Part Two: Percy Fawcett: Real-Life Indiana Jones, or Deluded Psychic Racist?

Robert concludes the tale of Percy Fawcett by discussing how he came to believe a hidden jungle portal would turn his son into a god (spoiler: they died horribly). See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history, where I just thought I was about to sneeze, but I didn't. And so

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Congratulations.

• 0:13Robert Evans?

  We're able to start now, as opposed to like, three seconds later.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Mazel tov, Robert.

• 0:16Robert Evans?

  Unless I sneeze in like, a second. There's no way to know. There's no way to know. It's really dusty out there right now, what with all the fire.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:23Robert Evans?

  Everything's on fire. Yeah.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:26Robert Evans?

  You know who's not on fire? In like, a bad way. But in a good way, they are. Being on fire can mean a confusingly wide variety of things. Hello, Miriam, how are you?

• 0:36Speaker 01

  I'm doing good. I'm not on fire in any way that I'm aware of.

• 0:40Robert Evans?

  Okay. Okay. Neither in a good nor a bad way.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think so. Again, yeah, like you said, it can mean a lot of things. So, you know, I don't want to foreclose on every possibility, but...

• 0:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that makes, that makes sense, you know? So, whether or not you're on fire, I hope you're ready to listen to the next part of our series on the life of Percy Fawcett, the guy who was probably the most direct inspiration for Indiana Jones slash, just like, the archetype of like, the gentleman adventurer, you know? And who also, as we're about to discuss, is going to go increasingly crazy over the course of this episode.

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• 1:25Robert Evans?

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• 3:41Robert Evans?

  So, when we left him off, he had first listened to his mom and broken up with his fiance, and then years later, gotten back together with her. He's converted to Buddhism. He's become a theosophist, and he's gotten really into the occult. And after being trained up as an adventurer and working briefly as a spy, he's finally wound up back in Ceylon in 1903, which he really likes, because it's, it's this place, it's filled with all these Buddhist temples, it's filled with what he sees as like, these people who are seekers of the truth. There's a lot of, not just like, local Buddhists, but a lot of like, white people who are really into the occult are in Ceylon and moving, because it's really hip to travel to the east and travel to these parts of the world where there's people who are like Buddhists and Hindus, because, because a lot of these Victorian Age and like, slightly

• 4:26Robert Evans?

  post-Victorian Age white people are really into, like, co-opting little bits of, of different eastern religions, and sort of like, tacking them on to these pieces of like, theosophy and other spiritualist, like, belief systems, that are starting to be cobbled together as like, a hobby. This is like, a hobby for a lot of people, right?

• 4:45Speaker 01

  It stays fashionable for a while.

• 4:48Robert Evans?

  It stays fashionable. And Percy's kind of using his military career as a way to also further his hobby in this way. Like, he's really happy to be stationed here with his wife, and Nina seems to be as well. She was born there. So, many descriptions of Percy Fawcett's life start, like, depict the beginning of his career as a boundary surveyor, as if it suddenly ignites a desire for exploration. In Grant's book, Chapter Eight: Into the Amazon, goes straight from Percy returning to England in 1902, to him then being in Bolivia, like, six or seven years later, which is like, where the first adventure from the movie The Lost City of Z starts, too. And that leaves out years of his life, where he was like, getting increasingly into Buddhism and theosophy and Ceylon. And it's kind of important, because that sets the stage for what's going to happen

• 5:33Robert Evans?

  next. So, from what I can tell, despite Percy's aptitude for surveying, he doesn't seem to have been particularly drawn to it as a career at this point. In 1903, his chief interest was a different sort of exploration, the search for lost treasures and esoteric truths via meditation and other forms of spiritual exercise. And because Percy's talking a lot about finding lost treasure, I think people draw this too much to like, archaeology, and think that he's often literally seeking, like, lost cities of gold. That's not the truth as much as he's speaking more metaphorically about these kind of spiritual treasures that he wants to uncover by finding places that are supposedly lost.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  So, like, the, the real treasure was, in fact, within you all the time?

• 6:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but also, the real treasure is going to make you and your son gods. He's not selfless in where he thinks this is going to bring him, right?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 6:29Robert Evans?

