The Lost City of Z

5. BLANK SPOTS ON THE MAP

“Here you go, the Royal Geographical Society,” the taxi driver said, as the cab let me out in front of the entrance, across from Hyde . Park, on a February morning in 2005. The building resembled an extravagant manor, which it had been before the Society, in need of a larger space, purchased it in 1912. Three stories high, it had redbrick walls, sash windows, Dutch pilasters, and an overhanging copper roof that came together, along with several chimneys, at various jumbled points, like a child’s vision of a castle. Along the outer wall were life-size statues of Livingstone, with his trademark cap and walking stick, and of Ernest Shackle-ton, the Antarctic explorer, bundled in scarves and wearing boots. At the entrance, I asked a guard for the location of the archives, which I hoped would shed further light on Fawcett’s career as an explorer, and on his last voyage.

When I had first called John Hemming, a former director of the Royal Geographical Society and a historian of the Brazilian Indians, to ask about the Amazon explorer, he said, “You’re not one of those Fawcett lunatics, are you?” The Society had apparently become wary of people who were consumed by Fawcett’s fate. Despite the passage of time and the diminished likelihood of finding him, some people seemed to grow more rather than less fanatical. For decades, they had pestered the Society for information, concocting their own bizarre theories, before setting out into the wilderness to effectively commit suicide. They were often called the “Fawcett freaks.” One person who went in search of Fawcett in 1995 wrote in an unpublished article that his fascination had mutated into a “virus” and that, when he called upon the Society for help, an “exasperated” staff person said of Fawcett hunters, “I think they’re mad. These people are completely obsessed.” I felt slightly foolish descending upon the Society to request all of Fawcett’s papers, but the Society’s archives, which contain Charles Darwin’s sextant and Livingstone’s original maps, had been opened to the general public only in the previous few months, and could prove invaluable.

A guard at the front desk gave me a card authorizing me to enter the building, and I walked down a cavernous marble corridor, passing an old smoking lounge and a walnut-paneled map room where explorers like Fawcett had once gathered. In recent years, the Society had added a modern glass pavilion, but the renovation could not dispel the anachronistic air that hung over the institution.

Yet in Fawcett’s day the Society was helping to engineer one of the most incredible feats of humankind: the mapping of the world. Perhaps no deed, not the building of the Brooklyn Bridge or the Panama Canal, rivals its scope or human toll. The endeavor, from the time the ancient Greeks laid out the main principles of sophisticated cartography, took hundreds of years, cost millions of dollars, and claimed thousands of lives, and, when it was all but over, the achievement was so overwhelming that few could recall what the world looked like before, or how the feat had been accomplished.

In a corridor of the Royal Geographical Society’s building, I noticed on the wall a gigantic seventeenth-century map of the globe. On the margins were sea monsters and dragons. For ages, cartographers had no means of knowing what existed on most of the earth. And more often than not these gaps were filled in with fantastical kingdoms and beasts, as if the make-believe, no matter how terrifying, were less frightening than the truly unknown.

During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, maps depicted fowl in Asia that tore humans apart, a bird in Germany that glowed in the dark, people in India with everything from sixteen toes to dog heads, hye nas in Africa whose shadows rendered dogs mute, and a beast called a “cockatrice” that could kill with a mere puff of its breath. The most dreaded place on the map was the land of Gog and Magog, whose armies, the book of Ezekiel had warned, would one day descend from the north to wipe out the people of Israel, “like a cloud to cover the land.”

At the same time, maps expressed the eternal longing for something more alluring: a terrestrial paradise. Cartographers included as central landmarks the Fountain of Youth, for which Ponce de León scoured Florida in the sixteenth century, and the Garden of Eden, which the seventh-century encyclopedist Isidore of Seville reported was filled “with every kind of wood and fruit-bearing tree, having also the tree of life.”

In the twelfth century, these feverish visions were inflamed when a letter appeared in the court of the emperor of Byzantium, purportedly written by a king named Prester John. It said, “I, Prester John, who reign supreme, exceed in riches, virtue, and power all creatures who dwell under heaven. Seventy-two kings pay tribute to me.” It continued, “Honey flows in our land, and milk everywhere abounds. In one of our territories no poison can do harm and no noisy frog croaks, no scorpions are there, and no serpents creep through the grass. No venomous reptiles can exist there or use their deadly power.” Though the letter was likely written as an allegory, it was taken as proof of paradise on earth, which mapmakers placed in the unexplored territories of the Orient. In 1177, Pope Alexander III dispatched his personal physician to extend “to the dearest son in Christ, the famous and high king of the Indians, the holy priest, his greetings and apostolic benediction.” The doctor never returned. Still, the Church and royal courts continued for centuries to send emissaries to locate this fabulous kingdom. In 1459, the learned Venetian cartographer Fra Mauro created one of the most exhaustive maps of the world. At last, Prester John’s mythic kingdom was wiped from Asia. Instead, in Ethiopia, Mauro had written, “qui il Presto Janni fa residential principal”-“here Prester John makes his principal residence.”

Even as late as 1740, it was estimated that fewer than a hundred and twenty places on the planet had been accurately mapped. Because precise portable clocks did not exist, navigators had no means of determining longitude, which is most easily measured as a function of time. Ships plowed into rocks and shoals, their captains convinced that they were hundreds of miles out to sea; thousands of men and millions of dollars’ worth of cargo were squandered. In 1714, Parliament announced that “the Discovery of the Longitude is of such Consequence to Great Britain for the safety of the Navy and Merchant-Ships as well as for the improvement of Trade” that it was offering a twenty-thousand-pound prize-the equivalent today of twelve million dollars-for a “Practical and Useful” solution. Some of the greatest scientific minds tried to solve the problem. Most hoped to use the position of the moon and stars to fix time, but in 1773 John Harrison was recognized as the winner with his more feasible solution: a three-pound, diamond-and-ruby-laden chronometer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I guess you could call it that.”