The Lost City of Z (33 page)

Elsie Rimell insisted that she would “never give up” believing that her son would return. Privately, though, she was despairing. A friend wrote her a letter saying that it was natural that she was so “down,” but pleaded with her, “Do not lose hope.” The friend assured her that the true fate of the explorers would soon be made known.

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N
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ARCH 12, 1932,
a man with brooding eyes and a dark mustache appeared outside the British Embassy in São Paulo, demanding to see the consul general. He wore a sports jacket, striped tie, and baggy pants tucked into knee-high riding boots. He said it was an urgent matter concerning Colonel Fawcett.

The man was led in to see the consul general, Arthur Abbott, who had been a friend of Fawcett’s. For years, Abbott had held out faith that the explorers might materialize, but only a few weeks earlier he had destroyed
his last letters from Fawcett, believing that “all hope of ever seeing him again had gone.”

In a later sworn statement, the visitor said, “My name is Stefan Rattin. I am a Swiss subject. I came to South America twenty-one years ago.” He explained that, nearly five months earlier, he and two companions had been hunting near the Tapajós River, in the northwest corner of Mato Grosso, when he encountered a tribe holding an elderly white man with long yellowish hair. Later, after many of the tribesmen had got drunk, Rattin said, the white man, who was clad in animal skins, quietly approached him.

“Are you a friend?” he asked.

“Yes,” Rattin replied.

“I am an English colonel,” he said, and he implored Rattin to go to the British consulate and tell “Major Paget” that he was being held captive.

Abbott knew that the former British ambassador to Brazil, Sir Ralph Paget, had been a confidant of Fawcett’s. Indeed, it was Paget who had lobbied the Brazilian government to fund Fawcett’s 1920 expedition. These facts, Abbott noted in a letter to the Royal Geographical Society, were “only known to me and a few personal friends.”

When Nina Fawcett and Elsie Rimell first heard Rattin’s account, they thought it sounded credible. Nina said that she “dare not build my hopes too high;” still, she sent a telegram to a news outlet in Brazil saying that she was now convinced that her husband was “ALIVE.”

Others remained skeptical. General Rondon, after interviewing Rattin for three hours, noted in a report that the place the Swiss trapper indicated that he had found Fawcett was five hundred miles from where the expedition was last sighted. Paget himself, when he was reached in England, wondered why Rattin would have been allowed to leave the tribe while Fawcett was forced to remain a prisoner.

Abbott, however, was convinced of Rattin’s sincerity, especially since he vowed to rescue Fawcett without seeking a reward. “I promised
Colonel Fawcett I would bring aid and that promise will be fulfilled,” Rattin said. The Swiss trapper soon set out with two men, one of them a reporter, who filed articles for the United Press syndicate. After walking through the jungle for weeks, the three men arrived at the Arinos River, where they built canoes out of bark. In a dispatch dated May 24, 1932, as the expedition was about to enter hostile Indian territory, the reporter wrote, “Rattin is anxious to get away. He calls, ‘All aboard!’ Here we go.” The men were never heard from again.

Not long after, a fifty-two-year-old English actor named Albert de Winton arrived in Cuiabá, vowing to find Fawcett, dead or alive. He had recently had minor roles in several Hollywood films, including
King of the Wild.
According to the
Washington Post,
Winton had “given up the imitation thrills of the movies for the real ones of the jungle.” Wearing a crisp safari uniform, a gun strapped to his waist, and smoking a pipe, he hurried into the wilderness. A woman from Orange, New Jersey, referring to herself as Winton’s “American Representative,” released updates to the RGS on stationery that was embossed
“Albert De Winton
EXPEDITION INTO UNEXPLORED BRAZILIAN JUNGLE IN SEARCH OF COLONEL P. H. FAWCETT.” Nine months after Winton entered the jungle, he emerged with his clothes in tatters, his face shrunken. On February 4, 1934, a photograph of him appeared in newspapers with the caption “Albert Winton, Los Angeles actor, is not made up for a role in a film drama. This is what nine months in a South American wilderness did for him.” After a brief rest in Cuiabá, where he visited a museum that had an exhibit devoted to Fawcett, Winton returned to the Xingu region. Months elapsed without any word from him. Then, in September, an Indian runner emerged from the forest with a crumpled note from Winton. It said that he had been taken prisoner by a tribe and entreated, “Please send help.” Winton’s daughter notified the RGS about “this grave turn of events,” and prayed that someone at the Society would save her father. But Winton, too, was never seen again. Only years later did Brazilian officials learn from Indians in the region that two members of the Kamayurá tribe had found Winton
floating, naked and half-mad, in a canoe. One of the Kamayurás smashed his head in with a club, then took his rifle.

