The Lost City of Z (8 page)

Despite its success, Harrison’s clock could not overcome the main problem that had bedeviled mapmakers: distance. Europeans had not yet traveled to the farthest ends of the earth—the North and South Poles. Nor had they surveyed much of the interior of Africa, Australia, or South America. Cartographers scrawled across these areas on the map a single haunting word: “Unexplored.”

Finally, in the nineteenth century, as the British Empire was increasingly expanding, several English scientists, admirals, and merchants believed that an institution was needed to create a map of the world based on observation rather than on imagination, an organization that detailed both the contours of the earth and everything that lay within them. And so, in 1830, the Royal Geographical Society of London was born. According to
its mission statement, the Society would “collect, digest and print. . . new interesting facts and discoveries;” build a repository of “the best books on geography” and “a complete collection of maps;” assemble the most sophisticated surveying equipment; and help launch explorers on their travels. All this was part of its mandate to chart every nook and cranny of the earth. “There was not a square foot of the planet’s surface to which Fellows of this Society should not at least try to go,” a later president of the institution vowed. “That is our business. That is what we are out for.” While the Society would serve as a handmaiden of the British Empire, what it was out for represented a departure from the previous age of discovery, when conquistadores, like Columbus, were dispatched strictly in pursuit of God, gold, and glory. In contrast, the Royal Geographical Society wanted to explore for the sake of exploration—in the name of the newest god, Science.

Within weeks of its unveiling, the Society had attracted nearly five hundred members. “[It] was composed almost entirely of men of high social standing,” a secretary of the institution later remarked, adding, “It may thus be regarded as having been to some extent a Society Institution to which everybody who was anybody was expected to belong.” The original list of members included acclaimed geologists, hydrographers, natural philosophers, astronomers, and military officers, as well as dukes, earls, and knights. Darwin became a member in 1838, as did one of his sons, Leonard, who in 1908 was elected president of the Society.

As the Society launched more and more expeditions around the world, it drew into its ranks not just adventurers, scholars, and dignitaries but also eccentrics. The Industrial Revolution, in addition to producing appalling conditions for the lower classes, had engendered unprecedented wealth for members of the middle and upper classes in Britain, who could suddenly afford to make leisurely pursuits such as travel a full-time hobby. Hence the rise of the amateur in Victorian society. The Royal Geographical Society became a haven for such people, along with a few poorer members, like Livingstone, whose exploits it helped to finance. Many of its members
were odd even by Victorian standards. Richard Burton espoused atheism and defended polygamy so fervently that, while he was off exploring, his wife inserted into one of his manuscripts the following disclaimer: “I protest vehemently against his religious and moral sentiments, which belie a good and chivalrous life.”

Not surprisingly, such members produced a fractious body. Burton recalled how at a meeting attended by his wife and family he grew so agitated after an opponent had “spoken falsely” that he waved his map pointer at members of the audience, who “looked as if a tiger was going to spring in amongst them, or that I was going to use the stick like a spear upon my adversary, who stood up from the benches. To make the scene more lively, my wife’s brothers and sisters were struggling in the corner to hold down their father, an old man, who had never been used to public speaking, and who slowly rose up in speechless indignation at hearing me accused of making a misstatement.” Years later, another member conceded, “Explorers are not, perhaps, the most promising people with whom to build a society. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men.”

Debates raged within the Society over the course of rivers and mountains, the boundaries of cities and towns, and the size of the oceans. No less intense were the disputes over who deserved recognition, and the subsequent fame and fortune, for making a discovery. And the discussions often involved the most fundamental questions of morality and human existence: Were newly discovered tribes savages or civilized? Should they be converted to Christianity? Did all of humanity stem from one ancient civilization or from many? The struggle to answer such questions frequently pitted the so-called “armchair” geographers and theoreticians, who pored over incoming data, against the rough-and-tumble explorers, who worked in the field. One official of the Society reprimanded an African explorer for his suppositions, telling him, “What you can do, is state accurately what you
saw,
leaving it to stay-at-home men of science to collate the data
of very many travelers, in order to form a theory.” The explorer Speke, in turn, denounced those geographers “who sit in carpet slippers, and criticise those who labour in the field.”

