Manley lay listening, as the sound of their voices and instruments drowned out the howl of monkeys and the whir of mosquitoes. For a moment, they seemed, if not happy, at least able to mock the prospect of their own death.
“YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO BE TIRED!” Fawcett snapped at Murray.
They were on one of two rafts that they had built to go up the Heath River. Murray said that he wanted to wait for a boat that was trailing them, but Fawcett thought that he was making another excuse to rest. As Costin warned, internal discord was common in the miserable conditions, and was perhaps the biggest threat to a party’s survival. During the first European expedition down the Amazon, in the early 1540s, members were accused of deserting their commander in the “greatest cruelty that faithless men have ever shown.” In 1561, members of another South American expedition stabbed their leader to death while he slept, then, not long after, murdered the man they had chosen to replace him. Fawcett had his own view of mutiny: as a friend once warned him, “Every party has a Judas.”
With each day, tensions mounted between Fawcett and Murray. There was something about the man whom Costin reverently called “chief that scared Murray. Fawcett expected “every man to do as much as he can” and was “contemptuous” of anyone who succumbed to fear. (Fawcett once described fear as “the motive power of all evil” which had “excluded humanity from the Garden of Eden.”) Every year in the jungle seemed to make him harder and more fanatical, like a soldier who had experienced too much combat. He rarely cut a clean path through the forest; rather, he slashed his machete in every direction, as if he were being stung by bees. He painted his face with bright colors from berries, like an Indian warrior, and spoke openly of going native. “There is no disgrace in it,” he said in
Fawcett, who seemed to approach each journey as if it were a Buddhist rite of purification, believed that the expedition would never get anywhere with Murray. Not only was the biologist ill suited for the Amazon; he drained morale by complaining incessantly. Because Murray had served under Shackleton, he seemed to think that he could question Fawcett’s authority. Once, while walking a raft loaded with gear across a river, Murray was swept off his feet by the current. Ignoring Fawcett’s instructions, he grabbed onto the raft’s edge, threatening to topple it. Fawcett told him to let go and swim to safety, but he wouldn’t, which confirmed him, in Fawcett’s parlance, as “a pink-eyed weakling.”
Fawcett soon came to suspect the scientist of something more serious than cowardice: stealing. In addition to the missing caramels, other communal provisions had been pilfered. Few crimes were graver. “On such an expedition the theft of food comes next to murder as a crime and should by rights be punished as such,” Theodore Roosevelt said of his 1914 Amazon journey. When Fawcett confronted Murray about the thefts, the biologist was indignant. “Told them what I had eaten,” he wrote bitterly, adding, “It seems my honorable course would have been to starve.” Not long after, Costin caught Murray with maize that seemed to belong to reserves for later in the trip. Where did you get that? Costin demanded.
Murray said it was surplus from his own private store.
Fawcett ordered that because Murray had taken a handful, he wouldn’t be permitted to eat the bread made from the maize. Murray pointed out that Manley had eaten corn from his own private store. Fawcett was unmoved. It was a matter of principle, he said.
“If it was,” Murray said, “it was the principles of a fool.”
The mood continued to deteriorate. As Murray put it one evening, “There is no singing in camp tonight.”
MANLEY WAS the first stricken. His temperature rose to 104 degrees, and he shook uncontrollably-it was malaria. “This is too much for me,” he muttered to Murray. “I can’t manage it.” Unable to stand, Manley lay on the muddy bank, trying to let the sun bake the fever out of him, though it did little good.
Next, Costin contracted espundia, an illness with even more frightening symptoms. Caused by a parasite transmitted by sand flies, it destroys the flesh around the mouth, nose, and limbs, as if the person were slowly dissolving. “It develops into… a mass of leprous corruption,” Fawcett said. In rare instances, it leads to fatal secondary infections. In Costin’s case, the disease eventually became so bad, as Nina Fawcett later informed the Royal Geographical Society, that he had “gone off his rocker.”
