Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Telephones
Punto Cotel (Mon-Fri 8.30am-10.30pm, Sat & Sun 8.30am-8pm) on Mariscal
Santa Cruz. There's also pricey internet here but it's so prohibitively slow, it's hardly worth
the effort.
THE MYSTERIOUS COLONEL FAWCETT
The forests of the Bolivian Amazon have long attracted adventurers, eccentrics and ex-
plorers,butfewhavematchedtheexploitsof
Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett
.Anofficer
in the British Indian Army, Fawcett first came to Bolivia in 1906 to survey the unmarked
and largely unexplored wilderness frontiers between Bolivia and Peru and Brazil. Over the
next nineteen years, he travelled the length and breadth of the Beni, keeping a diary which
his brother Brian would later use as the basis for the iconic
Exploration Fawcett
. First
published in 1953, the topic painted a vivid if, as some have speculated, somewhat em-
bellished picture of life in the Amazon at the peak of the rubber boom. This was a time
when “slavery, vice and bloodshed ruled supreme on the rivers”, and during which the in-
digenous inhabitants - considered “wild and hostile savages” - were “as a rule … either
shot on sight like dangerous animals or ruthlessly hunted down to be sent as slaves to rub-
ber estates”. Fawcett's own adventures involved frequent close encounters with 20m-long
anacondas, ferocious cannibal tribes, virulent tropical diseases and brutal and corrupt offi-
cials. On one occasion he and a small exploration party found their canoe marooned on a
sandbar in the
Río Heath
and surrounded by heavily armed Guarayos warriors. Realizing
that to fight would be hopeless, Fawcett says he ordered his companions to sing, accom-
panied by an accordion. After a few verses of “A Bicycle Made for Two”, the previously
hostile tribesmen were completely pacified.
FROM MAN TO MYTH
In other respects a typical product of the British Empire, the longer Fawcett spent in the
Amazon, the more he came to love the wilderness and sympathize with its inhabitants.
Over the years he became convinced that somewhere hidden deep in the forest stood a
magnificent city inhabited by an ancient and highly advanced race of white Indians. Con-
demned by many of his contemporaries as a mystic and dreamer, in 1925 he set off to find
this
mythical city
in the wilds of the Brazilian Amazon, and was never seen again. Since
then, countless expeditions have gone in search of the colonel, while rumours concerning
his possible end abound; according to David Grann's definitive
Lost City of Z
, the most
likely scenario is that Fawcett - along with his son Jack - was murdered by one of the
warlike tribes in the
Xingu region
of Brazil. The truth behind his disappearance has nev-
er been established conclusively, however, and his own fate has now become the kind of
mystery that so entranced him when he was alive. As the archeological evidence continues
to mount up, moreover, his core theory of an advanced Amazonian civilisation looks more
and more like the work of a visionary rather than a dreamer.
