BOOK: Evelyn Waugh, "A Handful of Dust"

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Volume 4: A Handful of Dust. Ed. by H. R. Woudhuysen. Oxford University Press, 2023. 9780198703150. c + 424 pp.

This is Waugh's fourth novel, and a bit longer than the other Waugh books that I've read so far. It is well-written and I enjoyed reading it, but there were also some things I didn't like that much about it. It is not as light-hearted as Waugh's Vile Bodies, which I read earlier this year (see my post about it); there is still humour in it, but it stays more in the background; what satire there is, is more bitter, and overall it is a sad story with an unhappy end.

<spoiler warning>

Tony and Brenda Last are around 30 years old and have been married for some seven years (p. 14). They are rich, but not extremely rich; Tony inherited some £6000 a year (p. 122) and a sprawling, neo-Gothic mid-19th-century country house (whose architecture is everything that the modernists liked to turn up their noses at; p. 11), where he and Brenda live. Paying off the inheritance taxes and maintaining the house, with its staff of 15 servants (p. 28), consumes more than 5/6 of Tony's income (p. 123), and they have to be careful about their other expenses, at least by rich-people standards (early in the book we even find Brenda travelling to London on a third-class train ticket; p. 30). Clearly they are a fairly advanced example of the decline of the traditional British upper class. Tony would be wise to sell the house (Brenda's family used to have a similar one but had sold it some years before), but he is too sentimentally attached to it and to his quiet life there.

Alas, after seven years of marriage, Brenda got bored of it, and I suspect also of their lifestyle; she has a bunch of friends in London, women who seem to be richer than her, and she would probably prefer to live closer to them where there's more things going on. She also finds the country house “all, every bit of it, appallingly ugly” (p. 28); later we see her institute large redecorations in a modern style blatantly at odds with the original spirit of the building (“white chromium plating”, p. 65).

Brenda starts an affair with John Beaver, a man a few years younger than her (and a distant acquaintance of Tony's). You might say that he is a still more advanced case of upper-class decline; we are not told who or what his late father was, but we do see that his mother, Mrs. Beaver, now has to support herself by running a real-estate and interior design business, and that Beaver himself had been to Oxford and then worked in an advertising agency until he lost his job in the great economic crisis. Since then he has been unemployed (which I guess means several years; the novel appeared in 1934); he lives with his mother (in a house “crowded with the unsaleable furniture of two larger houses”, p. 4 — another sign of decline) and sits eagerly by the phone every day, hoping that some friends will invite him to a party or a dinner (as indeed they often do) and thereby provide him a free meal. In short, he is a harmless parasite that I couldn't help feeling more pity than contempt for.

Over the years of their marriage, Tony, as we are told on more than one occasion, “got into a habit of loving and trusting Brenda” (pp. 102, 107), and she takes full advantage of his trusting nature. She persuades him to rent a small flat for her in London, and announces that she will start taking economics classes at the university there. Soon she seems to be spending less time at home than in London, seeing Beaver in her flat or enjoying social life with her friends (all of whom know about the affair and rather approve of it, or at least consider it harmless; they mostly look down on Tony anyway, p. 54). Tony clearly misses her during these increasingly long absences, and it's a testament to his trusting nature — or should we say his naïveté — that at no point does it seem to occur to him to ask her anything about economics, or to ask to see her course materials.

But I suppose it's no use; from what we've seen of their marriage dynamics, even if he did ask, she'd dismiss him with some vague excuse and make him feel guilty for having posed the question at all. For instance, on one occasion, Tony tries to make a surprise visit to her in London, but she simply refuses to see him: “He's got to be taught not to make surprise visits.” (P. 55.) This leads to a funny episode where Tony and a friend get increasingly drunk, keep calling Brenda on the phone and eventually end the night chatting and dancing with two tarts in a nightclub.

