The Lost City of Z

22. DEAD OR ALIVE

The world waited for news. “Any day now may bring a cable from my husband announcing that he is safe and is returning with” Jack and Raleigh, Nina Fawcett told a reporter in 1927, two years after the party was last heard from. Elsie Rimell, who corresponded frequently with Nina, echoed her sentiments: “I believe firmly that my boy and those he is with will come back out of that wilderness.”

Nina, who was living in Madeira with her sixteen-year-old daughter, Joan, beseeched the Royal Geographical Society not to lose confidence in her husband and proudly circulated one of Jack’s last letters describing his journey into the wilderness. “I think it is quite interesting, as being the first experience of the kind as seen by a boy of twenty-two,” she said. Once, when Joan was competing in a long-distance swimming race in the ocean, she told Nina, “Mother! I feel I must succeed, because if I succeed today Daddy will succeed in finding what he is searching for, and if I fail- they will fail.” To everyone’s astonishment, she won. Brian, who was then twenty and working at the railroad company in Peru, assured his mother that there was no reason to worry. “Father has got to his goal,” he said, “and is staying there as long as possible.”

By the spring of 1927, however, anxieties had become widespread; as a North American Newspaper Alliance bulletin declared, “Fear of Fawcett Fate Grows.” Theories abounded over what might have happened to the explorers. “Have they been killed by the warlike savages, some of them cannibals?” one newspaper asked. “Did they perish in the rapids… or have they starved to death in this all but foodless region?” A popular theory was that the explorers were being held hostage by a tribe-a relatively common practice. (Several decades later, when Brazilian authorities approached the Txukahamei tribe for the first time, they found half a dozen white captives.)

In September 1927, Roger Courteville, a French engineer, announced that while traveling near the source of the Paraguay River, in Mato Grosso, he had discovered Fawcett and his companions living not as hostages but as hermits. “Explorer Called Dupe of Jungle’s Sorcery: Fawcett Forgetting World in Paradise of Birds, Wild Cattle and Game,” the Washington Post reported. Though some sympathized with Fawcett’s apparent desire to “escape from a mechanical age and… from dank subway platforms and sunless tenements,” as one American newspaper editorial put it, others alleged that the explorer had perpetrated one of the greatest hoaxes in history.

Brian Fawcett, who had rushed to meet with Courteville, thought he “described Daddy exactly.” Yet, with each new telling, Courteville changed both his story and the spelling of his own name, and Nina ferociously defended Fawcett’s reputation. “I was boiling over with indignation at the slur cast on my husband’s honour,” she wrote to the RGS, and informed Courteville, “As the story grew and changed, there came an element of evil and malice into it. But thank God, I, [Fawcett’s] wife, saw the discrepancies of the published statements.” By the time she had finished her campaign against the Frenchman, almost no one placed any credence in him or his story.

Still, the question remained: Where were Fawcett and his young companions? Nina was confident that her husband, having survived for years in the jungle, was alive. But, like Elsie Rimell, she realized now that something terrible must have happened to the expedition-most likely that the men had been kidnapped by Indians. “One cannot tell what hopelessness and despair might do with those boys,” Nina said.

Just as her concerns were mounting, a tall, impeccably dressed man appeared at her doorstep in Madeira. It was Fawcett’s longtime rival Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice. He had come to console her, and assured her that even if the expedition had been taken hostage Fawcett would find a way to escape. The one person you need not worry about in the jungle is the colonel, Dr. Rice said.

Nina had so far resisted sending a rescue team, insisting that Fawcett and her son would rather die than have others lose their lives, but now, in her growing panic, she asked the doctor if he would be willing to go. “No better man could be selected to lead such an expedition,” she later said. To the shock of many of his colleagues, however, Dr. Rice decided to retire from exploring. Perhaps, at the age of fifty, he felt too old, especially after seeing what had happened to his seemingly invulnerable rival. Perhaps Dr. Rice’s wife, who had lost her first husband and son in a tragic accident, prevailed upon him not to go back. Or perhaps he simply felt that he had accomplished everything he could as an explorer.

