Percy Fawcett

Percy Harrison Fawcett
Born	1867 (1867) Torquay, United Kingdom
Died	1925 (1926) (in or after) Brazil

Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett (1867 – in or after 1925) was a British archaeologist and explorer.

Along with his son, Fawcett disappeared under unknown circumstances in 1925 during an expedition to find what he believed to be an ancient lost city in the uncharted jungles of Brazil.

Early life and career

An adventurous father

Percy Fawcett was born 1867 in Torquay, Devon, England to Edward B. and Myra Fawcett. His Indian born father was a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society. Percy's elder brother Edward Douglas Fawcett (1866-1960) was a mountain climber, Eastern Occultist, and popular writer of adventure novels. In 1886 Percy received a commission in the Royal Artillery and served in Trincomalee, Ceylon where he also met his wife. Later he worked for the British secret service in North Africa and learned the surveyor's craft. He was also a friend of authors H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle, who used Fawcett's Amazonian field reports as an inspiration for The Lost World.

Fawcett's early expeditions

Fawcett's first expedition to South America was in 1906 when he travelled to Brazil to map a jungle area at the border of Brazil and Bolivia at the behest of the Royal Geographic Society; the society had been commissioned to map the area as a third party, unbiased by local national interests. He arrived in La Paz, Bolivia, in June. Whilst on the expedition, Fawcett claimed to have seen a giant anaconda, for which he was widely ridiculed by the scientific community. He reported other mysterious animals unknown to zoology, such as a small cat-like dog about the size of a foxhound, which he claimed to have seen twice.

Fawcett made seven expeditions between 1906 and 1924. He mostly got along with the locals through gifts, patience and courteous behaviour. In 1910 Fawcett made a trip to Heath River to find its source. Following his 1913 expedition, he supposedly claimed to have seen dogs with double noses - these may have been Double-nosed Andean tiger hounds. He returned to Britain for active service in the army during World War I, but after the war he returned to Brazil to study local wildlife and archaeology.

Fawcett's last expedition

In 1925, with funding from a London-based group of financiers called The Glove, Fawcett returned to Brazil with his older son Jack for an exploratory expedition. Colonel Fawcett had studied ancient legends and historical records and was convinced a lost city existed somewhere in the Mato Grosso region, a city Fawcett named "Z." Fawcett left behind instructions stating that if his expedition to discover the lost city of Z did not return, no rescue expedition should be sent, lest the rescuers suffer his fate.

For a first-hand account of the encounter of Fawcett and his companions with the Kalapalo, told by a Kalapalo leader in Kalapalo to anthropologist Ellen Basso, please see Ellen Basso's The Last Cannibals (University of Texas Press)[6]

Disappearance and early hypothesis

The last sign of Fawcett was on May 29 1925 when Fawcett telegraphed his wife that he was ready to go into unexplored territory only with Jack and Jack's friend Raleigh Rimmell. They were reported to be crossing the Upper Xingu, a south-eastern tributary of the Amazon River. Then nothing more was heard of them.

Many presumed that local Indians had killed them, several tribes being posited at the time – the Kalapalos who last saw them, or the Arumás, Suyás, or Xavantes tribes whose territory they were entering. Both of the younger men were lame and ill when last seen, and there is no proof they were murdered. It is plausible that they died of natural causes in the Brazilian jungle.

In 1927, a nameplate of Fawcett was found with an Indian tribe.

In June 1933, a theodolite compass belonging to Fawcett was found near the Baciary Indians of Matto Grosso by Colonel Aniceto Botelho.

Subsequent expeditions, explanations and theories

Rumours and unverified reports

During the following decades, various groups mounted several rescue expeditions without results. They heard only various rumours that could not be verified. In addition to reports that Fawcett had been killed by Indians or wild animals, there was a tale that Fawcett had lost his memory and lived out his life as the chief of a tribe of cannibals.

An estimated one hundred would-be-rescuers have died in more than 13 expeditions sent to uncover Fawcett's fate. One of the earliest was led by American explorer George Miller Dyott in 1927 - he claims to have found evidence of Fawcett's death at the hands of the Aloique Indians, but the strength of his story soon began to unravel. A 1951 expedition unearthed human bones that were later found to be unconnected to Fawcett or his companions. Kalapalo tribesmen captured a 1996 expedition, but released them days later when they gave up all their equipment.

