BOOK: Percy Fawcett, "Exploration Fawcett"

[Note: I read this book, and wrote this post, back in 2006, but didn't get around to posting it until now. The text below is pretty much unchanged, except for a few additional notes in brackets; I also replaced a few dead links with their archived versions.]

Percy Harrison Fawcett: Exploration Fawcett. Edited by Brian Fawcett. London: Phoenix Press, 2001. (First ed.: Hutchinson, 1953. The U.S. ed. was published as Lost Trails, Lost Cities, NY: Funk & Wagnalls, 1953.) 1842124684. xviii + 312 pp.

A detour through the Bermuda Triangle

The way which leads one to eventually read a particular book can be long and winding. This one begins sometime in my primary school years, when I came across Charles Berlitz' The Bermuda Triangle, probably the most famous of all the Bermuda Triangle books. I couldn't, of course, accept his attempts to explain the unusual accidents and disappearances in the Triangle by paranormal phenomena and pseudoscientific theories; but the book, especially its early chapters that briefly describe the circumstances of many of the disappearances, nevertheless made for intensely fascinating reading. No wonder it was such a bestseller for many years after its first publication in the seventies. Anyway, this experience showed me that paranormal baloney can be great fun to read, even if I don't believe any of it or agree with it. I later read several other books by Berlitz, as well as various other pseudoscientific books that happened to be available at our local library. (I even read The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, quite innocently, a few years before all this Da Vinci Code furore broke out over it; but I didn't like it at all. I enjoyed their attempt to build what seemed to me at the time the mother of all conspiracy theories, but their style of writing was dull and boring, not nearly as fun to read as e.g. Berlitz's books.)

Anyway, the Bermuda Triangle remained a subject of interest for me. Later I started searching for more information about it on the web, and soon found the web site that probably contained more material about it than all the others put together: www.bermuda-triangle.org.* The author, Gian Quasar, made what seems to me a very honest and creditable effort to gather as much official and reliable information about the various Triangle incidents and accidents as possible. He wrote to various archives, requesting copies of reports written by various bodies that had investigated these incidents. He then published numerous short articles about various incidents on his web site, sometimes even including scans of the original documents.

[*2023 note: that link is now dead, Quasar's website is now on thequesterfiles.com but still features the same insane design style as it did back then.]

If this material is trustworthy, then one has to admit that there really are quite a few unexplained disappearances in the Triangle; that there really are quite a few instances where a board of investigation finally admitted something like ‘we gathered all the evidence we could, we looked at the transcripts of the radio conversations, we interviewed all sorts of possible witnesses, and we conclude that we haven't got the slightest clue what happened that caused the ship/airplane to disappear’. This, in my opinion, makes the Triangle an interesting topic, even if we don't in the least agree (as indeed I don't) with the paranormal explanations usually offered for the phenomena.

Possibly it may be true, as some people say, that the number of unexplained events in the Triangle is not really unusually large — that it is large simply because there is a lot of traffic in that area, but once this factor is taken into account there aren't really unusually many disappearances. That may be true; I really don't have the information to verify it myself, but regardless of whether it's true or not, it seems clear that some unusual and unexplained accidents and disappearances did take place, and these are interesting in and of themselves regardless of whether there were unusually many of them or not (and whether they have a paranormal explanation or not).

I know that it is also sometimes claimed that most of these incidents were not really mysterious disappearances at all, but were simply portrayed as such by Berlitz and other unscrupulous authors (who would e.g. ignore reports of storms and claim that a disappearance occured in good weather). Larry Kusche wrote a whole book in support of this claim, The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved. [2023 note: see also my post about it, from 2007.] But according to one of Quasar's web pages [archived old version], there are many faults and inaccuracies in Kusche's book; and if the various original documents whose scans appear on Quasar's web site are real, there seems no doubt that at least some disappearances really are mysterious and unexplained.

