uniform- made his way along the edges of cliffs, which fell away hun dreds of feet. Traveling in a blizzard, the men could see no more than a few yards ahead, though they heard rocks slipping from under the hooves of their pack animals and cascading into the gorges. It was hard to believe, as wind whipped around twenty-thousand-foot peaks, that they were on their way to the jungle. The altitude made them dizzy and nauseated. The animals staggered forward, out of breath, their noses bleeding from a lack of oxygen. Years later, moving through the same mountains, Fawcett would lose half a convoy of twenty-four mules. “A mule's load would often foul on jutting rocks, and knock [the animal] screaming over the precipices,” he wrote.
Occasionally, Fawcett and Chivers came upon a footbridge-strung together with palmetto slats and cables-that stretched more than a hundred yards over a gorge and swung wildly in the wind, like a shredded flag. The mules, too scared to pass, had to be blindfolded. After cajoling them across, the explorers picked their way downward around boulders and cliffs, spotting the first signs of vegetation-magnolias and stunted trees. By three thousand feet, where the heat was palpable, they encountered roots and vines creeping up the mountainside. Then Fawcett, drenched in sweat, peered into a valley and saw trees shaped like spiders and parachutes and clouds of smoke; waterways threading back and forth for thousands of miles; a jungle canopy so dark it appeared almost black- Amazonia.
Fawcett and Chivers eventually abandoned their pack animals for a raft made from sticks and twine and drifted into the Amazon frontier, a collection of Dodge-like towns with mocking names, such as Hope and Beautiful Village, that had recently been carved into the jungle by settlers who had fallen under the spell of
The prospect of fortune had enticed thousands of illiterate workers into the wilderness, where they quickly became indebted to rubber barons who had provided them with transportation, food, and equipment on credit. Wearing a miner's lamp to help him see, a trapper would hack through jungle, toiling from sunrise to sundown, searching for rubber trees, then, upon his return, hungry and feverish, would spend hours hunched over a fire, inhaling toxic smoke as he cooked the latex over a spit until it coagulated. It often took weeks to produce a single rubber ball large enough to sell. And it was rarely enough to discharge his debt. Countless trappers died of starvation, dysentery, and other diseases. The Brazilian writer Eu-clides da Cunha called the system “the most criminal organization of labour ever devised.” He noted that the rubber trapper “actually comes to embody a gigantic contradiction: he is a man working to enslave himself!”
The first frontier town that Fawcett and Chivers came to was Rur-renabaque, in northwest Bolivia. Although it appeared in capital letters on Fawcett's map, it consisted of little more than a strip of mud with bamboo huts, and with vultures circling overhead. “My heart sank,” Fawcett wrote in his journals, “and I began to realize how truly primitive this river country was.”
The region was removed from any center of power or ruling authority. In 1872, Bolivia and Brazil had attempted to build a railroad through the jungle, but so many workers died from disease and from Indian attacks that the project became known as the Railroad of the Dead. It was said that one man died per tie. When Fawcett arrived, more than three decades later, the railway was under construction by a third firm; still, only five miles of track had been laid-or, as Fawcett put it, it ran “from ‘nowhere' to ‘nowhere.' ” Because the Amazon frontier was so isolated, it was governed by its own laws and, as one observer put it, made the American West seem by comparison “as proper as a prayer meeting.” When a British traveler passed through the region in 1911, he reported one resident telling him, “Government? What is that? We know no government here!” The area was a haven for bandits, fugitives, and fortune hunters who carried guns on each hip, lassoed jaguars out of boredom, and killed without hesitation.
As Fawcett and Chivers descended deeper into this world, they reached the distant outpost of Riberalta. There, Fawcett watched a boat pulling along the bank. A worker yelled, “Here come the cattle!”-and Fawcett saw guards with whips driving a chain of about thirty Indian men and women onshore, where buyers began to inspect them. Fawcett asked a customs officer who these people were. Slaves, the officer replied.
Fawcett was shocked to learn that, because so many workers died in the jungle, rubber barons, in order to replenish their labor supply, dispatched armed posses into the forest to kidnap and enslave tribes. In one instance along the Putumayo River in Peru, the horrors inflicted on the Indians became so notorious that the British government launched an investigation after it was revealed that the perpetrators had sold shares in their company on the London Stock Exchange. Evidence showed that the Peruvian Amazon Company had committed virtual genocide in attempting to pacify and enslave the native population: it castrated and beheaded Indians, poured gasoline on them and lit them afire, crucified them upside down, beat them, mutilated them, starved them, drowned them, and fed them to dogs. The company's henchmen also raped women and girls and smashed children's heads open. “In some sections such an odour of putrefying flesh arises from the numerous bodies of the victims that the places must be temporarily abandoned,” said an engineer who visited the area, which was dubbed the “devil's paradise.” Sir Roger Casement, the British consul general who led the investigation, estimated that some thirty thousand Indians had died at the hands of this one rubber company alone. A British diplomat concluded, “It is no exaggeration to say that this information as to the methods employed in the collection of rubber by the agents of the company surpass in horror anything hitherto reported to the civilized world during the last century.”
Long before the Casement report became public, in 1912, Fawcett denounced the atrocities in British newspaper editorials and in meetings with government officials. He once called the slave traders “savages” and “scum.” Moreover, he knew that the rubber boom had made his own mission exceedingly more difficult and dangerous. Even previously friendly tribes were now hostile to foreigners. Fawcett was told of one party of eighty men in which “so many of them were killed with poisoned arrows that the rest abandoned the trip and retired;” other travelers were found buried up to their waists and left to be eaten alive by fire ants, maggots, and bees. In the journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Fawcett wrote that “the wretched policy which created a slave trade, and openly encouraged a reckless slaughter of the indigenous Indians, many of them races of great intelligence,” had imbued the Indians with a “deadly vengeance against the stranger” and constituted one of “the great dangers of South American exploration.”
On September 25, 1906, Fawcett left Riberalta with Chivers, accompanied by twenty desperadoes and native guides he had recruited on the frontier. Among them was a Jamaican prospector named Willis, who, despite a penchant for liquor, was a first-rate cook and fisherman (“He could smell out food and drink as a hound smells out a rabbit,” Fawcett quipped), and a Bolivian former military officer who spoke fluent English and could serve as an interpreter. Fawcett had made sure that the men understood what they were getting themselves into. Anyone who broke a limb or fell sick deep in the jungle would have little chance of survival. To carry the person out would jeopardize the welfare of the entire party; the logic of the jungle dictated that the person be abandoned-or, as Fawcett grimly put it, “He has his choice of opium pills, starvation, or torture if he is found by savages.”
Using canoes that they built from trees, Fawcett and his men meandered westward on their planned route of nearly six hundred miles along the frontier between Brazil and Bolivia. The river was barricaded with fallen trees, and from the canoes Chivers and Fawcett tried to slash through them with machetes. Piranhas were abundant, and the explorers were careful not to let their fingers skim the river's surface. Theodore Roosevelt, after exploring an Amazon tributary in 1914, called the piranha “the most ferocious fish in the world.” He added, “They will rend and devour alive any wounded man or beast; for blood in the water excites them to madness… The head, with its
