BOOK: Peter Fleming, "Brazilian Adventure"

Peter Fleming: Brazilian Adventure. Penguin Books, 1957. (First published in 1933.) 320 pp. [A scan of a different edition (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964) is available on archive.org, and the page numbers below will refer to that edition.]

I bought and read this book more than twenty years ago (and have now recently read it for the second time), so I have quite forgotten how I came to hear about it in the first place. I can imagine a couple of reasons. One is that the author, Peter Fleming, has a familiar last name: his more famous brother Ian wrote the James Bond novels. Peter Fleming, on the other hand, seems to have mostly written non-fiction, such as travel books and also a well-known account of German plans to invade Britain in 1940 (Operation Sea Lion).

The other reason for my interest in Brazilian Adventure is its connection to the disappearance of Percy Fawcett, the British explorer who vanished in the Brazilian jungle in 1925 while trying to find a ‘lost city’ which he was sure must have existed somewhere in the area. I'm not sure when and where I first heard of Fawcett, but I strongly suspect it was in Gian Quasar's book, Into the Bermuda Triangle, which I read because of my interest in the Bermuda Triangle. Later I also read Fawcett's memoir, Exploration Fawcett (edited after his disappearance by his son Brian Fawcett), and what is (or at least was circa 2010) probably the most definite recent book on the subject, The Lost City of Z by David Grann. [But see this 2017 article, which suggests that Grann's book greatly exaggerates Fawcett's accomplishments as an explorer.] One of the purposes of the journey described by Fleming in Brazilian Adventure was to find out more (if possible) about Fawcett's fate, so that would naturally have been another reason for me to want to read this book.

Anyway, this turns out to be a very readable and enjoyable book, though as a contribution to the Fawcett mystery it leaves a good deal to be desired. Its chief feature is the author's sense of humour and his staunch refusal to take himself or his expedition seriously. He was, it seems, fed up with the genre of “travel and adventure” books (p. 122) in which the countless adventurers — self-styled explorers, colonels on long-term leave from the army, great white hunters, and the like — dished up exaggerated accounts of their bushwhacking exploits in the jungles of various remote parts of the world. By 1932/33, when this book was written (the expedition took place in July–October 1932), the times when such adventurers could make any really substantial contributions to geographical science were long gone (pp. 31–32), but I guess that the genre of books they had spawned took some time to die.

In reaction to this genre, much of what Fleming says, and the way he says it, is in deliberate opposition to and mockery of its conventions. ‘Travel and adventure’ writers might seriously refer to ‘the precious fluid’ when writing about their shortage of drinking water; Fleming prints “the Precious Fluid” with capital initials to poke fun at the cliche (p. 122; indeed the book positively bristles with sarcastic capital initials of this type). They might have hostile Indians with their poisoned arrows and blow-darts lurking behind every corner; Fleming tells you bluntly that he never encountered anyone hostile and was at no point in any serious danger. They might make a big deal of the discomforts they had to endure due to heat, insects and the like; Fleming makes light of “[t]he minor — the very minor — discomforts of camping in the jungle” (p. 171; though you can't help feeling, from his descriptions, that a good deal of it was actually pretty darn uncomfortable after all). They might make great claims of geographical discovery and blank spots on the map; Fleming admits plainly that at best they navigated a tiny bit of “a tributary to a tributary to a tributary of the Amazon” (p. 9), and that if any reduction of the blank spots was thereby accomplished it must have been negligible indeed (p. 240).

This attitude of his was in a way refreshing and made for entertaining reading; but I also couldn't help feeling that it must have been more refreshing in the 1930s than it is today — the idea of not being able to take things seriously, and of maintaining a sort of ironic detachment from everything, is no longer new and refreshing nowaways, but is itself an old and worn-out cliche. So I couldn't help feeling, from time to time, how nice it would be if he could have felt honestly enthusiastic and dedicated to something now and then.

The only other complaint I have, and it isn't so much about the book as about the expedition on which it is based, is this: I wish that the whole thing had been a little less amateurish and bungled, and that it had made a somewhat more earnest effort to clear up the Fawcett mystery. Now, Fleming will be the first to admit that their expedition was indeed amateurish and bungled, and he delights in poking fun at himself and his companions in the most disarming fashion — and yet at some point you can't help wishing that you were reading a book by someone who did a good and competent job than by someone who bungled it but is able to joke charmingly about his own incompetence.

*

The whole affair is presented as faintly ridiculous from practically the very first page: Fleming joined the expedition by replying to their ad in the ‘Agony Column’ of The Times (16 April 1932, p. 1, col. 3). It was advertised as partly a shooting and fishing trip, and partly a search for Fawcett, and indeed here is where the problems began: Fleming and his friend Roger, whom he recruited to join the expedition (pp. 43–44), were actually interested in searching for clues as to Fawcett's fate, but the other members, the ones who had started organising the expedition (and put out the newspaper ad looking for two more members, which Fleming then replied to) were really only in it for a slightly more adventurous hunting trip, and weren't really interested in going out of their way to reach the area where Fawcett had disappeared.