The Royal Geographical Society, meanwhile, declared in 1927 that “we hold ourselves in readiness to help any competent and well-accredited” search party. Though the Society warned that if Fawcett “could not penetrate and push through, much less can anyone else,” it was deluged with hundreds of letters from volunteers. One wrote, “I am thirty-six years of age. Practically Malaria-proof Stand 5…11… in my socks and am as hard as nails.” Another said, “I am prepared to sacrifice all, including my life.”

A few volunteers sought to escape a dreary home life. (“My wife and I have… decided that separation for a couple of years will do us both worlds of good.”) Some hoped to attain fame and fortune, like Henry Morton Stanley, who had located Livingstone five decades earlier. Others were simply drawn to the heroic nature of the quest-to see, as one put it, “whether there is the making of a man in me, or just clay.” A young Welshman, who offered to enlist with his friends, wrote, “We consider that there is a greater measure of heroism in this quiet adventure than, for example, in Lindbergh’s spectacular triumph.”

In February 1928, George Miller Dyott, a forty-five-year-old member of the Royal Geographical Society, launched the first major rescue effort. Born in New York-his father was British and his mother American-he had test piloted airplanes not long after the Wright brothers and was among the first ever to fly at night. After serving as a squadron commander during World War I, he had given up flying to become an explorer, and though he did not quite fit the image of a rugged adventurer-he was five feet seven and weighed only a hundred and forty pounds-he had trekked across the Andes more than a half-dozen times and ventured through parts of the Amazon. (He had navigated the River of Doubt to confirm Teddy Roosevelt’s once-disputed claims.) He had also been held captive for several weeks by an Amazonian tribe that shrank its enemies’ heads.

For the media, Fawcett’s disappearance had only contributed to what one writer called a “romantic story which builds newspaper empires”- and few were as adept at keeping the story ablaze as Dyott. A former managing director of a company called Travel Films, he was one of the earliest explorers to bring along motion-picture cameras, and he knew instinctively how to strike a pose and talk like a character in a B movie.

The North American Newspaper Alliance sponsored his rescue effort, which it advertised as “an adventure that makes the blood race… Romance, mystery-and Peril!” Despite protests from the RGS that the publicity was threatening the expedition’s objective, Dyott planned to file daily dispatches with a shortwave radio and to film his journey. To succeed, Dyott, who had once met Fawcett, claimed that he would need “the intuition of Sherlock Holmes” and “the skill of a big-game hunter.” He pictured Fawcett and his companions “camped in some remote corner of the primeval forest, unable to come or go. Their reserve food supply must long since have been exhausted; their clothing torn to shreds or rotted to pieces.” In such a prolonged “hand-to-hand” combat with the wilderness, Dyott added, it was only Fawcett’s “supreme courage that will have held his party together and instilled in them the will to live.”

Like Fawcett, Dyott had developed over the years his own idiosyncratic methods of exploring. He believed, for instance, that diminutive men-men, that is to say, built like himself-were best able to endure in the jungle. “A big man has to exert so much energy to carry his bulk that he has no surplus,” Dyott told reporters, and he would be “difficult to stow in a canoe.”

Dyott posted an advertisement in several American newspapers seeking a volunteer who was “small, spare, of wiry build.” The Los Angeles Times broadcast his appeal under the headline “Dyott Needs Young Unmarried Man for Perilous Jungle Trip in Search for Scientist: Applicant Must Be Single, Quiet and Youthful.” Within days, he received offers from twenty thousand people. “They have come from all over the world,” Dyott told reporters. “England, Ireland, France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Peru, Mexico-all are represented. Letters have come from Alaska, too.” He noted, “There are applicants in all ranks of society… There are letters from lawyers, physicians, real estate dealers, steeplejacks… From Chicago an acrobat wrote, and a wrestler.” Dyott hired three secretaries to help him sift through the applications. The Independent, an American weekly newspaper, marveled, “Perhaps if there were a sufficient number of jungles available and enough expeditions to go round, we would see the spectacle of our whole population marching off in search of lost explorers, ancient civilizations, and something which it vaguely felt was missing in its life.” Nina told the RGS that the outpouring was a “great compliment” to the enduring reputation of Colonel Fawcett.

