How Colonel Fawcett was killed

 

A story can make space into place: despite the fact that Colonel Fawcett went missing and probably died a quite horribly death in 1927, his lingering presence humanizes one of the darkest corners of the Amazon. It may be rough and dangerous there in Xingu but explorers find solace in the idea that Fawcett went before them.

     

In 'The Heart of the Forest' (earlier) Adrian Cowell reports on what Indian tracker Orlando Villas-Boas learned about the murder of Colonel Fawcett from the Xingu-locals. Villas-Boas being after all the man who was told by the Kalapalo where the Fawcett skeleton (see above) could be found. The passage begins with Cowell encountering a young Kalapalo who on hearing that the visitor is English volunteers the story of three Englishman, one old / two young, walking into the village a long time ago and who now lay buried near the lake. Villas-Boas from his hammock recounts the story from Kalapalo perspective "in the language and style of the Indians." The story gives a good idea of social mores (the obligation to share food, little tolerance for unfriendliness towards children, etc) and the moral of the story is: Fawcett deserved to be killed but there is a twist.

The three Caraiba were one old and two young. They carried things on their backs, had guns and one was lame. They came from the West with Aloiqui, chief of the Nakukuas, and his son, who brought them from their own village on the Kuliseu river.

At that time, all the Kalapalos were in their fishing village to the east beyond the river Kuluene, except for Kavuquire and his son, who were in the main village. These two agreed to guide the Inglezes to the fishing settlement, so that they could pass beyond, into the country to the east. 

Next day that set out at dawn, two Nakukuas, two Kalapalos, and three Inglezes. After travelling for a day and a half the old man of the Inglezes spoke roughly to Kavuquire, blaming him for saying that the journey would only take from the rise of the sun to the sun't height. He was fifty-eight and the heat is great. 

Later the old man, whom the Indians took to be chief, shot a duck and Kavuquire ran to pick it up, fingering and looking until it was snatched from him as if he had been about to steal. Then, when they arrived at the small lagoon by the Kuluene, the chief of the Inglezes spoke harshly again, because the canoe Kavuquire had promised had been taken to the other side.

By this Kavuquire was angry. But he had heard the rattle of collar (beads) in the Inglezes packs and so kept silent, thinking in his head that he would get a reward: this is the Indian custom. When they reached the village he was given nothing, but kept silent again hoping that they would make presents at farewell on the following  day.

During the night the colonel cup up his duck with a knife, and when a boy played with the handle, he brushed his arm roughly aside. 

Next day the village gathered to say goodbye on the bank of the of the little lagoon. No presents were given.

Kavuquire demanded death . Caiabi ,the chief, agreed. He was a cautious man and he said it must be beyond the lagoon where the Nahukuas would not see.

While Kavuquire, Kuluele and one other ran round to lay ambush, the boy, Tuendi, paddled the Inglezes across. At the other side there was a cliff, small but sheer, and the chief of the Inglezes climbed to the top first, leaving the two others to bring up the baggage. 

As he got to his feet, he turned to look down on the young men below. Kavuquire came out from behind the tree with a club he had cut from a sapling. He struck his blow on the back of the neck. The old one cried, wheeled, clutched a tree and started to fall swivelling round it. Kavuquire hit again on the right shoulder, and the body collapsed, doubled up on the ground.

At the cry, the young Inglezes dropped their baggage and started to climb the cliff. Immediatly the two Kalapalos hidden in the bushes at the bottom leapt out and struck up at their necks and heads. The bodies toppled back into the water.

When Kavuquire, Kuluele and the others returned to the village Caiabi said they must burn the bodies. He was a cautious man and was frightened that the Nahukuas would tell Indians who were friends with the civilizados.

Caiabi talked to Kavuquire on the first day, and he did nothing; he talked to him the second day and he did nothing; he talked with him the third day and he went with some others. Putting leaves in their nostrils, they scraped a shallow hole by the old man. Then they lifted his feet, and then his head so that he lay nearly as he fell. They took everything from the body except for the machete clutched in his hand.

The young ones were still below, swollen in the water. So they were towed by canoe and left in the centre of the lake. Then from fear, their equipment and clothing were thrown into the Kuluene.

It is a good story! The caveat is that the bones are too short to be Fawcett's so what is going on? Villas-Boas suggests that the real location of the grave was kept a secret (the given one a decoy). A more reasonable suggestion to my mind is that so many people kept coming into the area looking for a trace of Fawcett that the locals invented a story, perhaps with some connection to reality, perhaps misidentifying Fawcett with another group (or groups) of Civilizados who came later. The Kalapalo volunteered his story to Cowell because everybody in the village knows that those silly white people love to hear it. Call it hospitality.

