way the ladies obeyed him was a sight for a king.” Fawcett did not meet Ferdinand, but he spotted a more alluring figure, a girl who seemed no more than seventeen or eighteen, her skin pale, her long brown hair pinned atop her head, highlighting her exquisite features. Her name was Nina Agnes Paterson, and she was the daughter of a colonial magistrate.

Although Fawcett never acknowledged it, he must have felt some of the desires that so terrified him. (Among his papers he had kept a fortuneteller’s warning: “Your greatest dangers come through women, who are greatly attracted to you, and to whom you are greatly attracted, yet they more often bring you sorrow and boundless troubles than anything else.”) Not permitted by custom to approach Nina and ask her to dance, he had to find someone to officially present him, which he did.

Despite being bubbly and flighty, Nina was highly cultured. She spoke German and French, and had been tutored in geography, religious studies, and Shakespeare. She also shared some of Fawcett’s brashness (she advocated women’s rights) and independent curiosity (she liked to explore the island and read Buddhist texts).

The next day Fawcett wrote to his mother to tell her that he had met the ideal woman, “the only one I want to marry.” Nina lived with her family on the opposite end of the island, in Galle, in a large house filled with servants, and Fawcett made pilgrimages to court her. He began to call her “Cheeky,” in part, one family member said, because “she always had to have the last word;” she, in turn, called him “Puggy,” because of his tenacity.
“I was very happy and I had nothing but admiration for Percy’s character: an austere, serious and generous man,” Nina later told a reporter.

On October 29, 1890, two years after they met, Fawcett proposed. “My life would have no meaning without you,” he told her. Nina agreed immediately, and her family held a party to celebrate. But, according to relatives, some members of Fawcett’s family opposed the engagement and lied to Fawcett, telling him that Nina was not the lady he thought she was—in other words, that she was not a virgin. It is unclear why the family objected to the marriage and leveled such an allegation, but Fawcett’s mother appears to have been at the center of the machinations. In a letter years later to Conan Doyle, Fawcett implied that his mother had been “a silly old thing and an ugly old thing for being so hateful” to Nina, and that she had “a good deal to make up for.” At the time, though, Fawcett’s fury was unleashed not at his mother but at Nina. He wrote her a letter, saying, “You are not the pure young girl I thought you to be.” He then terminated their engagement.

For years, they had no more contact. Fawcett remained at the fort, where, high on the cliffs, he could see a pillar dedicated to a Dutch maiden who, in 1687, had leaped to her death after her fiancé deserted her. Nina, meanwhile, returned to Great Britain. “It took me a long time to recover from this blow,” she later told a reporter, though concealing the true reason for Fawcett’s decision. Eventually, she met a captain in the Army named Herbert Christie Prichard, who was either unaware of the charge against her or unwilling to cast her out. In the summer of 1897, the two wed. But five months later he collapsed from a cerebral embolism. As Nina put it, “Destiny cruelly struck me again for the second time.” Moments before he died, Prichard reputedly told her, “Go . . . and marry Fawcett! He is the real man for you.” By then, Fawcett had discovered his family’s deception and, according to one relative, wrote to Nina and “begged her to take him back.”

“I thought I had no love left for him,” Nina confessed. “I thought
that he had killed the passion I had for him with his brutish behavior.” But, when they met again, she could not bring herself to rebuff him: “We looked at each other and, invincibly this time, happiness jumped all over us. We had found each other again!”

On January 31, 1901, nine days after Queen Victoria died, ending a reign that lasted almost sixty-four years, Nina Paterson and Percy Harrison Fawcett were finally married, and eventually settled at the military garrison in Ceylon. In May 1903, their first child, Jack, was born. He looked like his father, only with his mother’s fairer skin and finer features. “A particularly beautiful boy,” Fawcett wrote. Jack seemed preternaturally gifted, at least to his parents. “He ran about at seven months old and talked freely at a year old,” Fawcett boasted. “He was and is, physically and intellectually, far ahead.”

Although Ceylon had become for his wife and son “an earthly paradise,” Fawcett began to chafe at the confines of Victorian society. He was too much of a loner, too ambitious and headstrong (“audacious to the point of rashness,” as one observer put it), too intellectually curious to fit within the officer corps. While his wife had dispelled some of his moodiness, he remained, as he put it, a “lone wolf,” determined to “seek paths of my own rather than take the well-trodden ways.”

