The Lost City of Z

8. INTO THE AMAZON

It was the perfect cover. Go in as a cartographer, with maps and telescope and high-powered binoculars. Survey your target the way you surveyed the land. Observe everything: people, places, conversations. In his diary, Fawcett had jotted down a list of things that his British handler-someone he called simply “James”-had asked him to assess: “nature of trails… villages… water… army and organization… arms and guns… political.” Wasn’t an explorer really just an infiltrator, someone who penetrated alien lands and returned with secrets? In the nineteenth century, the British government had increasingly recruited agents from the ranks of explorers and mapmakers. It was a way not only to sneak people into foreign territories with plausible deniability but also to tap recruits skilled in collecting the sensitive geographical and political data that the government most coveted. British authorities transformed the Survey of India Department into a full-time intelligence operation. Cartographers were trained to use cover stories and code names (“Number One,” “The Pundit,” “The Chief Pundit”), and, when entering lands forbidden to Westerners, to wear elaborate disguises. In Tibet, many surveyors dressed as Buddhist monks and employed prayer beads to measure distances (each sliding bead represented a hundred paces) and prayer wheels to conceal compasses and slips of paper for notations. They also installed trapdoors in their trunks to hide larger instruments, like sextants, and poured mercury, essential for operating an artificial horizon, into their pilgrim’s begging bowls. The Royal Geographical Society was often aware of, if not com-plicit in, such activities-its ranks were scattered with current and former spies, including Francis Younghusband, who served as president of the Society from 1919 to 1922.

In Morocco, Fawcett was participating in an African version of what Rudyard Kipling, referring to the colonial competition for supremacy over central Asia, called “the Great Game.” Scribbling in his secret scrolls, Fawcett wrote that he “chatted” with a Moroccan official who was “full of information.” When venturing beyond the main desert routes, where tribes kidnapped or murdered foreign trespassers, Fawcett later noted, “some sort of Moorish disguise is considered necessary, and even then the journey is attended with very great risk.” Fawcett managed to insinuate himself into the royal court to spy on the sultan himself. “The Sultan is young and weak in character,” he wrote. “Personal pleasure is the first consideration, and time is passed bicycle trick riding, at which he is a considerable adept, in playing with motorcars, mechanical toys, photography, billiards, pig sticking on bicycles, feeding his menagerie.” All this information Fawcett delivered to “James” and then returned to England in 1902. It was the only time Fawcett acted as an official spy, but his cunning and powers of observation caught the attention of Sir George Taubman Goldie, a British colonial administrator who in 1905 became president of the Royal Geographical Society.

In early 1906, Goldie summoned Fawcett, who, since his Morocco trip, had been stationed in several military garrisons, most recently in Ireland. Goldie was not someone to trifle with. Famous for his keen intelligence and volatile temper, he had almost single-handedly imposed the British Empire’s control over Niger, in the 1880s and 1890s. He had shocked Victorian society by running off to Paris with a governess, and was an unrepentant atheist who championed Darwin’s theory of evolution. “[He] was lashed into frenzies of impatience by stupidity, or incompetence,” one of his biographers wrote. “Never did man suffer fools less gladly.”

Fawcett was led into the RGS to see Goldie, whose blue eyes seemed to “bore holes into one,” as a subordinate once put it. Goldie, who was nearly sixty, always carried in his pocket a tube of poison, which he planned to take if he ever became physically handicapped or incurably ill. As Fawcett recalled, Goldie asked him, “Do you know anything about Bolivia?”

When Fawcett said no, Goldie continued, “One usually thinks of Bolivia as a country on the roof of the world. A great deal of it is in the mountains; but beyond the mountains, to the east, lies an enormous area of tropical forest and plains.” Goldie reached into his desk and pulled out a large map of Bolivia, which he spread before Fawcett like a tablecloth. “Here you are, Major-here’s about as good a map of the country as I have! Look at this area! It’s full of blank spaces.” As Goldie traced his finger over the map, he explained that the area was so unexplored that Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru could not even agree on their borders: they were simply speculative lines sketched through mountains and jungles. In 1864, boundary disputes between Paraguay and its neighbors had erupted into one of the worst conflicts in Latin American history. (About half the Paraguayan population was killed.) Because of the extraordinary economic demand for rubber-“black gold”-which was abundant in the region, the stakes over the Amazon delimitation were equally fraught. “A major conflagration could arise out of this question of what territory belongs to whom,” Goldie said.

