The Lost City of Z (29 page)

By twilight, they had trekked seven miles, and Fawcett signaled to set up camp. Jack and Raleigh learned that this meant a race, before darkness enveloped them and the mosquitoes devoured their flesh, to string their hammocks, clean their cuts to prevent infections, collect firewood, and secure the pack animals. Dinner was sardines, rice, and biscuits—a feast compared with what they would eat once they had to survive off the land.

That night, as they slept in their hammocks, Raleigh felt something brushing against him. He awoke in a panic, as if he were being attacked by a jaguar, but it was only one of the mules, which had broken free. After he tied it up, he tried to fall asleep again, but before long dawn broke and Fawcett was shouting for everyone to move out, each person wolfing down a bowl of porridge and half a cup of condensed milk, his rations until supper; then the men were off again, racing to keep up with their leader.

Fawcett increased the pace from seven miles a day to ten miles, then to fifteen. One afternoon, as the explorers approached the Manso River, some forty miles north of Cuiabá, the rest of the expedition became separated from Fawcett. As Jack later wrote to his mother, “Daddy had gone on ahead at such a speed that we lost sight of him altogether.” It was just as Costin had feared: there was no one to stop Fawcett. The trail forked, and the Brazilian guides didn’t know which way Fawcett had turned. Eventually, Jack noticed indentations from hooves on one of the trails, and gave the order to follow them. Darkness was descending, and the men had to be careful not to lose each other as well. They could hear a sustained roar in the distance. With each step it grew louder, and suddenly the men discerned the rush of water. They had reached the Manso River. Still, Fawcett was nowhere to be found. Jack, assuming command of the party, told Raleigh and one of the guides to fire their rifles in the air. There was no reply.
“Daddy,”
Jack yelled, but all he could hear was the screeching of the forest.

Jack and Raleigh hung their hammocks and made a fire, fearing that Fawcett had been seized by the Kayapó Indians, who inserted large round disks in their lower lips and attacked their enemies with wooden clubs. The Brazilian guides, who recalled vivid accounts of Indian raids, did nothing to calm Jack’s and Raleigh’s nerves. The men lay awake, listening to the jungle. When the sun rose, Jack ordered everyone to fire more gunshots and to search the surrounding area. Then, as the explorers were eating breakfast, Fawcett appeared on his horse. While looking for rock paintings, he had lost track of the group and had slept on the ground, using his saddle for a pillow. When Nina heard what had happened, she feared how “anxious” they all must have been. She had received a photograph of Jack looking unusually somber, which she had shown to Large. “[Jack] has evidently been thinking about the big job before him,” Large told her. She noted later that Jack’s pride would keep him going, for he would say to himself, “My father chose me for this.”

Fawcett let the expedition remain in camp another day to recover from the ordeal. Huddling under his mosquito net, he composed his dispatches, which from that point on would be “relayed to civilization by Indian runners over a long and perilous route,” as editors’ notes later explained.

Fawcett described the area as “the tickiest place in the world;” the insects swarmed over everything, like black rain. Several bit Raleigh on his foot, and the irritated flesh became infected—“poisoned,” in Jack’s phrase. As they pressed on the next day, Raleigh grew more and more gloomy. “It is a saying that one only knows a man well when in the wilds with him,” Fawcett told Nina. “Raleigh in place of being gay and energetic, is sleepy and silent.”

Jack, in contrast, was gaining in ardor. Nina was right: he seemed to have inherited Fawcett’s freakish constitution. Jack wrote that he had packed on several pounds of muscle, “in spite of far less food. Raleigh has lost more than I gained, and it is he who seems to feel most the effects of the journey.”

Upon hearing about Jack from her husband, Nina told Large, “I think you will rejoice with me in the knowledge that Jack is turning out so capable, and keeping strong and well. I can see his father is very pleased with him, and needless to say
so am I!”

Because of Raleigh’s condition and the weakened animals, Fawcett, who was more careful not to get too far ahead again, stopped for several days at a cattle-breeding ranch owned by Hermenegildo Galvão, one of the most ruthless farmers in Mato Grosso. Galvão had pushed farther into the frontier than most Brazilians and reportedly had a posse of
bugueiros,
“savage hunters,” who were charged with killing Indians who threatened his feudal empire. Galvão was not accustomed to visitors, but he welcomed the explorers into his large red-brick home. “It was quite obvious from his manners that Colonel Fawcett was a gentleman and a man of engaging personality,” Galvão later told a reporter.