Fleming is mostly a bit vague about who exactly the other members of the expedition were, what their qualifications were, who exactly was organizing it (he refers only to “our Organizer”, p. 36) etc.; this annoyed me a little, and there was hardly any reason for hiding their names from the public since they had already been named in several articles in The Times (26 April 1932, pp. 17–18; 17 June 1932, pp. 15–16, 18; 29 November 1932, pp. 15–16, 18; 30 November 1932, pp. 13–14). The expedition was funded by the members themselves, each of them contributing £400 (p. 40). It was led by a Major Pingle (p. 37; a pseudonym — see this interesting discussion about his actual identity), an American living in Brazil who was supposed to have “wide experience” at this sort of thing.

The organisation of the expedition seems to have been somewhat amateurish from the start, as if the people involved had more self-confidence than competence (an attitude that worked well for the British upper classes for a long time, until it didn't); and then their plans were thrown still further off course when they arrived to Brazil and found that a revolution (pp. 78–80) had broken out meanwhile. Of course for Fleming's purposes this suited admirably; you pretty much expect some sort of revolution to be going on in the background of any self-respecting trip to South America, and it added wonderfully to the general atmosphere of chaos and unreality that pervades the whole book. Cables are constantly getting lost, much of their luggage never makes it out of Sao Paulo, the railway system is even more out of order than it would otherwise have been, the constant delays that plague the expedition at every step get even worse, etc. And for all that, the revolution seems to be a remarkably low-key affair, the Brazilians certainly talk a great deal about it but relatively little in the way of fighting or other sorts of revolutionary violence happens at any point; life just goes on in the same indolent, lackadaisical fashion as always.

Slowly the expedition made its way north — by train, then car, then boat — with the aim of eventually reaching a minor river, the Tapirapé, and then crossing about 150 miles of jungle towards the Kuluene river; this was the area where, according to reports by nearby Indians, the smoke of Fawcett's expedition had last been seen, some seven years before (pp. 27–29, 65–69, 109).

Along the way we get a good many descriptions of nature — the birds, the plants, and so on — perhaps more than one might have expected given Fleming's general commitment to ironic detachment, and also rather more than I was really keen on. (But, true to his spirit, Fleming anticipates this objection: “I could write interminably of the birds, but [. . .] You have had already more than you can stand”, p. 131.) Anyway, although I'm not really interested in descriptions of nature, one or two things here were interesting anyway; for example, some of the animals that we might consider familiar now were quite exotic from his point of view, their names given only in italics and in Brazilian Portuguese (e.g. the “capivara, which is a rodent as big as a sheep, a kind of water guinea pig”, p. 126). Incidentally, on the subject of local words in italics, naturally these are also a cliched aspect of the ‘Travel and Adventure’ school of writing, so that Fleming feels compelled to apologize at some length for using them anyway (p. 133). —

Eventually, however, it became clear that Major Pingle had been engaged by the expedition organizers on the (mis)understanding that it was going to be just a “casual shooting trip”, and, despite all his earlier protestations to the contrary, he had no interest in seriously attempting the voyage up the Tapirapé river, let alone the cross-country journey from there into the area where Fawcett had disappeared (pp. 164–7). By contrast, Fleming and his friend Roger were determined to at least make the attempt; not that they expected to succeed, but they aimed at “honourable failure” (p. 196) rather than the ignominy of not even attempting to achieve the stated goal of the expedition.

So the rest of the expedition continued up the river while Pingle waited, confident that they would turn back soon and return to him in a couple of weeks at most (pp. 172–3). Indeed without him they had a hard enough time communicating with their Brazilian attendants, let alone with the local Indians. Eventually the expedition split: Fleming and two others, with a few Indians as guides, decided to attempt the cross-country leg of the journey (pp. 196–201), while the rest returned downstream.

This overland journey, unsurprisingly, proved difficult; they could only take as much food, equipment etc. as they could carry, which was not much (pp. 217–18). They had little in the way of weapons and ammunition; nor was it easy to find water — the area was drier than a naive reader like me expects when he hears about bushwhacking in the Amazon. There was jungle along the rivers, elsewhere it was open grassland or “campo” (Fleming uses this word so casually that he doesn't even put it in italics :)). Their Indian ‘guides’ were soon at an end both of their geographical knowledge and of their patience, and turned back (p. 213); Fleming and others persisted for a few more days, mostly staying close to a small unnamed river and for some time actually wading up it (p. 227). The area must have been inhabited by Indians, as they often saw deliberately cut or broken branches, evidently to mark trails or something like that (p. 220), but at no point did they actually see these Indians themselves.