One of those who applied to join the expedition was Roger Rimell,

Raleigh’s brother, who was now thirty years old. “I am most anxious naturally,” he informed Dyott, “and do consider I am as entitled to go as much as anyone.” Elsie Rimell was so desperate to find Raleigh that she consented, saying, “I know of no greater help I can give them than to offer the services of my one remaining son.”

Dyott, however, not wanting to take someone with so little experience, politely declined. Several adventurous ladies also applied, but Dyott said, “I can’t take a woman.” In the end, he chose four hardened out-doorsmen who could operate a wireless radio and a movie camera in the jungle.

Dyott had strictly enforced a ban on married men, insisting that they were accustomed to “creature comforts” and “always thinking about their wives.” But, on the eve of the party’s departure from New York, he violated his own edict and married a woman nearly half his age, Persis Stevens Wright, whom the newspapers portrayed as a “Long Island society girl.” The couple planned to honeymoon during the expedition’s voyage to Rio. New York City’s mayor, Jimmy Walker, who came to bid the expedition farewell, told Dyott that his bride’s consent to his risking his life in order to save the lives of others was “a display of unselfish courage of which the whole nation should be proud.”

On February 18, 1928, in the midst of a blizzard, Dyott and his party drove to the same piers in Hoboken, New Jersey, where Fawcett had departed with Jack and Raleigh three years earlier. Dyott’s group was preparing to board the SS Voltaire when an anxious middle-aged woman appeared, bundled against the storm. It was Elsie Rimell. She had flown from California to meet with Dyott, whose expedition, she said, “fills me with new hope and courage.” She handed him a small package-a present for her son Raleigh.

During the voyage to Brazil, the ship’s crew dubbed the explorers the “Knights of the Round Table.” A banquet was held in their honor, and special menus were printed that listed each of the explorers by nicknames, such as “King Arthur” and “Sir Galahad.” The ship’s purser declared, “On behalf of your noble band of knights allow me to wish you Cheerio, good luck and Godspeed.”

After the Voltaire reached Rio, Dyott bade his wife farewell and headed with his men to the frontier. There he recruited a small army of Brazilian helpers and Indian guides, and the party soon grew to twenty-six members and required seventy-four oxen and mules to transport more than three tons of food and gear. A reporter later described the party as a “Cecil B. DeMille safari.” Brazilians began to refer to it as the “suicide club.”

In June, the expedition arrived at Bakairí Post, where a group of Kayapós had recently attacked and killed several inhabitants. (Dyott described the outpost as “the dregs of civilization mixing with the scum of the wilds.”) While camping there, Dyott made what he considered a breakthrough: he met an Indian named Bernardino, who said that he had served as Fawcett’s guide down the Kurisevo River, one of the headwaters of the Xingu. In exchange for gifts, Bernardino agreed to lead Dyott as far as he had taken Fawcett’s party, and, shortly after they departed, Dyott spotted Y-shaped marks carved into the trunks of trees-a possible sign of Fawcett’s former presence. “Fawcett’s trail loomed largely before us and, like a pack of hounds on the scent, we were in full cry,” Dyott wrote.

At night, Dyott sent his dispatches over the radio, and they were often passed on to NANA by the Radio Relay League, a network of amateur operators in the United States. Each new item was trumpeted in international bulletins: “Dyott Nearing Jungle Ordeal;” “Dyott Picks Up Fawcett Trail;” “Dyott Finds New Clew.” John J. Whitehead, a member of the expedition, wrote in his diary, “How different would the story of Stanley and Livingstone been written, if they had possessed radio.” Many people around the world tuned in, mesmerized. “I first heard of [the ex pedition] on my crystal set when I was only eleven years old,” Loren McIntyre, an American who went on to become an acclaimed Amazon explorer himself, later recalled.

Listeners vicariously faced the sudden terrors that confronted the party. One night Dyott reported:

We came across tracks in the soft ground, tracks of human feet. We stopped and examined them. There must have been thirty or forty persons in a single band. After a few moments one of our Bakairí Indians turned and said in an expressionless voice, “Kayapós.”

After trekking nearly a month northward from Bakairí Post, the party reached the settlement of the Nahukwá, one of many tribes that had sought sanctuary in the jungles around the Xingu. Dyott wrote of the Nahukwá, “These new denizens of the forest were as primitive as Adam and Eve.” Several in the tribe greeted Dyott and his men warmly, but the chief, Aloique, seemed hostile. “He regarded us impassively with his small eyes,” Dyott wrote. “Cunning and cruelty lurked behind their lids.”

