In his surprisingly profound, insanely fun book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, David Grann writes about his visit to a store catering to outdoorspeople in preparation for his trip to research, and to some degree retrace, the last expedition of renowned explorer Percy Fawcett. Grann, a consummate New Yorker, confesses he’s not at all the outdoors type, but once he’s on the trail of a story he does manifest a certain few traits in common with adventurers like Fawcett. Wandering around the store after having been immersed in the storied history of the Royal Geographical Society, Grann observes,
Racks
held magazines like Hooked on the
Outdoors and Backpacker: The Outdoors
at Your Doorstep, which had articles titled “Survive a Bear Attack!” and
“America’s Last Wild Places: 31 Ways to Find Solitude, Adventure—and Yourself.”
Wherever I turned, there were customers, or “gear heads.” It was as if the
fewer opportunities for genuine exploration, the greater the means were for
anyone to attempt it, and the more baroque the ways—bungee cording,
snowboarding—that people found to replicate the sensation. Exploration,
however, no longer seemed aimed at some outward discovery; rather, it was
directed inward, to what guidebooks and brochures called “camping and
wilderness therapy” and “personal growth through adventure.” (76)
Why do people feel such a powerful attraction to
wilderness? And has there really been a shift from outward to inward discovery
at the heart of our longings to step away from the paved roads and noisy bustle
of civilization? As the element of the extreme makes clear, part of the pull
comes from the thrill of facing dangers of one sort or another. But can people
really be wired in such a way that many of them are willing to risk dying for
the sake of a brief moment of accelerated heart-rate and a story they can lovingly
exaggerate into their old age?
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| David Grann is in front |
The
catalogue of dangers Fawcett and his companions routinely encountered in the Amazon is
difficult to read about without experiencing a viscerally unsettling glimmer of
the sensations associated with each affliction. The biologist James Murray, who
had accompanied Ernest Shackleton on his mission to Antarctica in 1907, joined
Fawcett’s team for one of its journeys into the South American jungle four
years later. This much different type of exploration didn’t turn out nearly as well
for him. One of Fawcett’s sturdiest companions, Henry Costin, contracted
malaria on that particular expedition and became delirious with the fever.
“Murray, meanwhile,” Grann writes,
seemed
to be literally coming apart. One of his fingers grew inflamed after brushing
against a poisonous plant. Then the nail slid off, as if someone had removed it
with pliers. Then his right hand developed, as he put it, a “very sick, deep
suppurating wound,” which made it “agony” even to pitch his hammock. Then he
was stricken with diarrhea. Then he woke up to find what looked like worms in
his knee and arm. He peered closer. They were maggots growing inside him. He
counted fifty around his elbow alone. “Very painful now and again when they
move,” Murray wrote. (135)
The thick clouds of mosquitoes leave every
traveler pocked and swollen and nearly all of them get sick sooner or later. On
these journeys, according to Fawcett, “the healthy person was regarded as a
freak, an exception, extraordinary” (100). This observation was somewhat
boastful; Fawcett himself remained blessedly immune to contagion throughout
most of his career as an explorer.
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| Percy Fawcett |
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| fawcettadventure.com |
This was likely an exaggeration since the record
documented length for an anaconda is just under 27 feet, and yet the men
considered their mission a scientific one and so would’ve striven for
objectivity. Fawcett even unsheathed his knife to slice off a piece of the
snake’s flesh for a specimen jar, but as he broke the skin it jolted back to
life and made a lunge at the men in the canoe who panicked and pulled
desperately at the oars. Fawcett couldn’t convince his men to return for
another attempt.
Though
Fawcett had always been fascinated by stories of hidden treasures and forgotten
civilizations, the ostensible purpose of his first trip into the Amazon Basin
was a surveying mission. As an impartial member of the British Royal
Geographical Society, he’d been commissioned by the Bolivian and Brazilian
governments to map out their borders so they could avoid a land dispute. But
over time another purpose began to consume Fawcett. “Inexplicably,” he wrote,
“amazingly—I knew I loved that hell. Its fiendish grasp had captured me, and I
wanted to see it again” (116). In 1911, the archeologist Hiram Bingham, with
the help of local guides, discovered the colossal ruins of Machu Picchu high in
the Peruvian Andes. News of the discovery “fired Fawcett’s imagination” (168),
according to Grann, and he began cobbling together evidence he’d come across in
the form of pottery shards and local folk histories into a theory about a lost
civilization deep in the Amazon, in what many believed to be a “counterfeit
paradise,” a lush forest that seemed abundantly capable of sustaining intense agriculture
but in reality could only support humans who lived in sparsely scattered
tribes. 
