Percy Fawcett, Manuscript 512, and a Lost City in the Amazon, Pt. 1

0:01 Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Oh, we have a two-parter coming at you. Yep. Over the course of about 18 years in the early 20th century, Percy Fawcett ventured out on seven expeditions to explore the Amazon Basin. He disappeared on the 7th, and historians, archaeologists, and even occultists have been trying to piece together what happened to him ever since.

0:41 And Fawcett's life is one that has invited a lot of speculation and some controversy because he was a very accomplished man who did a mix of very great and arguably some shady things. And he may have been drawn into like a mystical quest thanks to a document that he became somewhat obsessed with. that might very well be a fraud. We're going to talk about all of that. Also, I swear, I did not know this when I selected him, but the 2026 Rubber Series continues. Because... because we're not going to talk a lot about it, but we have to talk about it some, certainly not related to inventions, but the rubber boom was an economic driver that created some problems for Percy Fawcett and certainly for the indigenous

1:32 peoples in the areas he was exploring. Fawcett was drawn to exploration and particularly South American exploration to a degree that some people might consider feverish, or even so intense that he maybe wasn't always using logic and reason. His writing about his travels informed the work of Arthur Conan Doyle, who drew from Fawcett's accounts of his early adventure for his 1912 book, The Lost World. But he started all of this exploring as a cartographer, and his cartography work to develop borders that would be agreed upon among South American countries that were in conflict at the time actually still stands today. A lot of subsequent cartographers that have gone back and looked at his maps actually note how

2:22 incredibly thorough he was and how well he did that job. And his passion for exploration has led to claims that he was one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones. So he has a lot to talk about. There are a lot of other factors that we're going to talk about in his life, and it's going to take us two episodes to do it all. It's true. I feel like of all the things that you just said, we could not cover all of them, even in just two. We would need a whole life of episodes about Percy Fawcett.

2:54 Just his writings, and I'll talk about that behind the scenes, but his writings made the last week of my life intense. Percy Harrison Fawcett was born in 1867 in the town of Torquay in the county of Devon, England. Technically, the Fawcetts were members of the aristocracy, but Percy's father, Edward Fawcett, had lost all his money. Edward was a personal assistant to Queen Victoria's son Edward, known as Bertie, to the family, who would go on to become King Edward VII. Fawcett didn't feel like he had a great childhood, especially in terms of his relationships with his parents. He later wrote, quote, perhaps it was all for the best that my childhood in Torquay was so devoid of parental affection that it

3:44 turned me in upon myself. Although with my elder brothers and sisters, I had some grand times. So according to his siblings, and particularly an account that was given by his sister many years later, when Percy was still a boy, he had discovered a well full of Roman pottery at Halden Moors. And after pulling away the overgrowth that covered it, he got his siblings to help drop him down into that well, and he brought out numerous treasures from it, which he then brought to a museum. She didn't say which museum in this. I looked a lot at the Torquay Museum's website, and they have some stuff of his, but none of it seems to be this. So I don't know about the veracity of this, but it does kind of set up who he was as a kid.

4:31 It does sound very dangerous also. Fawcett attended Newton Abbott College as a teenager, and then when he was 17, he was sent to military school. In 1886, after he graduated, he joined the military and became part of the Royal Artillery, serving as a lieutenant. As a young man of 19, this gave him his first real taste of travel. In 1888, he was sent to Ceylon in modern-day Sri Lanka, and he wrote of this experience with a lot of fondness. Quote, life in Ceylon was as pleasant as army life can be.

5:09 There was interesting work to do, plenty of sport, especially yachting in the incomparable harbor, and not too much restriction. Actually, I could have enjoyed a longer period of service in that most beautiful of all islands. While he was on Ceylon, he also met a young woman who was the daughter of Scottish colonial magistrate Judge George Watson Patterson. So Nina Agnes Patterson was born there in Ceylon, and when she and Fawcett met, the two fell very much in love.