  It's still crazy, but it is different. Yeah. In the movie, Percy's depicted as an ambitious man weighed down by his father's reputation, who's just like, ready for any chance to become like, a military hero. And the real Fawcett is exhausted by military life, of military life by 1903.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  But he was so good at cricket.

• 6:49Robert Evans?

  He's so good at cricket. But he's made a vow not to kill anybody, and cricket's only good for killing.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 6:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah. A.J. Lee, who read through Percy's many letters during this time, describes Fawcett as still captivated by Ceylon and his understanding of Buddhism. In fact, he may have returned there for what we would today call therapeutic purposes. Lee describes him as, quote, "being captivated by the island's magic and mysticism, and with the help of faqirs and holy men, he began to extricate himself from the manacles of his unhappy childhood." So, in this account, too, it's not just that he wants to learn magic to become a powerful wizard, which is definitely part of it, but it's that he wants, he's, he's working through some shit. And like, these, these Buddhist holy men and these other sort of like, mystics that are all kind of clustered in Ceylon, are at least giving him an opportunity to like, talk about his childhood. And that's not really a thing

• 7:42Robert Evans?

  men of his stature get to do back in England?

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Men will literally go across the world to hunt for gold before going to therapy, and then trick themselves into going to therapy.

• 7:54Robert Evans?

  Into going to therapy, because the real gold is within you all the time, right? That's sort of what Percy's doing.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  The real gold is figuring out that your mom was kind of the worst.

• 8:05Robert Evans?

  Your mom was kind of the worst, yeah. So, Percy and Nina both grow obsessed with eastern mysticism during this time. She's also really into this stuff. They're a legitimately good match. She gets pregnant in Ceylon, and Percy would later claim that, before they announced to anybody that she's pregnant, quote, "A deputation of soothsayers and Buddhists somehow found out..." You're supposed to believe that they like, it was magic or something, that they found out that he was going, that his wife was gonna have a baby, and they all show up to demand an audience with him, because they've made predictions, there's a prophecy around this baby. And I'm gonna quote from

• 8:40Speaker 01

  That didn't happen.

• 8:41Robert Evans?

  A.J. Lee's book here.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  That didn't happen.

• 8:43Robert Evans?

  After the usual, yeah. I don't believe this really happened either, but I'm gonna read you what Percy says happened. "After the usual formalities, I was informed I was about to become the father of a son, whose appearance was minutely described. I suggested that it was obvious that something of this sort might reasonably be anticipated, but that a daughter would upset the prophecy. No, I was to have a son. He was the reincarnation of a very advanced spirit, and my wife and I had been specially selected, et cetera, et cetera."

• 9:11Speaker 01

  I mean,

• 9:12Robert Evans?

  that's Percy writes in the et cetera, et cetera.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Bro, married,

• 9:16Robert Evans?

  loves that.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Married couple predicted to have child in early 1900s. We're, we're at what 19, 1903 at this point?

• 9:26Robert Evans?

  03.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like, you're really not, you're really not doing-

• 9:29Robert Evans?

  They describe a mole that Jack has perfectly. So Sophie, I'm sorry, but they described the mole. That means he's a reincarnation of a powerful spirit.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Crazy thing that people have a mole. Wow.

• 9:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's super funny.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  The only baby with a mole, actually.

• 9:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Actually.

• 9:45Robert Evans?

  Never happened before. Uh, their first son, Jack, was born in 1903 and was probably- Yeah, Tom Holland and was probably named after Helena Blavatsky because Blavatsky's preferred nickname was also Jack, which is kind of why I think they named their son Jack.

• 10:01Robert Evans?

  The Fawcett's make a big deal out of the fact that Jack is born on the anniversary of Buddha's birth. Although Percy then explorates that like, well, Buddha's birth is like, was over, there's a range of days that they all celebrate because they don't know exactly what one it is. And he was born on the one that everyone says is the most likely of the days. And I'm like, okay, okay.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  This very special baby was born on all those days.

• 10:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he was born on every one of Buddha's birthdays.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Mystical mole baby.

• 10:26Robert Evans?