Percy
Harrison Fawcett’s character was in many ways an embodiment of some of the most
paradoxical currents of his age. A white explorer determined to conquer
unmapped regions, he was nonetheless appalled by his fellow Englishmen’s
treatment of indigenous peoples in South America. At the time, rubber was for
the Amazon what ivory was for the Belgian Congo, oil is today in the Middle
East, and diamonds are in many parts of central and western Africa. When the
Peruvian Amazon Company, a rubber outfit whose shares were sold on the London
Stock Exchange, attempted to enslave Indians for cheap labor, it lead to
violent resistance which culminated in widespread torture and massacre. Sir Roger Casement, a British consul general who conducted an investigation of the
PAC’s practices, determined that this one rubber company alone was responsible
for the deaths of thirty thousand Indians. Grann writes,
Long
before the Casement report became public, in 1912, Fawcett denounced the
atrocities in British newspaper editorials and in meetings with government
officials. He once called the slave traders “savages” and “scum.” Moreover, he
knew that the rubber boom had made his own mission exceedingly more difficult
and dangerous. Even previously friendly tribes were now hostile to foreigners.
Fawcett was told of one party of eighty men in which “so many of them were
killed with poisoned arrows that the rest abandoned the trip and retired”;
other travelers were found buried up to their waists and left to be eaten by
alive by fire ants, maggots, and bees. (90)
Fawcett, despite the ever looming threat of attack,
was equally appalled by many of his fellow explorers’ readiness to resort to
shooting at Indians who approached them in a threatening manner. He had much
more sympathy for the Indian Protection Service, whose motto was, “Die if you
must, but never kill” (163), but he prided himself on being able to come up
with clever ways to entice tribesmen to let his teams pass through their
territories without violence. Once, when arrows started raining down on his
team’s canoes from the banks, he ordered his men not to flee and instead had
one of them start playing his accordion while the rest of them sang to the
tune—and it actually worked (148).
But
Fawcett was no softy. He was notorious for pushing ahead at a breakneck pace
and showing nothing but contempt for members of his own team who couldn’t keep
up owing to a lack of conditioning or fell behind owing to sickness. James
Murray, the veteran of Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition whose flesh had become
infested with maggots, experienced Fawcett’s monomania for maintaining progress
firsthand. “This calm admission of the willingness to abandon me,” Murray
wrote, “was a queer thing to hear from an Englishman, though it did not
surprise me, as I had gauged his character long before” (137). Eventually,
Fawcett did put his journey on hold to search out a settlement where they might
find help for the dying man. When they came across a frontiersman with a mule,
they got him to agree to carry Murray out of the jungle, allowing the rest of
the team to continue with their expedition. To everyone’s surprise, Murray,
after disappearing for a while, turned up alive—and furious. “Murray accused
Fawcett of all but trying to murder him,” Grann writes, “and was incensed that
Fawcett had insinuated that he was a coward” (139).
The theory of a lost civilization crystalized in the explorer’s mind when he found a document
written by a Portuguese bandeirante—soldier
of fortune—describing “a large, hidden, and very ancient city… discovered in
the year 1753” (180) while rummaging through old records at the National
Library of Brazil. As Grann explains,
Fawcett
narrowed down the location. He was sure that he had found proof of
archaeological remains, including causeways and pottery, scattered throughout
the Amazon. He even believed that there was more than a single ancient city—the
one the bandeirante described was
most likely, given the terrain, near the eastern Brazilian state of Bahia. But
Fawcett, consulting archival records and interviewing tribesmen, had calculated
that a monumental city, along with possibly even remnants of its population,
was in the jungle surrounding the Xingu River in the Brazilian Mato Grasso. In
keeping with his secretive nature, he gave the city a cryptic and alluring
name, one that, in all his writings and interviews, he never explained. He
called it simply Z. (182)
Fawcett was planning a mission for the specific
purpose of finding Z when he was called by the Royal Geographical Society to
serve in the First World War. The case for Z had been up till that point mostly
based on scientific curiosity, though there was naturally a bit of the Indiana
Jones dyad—“fortune and glory”—sharpening his already keen interest. Ever since
Hernan Cortes marched into the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in 1519, and
Francisco Pizarro conquered Cuzco, the capital of the Inca Empire, fourteen
years later, there had been rumors of a city overflowing with gold called El Dorado, literally “the gilded man,” after an account by the sixteenth century
chronicler Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo of a king who covered his body every day
in gold dust only to wash it away again at night (169-170). It’s impossible to
tell how many thousands of men died while searching for that particular lost
city.