5:41 But Nina actually married somebody else. That was Captain Herbert Pritchard. And the why of this situation definitely comes with some family drama, because apparently Fawcett's family... was not particularly fond of Nina. Allegedly, Percy proposed to Nina and she accepted, but members of his family who were opposed to the marriage made up a story about Nina claiming that she was not a virgin. Percy Fawcett would become known as this fearless man who would walk into danger seemingly without a second thought, but he was also really tight-laced in a number of ways. He would not drink alcohol and he had very strong opinions about premarital sex. So the possibility that Nina had any kind of reputation was simply

6:28 too much for him, and he broke off the engagement. After Nina and Herbert Pritchard were married in June of 1897, they moved to Alexandria, Egypt. But this was a short marriage. Herbert contracted anthrax not long after they moved, and it caused an embolism which killed him. According to the family lore, Pritchard's last words to Nina were, go and marry Fawcett.

6:54 He is the real man for you. Whether or not Pritchard really said that, once Fawcett learned that she had been widowed and found out that his family had lied to him, he reconnected with Nina. He begged her forgiveness for his having doubted her and believing his family. The two of them got married in 1901 and were really devoted to one another. Percy called Nina Cheeky, allegedly because she always had to have the last word. Their son Brian later said that it was a fitting nickname because, quote, she was not only attractive but distinctly spoilt by local society in consequence. She called Percy Puggy, and the two of them welcomed their first son, Jack, in 1903. That year, Fawcett was sent to Spike Island, which is on the

7:42 southern coast of Ireland. He had already done a lot of traveling, often doing surveying work for the military at that point. And he at one point was working for the British Secret Service in Northern Africa during the scramble for Africa, ostensibly surveying, but also collecting intelligence. His work had taken him to Morocco and Malta and as far away as Hong Kong, as well as other places. So Ireland was a very tame place to be stationed in his estimation. The assignment in Ireland was also a lot cushier than any that Fawcett had had up to that point, and that was good for him and Nina to settle down into their family life together with Jack. According to the Spike Island write-up of Fawcett, he used his spare

8:26 time to host seances while he was there. Percy was indeed interested in mysticism, something his son Brian wrote about in the 1930s, stating, quote, Fawcett, the mystic, an accusation perhaps or a subtle suggestion of eccentricity to explain the tenacity with which he followed what many considered to be nothing but a fantasy. But any man risks being termed mystic who seeks knowledge beyond the material. He made no secret of his interest in the occult, and it has been quoted in his disfavor, the insinuation being that anyone so credulous as to believe in psychic hocus-pocus must not be taken seriously. There are respected people in the worlds of science and letters who might be similarly condemned. After all,

9:16 he was an explorer, a man of inquiring turn of mind whose desire for knowledge led him to explore more channels than one. So even if his mysticism had raised some eyebrows, it did not seem to hinder his career progression. He had been promoted to captain in 1897, the same year he and Nina broke off their engagement. During their time on Spike Island in 1905, he was promoted to major.

9:41 Fawcett's eagerness for adventure was about to be met with a perfect opportunity, and we'll talk about it after we pause for a sponsor break. The same year that Percy and Nina were married, Fawcett had joined the Royal Geographical Society, and the intent was that doing so would lead him to additional exploration activities. He took this very seriously, and he completed specialized training with the RGS in the and his standing in the eyes of the society's leadership. And it surely did. The president of RGS, Sir George Goldie, called a meeting with Fawcett in 1906, at which he asked him what Fawcett knew about Bolivia, and then explained that there was a dispute about the territory where Brazil, Peru,

10:38 and Bolivia all met, which had escalated because the rubber trade made that land extremely valuable. According to Fawcett's account of this meeting, the society's president explained to him, quote, the countries concerned in the dispute about the frontiers are not prepared to accept a demarcation made by interested parties.

10:58 It has become necessary to call in the services of another country, which can be relied on to act without bias. For that reason, the government of Bolivia, through its diplomatic representative here in London, has requested the Royal Geographical Society to act as referee and to recommend an experienced army officer for the work on Bolivia's behalf. As you completed our course in boundary delimitation work with outstanding success, I thought of you at once. Would you be interested in taking it on? And Fawcett, of course, enthusiastically agreed to this assignment, describing it as, quote, the chance to escape from the monotonous life of an artillery officer in home stations.

