there and realize it was a boulder. His mind was deceiving him. He had been marching since sunrise, but he had progressed scarcely a few hundred yards. It was getting dark, and in a fit of panic he fired his rifle in the air. There was no response. His feet ached, and he sat down and removed his boots and socks; the skin had peeled off his ankles. He had no food other than a pound of caramels, which Nina Fawcett had prepared for the expedition. The box was intended to be shared among the team, but Murray devoured half the contents, washing them down with the river's milky water. Lying alone in the blackness, he smoked three Turkish cigarettes, trying to stifle his hunger. Then he passed out.
In the morning, the group found him, and Fawcett reprimanded Murray for slowing the group's progress. But each day Murray lagged farther and farther behind. He was unaccustomed to intense hunger-the ceaseless, oppressive gnawing that ate away at mind and body alike. Later, when Murray was given some cornmeal, he scooped it greedily into his mouth with a leaf and let it melt over his tongue. “I wish no more than to be assured such food for the rest of my time,” he said. The entries in his diary became choppier, more frantic:
Very hot work, quite exhausted; suggest short rest, Fawcett refuses it; stay behind alone, when able to struggle on, fearfully dense scrub, cannot get through it, cut way back to river bank, very rough going there… see another playa [beach] away at next bend of the river, try to wade to it, gets too deep, return to mud playa, now night; gather some dead branches and canes and lianas and make fire to dry clothes; no food, some saccharine pellets, smoke three cigarettes, suck some of the cold fruits, mosquitoes pretty bad, cannot sleep from bites, cold and tiredness, try opium sedative, no use; weird noises in river and forest, [anteater] comes down to drink on opposite side, making great row. Think hear voices come across the river, and imagine they may be Guarayos. All clothes full of grit, gets in mouth, miserable night.
He tried to do some scientific work but soon gave up. As another biologist who later traveled with Fawcett put it, “I thought that I would get many valuable natural history notes but my experience is that when undergoing severe physical labor the mind is not at all active. One thinks of the particular problem in hand or perhaps the mind just wanders not performing coherent thought. As to missing various phases of civilized life, one has no time to miss anything save food or sleep or rest. In short one becomes little more than a rational animal.”
One night when Fawcett, Murray, and the others reached camp, they were so weak that most of them collapsed on the ground without pitching their hammocks. Later, Fawcett, apparently sensing the atmosphere of despair, and heeding what he had learned in exploring school, tried to encourage merriment. He pulled a recorder from his pack and played “The Calabar,” a gallows-humor Irish folk song about a shipwreck. He sang:
Next day we ran short of buttermilk-it was all the captain's fault-
So the crew were laid up with scurvy, for the herrings were terrible salt.
Our coloured cook said the meat was done, there wasn't a bap on the shelf;
“Then we'll eat the soap,” the captain cried, “let no man wash himself.”
Murray hadn't heard the song in thirty years and joined in along with Costin, who took out his own recorder. 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.”