Dyott was surrounded by Aloique’s children, and he noticed something tied to a piece of string around the neck of one boy-a small brass plate engraved with the words “W. S. Silver and Company.” It was the name of the British firm that had supplied Fawcett with gear. Slipping into the chiefs dark hut, Dyott lit a flare. In the corner, he spied a military-style metal trunk.

Without the benefit of translators, Dyott tried to interrogate Aloique, using elaborate sign language. Aloique, also gesturing, seemed to suggest that the trunk was a gift. He then indicated that he had guided three white men to a neighboring territory. Dyott was skeptical and urged Aloique and some of his men to take him along the same route. Aloique warned that a murderous tribe, the Suyás, lived in that direction. Each time the Nahukwás said the word “Suyá,” they would motion to the backs of their heads, as if they were being decapitated. Dyott persisted and Aloique, in exchange for knives, agreed to guide them.

That night, as Dyott and his men slept among the Indians, many in the party were uneasy. “We cannot predict the actions of [the Indians] for we know nothing about them except-and this is important-from these regions the Fawcett party disappeared,” Whitehead wrote. He slept with a.38 Winchester and a machete under his blanket.

As the expedition pushed on through the forest the following day, Dyott continued to question Aloique, and before long the chief seemed to add a new element to his story. Fawcett and his men, he now intimated, had been killed by the Suyás. “Suyás! Bung-bung-bung!” the chief yelled, falling to the ground, as if he were dead. Aloique’s shifting explanations aroused Dyott’s suspicions. As he later wrote, “The finger of guilt seemed to point to Aloique.”

At one point, as Dyott was reporting his latest findings over the radio, the machine stopped working. “Jungle Cry Strangled,” a NANA bulletin declared. “Dyott Radio Cut Off in Crisis.” The prolonged silence unleashed dire speculation. “I am so afraid,” Dyott’s wife told reporters.

The expedition, meanwhile, was short of food and water, and some of the men were so ill that they could barely walk. Whitehead wrote that he “couldn’t eat, my fever is too bad.” The cook’s legs had swollen and were oozing a gangrenous pus. Dyott decided to press on with only two of his men, in the hope of finding Fawcett’s remains. “Remember,” Dyott told Whitehead, “if anything happens to me, all my effects go to my wife.”

The night before the small contingent left, one of the men in Dyott’s expedition party, an Indian, reported that he had overheard Aloique plotting with tribesmen to murder Dyott and steal his equipment. By then, Dyott had no doubt that he had found Fawcett’s killer. As a deterrent, Dyott told Aloique that he now intended to take his entire party with him. The next morning Aloique and his men had vanished.

Soon afterward, scores of Indians from various tribes in the Xingu region emerged from the forest, carrying bows and arrows, and demanding gifts. With every hour a new canoe arrived with more tribesmen. Some of the Indians wore striking jewelry and had in their possession exquisite pottery, which made Dyott think that Fawcett’s stories of an ancient sophisticated civilization might be true. But it was impossible to make further inquiries. As Whitehead put it, “Natives from tribes all over the territory, possibly two thousand of them, gradually were hemming us in from all sides.”

Dyott had exhausted his supply of gifts, and the Indians were growing hostile. He promised them that the next morning he would give each of them an ax and knives. After midnight, when the Indians appeared to be asleep, Dyott quietly gathered his men and set out in the expedition’s boats. The men pushed off and floated with the currents. No one dared to strike a paddle. A moment later, they heard a group of canoes upriver coming toward them with more Indians, apparently heading to their camp. Dyott signaled to his men to pull their boats to the side of the river and lie down. The men held their breath as the Indians paddled past them.