Eventually they turned back, for several perfectly good reasons. It was clear that the rainly season was approaching, and that would bring with it incessant storms and the risk of fever. They were running uncomfortably low on food. It was unwise to assume that the local Indians would prove friendly, or even if they did, that they would have much food to sell. “If one of us had gone lame, or if anything had happened to the .22 [gun], it is improbable that we should have got out at all.” (P. 251.) Nevertheless a better organized expedition would probably have been able to accomplish the cross-country journey to the Kuluene (p. 252).

Based on his experiences on this last leg of the journey, Fleming concluded that Fawcett's expedition may have perished due to some accident, or become weakened to the point where they represented an easy target for some hostile group of Indians, and were either killed or died in captivity (pp. 256–8).

The return journey was either ugly or ludicrous, depending on how you look at it. They returned to Major Pingle, but he refused to release their share of the expedition funds (which he was in control of), being apparently sour about the fact that Fleming and a few others had resigned from the expedition and continued on their own, and being paranoid that Fleming had intended to libel him in dispatches to the press. Fleming and his friend Roger, refusing to return under Pingle's command, now had to make their way (with a few Brazilian attendants) down the river with a paltry sum of some £10, which was all they could get out of Pingle (p. 275).

Their destination was the town of Pará on the north coast of Brazil, and they were very keen to reach it before Pingle; partly as a matter of pride, partly to prevent him from causing trouble there, and partly to catch the first ship to England, otherwise they'd have to wait another month for the next one. So something like a race now emerged between Fleming's party and Pingle's, with all manner of intrigues and reversals and desperate attempts to get Brazilians to hurry (a nearly impossible task), all of which is described in Fleming's steady comical style that pervades the whole book. They had to raise additional funds by selling their equipment bit by bit (pp. 286–7, 297), and at one point they appealed to the revolutionary sympathies of a local bigwig to dissuade him from selling petrol to the boat that Pingle's party was travelling on :)) (pp. 349–51).

In the end, they did reach Pará before Major Pingle, and they did catch the boat for England, just barely. The book ends rather abruptly there, with only a short and suitably absurd epilogue showing Fleming's encounter with overzealous customs officials upon his return to England (pp. 368–9). I was hoping we would learn more about how they eventually resolved affairs with Major Pingle; did Fleming and others get their money back? Did Pingle suffer any sort of consequences whatsoever for his deplorable behaviour? I suspect not, but in any case, Fleming says nothing about this. Perhaps there was nothing to say, or he thought it would be libellous, or that it would be too serious and not in accord with the rest of the book. It seems clear that his feelings regarding Pingle were characterized more by pity than by anger (p. 371).

*

So, as I already said earlier, this was an entertaining book to read, but in some ways an unsatisfactory one. But I guess we mustn't blame Fleming for it; he knew that his expedition hadn't accomplished anything significant enough and that if he had attempted to write a serious book in the ‘Travel and Adventure’ genre, it would have been silly and insincere: “ours was not that sort of expedition, and mine is not that sort of book” (p. 9). Instead, he managed to produce something fresh that probably stood out from the mass of other bushwhacking books on the market, and still makes for a good read today.

Miscellaneous

“Women wearing funny little black hats, coloured handkerchiefs, and cavalry moustaches carry huge fish in baskets on their heads. I wonder whether it affects the character always having a dead fish so near one's brain?” (P. 51.)

“We went to night clubs and watched the maxixe, a dance the nature of which can perhaps best be indicated by saying that its purpose appears to be to get St. Vitus decanonized.” (P. 63.)

“Tall secretary birds pranced anxiously down the road before our cars with the stupidity of poultry and the gait of haute école.” (P. 95.) :)))

“But there were no Indians, no jaguars. We saw nothing more formidable than a toad, detected in the act of climbing into my trouser pocket as I slept. If I knew my job, I should say it was a man-eating toad; but I cannot slander so trustful a creature.” (P. 225.) I would *love* to see a man-eating toad :]

There's an interesting passage on p. 140, summarizing what kind of book this is: he records his subjective experiences rather than objective facts. “This book is all truth and no facts. It is probably the most veracious travel book ever written; and it is certainly the least instructive.”

Not from the book but from Fleming's report on the plans of the expedition in The Times (17 June 1932, p. 16): “since some of the tribes have a cannibalistic reputation the Indian who thinks he has the entrée to a neighbouring village may find that the word has, for him, an unpleasantly double meaning.” :))

ToRead:

Several other books by Fleming also look interesting:

• One's Company (1934) and News from Tartary (1936), about his travels in China in the 1930s.
• Invasion 1940 (1957), about German plans to invade Britain during WW2.
• The Siege at Peking (1959), about the Boxer Uprising .
• Bayonets to Lhasa (1961), about the British invasion of Tibet in 1905.