The Lost City of Z (27 page)

With his path to Z again clear, Fawcett could no longer even work up his notorious wrath toward Lynch, who had returned to London in disgrace. “He did precipitate this exploration, which is something to his credit, and The Gods select curious agents for their purposes sometimes,” Fawcett wrote the RGS. Plus, he said, “I am a great believer in the Law of Compensation.” He was sure that he had sacrificed all he had to give to reach Z. Now he hoped to receive what he called “the honour of immortality.”

Y
eah, I’ve heard of Fawcett,” a Brazilian guide who offered tours of the Amazon told me. “Isn’t he the one who disappeared looking for El Dorado or something?” When I mentioned that I was seeking a guide to help me trace Fawcett’s route and look for Z, he replied that he was
“muito ocupado,”
which seemed to be a polite way of saying, “You’re out of your mind.”

It was difficult to find someone not only willing to make the journey into the jungle but also with ties to the indigenous communities in Brazil, which function almost as autonomous countries, with their own laws and governing councils. The history of the interaction between
brancos
and
indios—
whites and Indians—in the Amazon often reads like an extended epitaph: tribes were wiped out by disease and massacres; languages and songs were obliterated. One tribe buried its children alive to spare them the shame of subjugation. But some tribes, including the dozens that remain uncontacted, have managed to insulate themselves in the jungle. In recent decades, as many indigenous people have organized themselves politically, the Brazilian government has stopped trying to “modernize” them and has worked
more effectively to protect them. As a result, some Amazon tribes, particularly those in the Mato Grosso region, where Fawcett disappeared, have flourished. Their populations, after being decimated, are growing again; their languages and customs have endured.

The person I eventually persuaded to accompany me was Paolo Pinage, a fifty-two-year-old former professional samba dancer and theater director. Though Paolo was not of Indian descent, he had previously worked for FUNAI, the agency that succeeded Rondon’s Indian Protection Service. Paolo shared its “Die if you must, but never kill” edict. During our initial phone conversation, I had asked him if we could penetrate the same region that Fawcett had, including part of what is now Xingu National Park, Brazil’s first Indian reservation, which was created in 1961. (The park, along with an adjoining reservation, is the size of Belgium and is one of the largest swaths of jungle under Indian control in the world.) Paolo said, “I can take you there, but it’s not easy.”

Entering Indian territories, he explained, required elaborate negotiations with tribal leaders. He asked me to send him medical records attesting that I carried no contagious diseases. Then he began approaching various chiefs on my behalf. Many of the tribes in the jungle now had shortwave radios, a more modern version of what Dr. Rice had used, and for weeks our messages were relayed back and forth as Paolo assured them that I was a reporter and not a
garimpero,
or “prospector.” In 2004, twenty-nine diamond miners trespassed onto a reservation in western Brazil, and members of the Cinta Larga tribe shot them or beat them to death with wooden clubs.

Paolo told me to meet him at the airport in Cuiabá. Although none of the tribes had agreed to my visit, he seemed optimistic when he greeted me. He was carrying several large plastic containers, instead of a suitcase or a backpack, and had a cigarette dangling from his lip. He wore a camouflage vest with myriad pockets, stuffed with supplies: a Swiss Army knife, a Japanese anti-itch medicine, a flashlight, a bag of peanuts, and more cigarettes.
He resembled someone returning from an expedition, not embarking on one. His vest was ragged, his face was bone thin and covered with a gray-tinged beard, and his bald head had been seared by the sun. His English pronunciation was shaky, yet he spoke as fast as he smoked. “Come, come, we go now,” he said. “Paolo take care of everything.”

We took a taxi to the center of Cuiabá, which was no longer the “ghost town” Fawcett had described but had an air of modernity, with paved roads and a few modest skyscrapers. Brazilian settlers had once been lured into the interior by rubber and gold. Now the primary temptation was the high price of commodities from ranching and farming, and the city served as a staging ground for these latest pioneers.

We checked into a hotel named El Dorado (“A funny coincidence, isn’t it?” Paolo said) and began making preparations. Our first challenge was to ensure that we correctly divined Fawcett’s route. I filled Paolo in about my trip to England and about everything Fawcett had done— including planting false leads and using ciphers—to conceal his course.

“This colonel goes to many lengths to hide something that no one has ever found,” Paolo said.

I spread the relevant documents that I had obtained in British archives on a wooden table. Among them were copies of several of Fawcett’s original maps. They were meticulous, recalling pointillist paintings. Paolo picked one up and examined it for several minutes under the light. Fawcett had printed
“UNEXPLORED”
in bold letters atop one image, which depicted the forests between the Xingu River and two other major tributaries of the Amazon. On another map, he added several notations: “small tribes. . . believed to be friendly;” “very bad Indian tribes—names unknown;” “Indians probably dangerous.”

One of the maps seemed somewhat crudely drawn, and Paolo asked if Fawcett had made it. I explained that a notation on the map—which I had found among several old documents from the North American Newspaper Alliance—indicated that it had belonged to Raleigh Rimell. He had
sketched on the map the expedition’s route and given it to his mother. Although he made her promise to destroy it after he left, she had held on to it.