At last, Dyott gave the order to row, and the explorers began to paddle furiously. One of the technicians got the wireless radio to work long enough to relay a brief message: “Am sorry to report Fawcett expedition perished at the hands of hostile Indians. Our position is critical… Can’t even afford time to send full details by wireless. Must descend the Xingu without delay or we ourselves will be caught.” The expedition then dumped the radio, along with other heavy gear, to hasten its exit. Newspapers debated the team’s odds. “Dyott’s Chance to Escape Even,” one headline ran. When Dyott and his men finally emerged from the jungle, months later-sick, emaciated, bearded, mosquito pocked-they were greeted as heroes. “We want to luxuriate in the pleasant and heady atmosphere of notoriety,” said Whitehead, who was subsequently hired as a pitchman for a laxative called Nujol. (“You can be sure that no matter what important equipment I have to discard, my next adventure will see me taking plenty of Nujol along.”) Dyott published a book, Man Hunting in the Jungle, and starred in a 1933 Hollywood film about his adventures called Savage Gold.

But by then Dyott’s story had begun to collapse. As Brian Fawcett pointed out, it is hard to believe that his father, who was so wary of anyone knowing his path, would have left Y marks on trees. The gear that Dyott found in Aloique’s house may well have been a gift from Fawcett, as Aloique insisted, or it may have come from Fawcett’s 1920 expedition, when he and Holt had been forced to dump much of their cargo. Indeed, Dyott’s case rested on his assessment of Aloique’s “treacherous” disposition-a judgment based largely on interactions conducted in sign language and on Dyott’s purported expertise in “Indian psychology.”

Years later, when missionaries and other explorers entered the region, they described Aloique and the Nahukwá as generally peaceful and friendly. Dyott had ignored the likelihood that Aloique’s evasiveness, including his decision to flee, stemmed from his own fears of a white stranger who was leading an armed brigade. Finally, there was Bernardino. “Dyott… must have swallowed hook, line and sinker what he was told,” Brian Fawcett wrote. “I say this because there was no Bernardino with my father’s party in 1925.” According to Fawcett’s last letters, he had brought with him from Bakairí Post only two Brazilian helpers: Gardenia and Simão. Not long after the expedition, Nina Fawcett released a statement declaring, “There is consequently still no proof that the three explorers are dead.”

Elsie Rimell insisted that she would “never give up” believing that her son would return. Privately, though, she was despairing. A friend wrote her a letter saying that it was natural that she was so “down,” but pleaded with her, “Do not lose hope.” The friend assured her that the true fate of the explorers would soon be made known.

ON MARCH 12, 1932, a man with brooding eyes and a dark mustache appeared outside the British Embassy in São Paulo, demanding to see the consul general. He wore a sports jacket, striped tie, and baggy pants tucked into knee-high riding boots. He said it was an urgent matter concerning Colonel Fawcett.

The man was led in to see the consul general, Arthur Abbott, who had been a friend of Fawcett’s. For years, Abbott had held out faith that the explorers might materialize, but only a few weeks earlier he had destroyed his last letters from Fawcett, believing that “all hope of ever seeing him again had gone.”

In a later sworn statement, the visitor said, “My name is Stefan Rat-tin. I am a Swiss subject. I came to South America twenty-one years ago.” He explained that, nearly five months earlier, he and two companions had been hunting near the Tapajós River, in the northwest corner of Mato Grosso, when he encountered a tribe holding an elderly white man with long yellowish hair. Later, after many of the tribesmen had got drunk, Rattin said, the white man, who was clad in animal skins, quietly approached him.

“Are you a friend?” he asked.

“Yes,” Rattin replied.

“I am an English colonel,” he said, and he implored Rattin to go to the British consulate and tell “Major Paget” that he was being held captive.

Abbott knew that the former British ambassador to Brazil, Sir Ralph Paget, had been a confidant of Fawcett’s. Indeed, it was Paget who had lobbied the Brazilian government to fund Fawcett’s 1920 expedition. These facts, Abbott noted in a letter to the Royal Geographical Society, were “only known to me and a few personal friends.”

When Nina Fawcett and Elsie Rimell first heard Rattin’s account, they thought it sounded credible. Nina said that she “dare not build my hopes too high;” still, she sent a telegram to a news outlet in Brazil saying that she was now convinced that her husband was “ALIVE.”

Others remained skeptical. General Rondon, after interviewing Rattin for three hours, noted in a report that the place the Swiss trapper indicated that he had found Fawcett was five hundred miles from where the expedition was last sighted. Paget himself, when he was reached in England, wondered why Rattin would have been allowed to leave the tribe while Fawcett was forced to remain a prisoner.