Quasar later went on to publish a book, Into the Bermuda Triangle, the first new Bermuda Triangle book to be published in quite some time. The apex of interest in the Triangle really seems to have been in the seventies; that's when both Berlitz's and Kusche's books were published. Anyway, I bought Quasar's book as soon as it was published (I couldn't even wait for the paperback edition), and I read it in a single day as soon as it arrived. I was rather disappointed. The structure of his book is similar to that of Berlitz', he presents briefly a number of disappearances in the first couple of chapters and then devotes the rest of the book to various paranormal explanations. Those first chapters about the actual disappearances themselves contained, in most cases, less information than had already been available on his web site. I was hoping that he would spend more time on documenting the events and less on paranormal explanations, because it was the gathering of official documentation where his real strength seemed to lie; paranormal explanations can be had a dime a dozen, and his were the same sort of tripe that is always published in books like that. He cites a book by some obscure nineteenth-century South American author as proof that some South American languages are related to Sanskrit, etc., etc. — the usual nonsense, as if nothing had changed since Donnelly's days.

Incidentally, Quasar's web site was later reorganized and much interesting material removed; I guess it's to avoid harming the sales of his book, and possibly of his planned and forthcoming books, of which the web site has been listing a great number for quite some time, though we have yet to see any of them actually published.* The ones about Flight 19 and the U.S.S. Cyclops are likely to be very interesting, if he manages to avoid the paranormal. His web site still has a nice long (and perfectly sober) article [archived old version] about the Cyclops, but most of the extensive Flight 19 section seems to have been removed (or maybe I just can't find it — I always thought the site is rather horribly disorganized).**

[*2023 note: he did publish a number of books since then, but I haven't read any of them yet. In particular, I see two books about the U.S.S. Cyclops: Hell Ship (2011), a fictionalized account; and A Passage to Oblivion (2014), which seems to be nonfiction. There is also Bermuda Triangle II (2017), which I guess is a sequel to his 2003 book; and They Flew into Oblivion (2013), about Flight 19.]

[**2023 note: there seems to be a good deal of information about Flight 19 on his website now. See also the archived pages from his old site.]

Anyway, Quasar's book is where I first heard of Percy Fawcett. He is in good company: his claims that the jungles of Brazil contain the ruins of an ancient civilization are quoted right next to the readings of Edgar Cayce on Atlantis. “Fawcett's belief that these Indians' tales were indeed referencing some unique forms of energy was reinforced by his firsthand examination of some of the most ancient dwellings in Colombia. He wrote: ‘They were windowless houses with narrow entrances, their interiors free from the grime of every cooking or illuminating agency known to us except electricity!’ ” (P. 183.) In an endnote he quotes Fawcett's book, Lost Trails, Lost Cities (as the U.S. edition of Exploration Fawcett was called).

Fawcett and his book

Well, how could one resist a book with such a title, written by such an author? Fawcett, originally a British army colonel (everyone seems to refer to him as a colonel, though he seems to have actually been a Lt. Col.), spent the better part of the first few decades of the 20th century bushwhacking around in the Amazon jungles, helping the South American republics survey their borders and obsessively chasing the lost cities that, based on Indian legends and early post-conquest written sources, he felt sure must exist somewhere deep in the forest. His last expedition, consisting of himself, his son Jack and another companion, set off in 1925 and disappeared without a trace.

Fawcett doesn't seem to be all that terribly widely known nowadays, not even in the English-speaking world; but in the twenties, his disappearance was an event most widely remarked on, and several expeditions were organized in the following years to try to find him or at least find out what happened to him and his expedition. I read a book about one of these later expeditions a couple of years ago: Brazilian Adventure, written by Peter Fleming (the brother of Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond novels), a book I can wholeheartedly recommend as it's written in a very pleasant, often humorous style, and Fleming never attempts to portray himself or his companions as heroes or hide the fact that the contributions of their 1932 expedition, both to the geography of the Amazon and to the clearing-up of the Fawcett mystery, were minuscule. [2023 note: I re-read it recently and wrote a post about it.]

Some twenty years later, in 1953, Fawcett's younger son Brian edited and published a book, Exploration Fawcett, composed of various manuscripts and logbooks written by Fawcett during the course of his travels. At the end, Brian Fawcett added two chapters of his own with information about Fawcett's last expedition (based on the last letters sent by the members) and a brief overview of various subsequent expeditions that tried to find out what happened to Fawcett. Brian Fawcett also added a few interesting footnotes based on his own experiences as a railway official in South America.

In the early 20th century, borders between some of the South American states ran partly through unexplored areas and were consequently only vaguely defined. Various surveying expeditions and border commissions were then organized to survey and define the precise course of the border. This is how Fawcett's travels in South America began — he was hired by Bolivia in 1905 to help them settle their border with Peru and Brazil (p. 19). He spent most of the rest of his life traveling and exploring South America (except during the WW1, when he rejoined the army).