Perhaps the most vicious feud was over the source of the Nile. After Speke claimed in 1858 that he had discovered the river’s origin, at a lake he christened Victoria, many of the Society’s members, led by his former traveling companion Burton, refused to believe him. Speke said of Burton, “B is one of those men who never can be wrong, and will never acknowledge an error.” In September of 1864, the two men, who had once nursed each other back from death on an expedition, were supposed to square off in a public meeting. The London
Times
called it a “gladiatorial exhibition.” But, as the meeting was about to begin, the gatherers were informed that Speke would not be coming: he had gone hunting the previous day, and was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. “By God, he’s killed himself!” Burton reportedly exclaimed, staggering on the stage; later, Burton was seen in tears, reciting his onetime companion’s name over and over. Although it was never known for certain if the shooting was intentional, many suspected, like Burton, that the protracted feud had caused the man who had conquered the desert to take his own life. A decade later, Speke’s claim to having discovered the Nile’s source would be proved correct.

During the Society’s early years, no member personified the organization’s eccentricities or audacious mission more than Sir Francis Galton. A cousin of Charles Darwin’s, he had been a child prodigy who, by the age of four, could read and recite Latin. He went on to concoct myriad inventions. They included a ventilating top hat; a machine called a Gumption-Reviver, which periodically wet his head to keep him awake during endless study; underwater goggles; and a rotating-vane steam engine. Suffering from periodic nervous breakdowns—“sprained brain,” as he called it—he had a compulsion to measure and count virtually everything. He quantified the sensitivity of animal hearing, using a walking stick that could make an inconspicuous whistle; the efficacy of prayer; the average age of death in each profession (lawyers: 66.51; doctors: 67.04); the exact
amount of rope needed to break a criminal’s neck while avoiding decapitation; and levels of boredom (at meetings of the Royal Geographical Society he would count the rate of fidgets among each member of the audience). Notoriously, Galton, who like so many of his colleagues was a profound racist, tried to measure levels of intelligence in people and later became known as the father of eugenics.

In another age, Galton’s monomania with quantification might have made him a freak. But, as the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once observed, “no man expressed his era’s fascination with numbers so well as Darwin’s celebrated cousin.” And there was no place that shared his fascination more than the Royal Geographical Society. In the 1850s, Galton, who had inherited enough money to enable him to avoid the burden of a conventional career, became a member of the Society and, with its endorsement and guidance, explored southern Africa. “A passion for travel seized me,” he wrote, “as if I had been a migratory bird.” He mapped and documented everything that he could: latitudes and longitudes, topography, animals, climate, tribes. Returning to great fanfare, he received the Royal Geographical Society’s gold medal, the field’s most prestigious honor. In 1854, Galton was elected to the Society’s governing body, on which, for the next four decades, he served in varying capacities, including honorary secretary and vice president. Together, Galton and this collection of men—they were all men until a divisive vote at the end of the nineteenth century admitted twenty-one women—began to attack, as Joseph Conrad put it of such militant geographers, “from north and south and east and west, conquering a bit of truth here and a bit of truth there, and sometimes swallowed up by the mystery their hearts were so persistently set on unveiling.”

“
WHAT MATERIALS
are you looking for?” one of the archivists asked me.

I had gone down into the small reading room in the basement.

Bookshelves, illuminated under fluorescent lights, were crammed with travel guides, atlases, and bound copies of the
Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society.
Most of the Society’s collection of more than two million maps, artifacts, photographs, and expedition reports had been moved in recent years from what had been called “Dickensian conditions” to climate-controlled catacombs, and I could see staff flitting in and out of them through a side door.

When I told the archivist that I was looking for Fawcett’s papers, she gave me a quizzical look. “What is it?” I asked.