Abbott, however, was convinced of Rattin’s sincerity, especially since he vowed to rescue Fawcett without seeking a reward. “I promised Colonel Fawcett I would bring aid and that promise will be fulfilled,” Rat-tin said. The Swiss trapper soon set out with two men, one of them a reporter, who filed articles for the United Press syndicate. After walking through the jungle for weeks, the three men arrived at the Arinos River, where they built canoes out of bark. In a dispatch dated May 24, 1932, as the expedition was about to enter hostile Indian territory, the reporter wrote, “Rattin is anxious to get away. He calls, ‘All aboard!’ Here we go.” The men were never heard from again.

Not long after, a fifty-two-year-old English actor named Albert de Winton arrived in Cuiabá, vowing to find Fawcett, dead or alive. He had recently had minor roles in several Hollywood films, including King of the Wild. According to the Washington Post, Winton had “given up the imitation thrills of the movies for the real ones of the jungle.” Wearing a crisp safari uniform, a gun strapped to his waist, and smoking a pipe, he hurried into the wilderness. A woman from Orange, New Jersey, referring to herself as Winton’s “American Representative,” released updates to the RGS on stationery that was embossed “Albert De Winton EXPEDITION INTO UNEXPLORED BRAZILIAN JUNGLE IN SEARCH OF COLONEL P. H. FAWCETT.” Nine months after Winton entered the jungle, he emerged with his clothes in tatters, his face shrunken. On February 4, 1934, a photograph of him appeared in newspapers with the caption “Albert Winton, Los Angeles actor, is not made up for a role in a film drama. This is what nine months in a South American wilderness did for him.” After a brief rest in Cuiabá, where he visited a museum that had an exhibit devoted to Fawcett, Winton returned to the Xingu region. Months elapsed without any word from him. Then, in September, an Indian runner emerged from the forest with a crumpled note from Winton. It said that he had been taken prisoner by a tribe and entreated, “Please send help.” Winton’s daughter notified the RGS about “this grave turn of events,” and prayed that someone at the Society would save her father. But Winton, too, was never seen again. Only years later did Brazilian officials learn from Indians in the region that two members of the Kamayurá tribe had found Winton floating, naked and half-mad, in a canoe. One of the Kamayurás smashed his head in with a club, then took his rifle.

Such stories did little to dissuade scores of additional explorers from trying to find Fawcett or the City of Z. There were German-led expeditions, and Italian ones, and Russian ones, and Argentine ones. There was a female graduate student in anthropology from the University of California. There was an American soldier who had served with Fawcett on the western front. There was Peter Fleming, the brother of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. There was a band of Brazilian bandits. By 1934, the Brazilian government, overwhelmed by the number of search parties, had issued a decree banning them unless they received special permission; nonetheless, explorers continued to go, with or without permission.

Although no reliable statistics exist, one recent estimate put the death toll from these expeditions as high as one hundred. The University of California graduate student, who, in 1930, was one of the first female anthropologists to venture into the region to conduct research, made it out only to die a few years later from an infection she had contracted in the Amazon. In 1939, another American anthropologist hanged himself from a tree in the jungle. (He left a message that said, “The Indians are going to take my notes… They are very valuable and can be disinfected and sent to the museum. I want my family to imagine I died in an Indian village of natural causes.”) One seeker lost his brother to fever. “I tried to save” him, he told Nina. “But unfortunately I could do nothing and so we buried him at the edge of the Araguaya.”

Like Rattin and Winton, other explorers seemed to drop off the face of the earth. In 1947, according to the Reverend Jonathan Wells, a missionary in Brazil, a carrier pigeon flew out of the jungle with a note written by a thirty-two-year-old schoolteacher from New Zealand, Hugh McCarthy, who had become fixated on finding Z. Wells said that he had met McCarthy at his Christian mission, on the eastern fringe of the frontier in Mato Grosso, and had warned him that he would die if he proceeded alone into the forest. When McCarthy refused to turn back, Wells said, he gave the schoolteacher seven carrier pigeons to deliver messages, which McCarthy placed in wicker baskets in his canoe. The first note arrived six weeks later. It said, “I am still quite ill from my accident, but the swelling in my leg is gradually receding… Tomorrow I leave to continue my mission. I am told that the mountains which I seek are only five days away. God keep you. Hugh.” After a month and a half, a second carrier reached Wells with a new message. “I… am in dire circumstances,” McCarthy wrote. “Long ago I abandoned my canoe and threw away my rifle as it is impractical in the jungle. My food supply has been exhausted and I am living on berries and wild fruits.” A last trace of McCarthy was in a third note that read, “My work is over and I die happily, knowing that my belief in Fawcett and his lost City of Gold was not in vain.”