The Villas Boas story

Danish explorer Arne Falk-Rønne journeyed to the Mato Grosso in the 1960s. In a 1991 book, he wrote that he learned Fawcett's fate from Orlando Villas Boas, who had heard it from one of Fawcett's murderers. Apparently, Fawcett and his companions had a mishap on the river and lost most of the gifts they'd brought along for the Indian tribes. Continuing without gifts was a serious breach of protocol; since the expedition members were all more or less seriously ill at the time, the Kalapalo tribe they encountered decided to kill them. The bodies of Jack Fawcett and Raleigh Rimell were thrown into the river; Colonel Fawcett, considered an old man and therefore distinguished, received a proper burial. Falk-Rønne visited the Kalapalo tribe, and reported that one of the tribesmen confirmed Villas Boas' story about how and why Fawcett had been killed.

Fawcett's bones?

In 1951, Orlando Villas Boas supposedly received the actual remaining skeletal bones of Fawcett and had them scientifically analysed. The analysis allegedly confirmed the bones to be Fawcett's. But his son Brian Fawcett (1906-1984) refused to accept them. Villas Boas claimed that Brian was too interested in making money from books about his father's disappearance. As of 1965, the bones reportedly rested in a box in the apartment of one of the Villas Boas brothers in São Paulo.

In 1998, English explorer Benedict Allen set out to talk to the Kalapalo Indians—said by Villas Boas to have confessed to having killed the three Fawcett expedition members. An elder of the Kalapalo, Vajuvi, claimed during a filmed BBC interview with Allen that the bones found by Villas Boas some 45 years before were not really Fawcett's.. Vajuvi also denied that his tribe had any part in the Fawcetts' disappearance. No conclusive evidence supports either statement.

Commune in the jungle

On March 21, 2004, The British newspaper The Observer reported that television director Misha Williams, who had studied Fawcett's private papers, found that Fawcett had not intended to return to Britain, but rather meant to found a commune in the jungle based on theosophical principles and the worship of his son Jack. Williams set out his research in some detail in the Preface to his play AmaZonia first performed in April 2004.

Russian documentary

In 2003, a Russian documentary film "Проклятье золота инков / Экспедиция Перси Фоссета в Амазонку" (The Curse of the Incas' Gold / Expedition of Percy Fawcett to the Amazon) was released as a part of TV series "Тайны века" (Mysteries of the Century). Among other things the film focuses on the recent expedition of Oleg Aliyev to the presumed approximate place of Fawcett's last whereabouts and Aliyev's findings, impressions and presumptions about Fawcett's fate.

The Lost City of Z book

In 2005, The New Yorker staff writer David Grann visited the Kalapalo tribe and discovered that it had passed down an oral history about Fawcett, among the first white men the tribe had ever seen. The oral account said that Fawcett and his party had stayed at their village and then left, heading eastward. The Kalapalos warned Fawcett and his companions not to go that way—that they would be killed by the “fierce Indians” who occupied that territory—but that Fawcett insisted on going. The Kalapalos watched the expedition’s campfire on the horizon each evening for five days before it disappeared. The Kalapalos said they were sure the fierce Indians had killed them.. The article also reports that a monumental civilization may have actually existed near where Fawcett was looking, as discovered recently by archaeologist Michael Heckenberger and others. Grann's findings are further detailed in his book The Lost City of Z (2009).

Fictional Inspirations

Fawcett is said to have been an inspiration for Indiana Jones, the fictional archaeologist/adventurer, and a fictionalised version of Fawcett aids Jones in a novel. Also, according to an article in Comics Scene #45, he was also the inspiration of Kent Allard, the alter ego of the Shadow.

Arthur Conan Doyle also based his Professor Challenger character partly on Fawcett, and stories of the "Lost City of Z" became the basis for his novel The Lost World.

See also

• Amazon River
• Archaeology
• Explorers
• List of people who disappeared mysteriously
• Paititi
• Royal Geographic Society

References

• Falk-Rønne, Arne. (1991). Klodens Forunderlige Mysterier. Roth Forlag.
• Fawcett, Percy and Brian Fawcett. (2001) Exploration Fawcett. Phoenix Press, ISBN 1-84212-468-4
• Fawcett, Percy and Brian Fawcett. (1953) Lost Trails, Lost Cities Funk & Wagnalls ASIN B0007DNCV4
• Fleming, Peter. (1933) Brazilian Adventure, Charles Scribner's Sons ISBN 0-87477-246-X
• Grann, David (2009) The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon ISBN 978-0385513531
• Leal, Hermes (2008) Enigma do Coronel Fawcett, o verdadeiro Indiana Jones

External links

• Forgotten Travellers: The Hunt for Colonel Fawcett Essay on Lt.-Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett
• Virtual Exploration Society - Colonel Percy Fawcett
• Veil lifts on jungle mystery of the colonel who vanished
• Colonel Fawcett
• Mad Dreams in the Amazon Essay on Fawcett from The New York Review of Books