“All this is most interesting,” Fawcett interrupted. “But what has it got to do with me?”

Goldie said that the countries had established a boundary commission and were seeking an impartial observer from the Royal Geographical Society to map the borders in question-beginning with an area between Bolivia and Brazil that comprised several hundred miles in nearly impassable terrain. The expedition would take up to two years, and there was no guarantee that its members would survive. Disease was rampant in the region, and the Indians, who had been attacked mercilessly by rubber trappers, murdered interlopers. “Would you be interested in taking it on?” Goldie asked.

Fawcett later said that he felt his heart pounding. He thought about his wife, Nina, who was pregnant again, and his son, Jack, who was almost three years old. Still, he didn’t hesitate: “Destiny intended me to go, so there could be no other answer!”

THE CRAMPED, DIRTY hold of the SS Panama was filled with “toughs, would be toughs, and leather faced old scoundrels,” as Fawcett put it. Prim in his starched white collar, Fawcett sat beside his second-in-command for the expedition, a thirty-year-old engineer and surveyor named Arthur John Chivers, whom the Royal Geographical Society had recommended. Fawcett passed the time by studying Spanish, while other passengers sipped whiskey, spit tobacco, played dice, and slept with whores. “They were all good fellows in their way,” Fawcett wrote, adding, “To [Chivers] and myself it served as a useful introduction to an aspect of life we had not hitherto known, and much of our English reserve was knocked off in the process.”

The ship docked in Panama, where the construction of the canal- the most audacious attempt yet by man to tame nature-was under way, and the project gave Fawcett the first inkling of what he was about to encounter: stacked on the pier were dozens of coffins. Since the canal’s excavation began, in 1881, more than twenty thousand laborers had died from malaria and yellow fever.

In Panama City, Fawcett boarded a ship for Peru, then proceeded by train up the glimmering, snowcapped Andes. When the train reached around twelve thousand feet, he switched to a boat and crossed Lake Titicaca (“How strange it is to see steamers in operation up here on the roof of the world!”), before squeezing into another jaw-rattling train, which took him across the plains to La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. There he waited more than a month for the government to provide a few thousand dollars, a sum far less than he had counted on, for provisions and travel expenses, his impatience provoking a row with local officials that had to be smoothed over by the British consul. Finally, on July 4, 1906, he and Chivers were ready to go. They loaded their mules with tea, preserved milk, Edwards’ Desiccated Soup, sardines in tomato sauce, lemonade effervescing powder, and kola-nut biscuits, which, according to Hints to Travellers, produced “a marvelous effect in sustaining strength during exertion.” They also brought surveying instruments, rifles, rappelling ropes, machetes, hammocks, mosquito nets, collecting jars, fishing lines, a stereoscopic camera, a pan for sifting gold, and gifts such as beads for tribal encounters. A medical kit was stocked with gauze bandages; iodine for mosquito bites; permanganate of potash for cleaning vegetables or arrow wounds; a pencil knife for cutting out flesh poisoned from snakebites or gangrene; and opium. In his rucksack, Fawcett stuffed a copy of Hints to Travellers and his diary with his favorite poems to recite in the wilderness. One poem he often took was Rudyard Kipling’s “The Explorer”:

Fawcett and Chivers went over the Andes and began their descent into the jungle. Fawcett, wearing gabardine breeches, leather boots, a Stetson, and a silk scarf wrapped around his neck-his standard explorer’s uniform- made his way along the edges of cliffs, which fell away hun dreds of feet. Traveling in a blizzard, the men could see no more than a few yards ahead, though they heard rocks slipping from under the hooves of their pack animals and cascading into the gorges. It was hard to believe, as wind whipped around twenty-thousand-foot peaks, that they were on their way to the jungle. The altitude made them dizzy and nauseated. The animals staggered forward, out of breath, their noses bleeding from a lack of oxygen. Years later, moving through the same mountains, Fawcett would lose half a convoy of twenty-four mules. “A mule’s load would often foul on jutting rocks, and knock [the animal] screaming over the precipices,” he wrote.

