from a soil already leached by rain and floods. Meanwhile, vines and trees stampeded over each other as they strove to reach the canopy, to absorb a ray of light. One kind of liana called the matador, or killer, seemed to crystallize this competition: it wrapped itself around a tree, as if offering a tender embrace, then began to strangle it, stealing both its life and its place amid the forest.
Although this death struggle for the light above created a permanent midnight below, few mammals roamed the jungle floor, where other creatures could attack them. Even those animals that Fawcett and his party should have been able to see remained invisible to their untutored eyes. Bats hid in tents of leaves. Armadillos burrowed in the ground. Moths looked like bark. Caimans became logs. One kind of caterpillar had a more frightening deception: it transformed its body into the shape of a deadly pit viper, with an enlarged, swaying triangular head and big gleaming eyes. As the writer Candice Millard explained in
On this battlefield, Fawcett and his men found themselves outmatched. For days, Fawcett, a world-class hunter, scoured the land with his party, only to turn up a handful of nuts and palm leaves. The men tried fishing, which they were sure, given how many piranhas and eels and dolphins were in other Amazonian rivers, would provide sustenance, but to the explorers’ amazement they could not catch a single fish. Fawcett speculated that something had polluted the waters, and indeed some trees and plants produce tannic acids that poison rivers in the Amazon, creating what the biologists Adrian Forsyth and Kenneth Miyata have called “the aquatic equivalents of desert.”
And so Fawcett and his party were forced to wander hungry through the jungle. The men wanted to turn back, but Fawcett was determined to find the Verde’s source. They stumbled forward, mouths open, trying to capture every drop of rain. At night, chills swept through their bodies. A
Fisher muttered that they were going to “leave our bones here.” Others prayed for salvation.
Fawcett tried to find an easier route back, but each time he chose a path, the expedition ended up at a cliff and was forced to turn around. “How long could we carry on was the vital question,” Fawcett wrote. “Unless food was obtained soon, we should be too feeble to make our way out by any route.” They had gone for more than a month with almost no food, and were starving; their blood pressure plummeted, and their bodies consumed their own tissue. “The voices of the others and the sounds of the forest seemed to come from a vast distance, as though through a long tube,” Fawcett wrote. Unable to think about the past or the future, about anything other than food, the men became irritable, apathetic, and paranoid. In their weakened state, they were more susceptible to disease and infection, and most of them had developed severe fevers. Fawcett feared mutiny. Had they begun to look at one another differently, not as companions but as meat? As Fawcett wrote about cannibalism, “Starvation blunts one’s finer feelings,” and he told Fisher to collect the other men’s guns.
Fawcett soon noticed that one of the men had vanished. He eventually came upon him sitting collapsed against a tree. Fawcett ordered the man to get up, but he begged Fawcett to let him die there. He refused to move, and Fawcett took out his knife. The blade gleamed before the man’s eyes; Fawcett ached with hunger. Waving the knife, Fawcett forced him to his feet. If we die, Fawcett said, we’ll die walking.
As they staggered on, many of the men, inured to their fate, no longer tried to slap at the pestilent mosquitoes or keep watch against the Indians. “[An ambush], in spite of its moment of terror and agony, is quickly over, and if we regard these matters in a reasonable way it would be considered merciful” compared with starvation, Fawcett wrote.
Several days later, as the group was slipping in and out of consciousness, Fawcett caught sight of a deer, almost out of range. He had one shot, then it would be gone. “For God’s sake don’t miss, Fawcett!” one of the men whispered. Fawcett unslung his rifle; his arms had atrophied, and his muscles strained to hold the barrel steady. He inhaled and pulled the trigger. The report echoed through the forest. The deer seemed to vanish, as if it had been a figment of their delirium. Then, as they stumbled closer, they saw it on the ground, bleeding. They cooked it over a fire, eating every bit of flesh, sucking every bone. Five days later, they came across a settlement. Still, five of Fawcett’s men-more than half his team-were too weak to recover and soon died. When Fawcett returned to La Paz, people pointed and stared at him-he was a virtual skeleton. He sent off a telegram to the Royal Geographical Society. It said, “Hell Verde Conquered.”
11. DEAD HORSE CAMP
“There,” I said to my wife, pointing at a satellite image of the Amazon on my computer screen. “That’s where I’m going.”
The image revealed the cracks in the earth where the massive river and its tributaries had ruthlessly carved the land. Later, I was able to show her the coordinates more clearly using Google Earth, which was unveiled in the summer of 2005 and allowed anyone, in seconds, to zoom within meters of virtually every place on the globe. First, I typed in our Brooklyn address. The view on the screen, which had shown a satellite image of the earth from outer space, zoomed, like a guided missile, toward a patchwork of buildings and streets, until I recognized the balcony of our apartment. The level of clarity was incredible. Then I typed in Fawcett’s last published coordinates and watched the screen race over images of the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean, past a faint outline of Venezuela and Guyana, before zeroing in on a blur of green: the jungle. What was once blank space on the map was now visible in an instant.
My wife asked how I knew where to go, and I told her about Fawcett’s diaries. I showed her on the map the location that everyone assumed was Dead Horse Camp and then the new coordinates, more than a hundred miles south, which I had found in Fawcett’s logbook. Then I revealed a copy of a document with the word “CONFIDENTIAL” printed on it, which I had discovered at the Royal Geographical Society. Unlike other documents written by Fawcett, this one was neatly typed. Dated April 13, 1924, it was titled “Case for an Expedition in the Amazon Basin.”
Desperate for funding, Fawcett had seemingly relented to the Society’s demand that he be more forthcoming about his plans. After nearly two decades of exploring, he said, he had concluded that in the southern basin of the Amazon, between the Tapajos and the Xingu tributaries, were “the most remarkable relics of ancient civilization.” Fawcett had sketched a map of the region and submitted it with a proposal. “This area represents the greatest area of unexplored country in the world,” he wrote. “Portuguese exploration, and all subsequent geographical research by Brazilians or foreigners, has been invariably confined to waterways.” Instead, he planned to blaze a path overland between the Tapajos and the Xingu and other tributaries, where “none has penetrated.” (Conceding how much more dangerous this course was, he requested extra money to “get the survivors back to England,” as “I may be killed.”)
On one page of the proposal, Fawcett had included several coordinates. “What are they for?” my wife asked.
“I think they’re the direction he headed in after Dead Horse Camp.”
The next morning I stuffed my gear and maps in my backpack, and said goodbye to my wife and infant son. “Don’t be stupid,” my wife said. Then I headed to the airport and boarded a plane for Brazil.
12. IN THE HANDS OF THE GODS
Oh, the “glorious prospect of home,” Fawcett wrote in his diary. Streets paved and neatly aligned, thatched
