a stone and let its juice spill into a stream, where it formed a milky cloud. “After a few minutes a fish came to the surface, swimming in a circle, mouth gaping, then turned on its back apparently dead,” Costin recalled. “Soon there were a dozen fish floating belly up.” They had been poisoned. A Guarayo boy waded into the water and picked out the fattest ones for eating. The quantity of poison only stunned them and posed no risk to humans when the fish were cooked; equally remarkable, the fish that the boy had left in the water soon returned to life and swam away unharmed. The same poison was often used for toothaches. The Indians, Fawcett was discovering, were masters of pharmacology, adept at manipulating their environment to suit their needs, and he concluded that the Guarayos were “a most intelligent race of people.”
After his 1910 expedition, Fawcett, suspecting that the Indians of the Amazon held secrets long overlooked by historians and ethnologists, started to seek out various tribes, no matter how fierce their reputation. “There are problems to solve out here… which shout for someone to undertake them,” he informed the RGS. “But experience is essential. It is a folly to enter the unexplored parts without it-and in these days suicide.” In 1911, he resigned from the boundary commission to pursue inquiries into the burgeoning new field of anthropology. Once, not far from the Heath River, Fawcett was sitting with Costin and the rest of his team eating when a band of Indians encircled them with drawn bows. “Without any hesitation,” Costin wrote, “Fawcett dropped his belt and machete, to show he was unarmed, and advanced toward them, hands above his head. There was a slight pause in doubt and then one of ‘los barbaros’ [the savages] put down his arrows and walked to meet him. We had made friends with the Echojas!”
Over time, this became Fawcett’s signature approach. “Whenever he came upon the savages,” Costin said, “he would walk slowly towards them… with hands stretched in the air.” As with his method of traveling in radically small parties, without protection from armed soldiers, his means of establishing relations with tribes, some of which had never before seen a white man, struck many as both heroic and suicidal. “I know, from persons who have informed me, how he crossed the river in front of a whole tribe of hostile savages, and simply by his bravery induced them to cease firing, and accompanied them to their village,” a Bolivian official reported to the Royal Geographical Society of Fawcett’s meeting with the Guarayos. “I must say they are indeed very hostile, because I have been among them myself, and in 1893 General Pando not only lost some of his men, but also lost his nephew, and the engineer, Mr. Muller, who, tired of the journey, decided to cross from one of the rivers up to the Modeidi, and up to this day we have not heard anything about them.”
Fawcett’s ability to succeed where so many others failed contributed to a growing myth of his invincibility, which he himself began to believe. How could one explain, he wondered, “standing deliberately in front of savages with whom it was vital to make friends, arrows fixing past one’s head, between one’s legs, even between arm and body, for several minutes, and yet being untouched”? Nina also thought that he was indestructible.
Once, after he had approached a hostile Indian tribe with his modus operandi, she informed the RGS, “His encounter with the savages and the way he handled them is one of the bravest episodes I have ever heard of- and I am glad he behaved as he did-personally, I have no fears whatever regarding his safety, for I am so certain that on occasions like that he will do the right thing.”
Costin wrote that on their five expeditions Fawcett invariably made friends with the tribes they met. There was, however, one exception. In 1914, Fawcett sought out a group of Maricoxis in Bolivia, of whom the other Indians in the area had told him to be wary. When he made his usual overtures, the Indians reacted violently. As they came in for the kill, Fawcett’s men pleaded for permission to use their guns. We
Fawcett hesitated. “He did not wish to do so, for we had never fired before,” Costin recalled. But at last Fawcett relented. Later, Fawcett said that he had ordered his men to fire only at the ground or in the air. But, according to Costin, “we could see that one [Indian] at least had been hit in the stomach.”
If Costin’s account is correct, and there is little reason to doubt it, then it was the one time Fawcett violated his own edict, and he was apparently so mortified that he doctored his official reports to the RGS and concealed the truth his entire life.
