Blood and Guts in the Amazon
The Enduring Legend of Percy Fawcett
Blood and Guts in the Amazon: The
Extraordinary Life of Col. Percy Fawcett
“Deep down inside me a tiny voice was calling. At first scarcely audible, it persisted until I could no longer ignore it. It was the voice of the wild places, and I knew it was now part of me forever.” – Percy Fawcett[1]
The Heart of the Explorer
Some people can find no peace in the complacent acceptance of their native social norms. These individuals have busy minds and restless souls. They are always questioning, always exploring. Their stream of consciousness foams with lofty dreams and extravagant thoughts while their passions call them to the untrodden, uncharted, and unknown. They are called to adventure by what feels like a sheer necessity. Though other types of people retire their intellectual pursuits when they fall into some personalized form of social conformity, there is no such resolution for these adventurous souls. They are those who cannot be tied down, and who chafe under conditions of structure and mundane routine. They must continue searching, because for them, a stone unturned is a truth unlearned. Perhaps this kind of person seems eccentric, even unstable, since it may be assumed by some that a soul that cannot come to rest must have something wrong with it. It is a reasonable interpretation to come from our own society, which is filled with a aimless foreboding, fatigue, suppressed vitality, and melancholy resignation. Yet all exceptional spirits must possess a “touch of madness”, and it is partly thanks to this bold and curious lot that humanity holds its current wealth of knowledge and perspective.
Colonel Percy Fawcett was one such person. He possessed unslakable curiosity and a bottomless appetite for new discoveries. Paired with an uncommon physical endurance and unshakable resolve, Fawcett had the makings of a true explorer. He cared little for the modern conveniences of his day and despised weakness, preferring the austerity of the Amazonian wilderness over the comforts of contemporary England. For him, the Victorian lifestyle of an English gentleman was insufferable. Fawcett’s calling had nothing to do with pomp and ceremony or the exercise of proper etiquette and polite conversation. Fawcett always hated boundaries and loathed military life. He always knew he preferred the road less trodden. Yet it would not be until he was nearly 40 that he would uncover the path that led to his destiny. And there was no shortage of forces that threatened to beat his spirit into submission. His exodus from his suffocating confines to his own personal promised land of the South American wilderness serves as an inspiration for all like-minded individuals who cannot help but feel straight-jacketed in modern life today.
The Gilded Prison
Even in his early life, Percy Fawcett was no stranger to obstacles. His childhood was not an easy one. Although born into an aristocratic family, most of the family’s wealth was squandered by his father, who was a notorious alcoholic, philanderer, and profligate. His mother was bitter and capricious. Despite having a pronounced aversion to an “elite” lifestyle, his mother pulled together what money their family still had and sent Percy to Britain’s elite public schools, and later to The Royal Military Academy at Woolrich to pursue a career as a Commissioned Officer in the British Royal Army. Throughout his education and military training, aristocratic standards and upper-crust social etiquette were diligently impressed upon him. From his manners to his dress, he was expected to maintain the picture of an English gentleman, with all its inherent characteristics. When Fawcett completed his training and received his commission, he joined an officer corps that enjoyed somewhat of a country club-like lifestyle. Dinner parties, ceremonies, and rubbing shoulders with high society were routine. Fawcett could barely stand it. It was clear to him that he was not cut out for such a posh lifestyle. Yet as it all grated against him, he wasn’t exactly sure how to escape. His spirit was restless, yet without direction. For years, he endured the ill-fitting role of the “officer gentleman”, until fate finally gave him a sign.