I often find books about travel and exploration boring, but this is not one of them. It's full of interesting and entertaining anecdotes, incidents, and observations, both from the wilderness that he explored and from the remote towns and villages on the fringes of civilization where he started and ended his travels. Fawcett comes across as quite a likeable person; practical, and tough as far as withstanding jungle conditions is concerned, but also kind and sympathetic in his dealings with the Indians (see e.g. p. 151); he seems honest enough, so that even when he writes things that one finds impossible to believe, one can at least believe that he believed them himself; and, above all, there is no doubt of his sincere affection for South America (“All who have lived in these lands, and learned to know them, fall captive to their irresistible charm”, p. 17) and his dedication to his travels and exploration, and especially his efforts to find the lost cities he believed in. In pursuit of this he put his military career on hold and spent as much of his money as he could spare without throwing his wife and children into poverty. Although the book is just a bit over 300 pages long, the type is not very large, so that there is quite a lot of material here.

The fantastic and the paranormal

One thing that gives this book a somewhat curious feel is how it mixes the real and the fantastic. The vast majority of the book is perfectly down-to-earth stuff — exploration, Fawcett's interactions with the people he met, Indians, settlers, soldiers, planters, etc.; but every now and then, there comes a passage with some bit of lost-city lore, something of the sort that you'd normally expect from Donnelly or Däniken, not from a travel or exploration book. An unusual idol comes into his possession, and he consults a ‘psychometrist’, who promptly comes up with an Atlantis-type flood legend (pp. 12–13). When his expedition finds itself in very dire straits for lack of food, “I did what I had never known to fail when the need was sufficiently pronounced, and that is to pray audibly for food. Not kneeling, but turning east and west, I called for assistance—forcing myself to know that assistance would be forthcoming.” (P. 124. A deer duly appears, which Fawcett manages to shoot despite the great distance.) He encounters a poltergeist in a house in Santa Cruz (pp. 185–6), and another ghost in a village in the rainforest (p. 203).

Here's one of those cases where it isn't quite clear to me where reality ends and fiction begins. Apparently, the juice of a certain plant “ ‘will soften rock up till it's like paste.’ ” A woodpecker rubs its leaves over rocks prior to drilling holes into them with its beak (p. 76), and “ ‘That's the stuff the Incas used for shaping stones’ ” (p. 77 — this probably refers to the claim that some buildings are made of huge stones that fit together so perfectly that not even a knife can be inserted between them, p. 27). A similar story is cited by Brian Fawcett in a footnote on p. 252, where a jar of an unknown substance was discovered in a pre-Columbian grave, spilled on the ground, and “ ‘the rock under it [became] as soft as wet cement! It was as though the stone had melted, like wax under the influence of heat.’ ”

Another example on the verges of credibility: in a remote part of the jungle he encountered “some of the most villainous savages I have ever seen [. . .] great ape-like brutes who looked as if they had scarcely evolved beyond the level of beasts” (p. 201), had “overhanging brows” (p. 202) and didn't seem to speak — they only grunted. I'm not quite sure what to make of it; the encounter reads like something from Doyle's Lost World. I don't think these savages can have been quite so prehistoric as he describes them, but I have no idea how much of his portrayal is truth and how much is embellishment. Interestingly, he describes the neighbouring tribe, the Maxubi, as quite normal, even delicate, in appearance, friendly and courteous, able to make pottery, etc. (he even tries to tie them in to his lost-city theories: “In every way they indicated a fall from a state high in man's development rather than a people evolving from savagery”, p. 200).

I'm surprised that he took various lost-city rumours so seriously when he himself experienced an example of how similar rumours can develop and grow. At some point during one of his travels, Fawcett and his companions buried some equipment so that they wouldn't have to carry it; they later dug it out again on the way back. “Because of its weight”, they also buried £60 in gold. “Possibly this is how many tales of buried treasure originate. At any rate, wind of my buried treasure stole up and down the Guaporé, the sum increasing with every telling. The stories pursued me for years. When I last heard of the ‘Verde Treasure’ it had been magnified to £60,000.” (P. 120.) [But, incidentally, I don't understand why £60 in gold should be so heavy. If this was before the WW1, they had the gold standard and one ounce of gold was worth approx. £4.5, so £60 in gold would be 13.3 oz, which is approx. 378 g. In later years, the value of the pound could only be lower than that, so that £60 in gold would weigh even less. Among all the equipment that they were undoubtedly still carrying, why should another 378 g have presented such a problem that they would prefer to bury it?]