ONE DAY, WHILE staying with a tribe of Echojas in the Bolivian region of the Amazon, Fawcett stumbled across further evidence that seemed to contradict the prevailing notion that the jungle was a death trap in which small bands of hunter-gatherers led a miserable existence, abandoning and killing their own to survive. Fawcett had reinforced this image with accounts of his own harrowing journeys, and he was stunned to find that, like the Guarayos, the Echojas had stockpiled mass quantities of food. They often used the Amazonian floodplains, which were more fertile than terra firma, to grow crops, and they had developed elaborate ways of hunting and fishing. “Food problems never bothered them,” Fawcett said. “When hungry, one of them would go off into the forest and call for game; and I joined him on one occasion to see how he did it. I could see no signs of an animal in the bush, but the Indian plainly knew better. He set up ear-piercing cries and signed to me to keep still. In a few minutes a small deer came timidly through the bush… and the Indian shot it with bow and arrow. I have seen them draw monkeys and birds out of the trees above by means of these peculiar cries.” Costin, an award-winning marksman, was equally amazed to watch the Indians succeed where he, with his rifle, failed again and again.
And it wasn’t just the Indians’ ability to generate an abundant food supply-a precursor to any densely populated, sophisticated civilization- that intrigued Fawcett. Though the Echojas seemed to have no defenses against imported European diseases like measles, which is one reason Fawcett suspected their population was still small, they had developed an array of medicinal herbs and unorthodox treatments to protect themselves against the daily assault of the jungle. They were even adept at removing the maggots that had tortured Murray. “[The Echojas] would make a curious whistling noise with their tongues, and at once the grub’s head would issue from the blowhole,” Fawcett wrote. “Then the Indian would give the sore a quick squeeze, and the invader was ejected.” He added, “I sucked, whistled, protested, and even played the flute to mine, with absolutely no effect.” A Western doctor who was traveling with Fawcett considered such methods witchcraft, but Fawcett regarded them, along with an assortment of herbal cures, as a marvel. “With illness and disease so prevalent it is no wonder that herbal remedies are used,” Fawcett said. “It seems as though every disorder has its appropriate nature-cure.” He added, “Of course, the medical profession does not encourage people to make use of them. Yet the cures they effect are often remarkable, and I speak as one who has tried several with complete success.” Adopting herbal medicines and native methods of hunting, Fawcett was better able to survive off the land. “In 99 cases out of a 100 there is no need to starve,” he concluded.
But even if the Amazon could, as he supposed, sustain a large civilization, had the Indians ever actually constructed one? There was still no archaeological evidence. There was not even evidence of dense populations in the Amazon. And the notion of a complex civilization contradicted the two main ethnological paradigms that had prevailed for centuries and that originated with the first encounter between Europeans and Native Americans, more than four hundred years earlier. Though some of the first conquistadores were in awe of the civilizations that Native Americans had developed, many theologians debated whether these dark-skinned, scantily clad peoples were, in fact, human; for how could the descendants of Adam and Eve have wandered so far, and how could the biblical prophets have been ignorant of them? In the mid-sixteenth century, Juan Gines de Sepulveda, one of the Holy Roman Emperor’s chaplains, argued that the Indians were “half men” who should be treated as natural slaves. “The Spanish have a perfect right to rule these barbarians of the New World,” Sepulveda declared, adding, “For there exists between the two as great a difference as between… apes and men.”
At the time, the most forceful critic of this genocidal paradigm was Bartolome de Las Casas, a Dominican friar who had traveled throughout the Americas. In a famous debate with Sepulveda and in a series of treatises, Las Casas tried to prove, once and for all, that Indians were equal humans (“Are these not men? Do they not have rational souls?”), and to condemn those “pretending to be Christians” who “wiped them from the face of the earth.” In the process, however, he contributed to a conception of the Indians that became an equal staple of European ethnology: the “noble savage.” According to Las Casas, the Indians were “the simplest people in the world,” “without malice or guile,” “never quarrelsome or belligerent or boisterous,” who “are neither ambitious nor greedy, and are totally uninterested in worldly power.”
Although in Fawcett’s era both conceptions remained prevalent in scholarly and popular literature, they were now filtered through a radical new scientific theory: evolution. Darwin’s theory, laid out in