Occasionally, Fawcett and Chivers came upon a footbridge-strung together with palmetto slats and cables-that stretched more than a hundred yards over a gorge and swung wildly in the wind, like a shredded flag. The mules, too scared to pass, had to be blindfolded. After cajoling them across, the explorers picked their way downward around boulders and cliffs, spotting the first signs of vegetation-magnolias and stunted trees. By three thousand feet, where the heat was palpable, they encountered roots and vines creeping up the mountainside. Then Fawcett, drenched in sweat, peered into a valley and saw trees shaped like spiders and parachutes and clouds of smoke; waterways threading back and forth for thousands of miles; a jungle canopy so dark it appeared almost black-Amazonia.

Fawcett and Chivers eventually abandoned their pack animals for a raft made from sticks and twine and drifted into the Amazon frontier, a collection of Dodge-like towns with mocking names, such as Hope and Beautiful Village, that had recently been carved into the jungle by settlers who had fallen under the spell of oro negro-“black gold.” Christopher Columbus had first reported seeing Indians bouncing a ball made from the strange, sticky substance that bled from tropical trees, but it wasn’t until 1896, when B. F. Goodrich manufactured the first automobile tires in the United States, that rubber madness consumed the Amazon, which held a virtual monopoly on the highest-quality latex. In 1912, Brazil alone exported more than thirty million dollars’ worth of rubber, the equivalent today of nearly half a billion dollars. Rubber barons had transformed Ma-naus, along the Amazon River, into one of the gaudiest cities in the world. “No extravagance, however absurd, deterred them,” the historian Robin Furneaux wrote in The Amazon. “If one rubber baron bought a vast yacht, another would install a tame lion in his villa, and a third would water his horse on champagne.” And nothing was more extravagant than the opera house, with its Italian marble, Bohemian glass, gilded balconies, crystal chandeliers, Victorian murals, and a dome bathed in the colors of the national flag. Prefabricated in Europe and costing an estimated ten million dollars in taxpayers’ money, the opera house was shipped in pieces more than a thousand miles up the Amazon River, where laborers were deployed around the clock to assemble it, working at night under Brazil’s first electric lightbulbs. It didn’t matter that almost no one from Manaus had heard of Puccini or that more than half the members of a visiting opera troupe eventually died of yellow fever. This was the apotheosis of the rubber boom.

The prospect of fortune had enticed thousands of illiterate workers into the wilderness, where they quickly became indebted to rubber barons who had provided them with transportation, food, and equipment on credit. Wearing a miner’s lamp to help him see, a trapper would hack through jungle, toiling from sunrise to sundown, searching for rubber trees, then, upon his return, hungry and feverish, would spend hours hunched over a fire, inhaling toxic smoke as he cooked the latex over a spit until it coagulated. It often took weeks to produce a single rubber ball large enough to sell. And it was rarely enough to discharge his debt. Countless trappers died of starvation, dysentery, and other diseases. The Brazilian writer Eu-clides da Cunha called the system “the most criminal organization of labour ever devised.” He noted that the rubber trapper “actually comes to embody a gigantic contradiction: he is a man working to enslave himself!”

The first frontier town that Fawcett and Chivers came to was Rur-renabaque, in northwest Bolivia. Although it appeared in capital letters on Fawcett’s map, it consisted of little more than a strip of mud with bamboo huts, and with vultures circling overhead. “My heart sank,” Fawcett wrote in his journals, “and I began to realize how truly primitive this river country was.”

The region was removed from any center of power or ruling authority. In 1872, Bolivia and Brazil had attempted to build a railroad through the jungle, but so many workers died from disease and from Indian attacks that the project became known as the Railroad of the Dead. It was said that one man died per tie. When Fawcett arrived, more than three decades later, the railway was under construction by a third firm; still, only five miles of track had been laid-or, as Fawcett put it, it ran “from ‘nowhere’ to ‘nowhere.’ ” Because the Amazon frontier was so isolated, it was governed by its own laws and, as one observer put it, made the American West seem by comparison “as proper as a prayer meeting.” When a British traveler passed through the region in 1911, he reported one resident telling him, “Government? What is that? We know no government here!” The area was a haven for bandits, fugitives, and fortune hunters who carried guns on each hip, lassoed jaguars out of boredom, and killed without hesitation.

As Fawcett and Chivers descended deeper into this world, they reached the distant outpost of Riberalta. There, Fawcett watched a boat pulling along the bank. A worker yelled, “Here come the cattle!”-and Fawcett saw guards with whips driving a chain of about thirty Indian men and women onshore, where buyers began to inspect them. Fawcett asked a customs officer who these people were. Slaves, the officer replied.