his
approach was untethered from his rigorous RGS training and acute powers of
observation. He imbibed Madame Blavatsky’s most outlandish teachings about
Hyperboreans and astral bodies and Lords of the Dark Face and keys to unlocking
the universe—the Other World seemingly more tantalizing than the present one.
(190)
It was even rumored that Fawcett was basing some
of his battlefield tactics on his use of a Ouija board.
Brian Fawcett, Percy’s
son and compiler of his diaries and letters into the popular volume Expedition Fawcett, began considering
the implications of his father’s shift away from science years after he and
Brian’s older brother Jack had failed to return from Fawcett’s last mission in
search of Z. Grann writes,
Brian
started questioning some of the strange papers that he had found among his
father’s collection, and never divulged. Originally, Fawcett had described Z in
strictly scientific terms and with caution: “I do not assume that ‘The City’ is
either large or rich.” But by 1924 Fawcett had filled his papers with reams of
delirious writings about the end of the world and about a mystical Atlantean
kingdom, which resembled the Garden of Eden. Z was transformed into “the cradle
of all civilizations” and the center of one of Blavatsky’s “White Lodges,”
where a group of higher spiritual beings help to direct the fate of the
universe. Fawcett hoped to discover a White Lodge that had been there since
“the time of Atlantis,” and to attain transcendence. Brian wrote in his diary,
“Was Daddy’s whole conception of ‘Z,’ a spiritual objective, and the manner of
reaching it a religious allegory?” (299)
Grann suggests that the success of Blavatsky and
others like her was a response to the growing influence of science and
industrialization. “The rise of science in the nineteenth century had had a
paradoxical effect,” he writes:
while
it undermined faith in Christianity and the literal word of the Bible, it also
created an enormous void for someone to explain the mysteries of the universe
that lay beyond microbes and evolution and capitalist greed… The new powers of
science to harness invisible forces often made these beliefs seem more
credible, not less. If phonographs could capture human voices, and if
telegraphs could send messages from one continent to the other, then couldn’t science
eventually peel back the Other World? (47)
Even Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a close friend of
Fawcett and whose book The Lost World
was inspired by Fawcett’s accounts of his expeditions in the Amazon, was an
ardent supporter of investigations into the occult. Grann quotes him as saying,
“I suppose I am Sherlock Holmes, if anybody is, and I say that the case for
spiritualism is absolutely proved” (48).
Mesmer
claimed that illnesses were caused by blockages in the flow of animal magnetism
through the body, and he carried around a stack of printed testimonials on the
effectiveness of his cures. If the idea of energy blockage as the cause of
sickness sounds familiar to you, so too will Mesmer’s methods for unblocking
them. He, or one of his “adepts,” would establish some kind of physical contact
so they could find the body’s magnetic poles. It usually involved prolonged eye
contact and would eventually lead to a “crisis,” which meant the subject would
fall back and begin to shake all over until she (they were predominantly women)
lost consciousness. If you’ve seen scenes of faith healers in action, you have
the general idea. After undergoing several exposures to this magnetic treatment
culminating in crisis, the suffering would supposedly abate and the mesmerist
would chalk up another cure. Tellingly, when Mesmer caught wind of some of the
experimental methods the committee planned to use he refused to participate.
But then a man named Charles Deslon, one of Mesmer’s chief disciples, stepped
up.
The
list of ways Lavoisier devised to test the effectiveness of Deslon’s
ministrations is long and amusing. At one point, he blindfolded a woman Deslon
had treated before, telling her she was being magnetized right then and there,
even though Deslon wasn’t even in the room. The suggestion alone was
nonetheless sufficient to induce a classic crisis. In another experiment, the
men replaced a door in Franklin’s house with a paper partition and had a
seamstress who was supposed to be especially sensitive to magnetic effects sit
in a chair with its back against the paper. For half an hour, an adept on the
other side of the partition attempted to magnetize her through the paper, but
all the while she just kept chatting amiably with the gentlemen in the room.