Or, another example: on p. 215 he mentions the rumours of a lost city with permanent lights: “The Indians there spoke of houses with ‘stars to light them, which never went out’. This was the first but not the last time I heard of these permanent lights found occasionally in the ancient houses built by that forgotten civilization of old. [. . .] There was some secret means of illumination known to the ancients that remains to be recovered by the scientists of today—some method of harnessing forces unknown to us.” And yet on p. 234 he reports that he later investigated the area to which the rumours referred, and “[w]e had seen no Indians, and found none of the fine houses with lights that never go out, which according to hunters on the Ouro existed in this area.” And yet this doesn't seem to have taught him to be more skeptical about such rumours of lost cities and the like!

A truly ridiculous passage from p. 249: “The 11,000 years said by Plato to have passed since the last of the Atlantean islands submerged could be spanned by the lifetimes of only 110 centenarians. An eye-witness account of the disaster could be passed on from father to son down to the present day with only 184 repetitions! More credence may be given to what may sound mythical if this is borne in mind.” This is amazing. Shouldn't his own experience with the ‘Verde treasure’ have taught him how unreliable rumours become even in just a few years and with much less than 184 repetitions? The more sober estimate one usually hears regarding these things is that anything more than three repetitions brings the original story so far into the realm of myth that the original becomes quite unrecognizable and nothing of any historical value can be extracted from it any more. And with three repetitions you can span perhaps two hundred years, but not more. There exist a few rare cases of things being memorized reliably over a period longer than that (e.g. genealogies of Polynesian rulers, if I remember correctly), but these are exceptions rather than the rule, and 11000 years is completely ridiculous.

Throughout most of the book, these credulous and paranormality-friendly passages are just isolated paragraphs scattered among otherwise sane prose. But the last three chapters (ch. 20–22) are entirely in this vein. By then Fawcett has told us about all his travels up until then, and spends the last three chapters expounding his theories about the ancient history of South America and outlining his plans for the next expedition (the one from which he never returned), whose goal was a definite location regarding which he had no doubts that it contained a lost city. (Brian Fawcett adds on p. 269 that he later visited this site himself, and of course there was no lost city there.)

This part of the book is really a fine piece of Atlanteana, very much in the spirit of Donnelly and his ilk. Out of nowhere, citing nobody and nothing except perhaps a few vague references to Indian legends, Fawcett weaves a tale of a South America originally consisting of several large islands (p. 240), inhabited by various nations and races, of interminably long migrations and wars among these races (p. 250), of an advanced ancient civilization (the Toltecs of Mexican legend) shattered by Atlantis-like cataclysms (p. 243), etc., etc. All of this is stated more or less blandly as matters of fact — as if it wasn't all entirely outrageous from the first sentence onwards, as if it wasn't all in complete and utter defiance of even the most basic rudiments of geography, geology, history and archaeology even of Fawcett's day; as if the fact that his claims have been linked together into a nice story that reads well is a sufficent proof that this story is probable, or even true; as if there was no need to at least pretend to cite sources or produce decent arguments in favour of his claims. It's pleasant enough to read, but what on earth gave Fawcett the idea that this sort of things should be taken seriously? O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!

Incidentally, it is in this last and completely unreliable part of the book that the sentence about windowless houses illuminated by electricity, mentioned above as quoted in Quasar's book, appears (p. 245). And although Quasar makes it seem as if Fawcett had seen such houses himself, the context here in Fawcett's book looks more like he is only reporting “recent discoveries”, not necessarily his own. (Of course he doesn't say whose discoveries they are, or quote any concrete sources in support of his claim.)

Miscellaneous

He often speaks with indignation of the atrocities commited upon the Indians by the whites in South America, not just in the past but even in his own day: slaving raids (p. 49), exploitation of Indians by the rubber companies (pp. 56–9; “the atrocities on the Putumayo in Peru, disclosed by Sir Roger Casement, were only a fraction of the terrible story”, p. 58),

According to the manager of a rubber station, certain Indians were cannibals but “ ‘they didn't care so much about eating whites—men of other Indian tribes were preferred’ ” (p. 66). I remember similar observations from the writings of Roger Casement (Amazon Journal (1997), p. 317; Black Diaries (1959), p. 236), but there the explanation is that the Indians hate the white men too much because of the crimes committed by the whites against the Indians, who therefore find the whites' flesh repugnant.