At one point Brenda, apparently figuring that Tony would mind her absences less if he had an affair of his own (p. 67), even tries to introduce him to one of her friends, a bizarre creature named Jenny Abdul Akbar, apparently the estranged English wife of some Moroccan grandee. Tony shows no interest in her and the experiment is not a success, but Brenda agrees with the conclusion of another of her friends: “Anyway, this lets you out. You've done far more than most wives would to cheer the old boy up” (p. 76) — because obviously, staying with Tony and not cheating of him is not an option. A good example of the rather bitter sarcasm that is not uncommon in this book.

Tony and Brenda have a son named John Andrew; he is presumably about seven and I have to commend the author for representing the child's manner of speech very convincingly (e.g. see the excited, breathless sentence on p. 42, ll. 1257–63); I found it annoying, just as I probably would if I heard him speak in real life. Brenda doesn't seem to miss her little son very much, but fortunately he has a nanny to look after him. His main interest is riding and fox-hunting, in which he is encouraged by the Lasts' groom, Ben (we see a similar situation in the early parts of Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) — perhaps Waugh was inspired by that book?).

Then tragedy strikes: John Andrew is killed in what I guess technically counts as a traffic accident, caused by a combination of unfortunate coincidences that nobody is really to blame for. Evidently Brenda's son was the only thing still linking her with Tony;* now she announces that she is moving to London for good and demands a divorce from Tony. Friends advise him to refuse and wait a little, since Brenda is sure to lose interest in Beaver soon enough; but he is disappointed with her and doesn't want her back (p. 121).

[*And not very strongly either. Upon being told that John is dead, Brenda initially takes it to mean John Beaver, her lover, and is actually rather relieved when it turns out to be John Andrew, her son (p. 96). Probably this short but important scene is why the author adopted the otherwise inconvenient idea of giving two characters the same first name.]

This leads to a very curious episode. At that time, divorce was only possible for certain sufficiently good reasons, such as if one partner (but not both; p. lii) had been unfaithful; so Tony has to take a prostitute to a seaside hotel for a weekend and order breakfast in bed so that the hotel staff will be able to testify that they saw him in bed with her. (The fact that Tony and Brenda both agreed on a divorce and colluded to make these arrangements would also, if it became known to the authorities, result in the divorce not being granted; pp. li, 107.)

Initially Brenda and Tony agree that she is to receive £500 a year in alimony, but then, influenced by Beaver and also by her elder brother, Brenda begins to demand £2000 a year, even though she knows that this would force Tony to sell his house. Tony finally realizes how wrong he was to trust her; he decides to leave the country for half a year and then give Brenda the choice between divorce without alimony or no divorce at all.

Tony joins an explorer named Dr. Messinger on an expedition to South America, searching for a lost city deep in the jungles of the Amazon. Eventually their Indian attendants refuse to go any further, insisting that the next tribe are “bad people” (p. 147). Tony and Messinger continue on their own, but then Tony falls sick with fever; Messinger goes on alone, hoping to reach the next village and bring help, but drowns in a boat accident. Tony, more dead than alive, reaches the farm of one Mr. Todd, who nurses him back to health. Todd is illiterate but loves Dickens's novels, so he asks Tony to read them aloud to him every day. Months pass and Tony slowly realizes that he is effectively Todd's prisoner; he can't reach civilization without Todd's help, and Todd clearly intends to keep him there until one of them dies. (He had at least one victim in a similar arrangement years before; p. 178.) At one point a party of Englishmen arrive in search of Tony; but Mr. Todd, either by dint of good luck or by being forewarned of their coming, has arranged for Tony to spend the day drunk and asleep in a nearby Indian village, and has meanwhile convinced the search party that Tony is dead, so that no further rescue attempts are likely to be made and Tony's fate is sealed.

The novel ends with a short epilogue. Beaver seems to have lost interest in Brenda, and has gone to America with his mother (p. 151). Tony has been declared dead; Brenda married his friend Jock, a local MP; and Tony's country house is now in the hands of his cousins, who are just as fond of it as he was, but who have better financial sense than him. They have shrunk the staff to six servants to reduce expenses, and are operating a fur farm to bring in some money; whereby they hope eventually to restore the estate to its former glory.