11:42 Fawcett was 39 when this happened. His wife Nina was pregnant at the time, and this job would take him away from her before the baby was born. And this job also took a little finagling to get Fawcett released from his primary duties with the military so he could go do it. But it worked out, and he then boarded the steamer Kaiser Wilhelm der Große in May 1906, which would take him to New York. And he wrote of that leg of the journey, quote, this ship was at that time the last word in luxury liners. But as travel of this sort had little appeal for me, I was bored and quite indifferent to the overfed passengers who sprawled about the decks. There were gales and fog.

12:22 We nearly collided with a roving iceberg, invisible till it was almost too late to avoid it. A high-pressure cylinder burst and left us rolling for hours in the troughs of a terrific sea. But it all happened in a brief space of a week, and soon we were in New York. The energy and bustle were things I had never known before. Accustomed to the calm deliberation of the English and the solemn dignity of the East, America at first shocked me. This passage really tickles me a little bit because he writes himself that he never really went into the city... He was only in the area of the docks because he quickly transferred to another ship. And I'm like, the docks scared you? Like, oh, oh, my brother,

13:06 if you had gone into Manhattan, I don't know what would have happened. The trip after that point was not on luxury liners. And looking at Fawcett's writing gives us a sense of who he was and how he perceived new places. Quote, For us, Latin America began in Panama City. There was little attempt at sanitation. The smells were almost overpowering, yet the narrow streets and overhanging balconies were not without their charm. In the plaza was the Grand Hotel. It was always grand, royal, or imperial, however humble. And what it lacks in status, it makes up in grandiose title.

13:45 This one turned out to be an insect paradise, and the proprietor was greatly annoyed when I pointed out that the bed linen in my room was overdue for the laundry. He found Lima to be much more delightful and even praised the hotel that they stayed in there. While he was in Lima, Fawcett received a cable telling him that Nina had given birth to their second son, Brian. This expedition was really eye-opening, and it seems that it kind of set the stage for the way that Fawcett perceived Indigenous peoples of South America. Because before he ever got there, the rubber industry had, and the situation was not good.

14:25 As rubber products were becoming increasingly popular in North America and Europe, thanks to the inventors that we have been talking about lately, more sources of rubber were always being sought to keep up with demand. And when South America's wealth of rubber trees was discovered, it was not long before Europeans moved in and seized lands from the indigenous populations.

14:47 The rubber barons had caused so much destruction and chaos and hardship for the people who had already been living there that the indigenous population just came to perceive any European as a threat, which, of course, included Percy Fawcett. And that was, of course, valid. But the actual numbers regarding the way that indigenous peoples were impacted by European encroachment are harrowing. It's estimated that before Europeans arrived in the area of South America that makes up modern-day Brazil, there were at least 2,000 indigenous tribes with a combined total population of roughly 11 million people. Within the first hundred years from the time that colonists arrived in the 1500s, 90% of the indigenous population had died through disease or genocide.

15:37 Survivors were often enslaved for the rubber trade. This conflict, in some ways, gave Fawcett a sort of negative take on the peoples of South America, although it is very doubtful he would have seen it that way. He wrote about these people in incredibly racist ways, but he also believed he was trying to understand their culture. And even today, people often describe his great respect for Indigenous people, but that's really an oversimplification. He did generally try to find ways to de-escalate violent situations. Some of those are quite funny, and we'll talk about one in a bit. He would do this often by disarming and ordering everyone else in his party to do so. He always tried to make clear,

16:21 we are not a threat, we're not here to hurt you. And in direct interactions with people, he does seem to have been pretty respectful in how he behaved with the Indigenous people he encountered. He did make efforts to learn the languages of the various peoples he met in order to communicate with and to understand them. He also definitely placed blame on colonialists who had moved in and thoughtlessly taken over for creating an ongoing problem in relations between Europeans and the indigenous population. This assessment was based on accounts he heard from people he encountered in Brazil. They described Europeans murdering people and diseases running rampant in their tribes after those diseases were introduced by Europeans to people

17:03 who had no natural immunity to them. And in towns that developed around the rubber industry, as many as 40% of the people died each year because of illness or brutality. Fawcett did write a lot of condemnation of the way that Europeans who had preceded him had handled the situation in Brazil. But he also wrote a lot about his expeditions and his interactions with indigenous peoples. And a whole lot of that is really awful. It's racist and condescending.