Our callings come from within. Yet they are far too easily drowned out by the petulant racket coming from the external world and the nagging demands and pressures of our leviathan-like mechanistic societies. However, if we can stay vigilant and endure the insufferable cacophony long enough, we may arrive at the critical moment from which a rare opportunity calls through the clamor. Such an experience serves to harness the restless passions swirling within the deepest caverns of the unconscious mind and give them form, thereby giving the self toward a chosen destiny. Fawcett reached this watershed moment during his fourteen-year stint in Ceylon, modern-day Sri Lanka. An officer friend forwarded him an indigenous manuscript that he thought the inquisitive Fawcett might find interesting. It described a cave called Galla-pita-Galla, or “Rock upon Rocks” in Badulla a city toward the center of the island. There, according to the manuscript, lay hidden “uncut jewels and gold to an extent greater than that possessed off many kings.”[2]
Fawcett chose to spend his week of leave searching for this site and its treasure, seizing the opportunity to escape the officer base culture, that, “mirrored upper-class English society- a society that, beneath its veneer of social respectability, had always contained for Fawcett a somewhat Dickensian horror.”[3] He discovered little during his search for the hidden castle besides some broken pottery and a deadly white cobra. Yet this isolated experience lent a life-saving spark to his innate thirst for exploration. During his search, the surroundings of Fort Frederick gave way to “verdant forests and crystalline beaches and mountains, and people dressed in colors he had never seen before…. purples and yellows and rubies, all flashing and radiating and pulsating…”[4] His exposure to this new geography and culture awakened Fawcett’s appetite for adventure and discovery. In Ceylon, he found his heart. It was a prize worth more than any amount of bullion.
Unfortunately, the opportunity to cast aside his Officer’s threads and follow his will had yet to present itself. So, he spent most of his earlier years in begrudging accordance to a conventional military lifestyle. In that time, he all but completed his career as an artillery officer, achieving the rank of Major before finally retiring (he was awarded the rank of Lt. Col during his service in WWI). He met and married Nina Fawcett and started a family. Yet, his thirst for hidden truths lay dormant, waiting for its chance to break out. So, when that opportunity finally arrived, Fawcett enthusiastically seized it.
Into the Wild
Fawcett was 39 when the Royal Geographic Society reached out to him in 1906 with a request from the Brazilian government to survey the borders between themselves and Bolivia. The Rubber Boom was in full swing at this time, and in order to avoid conflicts over this valuable resource, an accurate delineation of territorial lines was required. He gladly accepted their request. After completing the prerequisite courses given at the Royal Geographical Society, Fawcett was ready to embark on his first venture into the jungle.
This mission turned out to the beginning of a new, fulfilling life for Fawcett. As he surveyed the boundaries along the river, he stayed at various barracas (Brazilian names for rubber camps) for respite. These remote rubber camps exposed him to a world radically different from what England or Ceylon had been. There, life was cheap, as workers were brutally exploited and workers in a barraca were left to writhe in pain, afflicted by a mysterious “mud sickness”, which compelled its victims to gorge themselves on mud cakes until death. Remote slaughterhouses operating upstream attracted swarms of piranhas that could devour a man’s flesh in minutes. One account Fawcett heard was that of a fisherman unlucky enough to fall overboard into an infested river and swiftly stripped to bones. In a cold testament to the harsh reality of life in the Amazon, the victim’s wife, rather than grieve or even shed a tear, promptly went on a search for a new breadwinner. Such was the value of life in the jungle in this depraved existence.[5]
Aside from the horrors of the Brazilian rubber camps, the jungle displayed a distinct dangerous majesty. Fascinating new forms of wildlife were everywhere, and, in accordance with a Victorian mindset, Fawcett took a keen interest in the exotic and deadly. Accounts of massive anacondas, vicious swarms of piranhas, and unbelievably aggressive insects are described in Fawcett’s memoirs, titled Exploration Fawcett.[6] The well-ordered life, predictable civility, and manicured parks of England fell away to the untamed wilderness, lurking brutality, and endless mystery of the jungle. Before he even realized it, Fawcett had found the path that summoned him. He marked out his destiny and charged headlong toward it. He was always at the edge of life and death, immersed in an untamed natural order woven from the fabric of Darwinian chaos. Fawcett was hooked.
New Perspectives
These experiences changed the way Fawcett looked at civil life in England. Life there took on an unbearably mundane and monochrome quality. His own family remarked that he became increasingly agitated while at home. Rather than find comfort in safety, convenience, and company, he languished in it. Adventure became his obsession. He was henceforth drawn back time and again to the Amazon, fleeing the confines of civil life and plunging into the dark and wild jungle time and again.