  However, many he's got and Ceylon, I don't know. I don't believe this either. Percy would later write that until he went to school, he was intermittently clairvoyant. Jack, right? That like his son was clairvoyant as a child until the school beat it out of him, basically. And he went on to add, and this is from a letter that Percy wrote to a magazine called The Theosophist in 1913. Both parents are psychic. He's like writing about his son. He's like, yeah, he was intermittently clairvoyant. By the way, both me and his mom are psychic. Like, that does not come up enough in the Percy Fawcett literature that he desperately believed he was psychic and wrote about it constantly.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that should have to, we should have to like, that should be one of the first things you learn about a person, I think.

• 11:09Robert Evans?

  People really should learn that. You should also have to read the like, three paragraphs or something of him explaining how because his son Jack was born in Asia, he has slanted eyes.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 11:19Robert Evans?

  That's Percy, that's Percy. Look, um, it's pretty rough. So from this point on, Nina and Percy would both refer to Jack as the special one.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, I, I don't want to be distracted by this, um, little, that little racist thing.

• 11:35Robert Evans?

  Let it out.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Did other people, I, sort of two questions here. Did other people also think that the son looked like he might have, for example, had one Asian parent? And are we sure that-

• 11:51Robert Evans?

  I haven't heard that.

• 11:54Robert Evans?

  It's not impossible, but I don't think that's the case.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  That would be very funny. I mean, I think it's probably just bad scientific racism.

• 12:01Robert Evans?

  I've looked at pictures of Jack. I think this was him saying, as a baby, his eyes were slanted. So you could tell that he had the spirit of a great Tibetan mystic or whoever, whatever kind of mystic. I don't know which country he thought the spirit came from. But I think it was the spirit of a great Eastern mystic, but Jack's white. That's also important, that Jack, that you were aware Jack is white.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  I'm looking at this image that I've quickly Googled. No.

• 12:28Robert Evans?

  Percy's racial politics are fascinating. Like, we don't, we don't make them like this anymore.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  No, it would take, it would take a while to unpack all of the, because he was born in Asia.

• 12:40Robert Evans?

  There's a lot going on here.

• 12:43Robert Evans?

  He and Nina would both refer to their first son, Jack, as the special one or the great one. And like, you get the feeling, cause his youngest son wrote about being kind of like, Jack wasn't great. Like, first off, let me just say, he was kind of a dick. He wasn't even as funny as people think. Like, his, his youngest brother was, seems to have been kind of pissed by this.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I can, I can see how that would happen.

• 13:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  The special one and the other one.

• 13:09Robert Evans?

  Special one, yeah. Look, we love all our children, but we only think one of you was the magical reincarnated spirit of a wizard. You know? Or a mystic or whatever.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  I love all my children equally, the special one and the other ones also.

• 13:23Robert Evans?

  Percy is seeing like a Buddhist mystic is indistinguishable from Merlin. Like, let's be honest, like that's, I'm not saying that's accurate to the Buddhist mysticism, but that's what Percy thinks about these people.

• 13:34Robert Evans?

  In 1906, Percy is called up for duty by the new president of the Royal Geographic Society, a no nonsense military man named Sir George Taubman Goldie. In The Lost City of Z, this is how Gran describes him. Famous for his keen intelligence and volatile temper, he had an almost single-handedly imposed the British Empire's control over Niger in the 1880s and 1890s. He had shocked Victorian society by running off to Paris with a governess and was an unrepentant atheist who championed Darwin's theory of evolution. Goldie has said, Goldie is, my favorite fact about this guy is he, he apparently always kept poison on his person so that he could kill himself if he were rendered handicapped immediately. Like, that's the kind of dude that this man is. So just shockingly weird men are only, the only people who reach high levels in the RGS.

• 14:19Robert Evans?

  Like, all of the maps were made by crazy people.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  So not, not carrying poison because he was like behind enemy lines and like, if he was caught and tortured, but just like, if he fell down and broke his hip real bad.

• 14:30Robert Evans?

  If I have to be in a wheelchair, I want to be out immediately. It, it's gotta be on sight for, for Goldie. He, he will not handle being taken care of. No one is caring for Goldie.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  There was an episode of Star Trek, The Next Generation where Worf tried to do this.

• 14:45Robert Evans?

  There, that's, he does have worse attitude.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Worf tries to get his son to stab him to death when he fall, when a box falls on him.

• 14:53Robert Evans?

  Imagine, if you want to imagine Sir George Taubman Goldie calling in Percy for this meeting as Michael Dorn, I won't stop you and you won't be entirely wrong.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  That's, that's the direction I'm going with this.