Fawcett was shocked to learn that, because so many workers died in the jungle, rubber barons, in order to replenish their labor supply, dispatched armed posses into the forest to kidnap and enslave tribes. In one instance along the Putumayo River in Peru, the horrors inflicted on the Indians became so notorious that the British government launched an investigation after it was revealed that the perpetrators had sold shares in their company on the London Stock Exchange. Evidence showed that the Peruvian Amazon Company had committed virtual genocide in attempting to pacify and enslave the native population: it castrated and beheaded Indians, poured gasoline on them and lit them afire, crucified them upside down, beat them, mutilated them, starved them, drowned them, and fed them to dogs. The company’s henchmen also raped women and girls and smashed children’s heads open. “In some sections such an odour of putrefying flesh arises from the numerous bodies of the victims that the places must be temporarily abandoned,” said an engineer who visited the area, which was dubbed the “devil’s paradise.” Sir Roger Casement, the British consul general who led the investigation, estimated that some thirty thousand Indians had died at the hands of this one rubber company alone. A British diplomat concluded, “It is no exaggeration to say that this information as to the methods employed in the collection of rubber by the agents of the company surpass in horror anything hitherto reported to the civilized world during the last century.”

Long before the Casement report became public, in 1912, Fawcett denounced the atrocities in British newspaper editorials and in meetings with government officials. He once called the slave traders “savages” and “scum.” Moreover, he knew that the rubber boom had made his own mission exceedingly more difficult and dangerous. Even previously friendly tribes were now hostile to foreigners. Fawcett was told of one party of eighty men in which “so many of them were killed with poisoned arrows that the rest abandoned the trip and retired;” other travelers were found buried up to their waists and left to be eaten alive by fire ants, maggots, and bees. In the journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Fawcett wrote that “the wretched policy which created a slave trade, and openly encouraged a reckless slaughter of the indigenous Indians, many of them races of great intelligence,” had imbued the Indians with a “deadly vengeance against the stranger” and constituted one of “the great dangers of South American exploration.”

On September 25, 1906, Fawcett left Riberalta with Chivers, accompanied by twenty desperadoes and native guides he had recruited on the frontier. Among them was a Jamaican prospector named Willis, who, despite a penchant for liquor, was a first-rate cook and fisherman (“He could smell out food and drink as a hound smells out a rabbit,” Fawcett quipped), and a Bolivian former military officer who spoke fluent English and could serve as an interpreter. Fawcett had made sure that the men understood what they were getting themselves into. Anyone who broke a limb or fell sick deep in the jungle would have little chance of survival. To carry the person out would jeopardize the welfare of the entire party; the logic of the jungle dictated that the person be abandoned-or, as Fawcett grimly put it, “He has his choice of opium pills, starvation, or torture if he is found by savages.”

Using canoes that they built from trees, Fawcett and his men meandered westward on their planned route of nearly six hundred miles along the frontier between Brazil and Bolivia. The river was barricaded with fallen trees, and from the canoes Chivers and Fawcett tried to slash through them with machetes. Piranhas were abundant, and the explorers were careful not to let their fingers skim the river’s surface. Theodore Roosevelt, after exploring an Amazon tributary in 1914, called the piranha “the most ferocious fish in the world.” He added, “They will rend and devour alive any wounded man or beast; for blood in the water excites them to madness… The head, with its short muzzle, staring malignant eyes and gaping, cruelly armoured jaws, is the embodiment of evil ferocity.”

When bathing, Fawcett nervously checked his body for boils and cuts. The first time he swam across a river, he said, “there was an unpleasant sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.” In addition to piranhas, he dreaded candirus and electric eels, or puraques. The latter-about six feet long, with eyes set so far forward on their flattened heads that they nearly rested on their upper lips-were living batteries: they sent up to six hundred and fifty volts of electricity coursing through the bodies of their victims. They could electrocute a frog or a fish in a tank of water without ever touching it. The German explorer-scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who traveled along the Orinoco River in the Amazon at the beginning of the nineteenth century, drove, with the help of Indians holding harpoons, thirty horses and mules into a bog of water filled with electric eels to see what would happen. The horses and mules-manes erect, eyes inflamed-reared in terror as the eels surrounded them. Some horses tried to jump out of the water, but the Indians forced them back with the harpoons. Within seconds, two horses had drowned, while the rest eventually broke through the Indians’ blockade and collapsed to the ground, exhausted and numb. “One shock is sufficient to paralyze and drown a man-but the way of the puraque is to repeat the shocks to make sure of its victim,” Fawcett wrote. He concluded that a person must do things in these parts that “carry no hope of epitaph-done in cold blood, and too often with an aftermath of tragedy.”