The amount of snowfall in the Andes seems to have decreased quite significantly during the first half of the 20th century (p. 75). This seems to be due to “the decrease in precipitation and the receding forest line”.

“The manager was a Frenchman of good family, who, in spite of being a sick man, relieved the utter boredom of life by keeping a harem of four rather pretty Indian women.” (P. 82.) In spite of? Sounds more like because of :)

Crocodiles turn out to be nothing but big sissies: “The otter's presence told the rest of us that there were no crocodiles, for the croc is afraid of otters and carefully avoids the same stretch of river.” (P. 72.) “[T]he bufeo, a mammal of the manatee species, [. . .] is neither helpless nor inoffensive, and will attack and kill a crocodile.” (P. 85. See also p. 202. Regarding the bufeo, the Wikipedia says this is a synonym for the Amazon river dolphin, but this doesn't appear to be very closely related to the manatee; they are both mammals, but from different orders.) “Crocodiles may respect human beings, but will always go for a dog.” (P. 131.)

He says he shot a 62-foot anaconda, and others reported snakes up to 80 feet long (p. 86).

There are some hilarious anecdotes about British mechanics and engineers in South America, pp. 91–2.

While vigorously criticizing the widespread use of the lash in South America's rubber districts, he commendably adds: “The lash in a far more serious form was used in the British Isles within living memory—is, in fact, still employed in the penal code, and constantly recommended for more general use. [. . .] To cry out at the atrocities of the rubber boom, while saying nothing of the many cruelties still legally sanctioned in our own country safe out of the public's sight, is to be too narrow in outlook.” (P. 97.)

In several places he mentions a strange disease that leads its victims to “an irresistible craving to eat earth. Possibly the underlying cause was an intestinal parasite—earth may have served to deaden internal irritation.” (P. 98.) The victim would eventually swell up and, in a year or two, die (pp. 151, 205). Finally a more down-to-earth explanation of the phenomenon I first encountered in V. S. Naipaul's The Loss of El Dorado (ch. 6, p. 176): “Negroes [. . .] were carried off by overwork, bad food and special Negro diseases, like the mal d'estomac caused by dirt-eating. A Scottish pamphleteer who came to Trinidad said he had noted the same disease, the product of despair, among the Scottish Highlanders who had sold themselves into slavery in the United States.” Another example from Fawcett, p. 151: “One of its victims had shortly before been sent off sick with a load of bananas and meat to keep him going, but on the way out was caught making three mud pies for breakfast. He died before reaching his destination.”

On a truly horrible river voyage: “During the whole voyage I never saw the Colonel wash himself, and the chamber pot was used, amongst other things, for containing food.” (P. 101.) “Turtles' eggs were plentiful—so plentiful that the bottom of the batelón [boat] was filled with them for sale in Rurenabaque; but long before we arrived there careless feet had crushed them into a mess and one more smell was added to the general stench. To add yet another the Colonel brought aboard some chaloma, or dried mutton. Though it was in an advanced state of putrefaction and swarming with maggots, its owner prized it highly. For me, it made the cabin unbearable at last, and I moved my hammock outside, mosquitoes or not.” (P. 104.)

Arthur Conan Doyle got part of the inspiration for his famous novel, Lost World, upon seeing Fawcett's photographs of the isolated Ricardo Franco Hills in Brazil. (P. 122. But the main inspiration for Doyle seems to have been the Roraima mountain range between Brazil and Venezuela; see e.g. this web page.)

On p. 156 I learned of the existence of another cute fuzzy animal: “Viscachos abound here. These are animals about the size of a rabbit and similar in appearance, except that their bushy tails resemble those of squirrels and their fur is the colour of chinchilla.”

His favourable opinion of going native: “The English peel off the unessentials of modernity very easily—they ‘go native’ more readily than any Europeans except the Italians; and the more refined their upbringing the quicker the change comes about. There is no disgrace in it. On the contrary, in my opinion it shows a creditable regard for the real things of life at the expense of the artificial.” (P. 163.) Cf. also pp. 197.