• 15:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, all right. So Michael Dorn calls Percy in and asks if he's ever been to Bolivia. Gold, uh, Goldie shows him a map and he says, it's full of blank spaces and explains that Bolivia, Brazil and Peru are all up in arms over the precise extent of their borders. Now, we just did episodes on the dictator of Paraguay, Francisco Solano Lopez, and the war of the triple alliance that occurs not far from here. And it's a border dispute that helps lead to it. In Gran's book, The Lost City of Z, Gran wrongly writes, the boundary issues between Paraguay and its neighbors caused the war. That's, that's not true. There were boundary issues that were inherent to conflicts between those countries previously, but the war was caused because Francisco Solano Lopez was a fucking maniac

• 15:50Robert Evans?

  who wanted to get involved in Uruguay in politics and then invaded Brazil, Argentina and tried to invade Uruguay. It was not caused by a boundary dispute.

• 16:00Robert Evans?

  Anyway, I just, I had to correct Gran on that as well.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Well, and boundary dispute usually means more than like, oh, we thought the line was over here and you thought it was a half mile this way. Like, it's usually more like, we want more of your stuff.

• 16:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we, we really want these mines is generally, and that's what's happening here, right? It's mines and rubber is generally what's, what's at like the root of these. But also when the boundaries were set up, people couldn't make good maps. Like, we didn't, we didn't have the ability to really make high quality maps. And so the boundaries were also not fixed. Like, it very much is a problem that was going to need to be solved. The first thing Percy does here is good. Like, it was necessary for some motherfucker to get out to and map some of these rivers that, and, and when I say he was mapping them for the first time, what that, the way that's depicted in the movie is he's going into a place like no one's ever been back from. That's nonsense. There were stations all up and down the river. People knew how to sail it.

• 16:57Robert Evans?

  That doesn't mean there were maps of it, right? That you could like, set boundary lines on. Those are two different kinds of things.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  It's very possible to live somewhere for hundreds and thousands of years and not know the coordinates of it.

• 17:11Robert Evans?

  Right, exactly. That's what needs to be done. If someone needs to go through and do that pain in the ass work and actually lay out where the boundaries are, right?

• 17:20Robert Evans?

  And so the British, part of why the, the RGS is getting involved here, even though none of these are British territory, is that there's a lot of like money involved in particularly the rubber trade at this point. And the British are worried there's going to be a war over some of these boundary disputes, as there are periodically. And they're like, well, maybe if we can get this all mapped out, we can settle that ahead of time. And both countries are willing to have the British do it because they're seen as like a neutral party, right?

• 17:44Robert Evans?

  So in Gran's book, he describes the area that Percy is going to map as several hundred miles of nearly impassable terrain. And he continues with language that is going to do, like, this is very clearly written, expecting there to be a movie made of your book, The Lost City of Z. Quote, "The expedition would take up to two years and there was no guarantee that its members would survive. Disease was rampant in the region and the Indians, who had been attacked mercilessly by rubber trappers, murdered interlopers." And this is how the movie depicts things too. Like, as soon as Percy and his small team, including, including Robert Pattinson, set off on like this primitive rickety raft down the river, they're ambushed by Indians with bows. One man is wounded and he falls into the water and he gets tangled in a fishing net and the piranha eat him alive.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Oh, shit.

• 18:29Robert Evans?

  That's a fantasy. That's a complete fantasy. Both depictions of this voyage are complete fantasies. Both David Gran's depiction in his book and the depiction in the movie made off of his book. Now, some of that is because Percy Fawcett lied about his own adventures. He was a huge fan of adventure novels and he couldn't resist making claims, not in his, his actual, like, the paperwork he submitted to the RGS was always really good. Most people seem to agree. But he would give public speeches and he would like write articles where he would make lavish claims like that he had shot an attacking anaconda 49 feet long in the spine with his 44, 10 feet below its wicked head and killed it right before it could murder them all. And like, first off, it's, I mean, it's theoretically possible for an anaconda to get that big,

• 19:14Robert Evans?