One day Fawcett spied something along the edge of the sluggish river. At first it looked like a fallen tree, but it began undulating toward the canoes. It was bigger than an electric eel, and when Fawcett’s companions saw it they screamed. Fawcett lifted his rifle and fired at the object until smoke filled the air. When the creature ceased to move, the men pulled a canoe alongside it. It was an anaconda. In his reports to the Royal Geographical Society, Fawcett insisted that it was longer than sixty feet (“Great Snakes!” blared one headline in the British press), though much of the anaconda was submerged and it was surely smaller: the longest officially recorded one is twenty-seven feet nine inches. (At that length, a single anaconda can still weigh over half a ton and, because of its elastic jaw muscles, swallow a deer whole.) Staring at the motionless snake in front of him, Fawcett removed his knife. He tried to slice off a piece of its skin, to put it in a specimen jar, but as he cut into the anaconda it jolted toward Fawcett and his party-sending them fleeing in fear.

As the expedition pushed onward, its members gazed at the jungle. “It was one of the gloomiest journeys I had made, for the river was threatening in its quiet, and the easy current and deep water seemed to promise evils ahead,” Fawcett wrote months after leaving Riberalta. “The demons of the Amazonian rivers were abroad, manifesting their presence in lowering skies, downpours of torrential rain and somber forest walls.”

Fawcett enforced a strict regimen. According to Henry Costin, a former British corporal who went on several later expeditions with Fawcett, the party woke at first light with one person calling reveille. Then the men rushed down to the river, washed, brushed their teeth, and packed, while the person on breakfast duty started a fire. “We lived simply,” Costin recalled. “Breakfast would usually be porridge, tinned milk, lots of sugar.” Within minutes, the men were on their way. Collecting the extensive data for Fawcett’s RGS reports-including surveys, sketches of the landscape, barometric and temperature readings, and catalogs of the flora and fauna- required painstaking work, and Fawcett toiled furiously. “Inactivity was what I couldn’t stand,” he once said. The jungle seemed to exaggerate his fundamental nature: his bravery and toughness, along with his irascibility and intolerance of others’ weakness. He allowed his men only a brief pause for lunch-a snack of a few biscuits-and trekked up to twelve hours a day.

Just before sundown, he would finally signal to his men to set up camp. Willis, the cook, was in charge of preparing supper and supplemented their powdered soup with whatever animals the group had hunted. Hunger turned anything into a delicacy: armadillos, stingrays, turtles, anacondas, rats. “Monkeys are looked on as good eating,” Fawcett observed. “Their meat tastes rather pleasant; but at first the idea revolted me because when stretched over a fire to burn off the hair they looked so horribly human.”

While moving through the forest, Fawcett and his men were more susceptible to predators. Once, a pack of white-lipped wild pigs stampeded toward Chivers and the interpreter, who fired their guns in every direction as Willis scampered up a tree to avoid being shot by his companions. Even frogs could be deadly to the touch: a Phyllobates terribilis, which is found in the Colombian Amazon, has enough toxins in it to kill a hundred people. One day Fawcett stumbled upon a coral snake, whose venom shuts down the central nervous system of its victim, causing the person to suffocate. In the Amazon, Fawcett marveled, the animal kingdom “is against man as it is nowhere else in the world.”

But it wasn’t the big predators that he and his companions fretted about most. It was the ceaseless pests. The sauba ants that could reduce the men’s clothes and rucksacks to threads in a single night. The ticks that attached like leeches (another scourge) and the red hairy chiggers that consumed human tissue. The cyanide-squirting millipedes. The parasitic worms that caused blindness. The berne flies that drove their ovipositors through clothing and deposited larval eggs that hatched and burrowed under the skin. The almost invisible biting flies called piums that left the explorers’ bodies covered in lesions. Then there were the “kissing bugs,” which bite their victim on the lips, transferring a protozoan called Try-panosoma cruzi; twenty years later, the person, thinking he had escaped the jungle unharmed, would begin to die of heart or brain swelling. Nothing, though, was more hazardous than the mosquitoes. They transmitted everything from malaria to “bone-crusher” fever to elephantiasis to yellow fever. “[Mosquitoes] constitute the chief single reason why Amazonia is a frontier still to be won,” Willard Price wrote in his 1952 book The Amazing Amazon.