For several days, the explorers remained there, eating and resting. Galvão was curious about what had lured the Englishmen into such wilderness. As Fawcett described his vision of Z, he removed from his belongings a strange object covered in cloth. He carefully unwrapped it, revealing the stone idol Haggard had given to him. He carried it with him like a talisman.

The three Englishmen were soon on their way again, heading east, toward Bakairí Post, where in 1920 the Brazilian government had set up a garrison—“the last point of civilization,” as the settlers referred to it. Occasionally, the forest opened up, and they could see the blinding sun and blue-tinged mountains in the distance. The trail became more difficult, and the men descended steep, mud-slicked gorges and traversed rock-strewn rapids. One river was too dangerous for the animals to swim across with the cargo. Fawcett noticed a canoe, abandoned, on the opposite bank and said that the expedition could use it to transport the gear, but that someone would need to swim over and get it—a feat involving, as Fawcett put it, “considerable danger, being made worse by a sudden violent thunderstorm.”

Jack volunteered and began to strip. Though he later admitted that he was “scared stiff,” he checked his body for cuts that might attract piranhas and dived in, thrashing his arms and legs as the currents tossed him about. When he emerged on the opposite bank, he climbed in the canoe and paddled back across—his father greeting him proudly.

A month after the explorers left Cuiabá, and after what Fawcett described as “a test of patience and endurance for the greater trials” ahead, the men arrived at Bakairí Post. The settlement consisted of about twenty ramshackle huts, cordoned off by barbed wire, to protect against aggressive tribes. (Three years later, another explorer described the outpost as “a pinprick on the map: isolated, desolate, primitive and God forsaken.”) The Bakairí tribe was one of the first in the region that the government had tried to “acculturate,” and Fawcett was appalled by what he called “the Brazilian methods of civilizing the Indian tribes.” In a letter to one of his sponsors in the United States, he noted, “The Bakairís have been dying out ever since they became civilized. There are only about 150 of them.” He went on, “They have in part been brought here to plant rice, manioc . . . which is sent to Cuiabá, where it fetches, at present, high prices. The Bakairís are not paid, are raggedly clothed, mainly in khaki govt. uniforms, and there is a general squalor and lack of hygiene which is making the whole of them sick.”

Fawcett was informed that a Bakairí girl had recently fallen ill. He often tried to treat the natives with his medical kit, but, unlike Dr. Rice, his knowledge was limited, and there was nothing he could do to save her. “They say the Bacairys are dying off on account of fetish [witchcraft], for there is a fetish man in the village who hates them,” Jack wrote. “Only yesterday a little girl died—of fetish, they say!”

The Brazilian in charge of the post, Valdemira, put the explorers up in the newly constructed schoolhouse. The men soaked themselves in the river, washing away the grime and sweat. “We have all clipped our beards, and feel better without them,” Jack said.

Members of other remote tribes occasionally visited Bakairí Post to
obtain goods, and Jack and Raleigh soon saw something that astonished them: “about eight wild Indians, absolutely stark naked,” as Jack wrote to his mother. The Indians carried seven-foot-long bows with six-foot arrows. “To Jack’s great delight we have seen the first of the wild Indians here—naked savages from the Xingu,” Fawcett wrote Nina.

Jack and Raleigh hurried out to meet them. “We gave them some guava cheese,” Jack wrote, and “they liked it immensely.”

Jack tried to conduct a rudimentary
autopsis.
“They are small people, about five feet two inches in height, and very well built,” he wrote of the Indians. “They eat only fish and vegetables—never meat. One woman had a very fine necklace of tiny discs cut from snail shells, which must have required tremendous patience to make.”

Raleigh, whom Fawcett had designated as the expedition’s photographer, set up a camera and took pictures of the Indians. In one shot, Jack stood beside them, to demonstrate “the comparative sizes;” the Indians came up to his shoulders.

In the evening, the three explorers went to the mud hut where the Indians were staying. The only light inside was from a fire, and the air was filled with smoke. Fawcett unpacked a ukulele and Jack took out a piccolo that they had brought from England. (Fawcett told Nina that “music was a great comfort ‘in the wilds,’ and might even save a solitary man from insanity.”) As the Indians gathered around them, Jack and Fawcett played a concert late into the night, the sounds wafting through the village.