  but they haven't like on record been quite as big as the one he was claiming. And also they don't act that way. I found a critique of Fawcett by Hugh Thompson, another veteran. Thompson is like a real explorer, like today, who's led, I think it's Peru is where he's done a shitload of expeditions, but he's led a lot of expeditions into the jungle. And he writes, quote, "Those who've traveled on the Amazon know that it is in reality mundane, so prehistoric and almost dreamlike. Very little happens slowly. It is perfectly possible to travel for days without seeing any wildlife, let alone an anaconda, which would slither away at the sound of oncoming canoes." It's just a fantasy. Like, and there are crazy ass animals in the Amazon,

• 19:57Robert Evans?

  but you don't see them because they don't want to be near you. They're scared of people usually, right? You have to kind of go out of your way and they're not generally going to attack you unless you're a huge fucking asshole. The thing that's going to kill you is the same thing that's going to kill you in most places of the world where people die from the environment. It's little bugs that give you diseases.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:16Robert Evans?

  You're not gonna get murdered by an anaconda.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  On your foot and die of gangrene.

• 20:21Robert Evans?

  And it gets infected because of the water and your foot rots off. Yeah. One thing every actual jungle explorer I have ever read from will point out is that if your narrative of an Amazon exploration has stories about being constantly attacked by deadly fauna, it's a lie because that doesn't really happen very often. Fawcett's first real life trip was mapping the Upper Heath River. The movie shows him mapping the Rio Verde first. He doesn't do that until years later. Here's how an actual world renowned expert on the region, John Henning, described Fawcett's first trip mapping Heath. "This survey was the best thing Fawcett did, but he described it as boring because the new frontier was all along rivers. This was the height of the great Amazon rubber boom, so he

• 21:05Robert Evans?

  and his team cruised from one comfortable rubber barocket to the next, taking their regular measurements." Again, the movie shows them like fighting off death at every single turn. In reality, they're going down to different places that all have food and like a pretty comfortable raft. There's people all around. All they're doing is just some math, basically, right? And Percy's work here does make history, but in the rather pedestrian sense of like, oh, well, we finally have a map for this area that we didn't have a map before, rather than like, oh, this bold adventurer carved a path through the howling wilderness to make this great discovery. And in the movie, at the end of this first voyage, he finds a bunch of pottery shards and ruins in the jungle, which is what convinces him that there's this lost city in the Amazon.

• 21:47Robert Evans?

  That's not what happens. In reality, Fawcett does, once he comes back to England, he gets famous for doing this because it was good work and no one had before. And he was also good at like self mythologizing, right? Once he gets back to England, he's not just telling people about the actual mapping he did. He's like, he's judging it up a little bit. He's making it a better story than it really was.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Anacondas.

• 22:10Robert Evans?

  Anacondas and shit. He gives at least one lecture prior to the outbreak of World War I, in which he discusses seeing what might have been ancient ruins in the rainforest. Now, we now know there are ruins in the area Fawcett said that there were ruins, but they're not stone ruins, which is what he always described and was looking for. They're like earthworks. And now that we have LiDAR, we can see where some of them would have been, right? So we do know that there was large scale habitation in this part of the Amazon, previously to like European contact. And that is kind of what Fawcett was saying. And he's so, he's sort of right. But again, as I'm going to talk about, everything he believed about that habitation was wrong.

• 22:52Robert Evans?

  Now, one thing the movie does get right is that once Percy gets a taste of the jungle, he starts going back, right? He leaves his family for like a year or so to do, you know, this first mission. And he keeps going back and he just abandons them for years at a time to hang out in the jungle, mostly with a bunch of dying men. And that is accurate. That's what Percy does from like the next eight, most of the next eight years leading up to World War I, is he just keeps heading back to the jungle to do different like surveying and explorational missions. Like, he cannot abandon his family often enough or long enough for his taste. Like, there is no amount of being with his family that he will not immediately get the fuck out of England to go back to the Amazon for. You cannot make this man raise his kids. He won't do it.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  So he did learn something from his own father after all.

• 23:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he picked that up from his dear old dad.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 23:41Robert Evans?