Such stories did little to dissuade scores of additional explorers from trying to find Fawcett or the City of Z. There were German-led expeditions, and Italian ones, and Russian ones, and Argentine ones. There was a female graduate student in anthropology from the University of California. There was an American soldier who had served with Fawcett on the western front. There was Peter Fleming, the brother of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. There was a band of Brazilian bandits. By 1934, the Brazilian government, overwhelmed by the number of search parties, had issued a decree banning them unless they received special permission; nonetheless, explorers continued to go, with or without permission.

Although no reliable statistics exist, one recent estimate put the death toll from these expeditions as high as one hundred. The University of California graduate student, who, in 1930, was one of the first female anthropologists to venture into the region to conduct research, made it out only to die a few years later from an infection she had contracted in the Amazon. In 1939, another American anthropologist hanged himself from a tree in the jungle. (He left a message that said, “The Indians are going to take my notes. . . They are very valuable and can be disinfected and sent to the museum. I want my family to imagine I died in an Indian village of natural causes.”) One seeker lost his brother to fever. “I tried to save” him, he told Nina. “But unfortunately I could do nothing and so we buried him at the edge of the Araguaya.”

Like Rattin and Winton, other explorers seemed to drop off the face of the earth. In 1947, according to the Reverend Jonathan Wells, a missionary in Brazil, a carrier pigeon flew out of the jungle with a note written by a thirty-two-year-old schoolteacher from New Zealand, Hugh McCarthy, who had become fixated on finding Z. Wells said that he had met McCarthy at his Christian mission, on the eastern fringe of the frontier in Mato Grosso, and had warned him that he would die if he proceeded alone into the forest. When McCarthy refused to turn back, Wells
said, he gave the schoolteacher seven carrier pigeons to deliver messages, which McCarthy placed in wicker baskets in his canoe. The first note arrived six weeks later. It said, “I am still quite ill from my accident, but the swelling in my leg is gradually receding . . . Tomorrow I leave to continue my mission. I am told that the mountains which I seek are only five days away. God keep you. Hugh.” After a month and a half, a second carrier reached Wells with a new message. “I . . . am in dire circumstances,” McCarthy wrote. “Long ago I abandoned my canoe and threw away my rifle as it is impractical in the jungle. My food supply has been exhausted and I am living on berries and wild fruits.” A last trace of McCarthy was in a third note that read, “My work is over and I die happily, knowing that my belief in Fawcett and his lost City of Gold was not in vain.”

N
INA CAREFULLY FOLLOWED
all of these developments in what she called “The Fawcett Mystery.” She had transformed herself into a kind of detective, sifting through documents and poring over Fawcett’s old logbooks with a magnifying glass. A visitor described her sitting in front of a map of Brazil, a pencil in her hand; scattered about her were her husband’s and son’s last letters and photographs, as well as a shell necklace that Jack had sent back from Bakairí Post. At her request, the RGS shared any reported sightings or rumors concerning the party’s fate. “You have always taken the courageous view that you yourself can judge better than any one the value of such evidence,” an RGS official told her. Insisting that she had “trained” herself to remain impartial, she acted, in case after case, as an arbiter of any evidence. Once, after a German adventurer claimed to have seen Fawcett alive, she wrote bitterly that the man had “more than one passport, at least three aliases, and a sheaf of Press cuttings was found on him!”

Despite her efforts to remain detached, she confessed to her friend Harold Large, after rumors spread that Indians had massacred the party, “My heart is lacerated by the horrible accounts I’m obliged to read and my
imagination conjures up gruesome pictures of what might have happened. It takes all my strength of will to push these horrors out of my thoughts, the brutal wear and tear is great.” Another friend of Nina’s informed the Royal Geographical Society that “Lady Fawcett is suffering with heart and soul.”

Nina discovered in her files a packet of letters that Fawcett had written to Jack and Brian when he was on his first expedition, in 1907. She gave them to Brian and Joan, she told Large, “so that they shall each and all know the real ego of the man from whom they are descended.” She added, “He is much in my thoughts today—his birthday.”

By 1936, most people, including the Rimells, had concluded that the party had perished. Fawcett’s older brother, Edward, told the RGS, “I shall act on the conviction, long held, that they died years ago.” But Nina refused to accept that her husband might not be coming back and that she had agreed to send her son to his death. “I am one of the few who
believe,”
she said. Large referred to her as “Penelope” waiting for “the return of Ulysses.”