</spoiler warning>

I've found this novel to be skilfully constructed and there are many things in it; my poor plot summary above is very far from doing it justice. I liked how Waugh often divides the story into fairly short ‘scenes’ (separated by an empty line), resulting in an effect similar to that of a movie. He often uses this to switch between two or more strands of the story, effectively presenting them in parallel (e.g. between Tony in Brazil and the other characters in England).

Another example of a well-constructed scene is the one where Brenda receives the news of her son's death. We hear she has been worrying all day that something might have happened to Beaver, who went on a trip to France (p. 94); meanwhile, Brenda is at a party with a number of her women friends, and at the moment she is having her fortune told from her foot, by what you might call a ‘sole reader’ or a ‘podomantist’ as opposed to a ‘palm reader’ or ‘cheiromantist’. Brenda seems to be taking the podomantist's ominous pronouncements (“Four men dominate your fate” etc.; p. 95) at least half seriously. When her session is over and Jock shows up to tell her that John is dead, she initially thinks it's John Beaver and not John Andrew: “ ‘John . . . John Andrew . . . I . . . Oh thank God . . .’ Then she burst into tears.” (P. 96.) I guess she is herself shocked at her expression of relief that it is her son that got killed, and not her lover. And at the end of that scene, we hear the podomantist telling the fortune of the next woman, *saying the exact same things that she said to Brenda*.

I liked Waugh's attention to little details that show the sentiments of his characters. At one point Brenda invites a bunch of her women friends to spend the weekend at her and Tony's country house. Tony, following his usual Sunday morning custom, buys carnations for all the ladies to wear in their buttonholes. The guests head back to London early on that same day, trashtalking Tony's house and commiserating with Brenda who has to live there: “ ‘My poor Brenda,’ said Veronica, unpinning her carnation and throwing it from the window into the side of the road.” (P. 67.) You can't help feeling that Tony, his whole lifestyle and everything he holds dear, are being thrown away in just the same careless, contemptuous manner.

Another thing I liked about this novel is the abundance of interesting minor characters. I particularly liked Revd. Tendril, the local vicar (p. 25; or rector?, p. 75) whose services Tony attends on Sunday mornings (though Tony isn't really religious himself and is only doing it out of a sense of tradition; you might say he is sort of LARPing how a traditional country squire is supposed to act). Tendril started his career as a military chaplain in India some thirty-odd years before and has been recycling the exact same sermons ever since, complete with references to “our dear ones far away” and “our Gracious Queen Empress in whose service we are here” (p. 25; confusing some of his audience, who do not quite realize that he's talking about Victoria). Another interesting minor character is Mrs. Rattery, a friend of Jock's, who at one point visits Tony's country house by flying her own airplane and landing it in a nearby park (p. 79).

*

Speaking of religion, apparently it holds a greater significance in the novel than meets the eye of a naive reader like me. We read in the editor's introduction (long and interesting, as always in this series) that “Waugh is deeply critical of Tony's taste and of his morals” (p. liv), e.g. because “Tony's church attendance is merely a social rite” (p. lv); later the editor summarizes Waugh's views thus: “Man without religion will seek after strange and false gods (fortune-telling, psychoanalysis, economics, lost cities); these will fail him, and he will find himself in a world where nothing makes sense. Good in the world can only derive from God, and without religion, man is ‘either bestial or a child’.” (P. lx.)

This may well be how Waugh saw things, but from the perspective of a non-religious person like me, this line of thinking seems completely incomprehensible. It is true that the world makes no sense, but what good does it do to make up a fictional answer to your questions? And surely it is obvious that plenty of people without religion somehow manage to be not much more bestial, nor much more childish, and not even much less good, than religious people are. And moreover, even if Tony had been genuinely religious rather than merely performing it as a social rite, what good would that have done him? How would it have prevented the fact that he and Brenda are incompatible in terms of how they want to live, and that therefore their marriage is doomed to fall apart or, if persisted in despite their incompatibilities, make at least one of them, and possibly both, deeply miserable? If Tony were religious, his marriage would still fail, his wife would still despise his beloved house, and her friends would still look down on him as a stuffy old square.