  For his dad, it was gambling and alcoholism. And for Percy, it's exploring the Amazon. Grant describes Fawcett's next several years as exploring thousands of square miles of Amazon and helping to redraw the map of South America, painstakingly working his way inwards over years of voyages, cataloging exotic species, until he had explored as much of the region as anyone. That's how Grant describes Percy, and it's nonsense. He is spending a lot of time in that part of the world, but Percy only surveyed about 300 kilometers of Bolivian rivers. And as Henning writes, "Fawcett's own writings reveal no special interest in flora or fauna, let alone his collecting or cataloging rare species." So he's, he's just not doing a lot of the stuff

• 24:23Robert Evans?

  Grant is. He's doing a pretty pedestrian job, or he's getting up to complete nonsense, looking for ruins that absolutely aren't there, right? There's, there's kind of two things that Percy is into. One of them is semi-useful and one of them is getting everyone killed for no reason at all.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  I don't know how he's failing to find these ruins when, as we know, he's a powerful psychic.

• 24:44Robert Evans?

  That's right. His psychic powers have not let him keep just leading people in circles in the jungle until they die or starve. Crazy stuff.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Come on, man.

• 24:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And one of the things that's very silly about Grant's book is that he describes basically that like, while Fawcett's continuing to try to get deeper and deeper into the jungle to explore more, he's opened up the jungle to other explorers. And so now he's got to compete with these like, less skilled, but better financed amateurs who don't know the jungle like he does. And they're tramping around and ruining things, you know, at best, right? And this is, I want to read you one paragraph of Grant's book describing some of these other explorers, right, who are only able to get into the Amazon because Percy Fawcett opens it up. "There was the Brazilian Colonel and part Indian orphan Candido Mariana da Silva Rondon, who had helped lay telegraph lines across the jungle, lost a toe to piranhas and started

• 25:35Robert Evans?

  the Indian Protection Service." And again, he describes this as a guy who's able to like, do all these good things because Percy helps to open up the Amazon. That's really fucked up because Rondon, like Candido Mariana da Silva Rondon is like, almost inarguably the greatest explorer in Brazilian history. By the time Fawcett got famous, Rondon had already spent 17 years straight exploring southwest Brazil, and in fact, discovered so much of southwest Brazil that the state of Rondonia is named after him.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  He said he lost a toe to a piranha. Like, that's pretty legit.

• 26:11Robert Evans?

  He actually got attacked by a piranha.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Like, not in the movie. Like, actually.

• 26:16Robert Evans?

  Not in the movie. Like, for realsies. Henning describes Rondon's expedition as having "made Fawcett's look like a jaunt up the Thames." It's just some beautiful British shade right there.

• 26:30Robert Evans?

  So at least Grant does correctly credit Rondon with founding the Indian Protection Service, whose noble motto was, "Die if you must, but never kill," right? That's the motto of the Indian Protection Service. "The Fawcett of fiction would have agreed with this. His belief in the city of Z is depicted as being fueled by a belief that indigenous Amazonians were more intelligent and capable than white Europeans gave them credit for being. And it is true that Percy was less racist against Indians than most British explorers of his station and era. That's probably fair. But Grant turns this into some great history of like enlightened first contact and credits him with, quote, 'discovery of so many previously unknown Indians who taught him their languages, their herbal medicines, and their hunting

• 27:14Robert Evans?

  methods.' In reality, Fawcett never learned a single native tongue. He never wrote about learning native hunting or farming methods, and he also murdered a native guy and covered it up." Here's Henning again. Quote, "Fawcett's attitudes towards indigenous peoples were contradictory. He deplored the rubberman's cruelty to Indians, whom they pressed into forced labor. He admired the three tribes whose villages he entered. But he could also lapse into extreme racism, talking about dangerous, repulsive cannibals, degenerate indigenees, or villainous savages scarcely evolved beyond the level of beasts, whereas others were robust and fair people of civilized origin. David Grant is as perplexed as anyone by such contradictions. He feels that Fawcett was impressed by the eugenic movement of the early 20th century, but struggled to reconcile

• 27:57Robert Evans?

  what he observed with everything he had been taught and could not rid himself of the pernicious disease of race." Grant does not quote the worst of Fawcett's racism. "When he described Maroxi warriors as hairy men with sloping skulls and long arms of Neanderthals, unlike any indigenous people, Fawcett allowed his team to fire into the air to frighten off these great ape-like brutes. But when Grant discovered the journal of companion Henry Costin, this revealed that one shot had been aimed at a Maroxi and hit him in the stomach. Fawcett, therefore, doctored his official report to the RGS and concealed the truth his entire life."