On May 19, a fresh, cool day, Jack woke up exhilarated—it was his twenty-second birthday. “I have never felt so well,” he wrote to his mother. For the occasion, Fawcett dropped his prohibition against liquor, and the three explorers celebrated with a bottle of Brazilian-made alcohol. The next morning, they prepared the equipment and the pack animals. To the north of the post, the men could see several imposing mountains and the jungle. It was, Jack wrote, “absolutely unexplored country.”

The expedition headed straight for terra incognita. Before them were no clear paths, and little light filtered through the canopy. They
struggled to see not just in front of them but above them, where most predators lurked. The men’s feet sank in mud holes. Their hands burned from wielding machetes. Their skin bled from mosquitoes. Even Fawcett confessed to Nina, “Years tell, in spite of the spirit of enthusiasm.”

Although Raleigh’s foot had healed, his other one became infected, and when he removed his sock a large patch of skin peeled off. He seemed to be unraveling; he had already suffered from jaundice, his arm was swollen, and he felt, as he put it, “bilious.”

Like his father, Jack was prone to contempt for others’ frailty, and complained to his mother that his friend was unable to share his burden of work—he rode on a horse, with his shoe off—and that he was always scared and sullen.

The jungle widened the fissures that had been evident since Raleigh’s romance on the boat. Raleigh, overwhelmed by the insects, the heat, and the pain in his foot, lost interest in “the Quest.” He no longer thought about returning as a hero: all he wanted, he muttered, was to open a small business and to settle down with a family. (“The Fawcetts can have all my share of the notoriety and be welcome to it!” he wrote his brother.) When Jack talked of the archaeological importance of Z, Raleigh shrugged and said, “That’s too deep for me.”

“I wish [Raleigh] had more brains, as I cannot discuss any of this with him as he knows nothing of anything,” Jack wrote. “We can only converse about Los Angeles or Seaton. What he will do during a year at ‘Z’ I don’t know.”

“I wish to
hell
you were here,” Raleigh told his brother, adding, “You know there is a saying which I believe is true: ‘Two’s company— three’s none.’ It shows itself quite often with me now!” Jack and Fawcett, he said, maintained a “sense of inferiority for others. Consequently at times I feel very ‘out of everything.’ Of course I do not outwardly show it. . . but still, as I have said before, I feel ‘awful lonesome’ for real friendship.”

After nine days, the explorers hacked their way to Dead Horse
Camp, where the men could still see the “white bones” from Fawcett’s old pack animal. The men were approaching the territory of the warlike Suyás and Kayapós. An Indian once described to a reporter a Kayapó ambush of his tribe. He and a few other villagers, the reporter wrote, fled across a river and “witnessed throughout the night the macabre dance of their enemies around their slaughtered brothers.” For three days, the invaders remained, playing wooden flutes and dancing among the corpses. After the Kayapós finally departed, the few villagers who had escaped across the river rushed back to their settlement: not a single person was alive. “The women, who they thought would have been spared, lay face up, their lifeless bodies in an advanced state of putrefaction, their legs spread apart by wooden struts forced between the knees.” In a dispatch, Fawcett described the Kayapós as an aggressive “lot of stick-throwers who cut off and kill wandering individuals. . . Their only weapon is a short club like a policeman’s billy”—which, he added, they deploy very skillfully.

After passing through the territory of the Suyás and Kayapós, the expedition would turn eastward and confront the Xavante, who were perhaps even more formidable. In the late eighteenth century, many in the tribe had been contacted by the Portuguese and moved into villages, where they received mass baptisms. Devastated by epidemics and brutalized by Brazilian soldiers, they eventually fled back into the jungle near the River of Death. A nineteenth-century German traveler wrote that “from that time onwards [the Xavante] no longer trusted any white man . . . These abused people have therefore changed from compatriots into the most dangerous and determined enemies. They generally kill anyone they can easily catch.” Several years after Fawcett’s journey, members of the Indian Protection Service tried to make contact with the Xavante, only to return to their base camp and discover the naked corpses of four of their colleagues. One was still clutching in his hand gifts for the Indians.