So perhaps for Waugh this novel was about the lack of religion in modern man's life, but for me it's first and foremost a sad story of incompatibility. How unfortunate it is that it took Tony and Brenda seven years of marriage to discover that one of them wants to live a quiet life in his ponderous neo-Gothic house, putting on the role of a country squire, while the other wants to stay in London and flit from party to party in an endless merry-go-round of socializing with her friends! Neither of these two things is bad in itself, it's just that people with such different tastes can't very well live together without being unhappy.

*

The thing that bothers me the most about this novel is how hard it is on Tony, and unfairly so. He hasn't really done anything bad as far as we can see, and yet he loses everything — his son, his marriage, and ultimately his life. In terms of Tony's circumstances, the whole novel is a story of non-stop decline. His Amazonian expedition, too, is in some sense a matter of non-stop decline: at first, Tony and Messinger travel with a group of (English-speaking) Guyanan blacks; then with a group of Indians, with whom it is nearly impossible to communicate; then it's just the two of them; and finally Tony is left alone. And then, when Tony gets into captivity under Mr. Todd, Waugh positively toys with his fate like a cat with a mouse: he was so close to getting rescued, and yet in the end he is as good as buried alive. And back at home, nobody particularly sympathizes with him or has any real appreciation of the sort of lifestyle that he would like to lead.

The only thing that prevents the end of the book from being a total and unmitigated disaster is the fact that Tony's cousin who inherits his house cares about it much like Tony did, and intends to preserve and restore it. And, dare I say, there is just a tiny glimmer of hope even for Tony. We do not, after all, leave him at the end of the book in any worse a state than he had been in for the past many months as an unwilling guest of Mr. Todd. He managed to hand a message to a passing prospector once (p. 178); conceivably a similar opportunity could occur again, and lead to a renewed rescue attempt. Moreover, Todd is almost sixty years old (p. 171), so it is only a matter of time before he dies or falls seriously ill, and the influence which he exerts over the local Indians (p. 177) could then cease and Tony might be able to get them to make him a boat. We do not know much about Mr. Todd's security arrangements but they do not seem to be very high; so it also seems possible to me that Tony might at some point attack and overpower Todd, perhaps get access to his gun, and then threaten Todd and/or the local Indians into helping him. I suspect that Waugh wouldn't think highly of any of these probabilities, but I at any rate am not willing to write off Tony completely just yet.

Interesting things from the editor's introduction

There's an interesting section on real-life influences on this or that element of the novel. For example, Waugh's first wife left him for a man named John, and Brenda in the novel also leaves her husband for a man named John (Beaver) — probably not a coincidence (pp. l, lx). And apparently Waugh himself said that the dog owned by Brenda's sister in the novel is based on a real dog owned by Phyllis de Janzé (pp. lxii–lxiii) — who, incidentally, was the English sister-in-law of Frédéric de Janzé, the author of two books which we encountered on the pages of this blog before (Vertical Land and Tarred with the Same Brush).

But the most interesting result of real-world influence on the novel, in my opinion, is the whole Amazonian episode. In fact it came as a complete surprise to me; when Tony and Brenda's divorce negotiations founder, there was nothing in the book up to that point which could lead one to expect that Tony would suddenly go on an expedition into the jungles of South America (indeed it comes as a result of a chance meeting in one of Tony's clubs; p. 132). Obviously, Waugh was inspired to send Tony to that part of the world because he himself had travelled into the interior of Guiana in 1933 (and described the trip in a travel book, Ninety-Two Days; see my post about it from last year).

Many little details in the Amazonian episode of the novel are based on Waugh's experiences from that journey; for instance, foodstuffs such as farine and tasso (p. 178), or the drinks cassiri (p. 144) and piwari (p. 179), the preparation of which involves chewing on cassava root and spitting it into a bowl; even the mechanical mice with which Dr. Messinger hopes to win over the uncooperative Indians (p. 156) — all these things were already mentioned in Ninety-Two Days. The character of Mr. Todd was inspired by one Mr. Christie (pp. lxxiv, 422), a reclusive rancher and bizarre religious fanatic whom Waugh described in chapter 3 of Ninety-Two Days.