NINA CAREFULLY FOLLOWED all of these developments in what she called “The Fawcett Mystery.” She had transformed herself into a kind of detective, sifting through documents and poring over Fawcett’s old logbooks with a magnifying glass. A visitor described her sitting in front of a map of Brazil, a pencil in her hand; scattered about her were her husband’s and son’s last letters and photographs, as well as a shell necklace that Jack had sent back from Bakairí Post. At her request, the RGS shared any reported sightings or rumors concerning the party’s fate. “You have always taken the courageous view that you yourself can judge better than any one the value of such evidence,” an RGS official told her. Insisting that she had “trained” herself to remain impartial, she acted, in case after case, as an arbiter of any evidence. Once, after a German adventurer claimed to have seen Fawcett alive, she wrote bitterly that the man had “more than one passport, at least three aliases, and a sheaf of Press cuttings was found on him!”

Despite her efforts to remain detached, she confessed to her friend Harold Large, after rumors spread that Indians had massacred the party, “My heart is lacerated by the horrible accounts I’m obliged to read and my imagination conjures up gruesome pictures of what might have happened. It takes all my strength of will to push these horrors out of my thoughts, the brutal wear and tear is great.” Another friend of Nina’s informed the Royal Geographical Society that “Lady Fawcett is suffering with heart and soul.”

Nina discovered in her files a packet of letters that Fawcett had written to Jack and Brian when he was on his first expedition, in 1907. She gave them to Brian and Joan, she told Large, “so that they shall each and all know the real ego of the man from whom they are descended.” She added, “He is much in my thoughts today-his birthday.”

By 1936, most people, including the Rimells, had concluded that the party had perished. Fawcett’s older brother, Edward, told the RGS, “I shall act on the conviction, long held, that they died years ago.” But Nina refused to accept that her husband might not be coming back and that she had agreed to send her son to his death. “I am one of the few who believe,” she said. Large referred to her as “Penelope” waiting for “the return of Ulysses.”

Like Fawcett’s quest for Z, Nina’s search for the missing explorers became an obsession. “The return of her husband is all that she lives for nowadays,” a friend told the consul general in Rio. Nina had almost no money, except for the fraction of Fawcett’s pension and a small stipend that Brian sent her from Peru. As the years wore on, she lived like a nomadic pauper, wandering, with her stack of Fawcett-related papers, from Brian’s home in Peru to Switzerland, where Joan had settled with her husband, Jean de Montet, who was an engineer, and four children, including Ro-lette. The more people who doubted the explorers’ perseverance, the more wildly Nina seized upon evidence to prove her case. When one of Fawcett’s compasses turned up in Bakairí Post, in 1933, she insisted that her husband had recently placed it there as a sign that he was alive, even though, as Brian pointed out, it was clearly something that his father had left behind before he departed. “I get the impression,” Nina wrote a contact in Brazil, “that on more than one occasion Colonel Fawcett has tried to give signs of his presence, and no one-except myself-has understood his meaning.” Sometimes she signed her letters, “Believe me.”

In the 1930s, Nina began to receive reports from a new source: missionaries who were pushing into the Xingu area, vowing to convert what one of them called “the most primitive and unenlightened of all South American Indians.” In 1937, Martha L. Moennich, an American missionary, was trekking through the jungle, her eyelids swollen from ticks, and reciting the Lord’s promise-“Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”-when she claimed to make an extraordinary discov ery: at the Kuikuro village, she met a boy with pale skin and bright-blue eyes. The tribe told her that he was the son of Jack Fawcett, who had fathered him with an Indian woman. “In his dual nature there are conspicuous traits of British reserve and of a military bearing, while on his Indian side, the sight of a bow and arrow, or a river, make him a little jungle boy,” Moennich later wrote. She said that she had proposed taking the boy back with her so that he could be given the opportunity “not only to learn his father’s language but to live among his father’s race.” The tribe, however, refused to relinquish him. Other missionaries brought back similar tales of a white child in the jungle-a child who was, according to one minister, “perhaps the most famous boy in the whole Xingu.”

