Review: Colonel Percy Fawcett

FAWCETT, Brian (Ed.), Exploration Fawcett: Journey to the Lost City of Z, arranged from the manuscripts, letters, log-books and records of Col. Percy Fawcett, The Overlook Press/Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc., New York, NY, USA, 2010

Trade octavo paperback, illustrated wrappers, 312pp., 16pp. of monochrome photographic plates, one photographic illustration, a map, and many line drawings by Brian Fawcett. As new.

I know that Pagan Publishing did a piece on Fawcett in The Unspeakable Oath, Number 16/17 (2001) and, to be honest that’s where I first heard about him. I read another book concerning him later (see below) and so, my interest already piqued, I fell upon this particular volume the moment I clapped eyes on it.

No offence to Brian Appleton and Co. at the ‘Oath, but the sidebar treatment they gave Colonel Fawcett was a bare scratching of the surface. If anyone needs a template or role-model for the archetypical Mythos investigator, look no further than this excellent tome. First published in 1953, Hemingway considered it inspirational reading and kept it handy; many other readers compare it favourably to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which is a completely reasonable accolade, although Fawcett’s observations are far darker and often more disturbing than anything found in Conrad’s book.

Brian Fawcett inherited his father’s papers and began reading them during the two-hour siesta that interrupted his working day as an engineer in South America. Over time, he collated them into the present volume and edited them together as a compelling narrative complete with footnote annotations to highlight various incidents and provide extra information. Pleasingly, the text is not always smoothly joined together, and topics jump between paragraphs here and there, however not in a way that interrupts the narrative too greatly; rather these shifts emphasise that the work is a compilation from several sources and underscore the admirable job that has been done in working the whole into a single entity.

The text covers Fawcett’s explorations into the Amazonian forests over the period 1907 to 1925, the year of his disappearance. His writings describe a lawless and totally inhospitable frontier territory ruled by rubber entrepreneurs who ruled their slave work-forces with whips and guns; he encounters wild animals and Indians with poison arrows; he is attacked by giant spiders, monstrous serpents and man-eating fish. Then there are hideous diseases. In fact, some of the diseases that he mentions, while trying vainly to aid the afflicted, are enough to give anyone nightmares: fungal lesions that cause faces to rot away; gastric worms that force the afflicted to swallow mouthfuls of earth; and that bugbear of Amazon travellers, the Candiru, a tiny barbed fish that lodges in the orifices of the human body and causes massive internal infections.

"I visited a Frenchman in the Riberalta jail who had murdered his employer in a fit of jealousy. While imprisoned he was fed by his woman, whom one day he seized and strangled, and he was condemned to death. He escaped and fled into Brazil, thanks to the judge who sold him a file!"

The focus of Fawcett’s travels in Brazil initially were the delimitation of the boundaries between Bolivia and Brazil, a task given to the disinterested Brits since their results would be impartial, and which would help ratify the rubber boom taking place there. Thereafter, Fawcett turns his attention to the legends of a massive lost city, remnant of an ancient, unrecorded civilisation and which was stumbled upon by gold seekers in the 1700s. H. Rider Haggard (no less!) gave Fawcett a strangely-conductive 10-inch tall basalt stone carving, supposedly taken from this lost capitol, and he took it to several psychometric readers to have it analysed: they told him sufficient to believe that he was on the trail of the survivors of lost Atlantis. If that doesn’t sound like the actions of a Mythos investigator, then I don’t know what does!

We’ll never know what he found at the “Lost City of Z” because in 1925, he and his eldest son vanished into the jungle, never to be heard of again. Some contend that natives beset them and did away with them; however, Fawcett always made sure to treat the indigenes of South America very well and had acquired a reputation for doing so. Perhaps it was a misunderstanding. Otherwise, they may have met with some terrible accident – a flash-flood, or the crumbling of a rock face. Or perhaps they discovered some hidden secret at the City, something that would not let them return to tell the tale? At the present time, no-one can say.

Five tentacled horrors.

Not that the mystery was allowed to rest there. Other adventurers determined to find out what happened to the Fawcetts and they set out to locate them.

Brazilian Adventure, Peter Fleming

The Reprint Society, Ltd. / Jonathan Cape, Ltd., London, 1940 (first published 1933)

Octavo; blue cloth with gilt-lettered, black morocco spine label; 376pp., photographic frontispiece, 2 maps and a monochrome diagram; top edge of the text block dyed black. Binding rolled, corners bumped and spine sunned; preliminaries embrowned and with some offsetting; edges toned. Lacks dustjacket. Else good.

Nowadays the title of this book makes it sound like the re-telling of an unfortunate proceeding at a beauty salon; however, we can move on past that barrier and once more immerse ourselves in the jungles, insect swarms and plague-infested wilderness of the Matto Grosso

In 1930, Peter Fleming answered an advertisement in the Times of London’s ‘Agony Column’, seeking for brave adventurers to engage on a voyage to Brazil, there to seek the truth about the disappearance of Col. Percy Fawcett. At that time a literary editor for The Spectator, Fleming was almost immediately hooked by the prospect and signed on.

Unlike, Fawcett’s narrative, which resounds with doom and grim determination in the face of adversity, Fleming’s tale is a completely different beast. Fleming is a product of his time; an almost Bertie Wooster-like character, self-deprecating, wryly amused and unwilling to take himself too seriously. Even through the most desperate straits of his travels there is a solid vein of dry humour colouring the re-telling, and this makes for vivid and very entertaining reading. As an indication of his puckish nature, he even imitates the classic photograph of Fawcett in the frontispiece of his own book, hands in pockets and complete with the classic pipe.

Fleming (younger brother of the far more self-important Ian Fleming and a far better writer) never did find out conclusively what happened to Fawcett, but after 3,000 miles and the discovery of a new river tributary of the Amazon, he pens a thrilling, amusing and highly entertaining narrative of his failed attempt full of interesting observations.

I give it three-and-a-half tentacled horrors