Waugh also took some inspiration from Peter Fleming's journey to Brazil in 1932 (p. lviii–lix), which Fleming described in articles in The Times and then in his book, Brazilian Adventure (1933; see my recent post about it).

And Dr. Messinger and his quest for a lost city in the Amazonian jungle were surely inspired by Percy Fawcett, the famous explorer who disappeared in 1925 while on a quest for just such a city. But I have to admit that Messinger struck me as being more of a scientific type (at least he has a doctorate), while Fawcett was more purely an adventurer (and a military officer by occupation).

But I was shocked and almost hurt by this remark from the editor's introduction: “Fawcett's lack of experience, competence, and common sense is matched by Dr Messinger's; both share messianic tendencies and are, like the leader of the expedition in Fleming's Brazilian Adventure, Major Pingle, essentially frauds and untrustworthy.” (P. lix.) Now, it has been almost twenty years since I read Exploration Fawcett, Fawcett's posthumous autobiography edited by his surviving younger son; but surely, he had been on numerous expeditions into the interior of South America prior to that fateful one in 1925, and he impressed people by his ability to traverse difficult terain quickly while still drawing good-quality maps, to say nothing of his seeming imperviousness to tropical diseases. To say that such a man lacked experience and competence strikes me as completely bizarre. [But see this 2017 article, which suggests that he may have actually been a good deal less competent than I thought.] Nor was he a fraud; by all accounts he sincerely believed in the lost city he was looking for (and, let's not forget, he was willing to stake his life on it) — he may have been badly wrong about that city, but he was no fraud.

And for that matter, I didn't get the impression that Dr. Messinger in the novel is inexperienced or incompetent either, just the contrary in fact; and he struck me as no fraud, but honest in his quest, just as Fawcett had been; my only complaint about Messinger is that he is perhaps a tad too optimistic in his plans. It is shameful to compare these two honest people, the fictional Dr. Messinger and the real Col. Fawcett, to Major Pingle, who really was untrustworthy, for he deliberately lied to Fleming for weeks about his willingness to search for traces of Fawcett's expedition in otherwise unexplored territory (and not just to lead a casual shooting and fishing party).

Incidentally, the whole idea of Tony becoming a sort-of prisoner of Mr. Todd bears a distant resemblance to some of the theories that were being floated in the 1920s or 30s about Fawcett's fate, as people claimed that he was still alive as a captive of the Indians, or perhaps that he became a sort of cult leader amongst them. But I think that Waugh's idea is far more interesting and original than any of those theories. Anyone can imagine Fawcett becoming a captive of the Indians; but to imagine Tony becoming the captive of an illiterate, reclusive rancher with an obsession of having someone read Dickens's novels aloud to him — that takes some real creativity. My hat's off to Waugh for coming up with that one.

*

The editor's introduction also has an interesting account of the publication history of the novel, and I couldn't help but be impressed by how Waugh tried to get as much use out of his material as he could. His trip to Guiana was the basis of his travel book, Ninety-Two Days; it also inspired a short story, “The Man Who Liked Dickens” (which he actually wrote during the journey itself, in Brazil; p. 402), which appeared in Cosmopolitan (p. xxxiii; it's in the September 1933 issue)* and in Nash's—Pall Mall Magazine (pp. .403–4; in the November 1933 issue). Waugh then reused this short story, with some minor changes, as a chapter in A Handful of Dust (about Tony's captivity with Mr. Todd). The material about Tony's and Dr. Hessinger's expedition is mostly new in the novel, however; in the short story that part is dealt with very briefly. (An interesting difference: instead of Dr. Hessinger there is a Prof. Anderson and he dies of malaria rather than in a boat accident.)

[*Waugh grumbled to his agent: “If those Americans wrongly called Cosmopolitan take it there must be no monkeying with the text.” :)) (P. xxxvi.)]