Paolo and I agreed that the documents confirmed that Fawcett and his team, after leaving Cuiabá, had proceeded north, to the territory of the Bakairí Indians. From there they had gone to Dead Horse Camp, and then, presumably, deep into what is today Xingu National Park. In the route that Fawcett had supplied in confidence to the Royal Geographical Society, he wrote that his party would turn due east around the eleventh parallel south of the equator and continue past the River of Death and the Araguaia River, until they reached the Atlantic Ocean. Fawcett noted in his proposal that it was preferable to maintain an eastward trajectory, toward Brazil’s coastal regions, since it “would preserve a higher level of enthusiasm than one proceeding farther and farther into the wilds.”

Yet one segment of the route Raleigh had drawn seemed to contradict this. At the Araguaia River, Raleigh indicated, the expedition would turn sharply northward, instead of continuing eastward, and would pass from Mato Grosso into the Brazilian state of Pará, before exiting near the mouth of the Amazon River.

“Maybe Raleigh made a mistake,” Paolo said.

“That’s what I thought, too,” I said. “But then I read this.”

I showed him the last letter that Jack had sent to his mother. Paolo read the line I had highlighted: “Next time I write will probably be from Para.”

“I think Fawcett kept this last piece of his route secret even from the RGS,” I said.

Paolo seemed increasingly intrigued by Fawcett, and with a black pen he began to trace Fawcett’s route on a clean map, excitedly ticking off each of our intended destinations. Finally, he took his cigarette out of his mouth and said, “On to Z, no?”

T
he train creaked toward the frontier. On February 11, 1925, Fawcett, Jack, and Raleigh had left Rio de Janeiro on their more than one-thousand-mile journey into the interior of Brazil. In Rio, they had stayed in the Hotel Internacional, where they tested their equipment in the garden and where virtually everything they did was chronicled in newspapers around the world. “At least forty million people [are] already aware of our objective,” Fawcett wrote his son Brian, reveling in the “tremendous” publicity.

There were photographs of the explorers with headlines like “Three Men Face Cannibals in Relic Quest.” One article said, “No Olympic games contender was ever trained down to a finer edge than these three reserved, matter-of-fact Englishmen, whose pathway to a forgotten world is beset by arrows, pestilence and wild beasts.”

“Aren’t the reports of the expedition in the English and American papers amusing?” Jack wrote his brother.

Brazilian authorities, fearing the demise of such an illustrious party on their territory, demanded that Fawcett sign a statement absolving them
of responsibility, which he did without hesitation. “They do not want to be pressed . . . if we do not turn up,” Fawcett told Keltie. “But we shall all turn up all right—even if it is just about as much as my fifty-eight years can put up with.” Despite such concerns, the government and its citizens warmly received the explorers: the party would be given free transport to the frontier in railroad cars reserved for dignitaries—luxurious carriages with private baths and saloons. “We have met with unbounded sympathy and goodwill,” Fawcett informed the RGS.

Raleigh seemed somewhat dispirited, though. On the voyage from New York, he had fallen in love, apparently with the daughter of a British duke. “I became acquainted with a certain girl on board, and as time went on our friendship increased till I admit it was threatening to get serious,” he confessed in a letter to Brian Fawcett. He wanted to tell Jack about his turbulent emotions, but his best friend, who had become even more priestly while training for the expedition, complained that he was making “a fool of himself.” Whereas before Raleigh had been intently focused on his adventure with Jack, now all he could think about was this
. . . woman.

“[The colonel] and Jack were getting quite anxious, afraid I should elope or something!” Raleigh wrote. Indeed, Raleigh contemplated getting married in Rio, but Fawcett and Jack dissuaded him. “I came to my senses and realized I was supposed to be the member of an expedition, and not allowed to take a wife along,” Raleigh said. “I had to drop her gently and attend to business.”

“[Raleigh] is much better now,” Jack wrote. Still, he worriedly asked Raleigh, “I suppose after we get back you’ll be married within a year?”

Raleigh replied that he wouldn’t make any promises, but, as he later put it, “I don’t intend to be a bachelor all my life, even if Jack does!”

The three explorers stopped for a few days in São Paulo and went to visit the Instituto Butantan, one of the largest snake farms in the world. The staff carried out a series of demonstrations for the explorers, showing how various predators strike. At one point, an attendant reached into a
cage with a long hook and removed a lethal bushmaster, while Jack and Raleigh stared at its fangs. “A whole lot of venom squirted out,” Jack later wrote his brother. Fawcett was familiar with Amazonian snakes, but he still found the demonstrations enlightening, and he shared his notes in one of his dispatches for the North American Newspaper Alliance. (“A snake-bite which bleeds is nonpoisonous. Two punctures, plus a bluish and bloodless patch, is a sign of poison.”)

Before leaving, Fawcett was handed what he most wanted: five years’ worth of anti-snakebite serums, stored in vials marked “rattlesnakes,” “pit vipers,” and “unknown” species. He also received a hypodermic needle to inject them.

After local officials in São Paulo gave the explorers what Jack described as “a fine send-off,” the three Englishmen again boarded a train, heading west toward the Paraguay River, along the border of Brazil and Bolivia. Fawcett had made the same trip in 1920, with Holt and Brown, and the familiar vista only intensified his chronic impatience. As sparks flew up from the rails, Jack and Raleigh looked out the window, watching the swamps and scrub forest pass, imagining what they would soon encounter. “I saw some quite interesting things,” Jack wrote. “In the cattle country were numerous parrots, and we saw two flocks. . . of young rheas [ostrichlike birds] about four to five feet high. There was a glimpse of a spider’s web in a tree, with a spider about the size of a sparrow sitting in the middle.” Spotting alligators on the banks, he and Raleigh grabbed their rifles and tried to shoot them from the moving train.