17:36 He does sometimes write complementary things about the cultures he encountered, particularly in instances where their structure was matriarchal or where he's able to communicate with people. So it's definitely a mixed bag. It's not worse than his contemporaries. In a lot of cases, it's better, but that's a really low bar when it comes to how European explorers talked about Indigenous people and Indigenous cultures. Yeah, I kept trying to pour through his writings, of which there is a huge volume, to try to find an example that was not too gross, just to, like, give an idea of what I'm talking about.

18:15 But it's all so gross, I was not comfortable including it. It was like, nobody needs to hear these words. What you said just to me before we started recording of some of the examples, I was like, yeah, we don't need to repeat that. I don't want to say that stuff. It's gross. And to be clear... Percy Fawcett was attacked by people who lived in the forests on his first and on subsequent expeditions. He and his companions that traveled with him relayed stories of arrows flying at them as they tried to make their way down the waterways, sometimes flying fast enough that they stuck in boat hulls. That indicates they were moving with a lot of force. Some of the people that they encountered had stolen shotguns from

18:57 the rubber workers, so they were armed with firearms as well. And Fawcett came up with some very creative ways of trying to prove that his party was not a threat. He wrote of one such encounter, quote, My peace overtures having proved unsuccessful, we moved the canoes to a safer position without any casualties. And then Todd was directed to sit on a log in the middle of the sandbar, just beyond dangerous range, and play his accordion. He was an expert with the accordion, which was one of our principal reasons for bringing him And as he sat there, squeezing out tune after tune, as calmly as though passing a jolly hour in an English pub, the scene must have been ludicrous. Here we were, dodging arrows and singing

19:42 at the tops of our voices, while Todd played away and stamped the time with both feet. Anyone coming on this scene would have said we were all roaring drunk. How long we kept this up, I don't know, but it seemed an age. We even forgot about the arrows in time, until all of a sudden, I.J. noticed that Koston, still in full song, was voicing, They've all stopped shooting at us, over and over again. He was right. arrows were no longer zipping past us. In fact, a dark face, eyes rounded in amazement, was peering at us over the top of a low bush. And from that moment, where they seemed to have shown, no, we're just goofy ding-dongs, we're not dangerous, Fawcett and his men were able to establish a friendly rapport with their attackers. They got welcomed

20:32 into the village and helped along their way. The fact that it was an accordion just delights me so much. The best. The best. There's an additional story he tells about one of those villagers playing with the accordion and the noise it makes scares him so bad he falls over backwards while everyone points and laughs at him. That sounds like kind of a fun day if you got to be out in the middle of nowhere, but it worked.

20:57 I'll give him credit. So coming up, we'll talk about some wild accounts Fawcett brought back from the jungle. But before we do that, we'll hear from the sponsors that keep Stuff You Missed in History class going. After that first 1906 expedition, Fawcett returned home with all kinds of stories. In addition to his detailed accounts of the levels of hospitality and lack thereof he encountered, he made some additional claims that people found literally unbelievable. And the first was about a snake. He wrote, quote, we were drifting easily along on the sluggish current not far below the confluence of the Rio Negro when almost under the bow there appeared a triangular head and several feet of undulating body.

21:52 It was a giant anaconda. I sprang for my rifle as the creature began to make its way up the bank and hardly waiting to aim, slashed a. 44 soft-nose bullet into its spine 10 feet below the wicked head. At once, there was a flurry of foam and several heavy thumps against the boat's keel, shaking us as though we had run on a snag. We stepped ashore and approached the reptile with caution. It was out of action, but shivers ran up and down the body like puffs of wind on a mountain tarn. As far as it was possible to measure, a length of 45 feet lay out of the water and 17 feet in it, making a total length of 62 feet. Less sensational, he made a claim that he and his men had seen some exceptionally large peanuts. He claimed that, quote, the nuts in

22:45 their pods were between three and four inches long. The taste, as well as the nutritive value, was excellent, and it would be hard to find a more convenient food to carry on a journey. He also described, quote, a large Apizauca spider, sort of a black tarantula so large that a plate would scarcely cover it. apologies if you don't like spiders. I was looking this up. I think he might have been talking about a bird-eating spider. It's a real thing. Yes. Some of these things were real, some not.