Fawcett and his men wrapped themselves in netting, but even this was insufficient. “The piums settled on us in clouds,” Fawcett wrote. “We were forced to close both ends of the [boat’s] palm-leaf shelter with mosquito-nets, and to use head-veils as well, yet in spite of that our hands and faces were soon a mass of tiny, itching blood-blisters.” Meanwhile, polvorina, which are so small they resemble powder, hid in the hair of Fawcett and his companions. Often, all that the men could think about was insects. They came to recognize the different pitch of each insect’s wings rubbing together. (“The Tabana came singly, but advertised their presence by a probe like the thrust of a needle,” Fawcett said.) The bugs tormented the explorers to the point of madness, as a diary of a naturalist who went on a later expedition with Fawcett showed:

10/20: Attacked in hammocks by tiny gnat not over 1 /10; inch in length; mosquito nets no protection; gnats bite all night allowing no sleep.

10/21: Another sleepless night account of blood-sucking gnats.

10/22: My body mass of bumps from insect bites, wrists and hands swollen from bites of tiny gnats. 2 nights with almost no sleep-simply terrible… Rain during noon, all afternoon and most of night. My shoes have been soaked since starting… Worst ticks so far.

10/23: Horrible night with worst biting gnats yet; even smoke of no avail.

10/24: More than half ill from insects. Wrists and hands swollen. Paint limbs with iodine.

10/25: Arose to find termites covering everything left on the ground… Blood-sucking gnats still with us.

10/30: Sweat bees, gnats and “polverinahs” (blood-sucking gnats) terrible.

11/2: My right eye is sadly blurred by gnats.

11/3: Bees and gnats worse than ever; truly “there’s no rest for the weary.”

11/5: My first experience with flesh and carrion-eating bees. Biting gnats in clouds-very worst we have encountered-rendering one’s food unpalatable by filling it with their filthy bodies, their bellies red and disgustingly distended with one’s own blood.

Six months into the expedition, most of the men, including Chivers, were sick with fever. They were overcome with insatiable thirst, skull-splitting headaches, and uncontrollable shivering. Their muscles throbbed so much that it was hard to walk. They had contracted, in most cases, either yellow fever or malaria. If it was yellow fever, what the men feared most was spitting up mouthfuls of blood-the so-called black vomit- which meant that death was near. When it was malaria-which, according to one estimate, more than 80 percent of the people then working in the Amazon contracted-the men sometimes experienced hallucinations, and could slip into a coma and die. At one point, Fawcett shared a boat with four passengers who fell ill and perished. Using paddles, he helped to dig their graves along the shore. Their only monument, Fawcett noted, was “a couple of crossed twigs tied with grass.”

One morning Fawcett noticed a trail of indentations on a muddy bank. He bent down to inspect them. They were human footprints. Fawcett searched the woods in the vicinity and discovered broken branches and trampled leaves. Indians were tracking them.

Fawcett had been told that the Pacaguara Indians lived along the banks of the Abuná River and had a reputation for kidnapping trespassers and carrying them into the forest. Two other tribes-the Parintinin, farther to the north, and the Kanichana, in the southern Mojo plains-were said to be cannibalistic. According to a missionary in 1781, “When [the Kanichana] captured prisoners in their wars they either kept them forever as slaves or roasted them to devour them in their banquets. They used as drinking cups the skulls of those whom they had killed.” Although Westerners were fixated on cannibalism (Richard Burton and some friends had started a soiree called the Cannibal Club) and often exaggerated its extent in order to justify their conquest of indigenous people, there is no question that some Amazonian tribes practiced it, either for ritualistic reasons or for vengeance. Human meat was typically prepared two ways: roasted or boiled. The Guayaki, who practiced ritualistic cannibalism when members of the tribe died, cut bodies into quarters with a bamboo knife, severing the head and the limbs from the trunk. “The head and the intestines are not treated according to the same ‘recipe’ as the muscular parts or the internal organs,” explained the anthropologist Pierre Clastres, who spent time studying the tribe in the early 1960s. “The head is first carefully shaved… then boiled, as are the intestines, in ceramic cooking pots. Regarding the meat proper and the internal organs, they are placed on a large wooden grill under which a fire is lit… The meat is roasted slowly and the fat released by the heat is absorbed gradually with the koto [brush]. When the meat is considered ‘done’ it is divided among all those present. Whatever is not eaten on the spot is set aside in the women’s baskets and used as nutriment the next day. As far as the bones are concerned, they are broken and their marrow, of which the women are particularly fond, is sucked.” The Guayaki’s preference for human skin is the reason that they call themselves Aché Kyravwa-“Guayaki Eaters of Human Fat.”

