London. (“Of the Houses of Parliament pinnacles were collapsing and walls were being riven asunder as the shells burst within them.”) The public had grown so agitated over the state of Victorian manhood that the government created an investigative body called the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration.
The press seized upon Fawcett’s accomplishments, portraying him like one of his childhood heroes and holding him up as the perfect counterpoint to the national crisis of confidence. One newspaper declared, “‘The lure of the wild’ has not lost its power upon men of the fearless and resourceful type represented by Maj. Fawcett.” Another journal urged children to emulate him: “There is a true Scout for you to follow! He gives up all thought of his own safety or comfort, so that he may carry out the duty that has been given to him.”
In early 1911, at a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society, where he presented his findings, dozens of scientists and explorers from across Europe crowded into the hall to glimpse the “Livingstone of the Amazon.” Beckoning him to the front of the hall, Charles Darwin’s son Leonard, who was now the Society’s president, described how Fawcett had mapped “regions which have never before been visited by Europeans” and had traveled up rivers that had “never before been ascended by one.” Darwin added that Fawcett had demonstrated that there was still a place “where the explorer can go forth and exhibit perseverance, energy, courage, forethought, and all those qualities which go to make up the qualities of an explorer of the times now passing away.”
Although Fawcett liked to protest that he was not “a great seeker for publicity,” he clearly relished the attention. (One of his hobbies was to paste newspaper accounts about himself into a scrapbook.) Showing lantern slides of the jungle and sketches of his maps, he told the crowd:
What I hope is that the publicity of these explorations may attract other adventurous spirits into this neglected part of the world. But it should be remembered that the difficulties are great and the tale of disasters a long one, for the few remaining unknown corners of the world exact a price for their secrets. Without any desire whatever for self-glorification, I can vouch for it that it requires a great en thusiasm to successfully bridge, year after year, the wide gulf which lies between the comforts of civilization and the very real risks and penalties which dog every footstep in the unexplored forests of this still little-known continent.
A Bolivian emissary who was there said of the emerging map of South America, “I must tell you that it is owing to Major Fawcett’s bravery that this has been accomplished… If we had a few more men like him, I am sure there would not be a single corner of the unexplored regions.”
Fawcett’s growing legend was predicated on the fact that not only had he made journeys that no one else had dared but he had done so at a pace that seemed inhuman. He accomplished in months what others took years to do-or, as Fawcett once put it matter-of-factly, “I am a rapid worker and have no idle days.” Incredibly, he rarely, if ever, seemed to get sick. “He was fever-proof,” said Thomas Charles Bridges, a popular adventure writer at the time who knew Fawcett. The trait caused rampant speculation about his physiology. Bridges attributed this resistance to his having “a pulse below the normal.” One historian observed that Fawcett had “a virtual immunity from tropical disease. Perhaps this last quality was the most exceptional. There were other explorers, although not many, who equaled him in dedication, courage and strength, but in his resistance to disease he was unique.” Even Fawcett began to marvel at what he called the “perfect constitution.”
In addition, he was struck by his ability to elude predators. Once, after leaping over a pit viper, he wrote in his journal, “What amazed me more than anything was the warning of my subconscious mind, and the instant muscular response… I had not seen it till it flashed between my legs, but the ‘inner man’-if I can call it that-not only saw it in time, but judged its striking height and distance exactly, and issued commands to the body accordingly!” His RGS colleague William Barclay, who worked in Bolivia and knew Fawcett’s methods as an explorer as well as anyone, said that over the years the explorer had developed “the conviction that no danger could touch him” and that, like a mythic hero, “his actions and happenings were fore-ordained.” Or, as Fawcett liked to say, “I am in the hands of the Gods.”