On to the City of “Z”
Over the years, Fawcett’s active imagination ran wild, feasting on the legends, lore, and rumors that the indigenous people told him. He became particularly interested in stories of great civilizations lost in time. It was during this time that Fawcett developed a fascination with discovering El Dorado, or what he called, “Z”. His experiences in the jungle had convinced him –despite the popular theory that the Amazonian environment was too harsh and barren to support any civilization other than primitive ones— that an advanced civilization very well could have existed in the heart of the Amazonian jungle, and perhaps still did. Fawcett’s convictions were largely based on a Brazilian manuscript dated at the year, 1753. Banditos, men who traveled into the jungle looking for slaves, claimed to have encountered a marvelous city so abundant with gold, that their King adorned himself with gold dust daily.[7] Despite the apocryphal nature of exploratory reports at the time of the document’s writing, Fawcett put his faith into the account and set out three times to uncover evidence of this lost civilization.
In 1925, Colonel Percy Fawcett, accompanied by his oldest Jack Fawcett, and Jack’s friend Raleigh Rimmel, disappeared into the jungle in the search for El Dorado, or “Z”, as Fawcett had termed it. The quest was the third attempt by the famous explorer to reach the fabled site, and by this time, newspapers filled their pages with stories of his exploits and expressions of excited anticipation for what lay next in their hero’s journey. The trek appeared to be the culmination of Fawcett’s career as Victorian England’s “last individualist explorer” in the Amazon.[8] Initially, he sent regular correspondence back to Europe, filled with words of reassuring optimism. His last letter stated that he would be entering uncharted territory and would likely not send communications for some time. That was the last anyone ever heard from him.
People remained patient for some time, but as weeks and months became years fears of the party’s demise grew large enough to motivate several search parties intent on rescuing the lost Colonel. Newspapers wondered what had happened, and rumors swirled about what had happened to these lost adventurers. Were they killed by the indigenous inhabitants? Cannibalized? Had they succumbed to injury or illness? Or perhaps, maybe, they had found Z after all. Maybe they found it so breathtaking, that they thought it better to stay. Countless theories of Fawcett’s disappearance have captivated minds for nearly a century, and his fate will most likely remain a mystery.
The ensuing media storm over Fawcett’s disappearance was followed by numerous search attempts, all ending in failure and resulting in at least one death. The list of individuals determined to solve the mystery of the lost explorer lasted so long that members of the Royal Geographic Society developed a marked distaste for whom James Hemming referred to as, “Fawcett lunatics.”[9] The public eye fixated itself on Fawcett’s disappearance, causing it to overshadow the rest of his lengthy exploratory career. While recent novels and movies have attempted to bring the full scope of Fawcett’s life and career into full view, his legacy suffered from decades of public hyperfocus on the mystery of his disappearance.
Fawcett’s Greatest Legacy
He certainly led a fascinating and impressive career. However, I believe that the most valuable contribution he made in his life and career, is that serves as an example of a person who successfully found his true calling. He broke away from a stuffy Victorian life and blazed a new path for himself, one that captivated his soul and illuminated his imagination. He overcame the painstaking rigidity of Victorian life, which, in fact, may have been precisely what jettisoned Fawcett into the jungle so fervently in the first place. By leaving that Matrix-like structure and immersing himself in the raw state of nature, he gained clarity and a novel perspective. That is what drew Fawcett into the wild again, and again. He had both the explorer’s disdain for complacent living and thirst for uncharted frontier. And once he had tasted it, he could no longer languish within the confines of turn-of-the-century England. He had to strike out into the unknown and test his grit and resolve against the hardships of the jungle because there, in the bowels of the wilderness, Fawcett was free to flourish in his true element.
For those with the hearts and souls of explorers, it awaits you, too. You only have to spot the opportunity that leads to your path and take the first step. Safe travels, explorers!
[1] Col. Percy Fawcett, 1953, Exploration Fawcett, The Overlook Press, NY, ©, pg. 109
[2][2] David Grann, The Lost City of Z; A Tale of Deadly Obsession, Vintage Departures, NY, © 2005 pg. 38
[3] Grann, pg. 38
[4] Grann, pg. 41
[5] Fawcett, pp. 128-129
[6] Some of these accounts are as hard to believe now as they were back then. James Hemming, a renowned rainforest expert in his own right, denounced many of Fawcett’s descriptions as absurd. But even if many of these writings were based on here say, or mistaken perceptions of a Englishman’s imagination run wild, it still stands as a testament to Fawcett’s fascination with this new world.
[7] Grann, pg. 168
[8] Grann, pg. 8
[9] Grann, pg. 55