23:18 This may be not quite as gargantuan as he was describing. Yeah. He also described a dog with two noses, and he wrote, quote, there are snakes and insects unknown to scientists. And in the forests of the Medidi, some mysterious and enormous beast has frequently been disturbed in the swamps, possibly a primeval monster like those reported in other parts of the continent.

23:42 Certainly tracks have been found belonging to no known animal. Huge tracks, far greater than could have been made by any species we know. And when he brought all of these reports back to Europe, a lot of people just did not believe him. Looking at the way he was written about at the time, it seems like there started to be two camps in terms of how people perceived Percy Fawcett. There were the ones who thought he was an incredible adventurer, who had seen things that no one else had, and then there were the people who thought he was exaggerating or just plain lying. Also on that dog with two noses thing, there is a dog that is called a two nose dog in that area. It doesn't have two noses, but its nose is split down

24:29 the middle in a way that I could see where somebody who was not familiar with canines would be like, that dog has two noses. So some of these are grounded in reality, although apparently snake experts have done a lot of like, running the numbers on the physics of how a snake works. And they're like, there's just no way.

24:46 There's just no way. Over the course of all of these map-making trips to South America, which Fawcett completed ably and in far less time than most people thought possible, he also became progressively more fixated on the idea that there was a lot more than cartography to explore there. As he had prepared for his trips and studied the histories of the areas he was to work in, He had read a number of accounts that indicated that there were lost cities in the jungle, and he really wanted to find those lost places. One that he was particularly interested in was a city he called Zed. So that's the letter Z if you're looking at it in print, but the English way of saying it. He believed this city was in the Mato Grosso area, which is a

25:32 roughly 900,000 square kilometer non-coastal state in central Brazil. That name means great woods, which makes sense because this is an intensely dense rainforest. While it has had population growth in the last hundred years, there are still huge swaths of it that are not really developed. It is the least densely populated area of Brazil today. So in the early 1900s, there were indigenous populations there, and very few Europeans had ventured into the area outside of people pursuing rubber interests. And it was in this area that Fawcett believed held one or more secret hidden cities. Fawcett's obsession with hidden cities had to be put on hold due to global events, however. When World War I began, Percy

26:23 had to return to Europe. He fought in the war on the front, even though he was in his 50s at that point. He was given command of a field artillery brigade, and he was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1916 and commanded more than 700 men. He found the war to be far more horrifying and difficult to understand than anything the cultures of the Amazon offered. And he even expressed the opinion that cannibalism made more sense to him than so-called civilized warfare. He was actually gassed in 1917, but continued fighting. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for all of his work during the war. And during this time, he also indulged in his mystical interests by conducting a seance to try to reach the spirits of

27:11 South America's dead. By the time the conflict ended, he was more interested in spiritualism than ever. After the war, he took his absolute first opportunity to go back to Brazil. He had been worried the entire time the war was playing out that someone else might find the buried secrets of the Brazilian forest while he was tied up in this military conflict. And he clearly loved his family, but also found European life just paled in comparison to the time that he spent in South America. He said so in his journals. He wrote of a stretch of time that he spent in Rio de Janeiro, for example, quote,' The time I spent in Rio lengthened out to six months,' but on the whole, it was a delightful experience in

27:57 spite of my anxieties. From the embassy roof, there was a perfect view in all directions, and when it comes to views, Rio is incomparable. Below, the wonderful Biramar Avenue passed under the ridge and entered the suburb of Copacabana, beyond which it extended through suburb after suburb along 12 miles of exquisite coastline. In the evenings, we often motored along this highway to return after dark when one of the most wonderful city lighting systems in the world suddenly flashed into full glory, throwing a carpet of shimmering reflections over the still waters of the bay. How drab and gloomy our worn-out English cities appear after such beauty as this.