Like Fawcett’s quest for Z, Nina’s search for the missing explorers became an obsession. “The return of her husband is all that she lives for nowadays,” a friend told the consul general in Rio. Nina had almost no money, except for the fraction of Fawcett’s pension and a small stipend that Brian sent her from Peru. As the years wore on, she lived like a nomadic pauper, wandering, with her stack of Fawcett-related papers, from Brian’s home in Peru to Switzerland, where Joan had settled with her husband, Jean de Montet, who was an engineer, and four children, including Rolette. The more people who doubted the explorers’ perseverance, the more wildly Nina seized upon evidence to prove her case. When one of Fawcett’s compasses turned up in Bakairí Post, in 1933, she insisted that her husband had recently placed it there as a sign that he was alive, even though, as Brian pointed out, it was clearly something that his father had left behind before he departed. “I get the impression,” Nina wrote a contact in Brazil, “that on more than one occasion Colonel Fawcett has tried
to give signs of his presence, and no one—except myself—-has understood his meaning.” Sometimes she signed her letters,
“Believe me.”

In the 1930s, Nina began to receive reports from a new source: missionaries who were pushing into the Xingu area, vowing to convert what one of them called “the most primitive and unenlightened of all South American Indians.” In 1937, Martha L. Moennich, an American missionary, was trekking through the jungle, her eyelids swollen from ticks, and reciting the Lord’s promise—“Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”—when she claimed to make an extraordinary discovery: at the Kuikuro village, she met a boy with pale skin and bright-blue eyes. The tribe told her that he was the son of Jack Fawcett, who had fathered him with an Indian woman. “In his dual nature there are conspicuous traits of British reserve and of a military bearing, while on his Indian side, the sight of a bow and arrow, or a river, make him a little jungle boy,” Moennich later wrote. She said that she had proposed taking the boy back with her so that he could be given the opportunity “not only to learn his father’s language but to live among his father’s race.” The tribe, however, refused to relinquish him. Other missionaries brought back similar tales of a white child in the jungle—a child who was, according to one minister, “perhaps the most famous boy in the whole Xingu.”

In 1943, Assis Chateaubriand, a Brazilian multimillionaire who owned a conglomerate of newspapers and radio stations, dispatched one of his tabloid reporters, Edmar Morel, to find “Fawcett’s grandson.” Months later, Morel returned with a seventeen-year-old boy with moon white skin named Dulipé. He was hailed as the grandson of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett—or, as the press called him, “the White God of the Xingu.”

The discovery sparked an international frenzy. Dulipé, shy and nervous, was photographed in
Life
and paraded around Brazil like a carnival attraction—a “freak,” as
Time
magazine put it. People packed into movie theaters, the lines curling around the block, to see footage of him in the wild, naked and pale. (When the RGS was asked about Dulipé, it responded phlegmatically that such “matters are rather outside the scientific
scope of our Society.”) Morel phoned Brian Fawcett in Peru and asked if he and Nina wanted to adopt the young man. When they examined photographs of Dulipé, however, Nina was taken aback. “Do you notice anything about the child’s eyes?” she asked Brian.

“They are all screwed up, as though hurt by the glare.”

“That child looks to me like an albino,” she said. Tests later confirmed her assessment. Many legends of white Indians, in fact, stemmed from cases of albinism. In 1924, Richard O. Marsh, an American explorer who later searched for Fawcett, announced that on an expedition in Panama he not only had spotted “white Indians” but was bringing back three “living specimens” as proof. “They are golden haired, blue-eyed and white-skinned,” Marsh said. “Their bodies are covered with long downy white hair. They . . . look like very primitive Nordic whites.” After his ship landed in New York, Marsh led the three children—two startled white Indian boys, ten and sixteen years old, and a fourteen-year-old pale Indian girl named Marguerite—before a crush of onlookers and photographers. Scientists from around the country—from the Bureau of American Ethnology, the Museum of the American Indian, the Peabody Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and Harvard University—soon gathered in a room at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to see the children on display, poking and prodding their bodies. “Feel the girl’s neck,” one of the scientists said. Marsh surmised that they were a “relic of the Paleolithic type.” Afterward the
New York Times
said, “Scientists Declare White Indians Real.” The Indians were kept in a house in a rural area outside Washington, D.C., so that they could be “closer to nature.” Only later was it revealed conclusively that the children were, like many San Blas Indians in Panama, albinos.