When the adept finally revealed himself, though, he was able to induce a crisis
in her immediately. The ideas of animal magnetism and magnetic cures were
declared a total sham. Lafayette, who brought French reinforcements to the
Americans in the early 1780s, hadn’t heard about the debunking and tried to
introduce the practice of mesmerism to the newly born country. But another prominent
student of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson, would have none of it.
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| Houdini |
Houdini
went on to write an exposé, A Magician among the Spirits, and he liked to incorporate common elements of séances into his stage shows to demonstrate how easy they were for a good magician to
recreate. In 1922, two years before Fawcett disappeared with his son Jack while
searching for Z, Scientific American
Magazine asked Houdini to serve on a committee to further investigate the
claims of spiritualists. The magazine even offered a cash prize to anyone who
could meet some basic standards of evidence to establish the validity of their
claims. The prize went unclaimed. After Houdini declared one of Conan Doyle's favorite mediums a fraud, the two men had a bitter falling out, the latter declaring the prior an enemy of his cause. (Conan Doyle was convinced Houdini himself must've had supernatural powers and was inadvertently using them to sabotage the mediums.) The James
Randi Educational Foundation, whose founder also began as a magician but
then became an investigator of paranormal claims, currently offers a
considerably larger cash prize (a million dollars) to anyone who can pass some
well-designed test and prove they have psychic powers. To date, a thousand
applicants have tried to win the prize, but none have made it through
preliminary testing.
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| Houdini and his wife Bess demonstrating seance tricks. He promised to contact her from beyond if he could, but finally she gave up, saying, "10 years is long enough to wait for any man." |
Today’s spiritualists and pseudoscientists rely more heavily on deliberately distorted and woefully dishonest references to quantum physics than they do on magnetism. But the differences are only superficial. The fundamental shift that occurred with the advent of science was that ideas could now be divided—some with more certainty than others—into two categories: those supported by sound methods and a steadfast devotion to following the evidence wherever it leads and those that emerge more from vague intuitions and wishful thinking. No sooner had science begun to resemble what it is today than people started trying to smuggle their favorite superstitions across the divide.
Not
much separates New Age thinking from spiritualism—or either of them from
long-established religion. They all speak to universal and timeless human
desires. Following the evidence wherever it leads often means having to
reconcile yourself to hard truths. As Carl Sagan writes in his indispensable paean
to scientific thinking, Demon-Haunted
World,
Pseudoscience
speaks to powerful emotional needs that science often leaves unfulfilled. It caters
to fantasies about personal powers we lack and long for… In some of its
manifestations, it offers satisfaction for spiritual hungers, cures for
disease, promises that death is not the end. It reassures us of our cosmic
centrality and importance… At the heart of some pseudoscience (and some religion
also, New Age and Old) is the idea that wishing makes it so. How satisfying it
would be, as in folklore and children’s stories, to fulfill our heart’s desire
just by wishing. How seductive this notion is, especially when compared with
the hard work and good luck usually required to achieve our hopes. (14)
As the website for one of the most recent New Age
sensations, The Secret, explains, “The Secret
teaches us that we create our lives with every thought every minute of every
day.” (It might be fun to compare The
Secret to Madame Blavatsky’s magnum opus The
Secret Doctrine—but not my kind of fun.)
That spiritualism and
pseudoscience satisfy emotional longings raises the question: what’s the harm
in entertaining them? Isn’t it a little cruel for skeptics like Lavoisier,
Houdini, and Randi to go around taking the wrecking ball to people’s beliefs,
which they presumably depend on for consolation, meaning, and hope? Indeed, the
wildfire of credulity, charlatanry, and consumerist epistemology—whereby you’re
encouraged to believe whatever makes you look and feel the best—is no
justification for hostility toward believers. The hucksters, self-deluded or
otherwise, who profit from promulgating nonsense do however deserve, in my
opinion, to be very publicly humiliated. Sagan points out too that when we
simply keep quiet in response to other people making proclamations we know to
be absurd, “we abet a general climate in which skepticism is considered
impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and
inappropriate” (298). In such a climate,
Spurious
accounts that snare the gullible are readily available. Skeptical treatments
are much harder to find. Skepticism does not sell well. A bright and curious
person who relies entirely on popular culture to be informed about something
like Atlantis is hundreds or thousands of times more likely to come upon a fable
treated uncritically than a sober and balanced assessment. (5)
Consumerist epistemology is also the reason why
creationism and climate change denialism are immune from refutation—and is
likely responsible for the difficulty we face in trying to bridge the political
divide. No one can decide what should constitute evidence when everyone is
following some inner intuitive light to the truth. On a more personal scale, you
forfeit any chance you have at genuine discovery—either outward or inward—when you
drastically lower the bar for acceptable truths to make sure all the things you
really want to be true can easily
clear it.