On p. 169 he mentions “Wila Wila, a plant like Edelweiss, found only at the highest altitudes.” (According to this web page, its scientific name is Senecio canescens. Some web pages refer to it as ‘huira huira’. I tried to find pictures of it on the web, but found only a very small picture from which it's hard to tell how similar it really is to the edelweiss.) Fawcett, as well as various web pages, mention it as a remedy against cough. Now I notice that the Wikipedia says something similar of the edelweiss: “has been used traditionally in folk medicine as a remedy against abdominal and respiratory diseases.” Of course, nowadays, with the prevailing attitude of ‘god forbid that you should touch a flower in the wilderness, especially an endangered one’, the idea of picking a bunch of edelweiss for the sake of curing a mere cold sounds as close to sacrilege as one can reasonably hope to get :-)

Apparently silver is very common in Peru, and was not considered particularly rare or valuable in pre-Columbian times (pp. 161, 264). Brian Fawcett says on p. 264 that during the WW2, all supplies of certain metals were shipped to the U.S. for the war effort and this scarcity led to experiments with silver, to see if it could be of any use industrially. Unfortunately, “while it looked pretty when made into plates and dishes, or even in the locally popular form of chamber pots, in the field of railroad engineering it was valueless. A pity, because there was so much of it.” Incidentally, I remember a passage in The Making of the Atomic Bomb saying that at some point, the Manhattan Project used several tons of silver (borrowed from the U.S. Treasury) as a substitute for copper (which was scarce) in the coils of electromagnets.

The copyright page of this 2001 Phoenix paperback edition states that “The moral right of Lt. Col. P. H. Fawcett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.” Since he disappeared and probably died in the 1920s, I guess they must have organized a séance and the assertion was made by his ghost :-) [Yes, yes, I know that technically speaking it is perfectly possible for a man in the 1920s to have done something in accordance with a law enacted in 1988. Possibly the 1988 act defines ‘to assert’ in such way that e.g. simply writing your name above the title when you begin the manuscript is considered a sufficient assertion of your moral right.]

Conclusion

This book is best seen as a mixture of two genres. Most of it is a travel/exploration/adventure type of book, and a very enjoyable and interesting one, too. But partly this is also an Atlantis/lost-civilization type of book, and as such, not bad if you enjoy this sort of thing, but nothing to write home about either. Qualitatively, his theories about ancient South American history aren't all that different from what one would expect to hear in a book from this genre. It has to be admitted, however, that, unlike cynical armchair atlantologists that populate most of this genre and just churn out book after book in an effort to fleece their naive readers, Fawcett wasn't a profiteer, but, by all appearances, sincerely believed in his theories and actually spent, risked, and finally lost, his life in the efforts to prove them. And this, although quixotic, is also in a way very admirable and puts him in a class far, far above the vast majority of purveyors of lost continent literature.

ToRead:

• I'm not aware of any other Fawcett-related books, but if I find them they might be interesting to read. [2023 update: a fine biography of Fawcett and his explorations appeared a few years later: David Grann, The Lost City of Z (2010). I read it in 2010 and liked it a lot, but unfortunately didn't get around to writing a post about it. Perhaps I'll reread it and write a post some time in the future.]
• G. C. Vaillant: The Aztecs of Mexico. Mentioned by Brian Fawcett on p. 241. On the subject of Aztecs, a very pleasant book I've read a couple of years ago is The Daily Life of the Aztecs by Jacques Soustelle.
• Peter Fleming (mentioned above for his expedition in search of Fawcett) also wrote several other books whose titles sound interesting: Travels in Tartary (about his travels in China, consisting of One's Company and News from Tartary), Invasion 1940 (German plans to invade Britain in 1940), Bayonets to Lhasa (the Younghusband expedition), etc.
• When it comes to adventurers in Latin America, F. A. Mitchell-Hedges (of crystal skull fame) may also be interesting to read. He is, however, more a spinner of yarns rather than a bona fide explorer.

[2023 note: most of what I've read about Fawcett, either here in Exploration Fawcett or in David Grann's The Lost City of Z, gave me quite a positive opinion about him. For the sake of balance, see also this very negative opinion published in 2017 on the Spectator's website. (The date says 1 April 2017, but it doesn't look like an April fool's joke to me.)]