This is perhaps a few days late; Fawcett's last message was sent in 30MAY1925.
Percy Fawcett has been described as ‘the last of the great Victorian and Edwardian explorers’; he represented the end of that era, when amateur gentleman explorers would probe the furthest corners of the Earth in order to make new scientific discoveries and expand the empire. And frequently die in the process.
Early Life.
Percival Harrison Fawcett was born on 18 August 1867 in Devon, the son of Edward Boyd Fawcett. His father who mixed the traits of a Regency rake (he was a friend of the Prince of Wales) and geographer (he’d been a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society). Exploration ran in the family, Percy’s older brother, Edward Douglas Fawcett, was a mountain climber and an author of adventure novels (including some science fiction) with mystical leanings of his own.
One of those novels, The Secret of the Desert was probably the first work of fiction to describe a tank. Was this inspired by an encounter with someone from elsewhen? A loose-lipped time traveller for example, or a psychic like one his brother consulted? Did the entire Fawcett family prone to making odd acquaintances?
After attending school in Britain, Percy entered the British Army at 19, not entirely willingly, and was commissioned in the Royal Artillery, serving in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). During his military service he became interested in geography, surveying and treasure hunting, though unsuccessful in the latter pursuit.
Fawcett became somewhat bored with Army life; it failed to satisfy his thirst for adventure. In 1901 he decided to learn surveying and cartography properly, by joining the Royal Geographic Society. He also worked with the nascent British Secret Service on occasion in Asia and North Africa (mainly Morocco), often while engaged for the RGS.
At the time Britain lacked a professional and organised foreign espionage system. It was run on a fairly slapdash and unofficial basis by volunteers and amateurs.
Surveying and Espionage.
The making of maps and collecting of information has always been a popular cover for intelligence gathering. Probably the best known of these was The Survey of India which was responsible for producing accurate maps of the country, but included Ethnological Department which in turn included intelligence gathering. Under cover of survey and census, the British government assembled the subtler kinds of information; the movements of foreigners, secret meetings and conversations and illicit trade amongst the border states.
A variation on the traditional Mala (Buddhist prayer beads) was sometimes used for covert measurements by agents who’d been taught to maintain a constant stride. The string contained 100 beads rather than the usual 108 and was used as a counting aid; 100 paces per bead, 10,000 paces to the string. The subsidiary string (dorje) of ten beads was used for counting multiples of 10,000 paces.
In the spring of 1906, at 39, Fawcett received his first exploratory assignment from Sir George Taubman Goldie, President of the Royal Geographic Society at the time. The Society wanted to survey the jungle area near the claimed borders of Bolivia, Peru and Brazil and determine where exactly the borders of the countries were, acting as a neutral party in the hope of reducing tension in the disputed areas.
Maps of Brazil at the time still had huge blank areas, unexplored by Europeans.
Brazil, the RGS and rubber.
It should be noted that it was originally the Bolivian Government, under the Presidency of Ismael Montes Gamboa, that suggested involving the Royal Geographic Society in the border survey. The RGS was not well liked in Brazil due to the actions of Henry Alexander Wickham in the 1870s. Wickham had been commissioned by Joseph Hooker (director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew) to acquire viable seeds of Hevea brasiliensis , the most commercially productive of all the Brazilian rubber trees. The expenses of his journey were paid by the India Office.
Wickham acquired some 6,500 seeds and (illegally) shipped them to London. At Kew about 2,800 seeds were successfully germinated and transported carefully to British possessions such as Malaya. There tea planters were persuaded to grow the new crop and, thanks to better cultivation practices and the lack of natural predators, they thrived. It would take decades but by 1910 Brazil’s rubber crop was in freefall; by 1915 it would lose 80% of it’s value and by 1919, 93%
It wasn’t an easy area to explore; disease was rife, along with wildlife both large and small, the indigenous population was known to be hostile in some areas. Not to mention illegal miners and rubber collectors, slave traders (and entire plantations using slave labour or debt bondage), political considerations and other purely human menaces.
Occult leanings.
Not unusually for a man of the period Fawcett had an interest in the occult and was influenced by the famous Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical movement. He also believed in the existence of Atlantis and the reality of ghost, as a form of psychic residue.
Fawcett believed his eldest son Jack was a reincarnated spirit destined to become some kind of messiah, an event predicted by Buddhist mystics. Fawcett wrote in Occult Review:
"One morning at breakfast on the verandah a deputation of soothsayers and Buddhists asked for an audience… I was told I was about to become the father of a son whose appearance was minutely described, the reincarnation of an advanced spirit, and my wife and I had been especially selected…..the child would have a mole on the instep of the right foot, and his toes in place of a sliding scale in size would run in pairs. He would be born on Buddha's anniversary, 19th May. This date was a month beyond the time anticipated. A remarkable feature about the boy, not shared by his brother or sister, is a slight obliquity of his eyes."