Murray, meanwhile, seemed to be literally coming apart. One of his fingers grew inflamed after brushing against a poisonous plant. Then the nail slid off, as if someone had removed it with pliers. Then his right hand developed, as he put it, a “very sick, deep suppurating wound,” which made it “agony” even to pitch his hammock. Then he was stricken with diarrhea. Then he woke up to find what looked like worms in his knee and arm. He peered closer. They were maggots growing inside him. He counted fifty around his elbow alone. “Very painful now and again when they move,” Murray wrote.
Repulsed, he tried, despite Fawcett’s warnings, to poison them. He put anything-nicotine, corrosive sublimate, permanganate of potash- inside the wounds and then attempted to pick the worms out with a needle or by squeezing the flesh around them. Some worms died from the poison and started to rot inside him. Others grew as long as an inch and occasionally poked out their heads from his body, like a periscope on a submarine. It was as if his body were being taken over by the kind of tiny creatures he had studied. His skin smelled putrid. His feet swelled. Was he getting elephantiasis, too? “The feet are too big for the boots,” he wrote. “The skin is like pulp.”
Only Fawcett seemed unmolested. He discovered one or two maggots beneath his skin-a species of botfly plants its eggs on a mosquito, which then deposits the hatched larvae on humans-but he did not poison them, and the wounds caused by their burrowing remained uninfected. Despite the party’s weakened state, Fawcett and the men pressed on. At one point, a horrible cry rang out. According to Costin, a puma had pounced upon one of the dogs and was dragging it into the forest. “Being unarmed except for a machete, it was useless to follow,” Costin wrote. Soon after, the other dog drowned.
Starving, wet, feverish, pocked with mosquito bites, the party began to eat itself from within, like the maggots corkscrewing through Murray’s body. One night Murray and Manley fought bitterly over who would sleep on which side of the fire. By then, Fawcett had come to believe that Murray was a coward, a malingerer, a thief, and, worst of all, a cancer spreading throughout his expedition. It was no longer a question of whether Murray’s slowness would cause the expedition to fail, Fawcett thought; it was whether he would keep the party from getting out at all.
Murray believed that Fawcett simply lacked empathy-“no mercy on a sick or tired man.” Fawcett could slow down to “give a lame man a chance for his life,” but he refused. As the party pushed ahead again, Murray began to fixate on Fawcett’s gold-washing pan, until he couldn’t bear it any longer. He opened his backpack and dumped the pan, along with most of his possessions, including his hammock and clothes. Fawcett warned him that he would need these things, but Murray insisted that he was trying to save his life, since Fawcett wouldn’t wait for him.
The lighter pack improved Murray’s speed, but without his hammock he was forced to sleep on the ground in the pouring rain with bugs crawling on him. “By this time the Biologist… was suffering badly from his sores and from lack of a change of clothes, for those he possessed were stinking,” Fawcett wrote. “He was beginning to realize how foolish he had been to throw away all but immediate necessities in his pack, and became increasingly morose and frightened.” Fawcett added, “As we had thunderstorms every day with deluges of rain, he grew worse instead of better. I was frankly anxious about him. If blood poisoning set in he would be a dead man, for there was nothing we could do about it.”
“The prospect of getting out recedes; food is nearly done,” Murray wrote in his diary.
Murray’s body had become swollen with pus and worms and gangrene; flies swirled around him as if he were already a corpse. With their route not even half done, the moment had arrived that Fawcett had warned every expedition member of, were he too sick to carry on: abandonment.
Although Fawcett had prepared for such a contingency, he had never actually enforced it, and he consulted with Costin and Manley as Murray looked on grimly. “There was a curious discussion in camp tonight, on the question of my abandonment,” Murray wrote. “When traveling in the uninhabited forest, without other recourses than you carry with you, every man realized that if he falls sick or can’t keep up with the others he must take the consequences. The others can’t wait and die with him.” Still, Murray felt that they were close enough to a frontier
