David Grann - The Lost City of Z - A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

Desperate for funding, Fawcett had seemingly relented to the Society's demand that he be more forthcoming about his plans. After nearly two decades of exploring, he said, he had concluded that in the southern basin of the Amazon, between the Tapajós and the Xingu tributaries, were “the most remarkable relics of ancient civilization.” Fawcett had sketched a map of the region and submitted it with a proposal. “This area represents the greatest area of unexplored country in the world,” he wrote. “Portuguese exploration, and all subsequent geographical research by Brazilians or foreigners, has been invariably confined to waterways.” Instead, he planned to blaze a path overland between the Tapajós and the Xingu and other tributaries, where “none has penetrated.” (Conceding how much more dangerous this course was, he requested extra money to “get the survivors back to England,” as “I may be killed.”)

On one page of the proposal, Fawcett had included several coordinates. “What are they for?” my wife asked.

“I think they're the direction he headed in after Dead Horse Camp.”

The next morning I stuffed my gear and maps in my backpack, and said goodbye to my wife and infant son. “Don't be stupid,” my wife said. Then I headed to the airport and boarded a plane for Brazil.

Oh, the “glorious prospect of home,” Fawcett wrote in his diary. Streets paved and neatly aligned, thatched cottages covered in ivy, pastures filled with sheep, church bells tolling in the rain, stores crammed with jellies and soups and lemonades and tarts and Neapolitan ices and wines, pedestrians jostling in the streets with buses and trams and taxis. Home was all Fawcett could think about on the boat ride back to England at the end of 1907. And now he was back in Devon with Nina and Jack, Jack as big as could be, running and talking, already four years old, and little Brian staring at the man in the doorway as if he were a stranger, which he was. “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. I wanted, in short, to be just ‘ordinary.' ” He bathed in warm water with soap and trimmed his beard. He dug in the garden, tucked his children into bed, read by the fire, and shared Christmas with his family-“as though South America had never been.”

But before long he found himself unable to sit still. “Deep down inside me a tiny voice was calling,” Fawcett said. “At first scarcely audible, it persisted until I could no longer ignore it. It was the voice of the wild places, and I knew that it was now part of me for ever.” He added, “Inexplicably-amazingly-I knew I loved that hell. Its fiendish grasp had captured me, and I wanted to see it again.”

So, after only a few months, Fawcett packed up his things again and fled what he called the “prison gate slowly but surely shutting me in.” Over the next decade and a half, he conducted one expedition after another in which he explored thousands of square miles of the Amazon and helped to redraw the map of South America. During that time, he was often as neglectful of his wife and children as his parents had been of him. Nina compared her life to that of a sailor's wife: “a very uncertain and lonely” existence “without private means, miserably poor, especially with children.” In a letter to the Royal Geographical Society in 1911, Fawcett professed that he would not “subject my wife to the perpetual anxiety of these risky journeys.” (He had once shown her the lines on the palm of his hand and said, “Note this well!”-someday, she might have to “identify my dead body.”) Yet he continued to subject her to his dangerous compulsions. In some ways, it must have been easier for his family when he was gone, for the longer he remained at home, the more his mood soured. Brian later confessed in his diary, “I felt relieved when he was out of the way.”

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. Still, she made sure that Fawcett had little to worry about, performing the kinds of chores-cooking and cleaning and washing-to which she was unaccustomed and raising the children in what Brian called a “riotous democracy.” Nina also acted as her husband's chief advocate, doing everything in her power to burnish his reputation. When she learned that a member of Fawcett's 1910 expedition was trying to publish an unauthorized account, she quickly alerted her husband so that he could put a stop to it. And when Fawcett wrote to her about his exploits, she immediately tried to publicize them by funneling the information to the Royal Geographical Society and, in particular, to Keltie, the institution's longtime secretary, who was one of Fawcett's biggest boosters. (Keltie had agreed to be the godfather of Fawcett's daughter, Joan, who was born in 1910.) 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.” Fawcett dedicated Exploration Fawcett to his beloved “Cheeky”-“because,” he said, “she as my partner in everything shared with me the burden of the work.”

Yet at times Nina longed to be not the person at home but the one in the wild. “I, personally, am quite ready now for accompanying P.H.F. on a Brazilian journey,” she once told a friend. She learned how to read the stars, like a geographer, and kept herself in “splendid health;” in 1910, while visiting Fawcett in South America, she wrote an unpublished dispatch for the RGS about her journey by train from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Valparaiso, Chile, which she thought might be “interesting to those who are fond of travel.” At one point, she could see “the snowcapped peaks of the Cordillera flushed with the rosy light of the rising sun”-a vista so “beautiful and grand as to stamp itself on the memory forever.”

Fawcett never consented to take her with him into the jungle. But Nina confided to a friend that she believed staunchly in the “equality… between man and woman.” She encouraged Joan to build her stamina and take physical risks, including swimming for miles in rough seas. Writing to Keltie about his goddaughter, Nina said, “Some day perhaps she may win the laurels of the Royal Geographical Society as a lady-geographer, and so fulfill the ambition that her mother has striven for in vain-so far!” (Fawcett also spurred Joan, like all his children, to take extreme risks. “Daddy gave us a tremendous amount of fun, because he didn't realize the danger,” Joan later recalled. “But he should have realized. He was always encouraging us to climb across roofs and up trees… Once I fell on the cervical vertebrae of my neck and that cost me a fortnight in bed with high delirium and unconscious. Since I had that accident my neck has always been slightly stooped.”)

It was Jack, however, who most yearned to be like his father. “By the look of it, my little son Jack is going to pass through the same phase as I did when he reaches early manhood,” Fawcett once remarked proudly. “Already he is fascinated by the stories we tell him of Galla-pita-Galla.” Fawcett wrote and illustrated stories for Jack, depicting him as a young adventurer, and when Fawcett was home the two did everything together-hiking, playing cricket, sailing. Jack was “the real apple of his eye,” one relative recalled.