Again according to Fawcett, the predictions were accurate and when the family returning to Trincomalee from the military hospital at Colombo their route was lined with people venerating the newborn.
Fawcett had been given by the writer (and follow occult enthusiast) Sir Henry Rider Haggard a 22cm black basalt idol which he’d supposedly acquired in Brazil.
Fawcett wrote of it;
"I could think of only one way of learning the secret of the stone image, and that was by means of psychometry -- a method that may evoke scorn by many people but is widely accepted by others who have managed to keep their minds free from prejudice."
The psychotometrist supposedly told Fawcett of "a large irregularly shaped continent stretching from the north coast of Africa across to South America... Then I see volcanoes in violent eruptions, flaming lava pouring down their sides, and the whole land shakes with a mighty rumbling sound... The voice says: 'The judgment of Atlanta will be the fate of all who presume to deific power!' I can get no definite date of the catastrophe, but it was long prior to the rise of Egypt, and has been forgotten -- except, perhaps, in myth."
Fawcett wrote (in his book Lost Trails, Lost Cities) that "the connection of Atlantis with parts of what is now Brazil is not to be dismissed contemptuously, and belief in it -- with or without scientific corroboration -- affords explanations for many problems which otherwise are unsolved mysteries."
Early explorations.
The 1906 expedition was Fawcett’s first, but he led several more expeditions into the jungle and rainforest over the next nine years; tracing the source of the Rio Verde (in 1909) and attempting to find the source of the Heath River, the border between Bolivia and Peru in 1910. Along the way he claimed to have had some encounters with wildlife never seen before, including an Anaconda described as ‘62 feet’ long.
At the time the giant anaconda seemed to be hyperbole, the largest even proven was about 5.2m, a quarter of the length of the snake Fawcett claimed to have killed. However given the numerous claims and the existence of fossils of an anaconda over 12m long such creature might be real.
Fawcett also claimed to have seen a small animal (the size of a foxhound) with canine and feline characteristics, now called the Mitla. It’s not known of this is a real animal or a misidentification of some other creature such as the elusive (but real) short-eared Zorro. In the Madidi swamps of the Beni River in Bolivia Fawcett wrote of finding the tracks of ‘some mysterious and enormous beast’ which he might be those of a living Diplodocus. This was one of the inspirations for Doyle’s The Lost World.
His first expedition, the border question, lasted from July 1906 to May 1907. His second, a long trek through the Brazilian jungle, lasted from March to November 1908.
During this trek the explorers left a cache of money and instruments buried near the source of the river. Exaggeration and rumour turned this into the ‘Verde treasure’, though in fact only about £60 in gold was left.
The third expedition into Bolivia and was much shorter, taking up the month of May 1909. His fourth expedition, following the Heath with seven companions, led to encounters with vampire bats and being captured by the indigenous Guarayos. It lasted from June to October 1910.
His fifth expedition, April to December 1911, to Fawcett and a few companions in search of lost ruins that he believed existed near the upper reaches of the Heath River. None were found before they had to turn back.
Fawcett’s final pre-war expedition, running from 1913 to 1915, took him in a wide sweep around the Plains of Mojos, in the region of the Rio Tuiche, Rio Beni and Rio Mamore in Brazil.
However the Great War would delay his plans to search further for the lost city he believed existed in the jungle.
While Fawcett’s achievements tend to be overshadowed by the story of his death he was recognised for his work. Fawcett’s article Bolivian Exploration was published in the March 1915 edition of the RGS’s Geographical Journal. 1916 he received the RGS Founders Gold Medal for his work in mapping South America.
The Great War.
Percy Fawcett was still wandering around the wilder reaches of the Amazon when the Great War broke out in 1914. He returned to Britain in 1915 to rejoin the Royal Artillery, and served with distinction on the Western Front. Initially he commanded a battery of 18-pdr field artillery in Flanders, often placed only a few hundred metres from the front lines, positioned to hit German infantry attacks with airburst shrapnel.
Later he rose in rank to lieutenant colonel and commanded an artillery brigade of mostly heavy artillery in the counter battery role.
While serving in France (near Aras) Fawcett one morning encountered a strange figure, wearing a Russian fur-lined greatcoat and French helmet, wandering near hit battery. Fawcett, wary of German spies, challenged him and the man replied to his demand for identification "Lieutenant Colonel Churchill, Sixth Royal Scots Fusiliers".
Return to the Jungle.
