The Lost City of Z (16 page)

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 “barren regions of eternal ice.” And he resented the hold that polar explorers had on the public’s imagination and the extraordinary funding they received. Murray, in turn, seemed certain that his journey with Shackleton— a journey more heralded than any that Fawcett had undertaken—had elevated him above the man in charge of his latest expedition.

While the two explorers were sizing each other up, they were joined
by Henry Costin, the British corporal who in 1910, bored with military life, had answered a newspaper advertisement that Fawcett had posted seeking an adventurous companion. Short and stocky, with a bold Kiplingesque mustache and heavily hooded eyes, Costin had proven Fawcett’s most durable and capable assistant. He was exceedingly fit, having been a gymnastics instructor in the Army, and was a world-class marksman. One of his sons later summed him up this way: “A tough bugger who hated bullshit.”

Rounding out the party was Henry Manley, a twenty-six-year-old Englishman who listed his profession as “explorer,” though he had not yet been to many places, and a handful of native porters.

On October 4, 1911, the expedition prepared to leave San Carlos to begin the trek northward along the banks of the Heath River. A Bolivian officer had warned Fawcett against traveling in this direction. “It’s impossible,” he said. “The Guarayos [Indians] are bad, and there are so many of them that they even dare to attack us armed soldiers right here! . . . To venture up into the midst of them is sheer madness.”

Fawcett was undeterred. So, too, was Murray—after all, how difficult could the jungle be compared with the Antarctic? Early on, the men had the benefit of pack animals, which Murray used to carry his microscope and collecting jars. One night Murray was astonished to see vampire bats swarming from the sky and attacking the animals. “Several mules with ugly wounds, and streaming with blood,” he wrote in his diary. The bats had front teeth as sharp as razor blades, which punctured the skin so swiftly and surgically that a sleeping victim often didn’t awake. The bats would use their grooved tongues to lap up blood for up to forty minutes, secreting a substance to keep the wound from clotting. The bats could also transmit a lethal protozoan.

The men cleaned and dressed the mules’ wounds quickly to ensure they didn’t become infected, but that wasn’t their only concern: vampire bats also fed on humans, as Costin and Fawcett had discovered from a previous trip. “We were all bitten by vampire bats,” Costin later recalled in a letter. “The major had his wounds on the head, while my four bites were
on each knuckle of my right hand . . . It is surprising the amount of blood lost from such small wounds.”

“We awoke to find our hammocks saturated with blood,” Fawcett said, “for any part of our persons touching the mosquito-nets or protruding beyond them were attacked by these loathsome animals.”

In the jungle, a pack animal would falter every few steps, tripping over sludge-covered tree trunks or sinking into a mud hole, and the men had to poke and prod and beat the miserable creatures forward. “Surely an iron-bound rock-ribbed stomach is required to walk behind and drive” these animals, a companion of Fawcett’s once wrote in his diary. “I am frequently besmirched with wet clots of rotting blood and other putrid matter that drops from their sore heads that are kept in a state of constant irritation by insects. Yesterday I probed out the maggots with a stick and filled the wounds with warm candle grease and sulphur mixed but it is doubtful whether this will prove effective.” The animals generally survived no more than a month in such conditions. Another Amazon explorer wrote, “The animals themselves are pitiful sights; bleeding from great, sloughing wounds . . . foam dripping from their mouths, they lunge and strain through this veritable hell on earth. For men and beasts alike it is a miserable existence, though a merciful death usually terminates the careers of the latter.” Fawcett finally announced that they would abandon the pack animals and proceed on foot with only a pair of dogs, which he considered the best sorts of companions: able to hunt, uncomplaining, and loyal to the bitter end.

Over the years, Fawcett had honed the number of items that his team carried on their backs, so that each pack weighed about sixty pounds. As the men loaded their gear, Fawcett asked Murray to carry one more thing: his pan for sifting gold. The weight of the pack startled Murray as he began to hump it through dense jungle and hip-deep mud. “My strength quite gave out, and I went slowly, resting now and again,” he wrote in his diary. Fawcett was forced to send a porter to help him carry his pack. The next day, Murray seemed even more exhausted and fell behind the rest of
the party while ascending a summit littered with fallen trees. “I climbed over them for an hour, killing work with the heavy pack, and had not made one hundred yards,” Murray wrote. “All trace of the path was lost, I couldn’t get forward, I couldn’t get up the steep hill, I couldn’t go back.”

Scanning the forest for Fawcett and the others, Murray heard the sound of a river below and, hoping that it might lead to an easier path, took out his machete and tried to reach it, slashing at the grasping vines and enormous tree roots. “Without a machete,” he realized, “it means death to be lost in such forest.” His boots chafed his feet, and he threw his backpack in front of him, then picked it up and threw it once more. The roar of the river was growing louder and he hurried toward it, but he came at the rushing water too quickly and lost his balance, sending something tumbling out of his backpack
. . . A portrait of his wife and letters from her.
As he watched the water envelop them, he was overcome by “a superstitious depression of spirits.”

He pushed on, desperate to find the others before night erased what little light seeped into the forest. He noticed footprints on the muddy bank. Could they be those of the Guarayos he had been told so much about, whose tribal name meant “warlike”? Then he spotted a tent in the distance and staggered toward it, only to get 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:

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:

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.

“Y
OU 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
Exploration Fawcett.
“On the contrary, in my opinion it shows a creditable regard for the real things of life at the expense of the artificial.” In his private papers, he jotted down thoughts under the heading “Renegades from Civilization”: “Civilization has a relatively precarious hold upon us and there is an undoubted attraction in a life of absolute freedom once it has been tasted. The ‘call o’ the wild’ is in the blood of many of us and finds its safety valve in adventure.”

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.”

M
ANLEY 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.”