rather, it was directed inward, to what guidebooks and brochures called “camping and wilderness therapy” and “personal growth through adventure.”
I was standing in bewilderment before a glass case filled with several watch-like contraptions when a young attendant with long, lean arms appeared from behind the counter. He had the glow of someone who had recently returned from Mount Everest.
“Can I help you with something?” he asked.
“What’s that thing there?” I asked.
“Oh, that rocks.” He slid open the counter door and removed the item. “It’s a little computer. See? It’ll give you the temperature wherever you are. And the altitude. It’s also got a digital compass, clock, alarm, and chronometer. You can’t beat it.”
I asked how much it was, and he said about two hundred dollars, though I wouldn’t regret it.
“And what’s that?” I asked, pointing to another gadget.
“Pretty much the same deal. Only that one monitors your heart rate, too. Plus, it’s a great logbook. It’ll store all the data you want to put in about weather, distances, rates of ascent-you name it. What kind of trip you planning anyway?”
When I explained, as best I could, my intentions, he seemed enthusiastic, and I thought of one Fawcett seeker from the 1930s who had classified people based on their reactions to his plans:
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 Romantic, who appeared to believe that if everyone did this sort of thing all the time the world’s troubles would soon be over. There were the Envious, who thanked God they were not coming; and there were the other sort, who said with varying degrees of insincerity that they would give anything to come. There were the Correct, who asked me if I knew any of the people at the Embassy. There were the Practical, who spoke at length of inoculations and calibres… There were the Apprehensive, who asked me if I had made my will. 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.
The salesman seemed like the Romantic type. He asked how long I intended to go, and I said I didn’t know- at least a month, probably more.
“Awesome. Awesome. That should let you get immersed in the place.” He seemed to be thinking of something. Then he asked if it was true that some catfish in the Amazon, called a candiru, “you know, that
He didn’t finish his question, though he didn’t have to. I had read about the almost translucent, toothpick-like creature in
When I told the salesman what I knew about the candiru, he seemed to transform from the Romantic into the Practical. Although there was little to protect someone from such a creature, he told me about one gizmo after another that was revolutionizing the art of camping: a tool that was a digital thermometer, a flashlight, a magnifying glass, and a whistle; compression sacks that shrank everything inside; Swiss Army knives with a computer flash drive to store photographs and music; water-purifying bottles that doubled as lanterns; portable solar-powered hot showers; kayaks that folded into the size of a duffel bag; a floating flashlight that didn’t need batteries; parkas that converted into sleeping bags; poleless tents; a tablet that “destroys viruses and bacteria in 15 minutes.”
The more he explained things, the more emboldened I became. I can do this, I thought, piling several of the most James Bond-like items into my basket. Finally, the salesman said, “You’ve never camped before, have you?”
He then helped me find the things that I’d really need, including comfortable hiking boots, a sturdy backpack, synthetic clothes, freeze-dried food, and a mosquito net. I also tossed in a handheld Global Positioning System just to be safe. “You’ll never get lost again,” he said.
I thanked him profusely, and when I got back to our apartment building I carried the equipment into the elevator. I hit the second-floor button. Then, as the door was about to close, I extended my hand to stop it. I got out and, hauling the stuff in my arms, walked up the stairs instead.
That night, after I put my son, Zachary, to sleep, I laid out all the things I planned to take on the trip and began to pack them. Among the items was a file I had made with copies of the most important Fawcett documents and papers. As I flipped through them, I paused at a letter that detailed something, in Brian Fawcett’s words, so “ hush-hush” that his father “never spoke of its objects” to anyone. After receiving his diploma from the Society, the letter said, Fawcett had been given his first assignment, in 1901, from the British government. He was to go to Morocco- not as an explorer but as a spy.
8. INTO THE AMAZON
It was the perfect cover. Go in as a cartographer, with maps and telescope and high-powered binoculars. Survey your target the way you surveyed the land. Observe everything: people, places, conversations. In his diary, Fawcett had jotted down a list of things that his British handler-someone he called simply “James”-had asked him to assess: “nature of trails… villages… water… army and organization… arms and guns… political.” Wasn’t an explorer really just an infiltrator, someone who penetrated alien lands and returned with secrets? In the nineteenth century, the British government had increasingly recruited agents from the ranks of explorers and mapmakers. It was a way not only to sneak people into foreign territories with plausible deniability but also to tap recruits skilled in collecting the sensitive geographical and political data that the government most coveted. British authorities transformed the Survey of India Department into a full-time intelligence operation. Cartographers were trained to use cover stories and code names (“Number One,” “The Pundit,” “The Chief Pundit”), and, when entering lands forbidden to Westerners, to wear elaborate disguises. In Tibet, many surveyors dressed as Buddhist monks and employed prayer beads to measure distances (each sliding bead represented a hundred paces) and prayer wheels to conceal compasses and slips of paper for notations. 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 com-plicit 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.
In Morocco, Fawcett was participating in an African version of what Rudyard Kipling, referring to the colonial competition for supremacy over central Asia, called “the Great Game.” Scribbling in his secret scrolls, Fawcett wrote that he “chatted” with a Moroccan official who was “full of information.” When venturing beyond the main desert routes, where tribes kidnapped or murdered foreign trespassers, Fawcett later noted, “some sort of Moorish disguise is considered necessary, and even then the journey is attended with very great risk.” Fawcett managed to insinuate himself into the royal court to spy on the sultan himself. “The Sultan is young and weak in character,” he wrote. “Personal pleasure is the first consideration, and time is passed bicycle trick riding, at which he is a considerable adept, in playing with motorcars, mechanical toys, photography, billiards, pig sticking on bicycles, feeding his menagerie.” All this information Fawcett delivered to “James” and then returned to England in 1902. It was the only time Fawcett acted as an official spy, but his cunning and powers of observation caught the attention of Sir George Taubman Goldie, a British colonial administrator who in 1905 became president of the Royal Geographical Society.
In early 1906, Goldie summoned Fawcett, who, since his Morocco trip, had been stationed in several military