Fawcett studied the forest around him, looking for Indian warriors. Amazon tribes were expert at stalking their enemies. While some liked to announce their presence before an attack, many used the forest to enhance their stealth. They painted their bodies and faces with black charcoal and with red ointments distilled from berries and fruits. Their weapons-blow darts and arrows-struck silently, before anyone had time to flee. Certain tribes exploited the very things that made the forest so hazardous to Fawcett and his men-dipping the points of their weapons in the lethal toxins from stingrays and dart frogs or using biting soldier ants to suture their wounds in battle. In contrast, Fawcett and his party had no experience in the jungle. They were, as Costin confessed during his first journey, “greenhorns.” Most were sick and debilitated and hungry-the perfect prey.

That night, Fawcett and his men were all on edge. Before they set off, Fawcett had made each of them agree to a seemingly suicidal edict: they were not to fire their weapons on Indians under any circumstances. When the Royal Geographical Society learned of Fawcett’s instructions, one member familiar with the region warned that such a method would “court assassination.” Fawcett conceded that his nonviolent approach involved “mad risks.” Yet he argued that it was not just the moral course; it was also the only way for a small and easily outnumbered party to demonstrate its friendly intentions to tribes.

As the men now lay in their hammocks, a small fire crackling, they listened to the tumult of the forest. They tried to distinguish each sound: the plopping of a nut in the river, the rubbing of branches, the whine of mosquitoes, the roar of a jaguar. Occasionally, the jungle would seem silent, then a screech would shatter the darkness. While the men couldn’t see anyone, they knew they could be seen. “It was trying to the nerves, knowing all the time that our every movement was watched, yet seeing almost nothing of those who were watching,” Fawcett wrote.

On the river one day the boats came to a series of rapids, and a pilot went inland to look for a place to circumvent them. A long time elapsed with no word from him, so Fawcett went with several men to find him. They hacked through the forest for half a mile and suddenly came upon the pilot’s body, pierced with forty-two arrows.

The men were beginning to panic. At one point, drifting on the boat toward the rapids, Willis yelled, “Savages!”-and there they were standing on the banks. “Their bodies [were] painted all over,” Fawcett wrote, and “their ears had pendulous lobes, and quills were thrust from side to side through their nostrils.” He wanted to try to establish contact, but the other men on board were shouting and paddling frantically away. The Indians took aim with six-foot bows and fired their arrows. “One ripped through the side of the boat with a vicious smack-through wood an inch and a half in thickness,” Fawcett said. The boat then slipped down a chute of rapids, leaving, for the moment, the tribe behind.

Even before this confrontation, Fawcett had noticed his men, especially Chivers, unraveling. “I had observed his gradual break-up,” Fawcett wrote. He decided to relieve Chivers of his duties and sent him and several other members of the party back to the frontier. Still, two of the men died of their fevers. Fawcett himself longed for his family. What kind of a fool was he, Fawcett wondered, to exchange the comfort of his previous postings for such conditions? His second son, Brian, had been born in his absence. “I was tempted to resign and return home,” Fawcett wrote. Yet, unlike his men, Fawcett was in good health. He was hungry and wretched, but his skin wasn’t yellow and his temperature was normal and he wasn’t vomiting blood. Later, John Keltie, the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, wrote a letter to Fawcett’s wife, saying, “Unless he had an exceptional constitution, I do not see how he could survive.” Fawcett noted that in these parts “the healthy person was regarded as a freak, an exception, extraordinary.”

Despite his yearnings for home, Fawcett continued with Willis and the interpreter to survey the border between Bolivia and Brazil, hacking for miles through the jungle. In May 1907, he completed his route and presented his findings to members of the South American boundary commission and the RGS. They were incredulous. He had redefined the borders of South America-and he had done it nearly a year ahead of schedule.