The Lost City of Z: Chapters 9–13

Many of the diaries were filled with the mundane, from someone with no expectation of history: “9 July...Sleepless night...Much rain and wet through by midday... 11 July...Heavy rain from midnight. Reached [camp] on trail, caught fish... 17 July...swimming across for balsa.”

They stood like a lost world, forested to their tops, and the imagination could picture the last vestiges of an age long vanished.

Scrounging for food, Fawcett and his men could make out only buttressed tree trunks and cascades of vines.

As the writer Candice Millard explained in The River of Doubt, “The rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary, but rather the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day.”

As they staggered on, many of the men, inured to their fate, no longer tried to slap at the pestilent mosquitoes or keep watch against the Indians.

As they staggered on, many of the men, inured to their fate, no longer tried to slap at the pestilent mosquitoes or keep watch against the Indians.

Fawcett unslung his rifle; his arms had atrophied, and his muscles strained to hold the barrel steady.

“I wanted to forget atrocities, to put slavery, murder and horrible disease behind me, and to look again at respectable old ladies whose ideas of vice ended with the indiscretions of so-and-so’s housemaid,” Fawcett wrote in Exploration Fawcett.

I wanted to listen to the everyday chit-chat of the village parson, discuss the uncertainties of the weather with the yokels, pick up the daily paper on my breakfast-plate.

Nina, for her part, subsumed her ambitions in her husband’s.

Fawcett’s annual salary of about six hundred pounds from the boundary commission provided little for her and the children, and she was forced to shuttle the family from one rental house to the next, living in genteel poverty.

Nina also acted as her husband's chief advocate, doing everything in her power to burnish his reputation.

In a typical communiqué, Nina wrote of Fawcett and his men, “They have had some miraculous escapes from death—once they were shipwrecked—twice attacked by huge snakes.”

In a separate letter to Nina, Fawcett spoke about his older son’s character and future: “A leader of men, I think—possibly an orator—always an independent, loveable, erratic personality, which may go far...a bundle of nerves—inexhaustible nervous energy—a boy of boys—capable of extremes—sensitive and proud—the child we longed for, and, I think, born for some purpose as yet obscure.”

His feats came at a time when Britain, with the death of Queen Victoria and the rise of Germany, had grown anxious about its empire. These doubts were exacerbated by an English general’s claim that 60 percent of the country’s young men were unfit to meet the requirements of military service, and by a rash of apocalyptic novels—including Hartmann the Anarchist; or, The Doom of the Great City, by Fawcett’s older brother, Edward.

Published in 1893, the cult science-fiction novel detailed how an underground cell of anarchists (“a disease bred by an effete form of civilization”) invented an airplane prototype christened the Attila and, in a scene that presaged the Blitz of World War II, used it to bomb London.

Fawcett’s growing legend was predicated on the fact that not only had he made journeys that no one else had dared but he had done so at a pace that seemed inhuman.

Born in Glasgow in 1865, Murray was the brilliant, peripatetic son of a grocer who, as a young man, had become obsessed with the recent discovery of microscopic creatures and, armed with little more than a microscope and a collecting jar, transformed himself into a virtually self-taught, world-renowned expert in the field.

Voraciously curious, vainglorious, rebellious, eccentric, daring, autodidactic: Murray seemed like Fawcett’s doppelgänger.

Although only two years older than Fawcett, Murray, at forty-six, looked crumpled and wizened; his face, with its well-trimmed mustache and graying hair, was filled with crags, his body was ill shapen.

Moreover, the qualifications for a great polar explorer and for an Amazon one are not necessarily the same. Indeed, the two forms of exploration are, in many ways, the antithesis of each other.

He looks out and sees snow and ice, snow and ice—an unrelenting bleakness. The psychological horror is in knowing that this landscape will never change, and the challenge is to endure, like a prisoner in solitary confinement, sensory deprivation.

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.

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.

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.

Fawcett expected “every man to do as much as he can” and was “contemptuous” of anyone who succumbed to fear.

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.

Not only was the biologist ill suited for the Amazon; he drained morale by complaining incessantly.

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.

Then his right hand developed, as he put it, a “very sick, deep suppurating wound,” which made it “agony” even to pitch his hammock.

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.

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.

As we had thunderstorms every day with deluges of rain, he grew worse instead of better.

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.

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 discharge from the knee is more copious; it runs down in streams from half-a-dozen holes and saturates my stockings.

Murray accused Fawcett of all but trying to murder him, and was incensed that Fawcett had insinuated that he was a coward.

Strange noises emanated from the forest.

Then Lynch noticed that four of the chiefs seemed to defer to a fifth one, who appeared to be the least swayed by the violent exhortations.