“Well, let’s just say many people who are interested in Fawcett are a little . . .” Her voice trailed off as she disappeared into the catacombs. While I was waiting, I skimmed through several accounts of expeditions backed by the Society. One described an 1844 expedition led by Charles Sturt and his second-in-command, James Poole, which searched the Australian desert for a legendary inland sea. “So great is the heat that. . . our hair has ceased to grow, our nails have become brittle as glass,” Sturt wrote in his diary. “The scurvy shows itself upon us all. We are attacked by violent headaches, pains in the limbs, swollen and ulcerated gums. Mr. Poole became worse and worse: ultimately the skin over his muscles became black, and he lost the use of his lower extremities. On the 14th he suddenly expired.” The inland sea never existed, and these accounts made me aware of how much of the discovery of the world was based on failure rather than on success—on tactical errors and pipe dreams. The Society may have conquered the world, but not before the world had conquered its members. Among the Society’s long list of those who were sacrificed, Fawcett filled a distinct category: neither alive nor dead—or, as one writer dubbed him, “the living dead.”

The archivist soon emerged from the stacks carrying a half-dozen mottled folders. As she placed them on the table, they released purplish dust. “You’ll have to put these on,” she said, handing me a pair of white gloves. After I slipped them over my fingers, I opened the first folder: yellowed, crumbling letters spilled out. On many of the pages were impossibly
small, slanting words that ran together, as if written in code. It was Fawcett’s handwriting. I took one of the pages and spread it in front of me. The letter was dated 1915 and began “Dear Reeves.” The name was familiar, and I opened one of the books on the Royal Geographical Society and scanned its index. Edward Ayearst Reeves had been the map curator of the institution from 1900 to 1933.

The folders contained more than two decades of correspondence between Fawcett and officials at the Society. Many of the letters were addressed to Reeves or to Sir John Scott Keltie, who was the RGS secretary from 1892 to 1915 and later its vice president. There were also scores of letters from Nina, government officials, explorers, and friends concerning Fawcett’s disappearance. I knew it would take me days, if not weeks, to go through everything, and yet I felt delight. Here was a road map to Fawcett’s life as well as to his death.

I held one of the letters up to the light. It was dated December 14, 1921. It said, “There is very little doubt that the forests cover traces of a lost civilization of a most unsuspected and surprising character.”

I opened my reporter’s pad and started to take notes. One of the letters mentioned that Fawcett had received “a diploma” from the RGS. I had never seen any reference to the Society having given out diplomas, and I asked the archivist why Fawcett had been awarded one.

“He must have enrolled in one of the Society’s training programs,” she said. She walked over to a bookshelf and began to riffle through journals. “Yes, right here. He apparently took a course and graduated around 1901.”

“You mean he actually went to school to become an explorer?”

“I guess you could call it that.”

F
awcett didn’t want to be late. It was February 4, 1900, and all he had to do was get from his hotel in Redhill, Surrey, to No. 1 Savile Row, in the Mayfair district of London, but nothing in the city moved— or, more accurately, everything seemed to be moving. Billboard men. Butcher boys. Clerks. Horse-drawn omnibuses. And that strange beast which was invading the streets, scaring the horses and pedestrians, breaking down on every curb: the automobile. The law had originally required drivers to proceed at no more than two miles per hour with a footman walking ahead waving a red flag, but in 1896 the speed limit had been raised to fourteen miles per hour. And everywhere Fawcett turned the new and the old seemed to be at war: electric lights, scattered on the fancier granite streets, and gas lamps, lodged on most cobblestoned corners, glowing in the fog; the Tube bolting through the earth like one of Edward Fawcett’s science-fiction inventions, and bicycles, only a few years earlier the smartest thing on the footpaths and now already fusty. Even the smells seemed at odds: the traditional stench of horse dung and the newer whiff of petrol. It was as if Fawcett were glimpsing the past and the future at once.