This story is not mentioned in David Grann's 'The Lost City of Z', the recent best selling book on the case. Ellen Basso is usually credited for learning the truth about Fawcett's fate when she published her Kalapalo testimonial in 'The Last Cannibal' (1995). This is a fantastic resource on Amazonian narrative and myth, not at all easy to read but totally inspirational. An earlier version of Basso's Fawcett chapter is online and you can see for yourself that the story has recognizable features with the story above but that the end is completely different. In Villas-Boas version the murder is explained as justified, in Basso's version Fawcett party passed trough the village before entering the lands of 'the fierce people' against the good advice of the Kalapalo and to their own detriment. Who to believe?       

Exploration Fawcett

About 9 months ago I ordered Exploration Fawcett for the sake of completeness: after 19 years of mapping uncharted areas of the Amazon rainforest Colonel Percy Fawcett had picked up enough lore concerning the lost cities of the Amazon, El Dorado and others, that he believed that he knew where to find one. In 1925 he went on a well publicized search for the City of Z in the Xingu area and was never seen again. We now know of the overgrown moats, ditches and roads collectively known as the Garden Cities of Xingu and with hindsight Fawcett seems to have been a visionary force in the rediscovery of the existence of pre-Columbian urbanity in the Amazon. 

Exploration Fawcett begins with him journeying to South-America for the first time and ends with his overview of the evidence for lost cities. It took me a long time to start reading it. I thought it would be tedious reading with undertones of obsessiveness and dullness and the cover didn't help either (and it is a trash book, it does not mention year of publication). It turns out that Fawcett was a headstrong but friendly humanitarian with a Victorian mind over matter and an acute observer. If Indiana Jones was not a film by Steven Spielberg but a book by Jane Austen this would be like it. Amidst the atrocities of the rubber boom Fawcett combines a firm grasp of the situation as a social wrong with a never wavering sympathy for human frailty. His stance on the Indians, believing their belligerence overstated, is incredibly modern and suits him well in his explorations. He is more Ray Mears than Bruce Parry.

The jungle is a place where stories are currency and hear-say is exchange money. Fawcett, ever the military man, tells quite a few stories of garrison humour, but there is even more strange ethnographic material that sometimes seems post-modern (like this earlier quote about cannibalism) but also sometimes seems incredibly pulpy. 

Every year the natives here celebrate a kind of sabbath in the forest. They gather round an altar of stones and brew the native beer, chicha, which they drink in huge quantities over mouthfuls of strong tobacco. The mixture maddens them, and man and woman give themselves up to a wild orgy. This often continues for a fortnight.

Fawcett feels modern in some aspects because he observed things with his own eyes and saw through dogma when he needed to. He made his own choices and this is why he survived. There are other parts of Fawcett that are resolutely distant in time from us: his firm believe in spiritualism that seems so at odds with his deep practicality. But (and I have made this point earlier) superstitions, the belief in active magic, might well be an adaptation of the human mind to cope with the conditions and challenges of life as part of the forest.   

Humans taste like monkey-meat

From Hans Staden as depicted by De Bry

Later I will have more to say about Exploration Fawcett, the book culled from Colonel Percy Fawcett's diaries covering 19 years of exploration in the Amazon before he vanished in the Xingu, famously. Here is a strikingly relativist 1907 appraisal of cannibalism. 

Senor Donayre ... was an interesting man. At one time the German firm for which he worked on the Purus sent him to the Putumayo to contact Indians on that river, learn their language, and report on the chances of rubber and trade. In one large tribe he was given a wife, and stayed with them for two years. 

"These people were cannibals," he said, "and many a time I have seen bits of men - white men - cooked. They didn't care to much for eating whites - man of other Indian tribes were preferred. The taste is rather like monkey meat."

"Did you ever sample the flesh yourself?" I asked.

"I lived with them, remember, and it was necessary for me to adopt their habits. If I had refused to do what they did I wouldn't have lived to tell the tale."

"How developed were they -  I mean mentally, socially...?"

"Oh, they were intelligent all right! They had an organized government; and while each separate community had its own chief, there was a supreme chief who acted as a king over the whole tribe. They sometimes cremated their dead, but usually ate them. Women were plentiful, and though polygamy practised, their morals were of a high order."

"It's easy to condemn cannibalism as disgusting, Major [Fawcett was never a real Colonel], but when you come to think of it, is it any worse to eat a dead man than to eat a dead beast or bird? It as least provides a reasonable motive for killing a men, which is more than you can say for civilized warfare; and it's a convenient way of getting rid of the death, without occupying valuable ground and polluting clean air by burying the corpse! Of course, it is a matter of viewpoint. One's first thought is that cannibalism is revolting, but when you are familiar with it there seems little to object to."