Moreover, before the novel was published as a book, a slightly earlier version of it was serialized in Harper's Bazaar under the title “A Flat in London” (p. xxxvi). However, the chapter that had previously appeared in Cosmopolitan and Nash's couldn't be included here, because of copyright reasons, so Waugh wrote a new and happier ending in which Tony and Brenda apparently get reconciled (ibid.)! This alternative ending was later included as an appendix in the fourth British edition of A Handful of Dust, but, to my disappointment, it is not included in the present volume; apparently it will be published in vol. 5 (pp. xlix, lxxxvii, 414). The same volume will also include the original version of “The Man Who Liked Dickens” (p. xxxiii).

Nevertheless the present volume does include a couple of interesting appendices: there's one with illustrations from the serialization of the novel in Harper's Bazaar (pp. 414–17) and one with a preface which Waugh wrote for the 1964 reprint of the novel (p. 422) and in which he explains his inspiration for the character of Mr. Todd.

Miscellaneous

Waugh supposedly said that “anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen, paper and no telephone or wife.” (Pp. xlix–l.)

Waugh apparently thought that flats “were essentially un-English” and that the English people have a “love of own front door”; flats were also seen as “a sign of the isolation of modern urban life” (p. xlvi). It's not that I disagree with any of that — I think that ideally every human settlement should look like Hobbiton at the start of the first Lord of the Rings movie — but considering how many people there are nowadays, and how many of them have to live in cities, it's inevitable that most of them will end up in flats.

Tony's butler, Albert, says “clucking like a 'en” on p. 92. I was intrigued by this; I guess it means that when people drop an h at the start of a word, the article a before it does not change into an even if it is now followed by a vowel; the dropped h still exerts a sort of posthumous influence.

One reviewer complained that Waugh's literature is too formulaic: “Waugh, he said, ‘has mixed one of his usual literary cocktails. His recipe is as follows:—One-quarter Ernest Hemingway, one-quarter Michael Arlen, one-quarter Anthony Powell, one-eighth crude caricatures of London personalities, one-eight local colour (tropical for preference). Add a catchphrase, stir to a light froth, and serve very cool.’ ” (P. lxix.) Nevertheless the novel “was clearly a great success” in Britain (p. lxiv), though less so in America (p. lxix).

Brenda reading the newspaper (p. 13): “Two more chaps in gas ovens. . .” I didn't realize that this was such a common method of suicide. Perhaps it is a nod to one of Waugh's previous novels, Vile Bodies, where Lord Balcairn commits suicide in this way?

Brenda complains of the many people involved in maintaining their country house: “[...] odd little men constantly popping in to wind the clocks and cook the accounts and clean the moat, [...]” (p. 28). I love how cooking the accounts is included so casually in that list :) Interestingly, it was omitted from the serialization in the U.S. edition of Harper's Bazaar (p. 263).

Tony and Jock having a chat with two tarts (p. 60): “ ‘What d'you do?’ / ‘I design postmen's hats,’ said Jock. / ‘Oh, go on.’ / ‘And my friend here trains sea lions.’ ” :))

A few interesting instances of racial terminology: Brenda says that Jenny Abdul Akbar is “[n]ot black but married one” (p. 68) — her husband was actually a Moroccan nobleman and surely an Arab rather than what we would call a black now; so I guess this shows that in Waugh's time the word ‘black’ was applied more widely. (Jenny describes her husband and his men as “pure Semitic type” on p. 71, contrasting this with “negroes”.) Later in the book, when Tony and Dr. Messinger travel with a group of actual blacks (from Guiana), they are referred to as “niggers” on p. 144 (ll. 594, 615), but “negroes” on p. 147 (l. 746).

Seven-year-old John Andrew is quite fascinated by Jenny. “ ‘Back to bed,’ she said, ‘or I shall spank you.’ / ‘Would you do it hard? I should't mind.’ ” :))) (P. 72.)

Tony has to take a prostitute to Brighton to provide fake evidence of infidelity for the divorce; but his lawyer tells of an even more bizarre case: “Lately we had a particularly delicate case involving a man of very rigid morality and a certain indifference. In the end his own wife consented to go with him and supply the evidence. She wore a red wig. It was quite successful.” (P. 107.) On a related note, another lawyer says later: “Judges in their more lucid moments sometimes wonder why perfectly respectable, happily married men go off for weekends to the seaside with women they do not know.” (P. 119.) Still, it seems that for the most part this silly stratagem worked to get people the divorce they wanted.