Yet the very things that made Fawcett a great explorer-demonic fury, single-mindedness, and an almost divine sense of immortality-also made him terrifying to be with. Nothing was allowed to stand in the way of his object-or destiny. He was “prepared to travel lighter and fare harder than most people would consider either possible or proper,” the journal of the Royal Geographical Society reported. In a letter to the Society, Nina said, “By the way, you will be amused to hear Major Fawcett contemplated cutting through 100 miles of forest… in a month! The others fairly gasped at the thought!!!”
To those who could keep up with him, he showed tremendous loyalty. To those who couldn’t-well, Fawcett came to believe that their sickness, even their death, only confirmed their underlying cowardice. “Such journeys cannot be executed” faintly, Fawcett wrote Keltie, “or I should never have got anywhere. For those who can do [them] I have nothing but gratitude and praise-for those who can’t I have little sympathy for they accept the job with their eyes open-but for the lazy or incompetent I have no use whatever.” In his private papers, Fawcett denounced a former assistant as a “hopeless rotter! A typical waster!”-the words scribbled beneath the man’s obituary. (He had drowned in a river in Peru.) Several men were expelled from his expeditions or, aggrieved and bitter, deserted him. “Why he would not stop to let us eat or sleep,” a former member of his party complained to another South American explorer. “We were working twenty-four hours a day and driven like bullocks before the lash.”
“The strain has always been too much for members of my own parties,” Fawcett informed Keltie, adding, “I have no mercy for incompetence.”
Keltie gently chided his friend: “I am very glad to think that you are keeping so very fit. You must have a wonderful constitution to stand all that you have stood and be none the worse. I am afraid this makes you perhaps a little intolerant of men who are not so very fit as you are.”
Keltie no doubt had in mind one man in particular, an explorer whose collaboration with Fawcett, in 1911, ended in catastrophe.
IT SEEMED LIKE the perfect match: James Murray, the great polar scientist, and Fawcett, the great Amazon explorer. Together, they would break through hundreds of miles of unexplored jungle surrounding the Heath River along Bolivia’s northwestern border with Peru, to map the region and study its inhabitants and wildlife. The Royal Geographical Society had encouraged the excursion, and why not?
Born in Glasgow in 1865, Murray was the brilliant, peripatetic son of a grocer who, as a young man, had become obsessed with the recent discovery of microscopic creatures and, armed with little more than a microscope and a collecting jar, transformed himself into a virtually self-taught, world-renowned expert in the field. In 1902, he helped survey the muddy depths of the Scottish lochs. Five years later, Ernest Shackle-ton enlisted Murray for his expedition to Antarctica, where he carried out groundbreaking recordings on marine biology, physics, optics, and meteorology. Afterward, he co-wrote a book called
But had anyone peered closer at their characters he might have seen warning signs. Although only two years older than Fawcett, Murray, at forty-six, looked crumpled and wizened; his face, with its well-trimmed mustache and graying hair, was filled with crags, his body was ill shapen. During the Scottish expedition, he had suffered a physical breakdown. “I had had rheumatism, inflamed eyes, and God knows what not,” he said. On the Shackleton expedition, he had been in charge of the base camp and had not endured the most brutal conditions.
Moreover, the qualifications for a great polar explorer and for an Amazon one are not necessarily the same. Indeed, the two forms of exploration are, in many ways, the antithesis of each other. A polar explorer has to endure temperatures of nearly a hundred degrees below zero, and the same terrors over and over: frostbite, crevices in the ice, and scurvy. He looks out and sees snow and ice, snow and ice-an unrelenting bleakness. The psychological horror is in knowing that this landscape will never change, and the challenge is to endure, like a prisoner in solitary confinement, sensory deprivation. In contrast, an Amazon explorer, immersed in a cauldron of heat, has his senses constantly assaulted. In place of ice there is rain, and everywhere an explorer steps some new danger lurks: a malarial mosquito, a spear, a snake, a spider, a piranha. The mind has to deal with the terror of constant siege.
Fawcett had long been convinced that the Amazon was more grueling and of greater scientific import- botanically, zoologically, geographically, and anthropologically-than what he dismissed as the exploration of “bar ren