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Wow. Jesus.

• 28:31Robert Evans?

  That's real.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  So he sucks.

• 28:33Robert Evans?

  So basically, Fawcett, first off, lied about this group, these group of Maricoxi warriors, and described them as looking like ape men, basically, when like, well, we just know that they aren't, because those people exist.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:45Robert Evans?

  We know what they look like, right? They're just people out in the jungle. And also, and Gran describes him as like, shooting up into the air. Fawcett describes himself shooting up into the air. But his companion, Henry Costin, played by Robert Pattinson in the movie, is like, no, he fucking murdered a dude. He murdered a dude and he made us all lie about it.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, he sucks.

• 29:04Robert Evans?

  We didn't want to say shit.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  It seems like his, you know, this sort of combination of like, oh, there are these enlightened people in the jungle at some point in ancient times, and now there's just all of these people I will say racist things about. It does not feel unconnected to the spiritualism Blavatsky stuff, where there's like-

• 29:27Robert Evans?

  No, super connected.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Where it's like, where you can romanticize and idealize a completely fucking made up group that you might sort of have like, that might like be located somewhere in real geography and like, linked to real stuff, but not actually like-

• 29:44Robert Evans?

  Exactly.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  You're not allowing them to like, self-represent, or you're making them up entirely. And it doesn't actually lead to you treating well-

• 29:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  -the people who are currently living there.

• 29:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like, the reality of Fawcett isn't that he was like, had an enlightened view of what like, ancient indigenous people were capable of, it's that, well, he believed that a certain number of them were basically descended from white people who had made a civilization here before that had collapsed for some reason, or that they had ascended into some sort of spiritual realm, because he thought there was a portal hidden in the jungle that he was looking for. This is what we're all building towards in the Percy Fawcett story. But it can sound on the surface, when he's talking about like, the great achievements of these Indians, like, he's actually like, woke, and he is for sure not. He's just a lunatic, guys.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  I mean, calling them apes and murdering them and covering it up is-

• 30:29Robert Evans?

  Did you just shout a man out of the gut for nothing? Yeah.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  And, and the thing where he claimed to have learned stuff from indigenous people, but never actually like, bothered to study them in any meaningful way, it's like, he is somebody who thinks that the idea of being like, taught secrets by indigenous people sounds very cool, and he would like to be the kind of person who people assume has been taught secrets by indigenous people, but like, he's not actually interested in what any indigenous person has to say. He's not gonna talk to them. They have weird foreheads or something. What did he say? Slope, like, you know, he doesn't like the shape of their skulls, like-

• 31:04Robert Evans?

  No. In reality, all of the ancient mysticism that he attributes to them came from like, a Russian lady and his brother?

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Yes. He's like, yeah, it sure would be cool to talk to them. I bet they think all the same things as that Russian liar. But I'm not gonna talk to them, because again-

• 31:20Robert Evans?

  Russian con woman knew what these guys believed.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Do not like the shape of their skulls.

• 31:23Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. Anyway, you know whose skulls I like? The skulls of these advertisers. Bring them to me. Wait. Yeah, yeah.

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• 32:46Speaker 07

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• 33:51Speaker 05

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• 34:19Speaker 03

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• 34:49Speaker 03

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• 34:55Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Ah, so, the reality of Fawcett's journeys and competence have been greatly exaggerated, not just by David Gran. I think this has established that like, Gran left out a lot of important stuff, and also just added a lot of stuff that Fawcett himself didn't even put in the narrative. For his part, Fawcett bragged about his own toughness constantly, claiming to feel none the worse for wear after losing 53 pounds in a disastrous expedition. And that's often, like, you'll see that fact mentioned as like, evidence of how hardcore this guy was. Like, this was a real man, you know? He could, he could really take punishment. That's what it took to be a great explorer. No, it's not. He's, he lost 53 pounds because he was a fucking idiot who got a bunch of people killed

• 35:39Robert Evans?

  for no reason, planning an expedition really badly. And now we're going to talk about, so in the movie, it shows his first expedition as being, which was like, his first actual expedition was up the Heath River. And as we've discussed, it was not at all that interesting or harrowing. The journey that most of that first journey in the movie is based on, is a 1908 trip that's the only true expedition that Percy Fawcett ever planned. And it was a five-week trip to survey the River Verde for the state of Brazil. This is the only time that he actually like, planned an expedition into an area that had not been mapped or charted, and tried to map or chart something. As Henning wrote in an article for Spectator, "The preparations were appalling.

