The Lost City of Z: Chapters 5–8

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.

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.

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.

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..."

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 scurvy shows itself upon us all. We are attacked by violent headaches, pains in the limbs, swollen and ulcerated gums.

And everywhere Fawcett turned the new and the old seemed to be at war: electric lights, scattered on the fancier granite streets, and gas lamps, lodged on most cobblestoned corners, glowing in the fog; the Tube bolting through the earth like one of Edward Fawcett's science-fiction inventions, and bicycles, only a few years earlier the smartest thing on the footpaths and now already fusty.

Unlike many of the bellicose, wild-eyed members of the Society, Reeves had a warm, gentle manner.

Taking the surveying course about the same time as Fawcett was Charles Lindsay Temple, who could regale his colleagues with stories of his time in the Civil Service in Brazil; Lieutenant T. Dannreuther, who was obsessed with collecting rare butterflies and insects; and Arthur Edward Seymour Laughton, who was gunned down by Mexican bandits in 1913, at the age of thirty-eight.

Reeves explained that it was a theodolite, which could determine the angle between the horizon and celestial bodies. He demonstrated more tools—artificial horizons, aneroids, and sextants—and then led Fawcett and the others up to the roof of the building, to test the equipment.

If he ingested poison, he was taught to immediately make himself throw up: “Use soap-suds or gunpowder if proper emetics are not at hand.”

They must write down a detailed account of what had happened and have the remaining members of the expedition corroborate it.

Fawcett had done it; he had received the imprimatur of the Royal Geographical Society—or, as he put it, “The R.G.S. bred me as an explorer.”

It was as if the fewer the opportunities for genuine exploration, the greater the means were for anyone to attempt it, and the more baroque the ways—bungee cording, snowboarding—that people found to replicate the sensation.

There were the Prudent, who said: “This is an extraordinarily foolish thing to do.” There were the Wise, who said: “This is an extraordinarily foolish thing to do; but at least you will know better next time.” There were the Very Wise, who said: “This is a foolish thing to do, but not nearly so foolish as it sounds.”

There were the Practical, who spoke at length of inoculations and calibres.

There were the Men Who Had Done A Certain Amount of That Sort of Thing In Their Time, You Know, and these imparted to me elaborate stratagems for getting the better of ants and told me that monkeys made excellent eating, and so for that matter did lizards, and parrots; they all tasted rather like chicken.

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 complicit 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.

Fawcett managed to insinuate himself into the royal court to spy on the sultan himself.

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.

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.

Disease was rampant in the region, and the Indians, who had been attacked mercilessly by rubber trappers, murdered interlopers.

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 mule’s load would often foul on jutting rocks, and knock [the animal] screaming over the precipices,” he wrote.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

The demons of the Amazonian rivers were abroad, manifesting their presence in lowering skies, downpours of torrential rain and somber forest walls.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Most were sick and debilitated and hungry—the perfect prey.

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.

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.

“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.”