After the war ended Fawcett was eager to return to South America.
Around 1920, Fawcett started to became even more interested (even obsessively so) in the legendary lost cities of South America. In that year in a library in Rio de Janeiro, he discovered a document (Manuscript No. 12) which described a trip made by a Portuguese group to the Amazon in 1743. The manuscript claims that the team discovered the ruins of a city where there were stone monuments with hieroglyphs similar to Celtic Ogham script.
From that point, things changed; Fawcett (now past fifty) began acting like a man with no time to lose. He stopped the surveying work and began funding his own expeditions, often through newspaper deals.
His seventh expedition began in February 1920 and ran until the end of 1921 in three phases; the first phase was a series of explorations between Corumba and Cuyaba and further, but was beset by problems.
The second phase took him and a few others from Bahia along hundreds of kilometres of trails and rivers in search of information. He heard numerous rumours and stories about an ‘enchanted city with houses roofed in gold’ and a lost city filled with precious gems but never found their source.
The final phase is the most mysterious; Fawcett travelled west from Bahia, using trails and the Rio Paraguassu, but he went along and neither spoke of, nor recorded his travels.
The Lost City of Z.
Fawcett’s public statements on the lost city of Z were fairly sober; he spoke of the possibility of a monumental city akin to those of Mesoamerica or the Inca, and he described his belief that a group of Portuguese travellers had run across this place in 1743.
The Portuguese expedition in 1743 had searching for the supposed gold, silver and diamond mines of Melchior Dias-Moreya (aka ‘Moribeca’), a half-Indian/half-Portuguese adventurer and ‘soldier of fortune’. He’d supposed discovered the mines in 1610 and, soon after, had been imprisoned when he wouldn’t reveal the location of the mines. He died in 1622, his secret intact. The Portuguese went off course and ended up travelling through the Matto Grosso, where they stumbled into a steep crevice and then climbed through an artificial breach in the cliff wall, along a path of old paved steps.
The manuscript described a large and opulent city of stone, whose entrance gate contained three great arches, atop which an indecipherable alphabet was carved. In the centre of the city stood, ‘a black stone column of extraordinary greatness, and atop it the statue of a man with one hand on his left hip, and the right arm extended, pointing the index finger to the North Pole’. Other statues were mentioned as was a huge temple, whose artistry left the Portuguese writer in awe.
Beyond the city was a river leading to a field of great tombs, all covering in writing. Fawcett believed, from the descriptions given, that the writing was in the Celtic Ogham script.
In a letter to his son Brian, Colonel Fawcett wrote of the city:
"I expect the ruins to be monolithic in character, more ancient than the oldest Egyptian discoveries. Judging by inscriptions found in many parts of Brazil, the inhabitants used an alphabetical writing allied to many ancient European and Asian scripts. There are rumours, too, of a strange source of light in the buildings, a phenomenon that filled with terror the Indians who claimed to have seen it."
"The central place I call "Z" -- our main objective -- is in a valley surmounted by lofty mountains. The valley is about ten miles wide, and the city is on an eminence in the middle of it, approached by a barrelled roadway of stone. The houses are low and windowless, and there is a pyramidal temple. The inhabitants of the place are fairly numerous, they keep domestic animals, and they have well-developed mines in the surrounding hills. Not far away is a second town, but the people living in it are of an inferior order to those of "Z." Farther to the south is another large city, half buried and completely destroyed."
The Final Expedition.
Quote:
“The forest in these solitudes is always full of voices, the soft whisperings of those who came before....”
After receiving funding from a group of financiers in London, Fawcett made another journey back to Brazil, this time with his elder son Jack and his friend Raleigh Rimell.
Those ‘financiers’ are another mystery; known only as ‘The Glove’ who they are and why the backed Fawcett’s expedition is unknown. Did they expect him to find conventional treasures such as gold and gems? Or something even more valuable hidden in the remote jungle of Brazil…
Fawcett's eighth and final expedition left Cuiabá on 20 April 1925. Initially the three men were accompanied by two hired Brazilian labourers, along with eight mules and two horses. Just over a month later (29 May) Fawcett telegraphed his wife saying he was about to venture into unexplored country.
The final communication was a letter dispatched from ‘Dead Horse Camp’ (written on 30 May and returned by a native messenger) was generally optimistic and told his supporters `You need have no fear of failure’.
The camp was so-named because on an earlier expedition Fawcett’s horse had been injured and had to be killed there.
The three men were never seen again.
Aftermath.
The cause of death for the Fawcetts and Rimell remains to this day unknown. They may have, as many people believe, been killed by a hostile tribe though the final sightings of Jack Fawcett and Rimell described them as appearing lame and ill, so there is some plausibility to the theory that they succumbed to disease or illness deep in the Brazilian jungle. The jungle has many ways to kill even the experienced explorer.