These paths led him to one of the most unconventional figures to emerge in the Victorian era: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, or, as she was usually called, Madame Blavatsky. For a moment during the late nineteenth century, Blavatsky, who claimed to be psychic, seemed on the threshold of founding a lasting religious movement. Marion Meade, one of her most dispassionate biographers, wrote that during her lifetime people across the globe furiously debated whether she was “a genius, a consummate fraud, or simply a lunatic. By that time, an excellent case could have been made for any of the three.” Born in Russia in 1831, Blavatsky was short and fat, with bulging eyes and folds of skin falling from her multiple chins. Her face was so broad that some people suspected she was a man. She professed to be a virgin (in fact, she had two husbands and an illegitimate son)
and an apostle of asceticism (she smoked up to two hundred cigarettes a day and swore like a soldier). Meade wrote, “She weighed more than other people, ate more, smoked more, swore more, and visualized heaven and earth in terms that dwarfed any previous conception.” The poet William Butler Yeats, who fell under her spell, described her as “the most human person alive.”

As she traveled to America and Europe in the 1870s and 1880s, she gathered followers who were mesmerized by her odd charms and Gothic appetites and, what’s more, by her powers to seemingly levitate objects and speak with the dead. The rise of science in the nineteenth century had had a paradoxical effect: while it undermined faith in Christianity and the literal word of the Bible, it also created an enormous void for someone to explain the mysteries of the universe that lay beyond microbes and evolution and capitalist greed. George Bernard Shaw wrote that perhaps never be fore had so many people been “addicted to table-rapping, materialization séances, clairvoyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing and the like.”

The new powers of science to harness invisible forces often made these beliefs seem more credible, not less. If phonographs could capture human voices, and if telegraphs could send messages from one continent to the other, then why couldn’t science eventually peel back the Other World? In 1882, some of England’s most distinguished scientists formed the Society for Psychical Research. Members soon included a prime minister and Nobel Prize laureates, as well as Alfred Tennyson, Sigmund Freud, and Alfred Russel Wallace, who, along with Darwin, developed the theory of evolution. Conan Doyle, who in Sherlock Holmes had created the embodiment of the rationalist mind, spent years trying to confirm the existence of fairies and sprites. “I suppose I am Sherlock Holmes, if anybody is, and I say that the case for spiritualism is absolutely proved,” Conan Doyle once declared.

While Madame Blavatsky continued to practice the arts of a medium, she gradually turned her attention to more ambitious psychic frontiers. Claiming that she was a conduit for a brotherhood of reincarnated
Tibetan mahatmas, she tried to give birth to a new religion called Theosophy, or “wisdom of the gods.” It drew heavily on occult teachings and Eastern religions, particularly Buddhism, and for many Westerners it came to represent a kind of counterculture, replete with vegetarianism. As the historian Janet Oppenheim noted in
The Other World,
“For those who wanted to rebel dramatically against the constraints of the Victorian ethos—however they perceived that elusive entity—the flavor of heresy must have been particularly alluring when concocted by so unabashed an outsider as H. P. Blavatsky.”

Some Theosophists, taking their heresy even further, became Buddhists and aligned themselves with religious leaders in India and Ceylon who opposed colonial rule. Among these Theosophists was Fawcett’s older brother, Edward, to whom Percy had always looked up. A hulking mountain climber who wore a gold monocle, Edward, who had been a child prodigy and published an epic poem at the age of thirteen, helped Blavatsky research and write her 1893 magnum opus,
The Secret Doctrine.
In 1890, he traveled to Ceylon, where Percy was stationed, to take the Pansil, or five precepts of Buddhism, which includes vows not to kill, drink liquor, or commit adultery. An Indian newspaper carried an account of the ceremony under the headline “Conversion of an Englishman to Buddhism”:

On another occasion, according to family members, Percy Fawcett, apparently inspired by his brother, took the Pansil as well—an act that, for a colonial military officer who was supposed to be suppressing Buddhists and promoting Christianity on the island, was more seditious. In
The Victorians,
the British novelist and historian A. N. Wilson noted, “At the very time in history when the white races were imposing Imperialism on Egypt and Asia, there is something gloriously subversive about those Westerners who succumbed to the Wisdom of the East, in however garbled or preposterous a form.” Other scholars point out that nineteenth and early twentieth century Europeans—even the most benignly motivated—exoticized the East, which only helped to legitimize imperialism. At least in Fawcett’s mind, what he had been taught his whole life about the superiority of Western civilization clashed with what he experienced beyond its shores. “I transgressed again and again the awful laws of traditional behavior, but in doing so learned a great deal,” he said. Over the years, his attempt to reconcile these opposing forces, to balance his moral absolutism and cultural relativism, would force him into bizarre contradictions and greater heresies.