Fawcett Farci

By STRIX

His eyes narrowed. "You bastard gringo," he hissed. "In the old days my father would have buried you alive."

`Slowly I rose to my feet. There was little point in allowing the argument to deteriorate into a brawl.'

This characteristic passage is taken from Doctor Goes West, by George Mair (Peter Owen, 18s.), an agreeably ridiculous book. It is improbable, to say the least, that a low- class Brazilian would on scant provocation have addressed these words to a British tourist; and if he had it is impossible that Dr. Mair, who speaks no Portuguese, would have understood them. But the doctor, who emerges as a sort of cross between Captain Foulenough and Mr. Thake, clearly rates the credulity of his readers high; for he claims not only to have achieved the object of his journey by discovering what hap- pened to Colonel Fawcett, but to have done so with the help of a demi-mondaine in Manaos, which is roughly a thousand miles from the scene of Fawcett's disappearance.

(He also had a tremendously exciting time— `there was a silence which could almost be felt'— taking a photograph of a boa constrictor at close range. At the last minute the reptile turned out to be dead and surrounded by a `stenching miasma'; `but at least for perhaps two minutes I had the satisfaction of approaching a boa constrictor which I believed to be in possession of all its senses, and that was something.' I suppose it was.) In 1932 1 wrote : 'The story of Colonel Fawcett is a curious and romantic one, and appears to have acquired in the eyes of editors an imperish- able news value, on which the passage of time produces little or no effect.' Passage of time, indeed! A mere seven years had then elapsed since the sixty-year-old explorer vanished in Matto Grosso. Twenty-six more have since gone by, and

today not only has a leading Sunday newspaper just serialised• the account of an expedition under the title `The Grave of Colonel Fawcett,' not only is Dr, Mair parading his risible `clues' and claim- ing `Now I do know what happened,' but the dead man's surviving son, Mr. Brian Fawcett, devotes half his autobiography (Ruins- in the Sky, Hutch- inson, 25s.) to a round-by-round account of recent investigations, or stunts purporting to be investi- gations, in the tribal areas concerned, which are now readily accessible by air.

What is the secret of Fawcett'S hold upon the imagination of the twentieth century? Why is it still true that even the most perfunctory impostor, if he turned up in any South American capital and claimed to have a new clue to the mystery, would automatically get on to most of the front pages in London? What has kept interest alive for thirty-three years?

It is a difficult question to answer. Even if you leave out the war, with its long list of missing, some of whom must still be alive, Fawcett is not the only man who has disappeared since 1925. Nor was there anything mysterious about his disap- pearance. if you walk with two inexperienced companions into country in which, even if it were not peopled by tribes at best untrustworthy and at worst actively hostile, it is difficult to survive, you are very likely to `disappear% and although the precise, the Spilsburian details of his fate remain and always will remain uncertain, the fact that he was murdered by Indians and the approxi- mate place where this happened were established by Dyott's expedition as far back as 1928.

In recent years contact has been made by the Brazilian authorities with the tribes directly or indirectly concerned, and all the evidence which has come to light confirms Dyott's findings, also mainly based on Indian information. The Indians' mentality is childlike, and their memories of a distant event are now blurred by time, by the desire to please and in some cases by a sense of guilt. But if they did not murder Fawcett's party there seems to be no particular reason why they should say they did; the theory, adumbrated by Mr. Brian Fawcett, that they may have murdered three quite different white men (one old and two young) at the same time and place is inconceiv- ably unlikely; and why, if this or some alternative explanation is the truth, do they remember nothing of Fawcett's progress through their ter- ritory, where in 1928 Dyott saw some of the explorer's personal possessions?

Mr. Brian Fawcett is determined to keep the verdict open. In 1952 he was flown, under the auspices of Senhor Assis Chateaubriand, to a post established in the territory, of the Kalapalos tribe by the celebrated Orlando Villas Boas. Thence he was taken with a party of journalists and photo-

graphers to the alleged scene of his father's murder, which the Indians re-enacted. Mr. Faw- cett gives a scornful description of this charade, by which he was from the first determined to be • unconvinced; but his own reliability as a witness is not enhanced by his claim that the party, which included a number of men who had only just left their desks in Rio and were heavily burdened with photographic equipment, walked twenty miles through exceptionally difficult country from their base to the scene of the crime and then walked back again the same night.

Three years later he returned under his own steam to Brazil, where he was coolly received by the authorities and by his erstwhile patrons. His plan now was to find his brother Jack; `my father,' he admits, `was unlikely to have survived into his eighties in such a hard country,' and he seems to have written off Jack's friend, Rimell, on the grounds that in the last authentic report from the expedition he was described as having sore feet.

Jack, however, `might still be alive.' Mr. Faw- cett's plan was to `buzz' every Indian village in an area of roughly 40,000 square miles. As the air- craft roared overhead, the savages would come capering into the open and Jack, if among them, would be readily identifiable. This slightly hap- hazard method of search would be supplemented by the dropping of leaflets containing `a question- naire and a simple code of arm signals'; and Jack, once located, could be rescued by helicopter or by an overland expedition.

Before putting this plan into operation Mr. Faw- cett was diverted by the need to examine a fresh clue—a set of documents dated 1930 and found in a bottle in the sea four years later. After a moment of scepticism, this possibility struck him as `eminently reasonable. . . . My father was a keen yachtsman, and the possibility of sending a message out by way of the river must surely have struck him.' But alas, the documents proved to be in German and to have been picked up on the coast near Bremen.

Worse disappointments were in store. The Brazilians withheld permission for Mr. Fawcett to use their air-strips in the interior, and the tree- top search for his brother had to be abandoned. We leave him, musing : 'No longer did the direc- tion of my life appear to lead along a perfectly designed chain of events to a predestined climax in the reunion of our scattered family. How pre- sumptuous I had been to imagine that it could be so! I was done with dreaming—done with mirages.'

This is sad news. But judging by the precedents of the last thirty-three years fresh clues and fresh theories are bound to turn up and it might, one feels, be premature to take Mr. Fawcett's words as a definitive renunciation of his quest.