Some items belonging to Fawcett were found a few years later, including a name plate found with an Indian tribe, and a theodolite compass that was recovered in 1933 from the Baciary Indians of Mato Grosso. However it’s not known for certain if these were carried on the final expedition or pre-date it, but the compass is believed to have been carried on his final trek.
Several expeditions have searched for Fawcett and his companions; including those with other purposes over fifteen in total. More than one hundred people have disappeared or died on such expeditions.
The Signet Ring.
Colonel Fawcett wore a gold signet ring on his last expedition, as indeed he did at almost all times. A few years later it turned up, under strange circumstances in the hands of a Swiss traveller named Stephan Rattin. Rattin had travelled into Mato Grosso, along the Rio Arinos north-west of Cuyaba in 1932. There, he claimed, he’d have met an elderly white man with a long beard, being held captive by Indians near the Iguassu Ximary, a tributary of the Rio Sao Manoel. Rattin further claimed that the man revealed said he was Colonel Fawcett and gave him the ring to bring to a friend of his (a Briton named Paget, one of the backers of Fawcett’s expedition) in Sao Paulo.
The story, in May 1933, excited interest in the disappearance of Fawcett and his party and another rescue mission was organised, though Rattin refused to join it; he claimed that Fawcett had promised him a reward and headed into the jungle alone. He was never seen again.
An all too common phrase when dealing with expeditions into the Amazon jungle.
Exactly how the ring made it’s way to Fawcett’s family in England isn’t known; presumably Paget sent it on. However it was genuine, identified by family members as belonging to Percy Fawcett.
George Miller Dyott searched for Fawcett in 1927 and wrote an account in Man Hunting in the Jungle: Being the Story of a Search for Three Explorers Lost in the Brazilian Wilds. This expedition is generally considered something of a shambles, poorly organised and it almost certainly didn't cover the ground Fawcett had.
In April 1933, a Dominican missionary, relating what an Indian woman told him, said,
‘The Fawcett party are held prisoners in a camp between the Rios Kuluesene, Kuluene, and Das Mortes. Colonel Fawcett has been forced to marry a daughter of an Indian chief." In July of the same year, Monsignor Coutouran reported a statement made by Signor Virginio Pessione, who visited an estate on the Rio São Manoel, many miles northwest of Dead Horse Camp (Fawcett's last know camp). Pessione said that an Indian woman of the Nafucua tribe told him, "When my son was still at the breast, there arrived in my village three white men and Indians, descending the Kuluene in a large canoe. One white man was tall, old, and blue-eyed, also bearded and bald. Another was a youth, said to be the son of the first; the third was of greater age.’
In 1934 an American missionary, Paul Guiley, saw a young boy with pale skin, blue eyes, and close-cropped hair, and was told that the child was a son of one of the Fawcett party.
Robert Churchward collected his observations of all the fuss in Wilderness of Fools: An account of the Adventures in Search of Lieut-Colonel P. H. Fawcett in 1936.
A 1951 expedition found human remains, but these were subsequently determined not be those of the Fawcetts or Rimell.
McCarthy.
In 1947 a 32-year old New Zealand schoolteacher named Hugh McCarthy quit his job and went in search of Fawcett and the supposed lost city of gold. He used carrier pigeons (he brought seven) to send messages on the progress of his trek to a missionary he’d become acquainted with.
That missionary, the Reverend Jonathan Wells, had warned him not to begin his expedition as he’d probably not survive. He was right.
Only three of the pigeons (numbers 3, 5 and 7) made the trip back. The last message related not only the details of his imminent death but also made reference to an earlier communication giving the exact location of the city: the pigeon carrying that particular letter never arrived, and McCarthy himself was never seen again.
‘I know that the soft cold hands of death will touch me shortly, and in these last moments I can but pray that all of the pigeons I sent out arrived safely. Writing is difficult and my lucid moments are few. But what a glorious way I have chosen to leave this world. I hope my map arrived safely by carrier pigeon number six, so that you, of all people in the world will know the location of this City of Gold.’
‘It is magnificent and unbelievable, with a golden pyramid and exquisite temples. With God's help, you will soon be able to lead an expedition of archaeologists back to this most wonderful of all cities since the beginning of Time and its treasures can be preserved for generations to come. My work is over and I die happily, knowing that my belief in Fawcett and his lost City of Gold was not in vain. Hugh.’
Did McCarthy actually find the Lost City? Was it, in fact, a real place? Or was he suffering the effects of injury, malnutrition and disease?