“England was east of America so he and Dr. Messinger got the sun later. It came to them at second hand and slightly soiled” (p. 143). Ewww, what an image :))

I learned from the notes (p. 198) that the name Daisy is a “[l]ate 19th-century form of Margaret”. I hadn't thought of that, but it makes sense, because the equivalent of “Margaret” is used as the word for a daisy (the flower) in many other languages (it seems to have started in French).

Interesting: Waugh had a habit of mentioning the same minor characters in several of his books, e.g. Margot, Lady Metroland (p. 201), or Lord Monomark (p. 227, which also explains the etymology: a monomark was “a short alphanumeric sequence used in place of a postal address” (wiktionary)).

“Make love” in its older sense, which we already encountered in one of Waugh's other books, appears again here (p. 36); the note on p. 203 adds: “the more modern and, initially US, sense of having sex with someone is first recorded by OED in 1927”.

I was interested to learn, from a note on p. 208, that the name Jenny “is a variation of Jane and popular in the 19th century”, although we think of it as a variant of Jennifer nowadays. But what is really strange is that the note says it is “correctly pronounced ‘Jinny’ ”. Maybe if you're a New Zealander... Neither the wikpedia nor the wiktionary nor the OED suggest that it should be pronounced with /ɪ/.

Interestingly, Waugh spells “Thibetan” with an h (p. 93). The note on p. 213 says that this spelling “remained current at least until the 1960s”. However, some editions of the novel use “Tibetan”: the serialization in the British Harper's Bazaar, the reprint in the Albatross Modern Continental Library (1935), and the Penguin edition of 1951 (p. 328). According to Google n-grams, the h-less forms were more common since at least the late 19th century. I suspect that the Th spelling started in an effort to indicate aspiration /tʰ/, perhaps in French, where this might well have made sense; but in English, where such a T is inevitably aspirated anyway, the presence of the h probably causes more harm than good, as it might mislead some people into pronouncing it with /θ/ instead.

I learnt a new word from p. 139: fête, which is the same as a name-day. But it seems to be more French than English.

Honi soit qui mal y pense: “In Guiana, he [i.e. Waugh] traded a Woolworth necklace for a black cock” (p. 226).

Interesting things from the critical apparatus

We've encountered the abbreviation 'ld (for would) instead of 'd in Waugh before (in Vile Bodies), and here it appears again in Waugh's manuscript (p. 287), though not in any printed edition of this novel.

On a few (but only a few) occasions the critical apparatus contains interesting additional material that did not make it into the final version of the novel. See e.g. the additional information about the Old Hundredth club on pp. 289–90 (note to 58.210–12); and their supposed fancy champagne was actually “distilled upstairs by the youngest Miss Weybridge” (p. 291, note to 58.233–59.235).

When Jenny says to the Revd. Tendril: “I could see from your sermon that you knew the East, Rector. [. . .] It has an uncanny fascination, hasn't it?” (p. 75), in early versions of the text the priest replied: “It had—before your day, young lady. You used to meet some of the finest types there. But it's not a white man's country any more.” (P. 307.)

At one point, when Tony and Messinger fail to get the local Indians to tell them the name of the rivers they have crossed, there are a few more lines of conversation between them in the first U.S. edition, but not in the British ones (p. 375, note to 150.856–7). They are not of any great importance, but I still don't see why Waugh thought it necessary to remove them.

Errors

This volume seems to have much fewer errors than some of the earlier ones in this series.

• The comma after “In,” at the start of n. 112, p. lxiv, is redundant.
• “Boa Visa” at the top of p. lxxiv should be “Boa Vista”.
• On p. 196 (note to 16.196), there is a semicolon after “slang)”, but it should be a comma.
• On p. 214 (note to 94.1635) there is a comma instead of a full-stop at the end of the sentence (after “Berkshire”).

But the printers have to be commended on the good job on “İzmir” (p. 222), which is a marked improvement from the embarrassing failure of “I˙zmit” in Helena (p. 133). :)

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.

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.)]