On
the other hand, there are also plenty of people out there given to rolling
their eyes anytime they’re informed of strangers’ astrological signs moments
after meeting them (the last woman I met is a Libra). It’s not just skeptics
and trained scientists who sense something flimsy and immature in the
characters of New Agers and the trippy hippies. That’s probably why people are
so eager to take on burdens and experience hardship in the name of their
beliefs. That’s probably at least part of the reason too why people risk
their lives exploring jungles and wildernesses. If a dude in a tie-dye shirt
says he discovered some secret, sacred truth while tripping on acid, you’re not
going to take him anywhere near as seriously as you do people like Joseph Conrad,
who journeyed into the heart of darkness, or Percy Fawcett, who braved the
deadly Amazon in search of ancient wisdom.
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| Michael Heckenberger |
The
story of the Fawcett mission undertaken in the name of exploration and
scientific progress actually has a happy ending—one you don’t have to be a
crackpot or a dupe to appreciate. Fawcett himself may not have had the benefit
of modern imaging and surveying tools, but he was also probably too distracted
by fantasies of White Lodges to see much of the evidence at his feet. David
Grann made a final stop on his own Amazon journey to seek out the Kuikuro Indians
and the archeologist who was staying with them, Michael Heckenberger. Grann
writes,
Altogether,
he had uncovered twenty pre-Columbian settlements in the Xingu, which had been
occupied roughly between A.D. 800 and A.D. 1600. The settlements were about two
to three miles apart and were connected by roads. More astounding, the plazas
were laid out along cardinal points, from east to west, and the roads were
positioned at the same geometric angles. (Fawcett said that Indians had told
him legends that described “many streets set at right angles to one another.”) (313)
These were the types of settlements Fawcett had
discovered real evidence for. They probably wouldn’t have been of much interest
to spiritualists, but their importance to the fields of archeology and
anthropology are immense. Grann records from his interview:
“Anthropologists,”
Heckenberger said, “made the mistake of coming into the Amazon in the twentieth
century and seeing only small tribes and saying, ‘Well, that’s all there is.’
The problem is that, by then, many Indian populations had already been wiped
out by what was essentially a holocaust from European contact. That’s why the
first Europeans in the Amazon described such massive settlements that, later,
no one could ever find.” (317)
Carl Sagan describes a “soaring sense of wonder”
as a key ingredient to both good science and bad. Pseudoscience triggers our
wonder switches with heedless abandon. But every once in a while findings that
are backed up with solid evidence are just as satisfying. “For a thousand
years,” Heckenberger explains to Grann,
the
Xinguanos had maintained artistic and cultural traditions from this highly
advanced, highly structured civilization. He said, for instance, that the
present-day Kuikuro village was still organized along the east and west
cardinal points and its paths were aligned at right angles, though its
residents no longer knew why this was the preferred pattern. Heckenberger added
that he had taken a piece of pottery from the ruins and shown it to a local
maker of ceramics. It was so similar to present-day pottery, with its painted
exterior and reddish clay, that the potter insisted it had been made recently….
“To tell you the honest-to-God truth, I don’t think there is anywhere in the
world where there isn’t written history where the continuity is so clear as
right here,” Heckenberger said. (318)
[The PBS series "Secrets of the Dead" devoted a show to Fawcett and you can watch the whole episode online.]
Also read The Self-Transcendence Price-Tag: A Review of Alex Stone's Fooling Houdini
[The PBS series "Secrets of the Dead" devoted a show to Fawcett and you can watch the whole episode online.]
Also read The Self-Transcendence Price-Tag: A Review of Alex Stone's Fooling Houdini