In 1943, Assis Chateaubriand, a Brazilian multimillionaire who owned a conglomerate of newspapers and radio stations, dispatched one of his tabloid reporters, Edmar Morel, to find “Fawcett’s grandson.” Months later, Morel returned with a seventeen-year-old boy with moon white skin named Dulipé. He was hailed as the grandson of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett-or, as the press called him, “the White God of the Xingu.”

The discovery sparked an international frenzy. Dulipé, shy and nervous, was photographed in Life and paraded around Brazil like a carnival attraction-a “freak,” as Time magazine put it. People packed into movie theaters, the lines curling around the block, to see footage of him in the wild, naked and pale. (When the RGS was asked about Dulipé, it responded phlegmatically that such “matters are rather outside the scientific scope of our Society.”) Morel phoned Brian Fawcett in Peru and asked if he and Nina wanted to adopt the young man. When they examined photographs of Dulipé, however, Nina was taken aback. “Do you notice anything about the child’s eyes?” she asked Brian.

“They are all screwed up, as though hurt by the glare.”

“That child looks to me like an albino,” she said. Tests later confirmed her assessment. Many legends of white Indians, in fact, stemmed from cases of albinism. In 1924, Richard O. Marsh, an American explorer who later searched for Fawcett, announced that on an expedition in Panama he not only had spotted “white Indians” but was bringing back three “living specimens” as proof. “They are golden haired, blue-eyed and white-skinned,” Marsh said. “Their bodies are covered with long downy white hair. They… look like very primitive Nordic whites.” After his ship landed in New York, Marsh led the three children-two startled white Indian boys, ten and sixteen years old, and a fourteen-year-old pale Indian girl named Marguerite-before a crush of onlookers and photographers. Scientists from around the country-from the Bureau of American Ethnology, the Museum of the American Indian, the Peabody Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and Harvard University-soon gathered in a room at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to see the children on display, poking and prodding their bodies. “Feel the girl’s neck,” one of the scientists said. Marsh surmised that they were a “relic of the Paleolithic type.” Afterward the New York Times said, “Scientists Declare White Indians Real.” The Indians were kept in a house in a rural area outside Washington, D.C., so that they could be “closer to nature.” Only later was it revealed conclusively that the children were, like many San Blas Indians in Panama, albinos.

Dulipé’s fate was tragic. Seized from his tribe and no longer a commercial attraction, he was abandoned on the streets of Cuiabá. There the “White God of the Xingu” reportedly died of alcoholism.

By the end of 1945, Nina, now seventy-five years old, was suffering from debilitating arthritis and anemia. She needed a cane, and sometimes two, to get around, and described herself as having “no home, no one to help me or meet me and crippled!”

Brian had earlier written her a letter, saying, “You’ve been through enough to bust the spirit of a dozen people but whatever you felt you… have smiled through it all and taken the rough stuff that Fate has ladled out to you for such a long time in a manner that makes me feel awfully proud to be your son. You must be rather an advanced being, or the Gods wouldn’t have put you through such a test, and your reward will undoubtedly be very Great.”

In 1946, when yet another account surfaced that the three explorers were alive in the Xingu-this time it was claimed that Fawcett was both “a prisoner and a chief of the Indians”-Nina was sure her reward had finally come. She vowed to lead an expedition to rescue them, even though “it means certain death for me!” The report, however, turned out to be another fabrication.

As late as 1950, Nina insisted that it would not surprise her if the explorers walked through the door at any moment-her husband now eighty-two, her son forty-seven. But in April 1951, Orlando Villas Boas, a government official revered for his defense of the Amazonian Indians, announced that the Kalapalos had admitted that members of their tribe had killed the three explorers. What’s more, Villas Boas claimed that he had proof: the bones of Colonel Fawcett.