28:44 One could not be bored here. During this second period of exploration after the war, Fawcett continued to study a lot of old documents about the area, many of which had been written by Spanish and Portuguese explorers in the 1500s and 1600s. And they referred to things that intrigued Fawcett, particularly large-scale cities that sounded very advanced compared to what he had seen in his travels. And one of the documents that has become closely associated with Fawcett's fascination with lost cities is and which he was studying even before the war, is Manuscript 512. Manuscript 512 was and still is housed in the National Library of Rio de Janeiro.

29:28 It's an account of a Portuguese adventurer in the Amazon describing a series of events in 1753. That adventurer is believed by some to have been explorer João de Silvestre, de Moraes. Fawcett gave the writer a fictitious name to have some way of referring to him. He went with Francisco Raposo, and of this manuscript, he wrote, quote, if you are romantically minded, and most of us are, I think, You have in the foregoing the background for a story so fascinating that I know none to compare. I myself came upon it in an old document still preserved at Rio de Janeiro and in the light of evidence gleaned from many quarters believe it implicitly. I am not going to offer a literal translation of the strange account given

30:15 in the document. The crabbed Portuguese script is broken in several places. But the story begins in 1753, when a native of Mina-Jeraish, whose name has not been preserved, decided to make a search for the lost mines of Mirabeca. And we are going to get into Manuscript 512 in more detail and Fawcett's quest to find his lost city, but we're going to do it next time. But right now I have listener mail. Hooray. The listener mail this week involves favorite things. Oh, good. This is from our listener, Rebecca, who writes, Dear Holly and Tracy, thank you for the joyful review of sneakers, which I listened to this week.

30:55 I always enjoy your podcasts, which touch on Australia, the E.M.I. War, Dame Nellie Melba, and Annette Kellerman's Spring to Mind. I moved from the U.S. to Sydney, Australia in 2005 and have joined the many thousands running up Heartbreak Hill in the annual City to Surf Fun Run in Sydney, Australia. One year, we made Smurf caps with cheap white cloth and stitched those together with dental floss, then ran the event covered in blues ink and face paint. I don't recommend it, but costumes are popular. I finally have photos to offer as pet tags. We recently moved to a farm in northern New South Wales and finally had enough land to have an active dog. We found our one-year-old moose through a Facebook page called Failed Working Dogs Rehomed.

31:43 Because he's afraid to work around sheep and cattle. Who doesn't work if they don't have to, right? His DNA test says he's 80% border collie and 20% kelpie. And I'm just going to say he's 100% adorable. Moose greets us in the morning with a kind wholesomeness. It is turning me into a morning person because how do you say no to that face? He is a high energy dog and has decided his mission is to keep birds off of the paddocks where we are growing winter bollage and sugar cane. He doesn't catch them. They seem to enjoy the game too, staying just above his head. He can run 20 kilometers in this self-appointed task and is a joy to watch run full tilt. Moose dislikes his evening paw wash, but puts up with this prerequisite to

32:26 sleep next to our bed. These photos capture his early morning greeting, regal pose, and muddy, glorious best. And then there are suggestions for some interesting Australian topics, which I'm going to make notes of. And then it concludes with, thanks again for your wonderful show. You seem to find the delicate balance to treat challenging topics with grace. And then it's pictures of moose. I want to kiss this dog so bad. No. I want to fly to Australia just to kiss this dog. He's really cute. And I believe that that would make you want to get up early just so you can watch him have the best morning ever, every day. He's really adorable, and I have no doubt that he brings a great deal of joy. So, Rebecca,

33:08 thank you so much for this, because it's darling. And since we mentioned dogs in this episode, I'm like, thematic. Sort of. If you would like to send us pictures of your adorable pets... talk about anything you wish that we've talked about or not, you can do that at historypodcast at iheartradio.com. You can also find show notes for any of the shows that we've done, including today's. They're right there in the show page at missedinhistory.com. And if you haven't subscribed to the show and you would like to, I promise you it's the easiest thing in the world.

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