• 36:22Robert Evans?

  Fawcett took minimal supplies, since he was accustomed to being fed by rubber stations. This was the end of the dry season, with the river at its lowest, so they soon had to abandon their boat and continue on foot. After only a week, all food was exhausted and they were really starving. Fawcett casually remarked that five out of his six peons died from the effects of this five-week disaster. This is the only expedition he led into unexplored territory."

• 36:46Robert Evans?

  And in the movie, in like, his second or third expedition, he goes back with this, this famous explorer, that he actually did go on an exploration with, this guy who had been an Arctic explorer, and they actually did have a big falling apart. And the movie shows this guy as like, destroying and wasting all of their rations. And I just love that in Fawcett's actual worst expedition, he just didn't think to bring them.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Like, you said he, he lost like, 53 pounds or whatever. If you're losing 53 pounds on a five-week trip, you fucked that trip up.

• 37:16Robert Evans?

  You're really bad at planning, man. Like, I'm not a great backpacker, but I think I do better than that. My god.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  And it, and he's just, and like, the people working for him, who he, like, doesn't seem to be talking about a lot-

• 37:29Robert Evans?

  Five out of six die?

• 37:30Speaker 01

  -who are carrying all his shit, and maybe him sometimes, are just dying, and he's like, eh, what can you do?

• 37:35Robert Evans?

  Just dropping like flies? What can you do? I didn't bring food. I thought there'd be people to hand me food.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  It just proves how hardcore I am, that all of my people I'm responsible for are dying. Just shows how good at this I am, actually.

• 37:48Robert Evans?

  Oh, so much of his reputation for toughness came, comes from the fact that he survived starving to death, because he himself did not bring enough food repeatedly. Like, it's very funny.

• 38:00Robert Evans?

  Fawcett kept going back to the Amazon, though. Even after this disastrous trip, he would not stop going, and he would not stop writing breathless articles and giving speeches about his harrowing journeys, with nightmare encounters of deadly insects and creatures and Indians that he'd survived. Hugh Thompson describes Fawcett's public image pre-war this way. "Fawcett self-mythologized, presenting jungle journeys as if they were Homeric odysseys. He was inspired in his descriptions by adventure novels such as Jules Verne's La Jaguande and the works of H. writer Haggard. All featured trusty companions, unreliable natives, and clues given by some ancient chronicle. The relationship between Edwardian writers and explorers was a symbiotic one." In other words, Fawcett's framing of his own life and the things he's trying to do in the jungle are inspired by fiction.

• 38:45Robert Evans?

  He's not a scientist most of the time, really ever past those first couple of journeys. He's a crank-

• 38:53Speaker 01

  I hate to say, but he's-

• 38:54Robert Evans?

  -who thinks he's in a novel.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  He's kinda LARPing. He's-

• 38:57Robert Evans?

  He's LARPing, yeah.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Paying people to like, come along and pretend with him that they are, that they are doing an adventure, except those people are getting killed.

• 39:05Robert Evans?

  He wants to be Alan Quartermaine. Yeah, and he keeps getting people killed to do it. Not a real man.

• 39:13Robert Evans?

  Percy was in central Bolivia in September of 1914, when word came through that his old buddy, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, hadn't made it through his last trip. And there was gonna be a World War I thing starting up soon. So he'd probably better get home.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  World War I thing.

• 39:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, everybody knows. Gotta get home for World War I. Don't wanna miss that. Don't wanna miss World. That would have been a good time to stay in the jungle, to be honest.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  That World War I thing.

• 39:39Robert Evans?

  I'd have gone right back.

• 39:42Robert Evans?

  I don't even care if there's food. Better than the front.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Oh, my goodness.

• 39:46Robert Evans?

  I would take starving in the jungle over the trenches.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, for sure.

• 39:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, easily.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  You can even lie about how hard it was.

• 39:54Robert Evans?

  You can even lie about it later.

• 39:58Robert Evans?

  In one of the few passages where he is far too kind to Fawcett, Henning writes this about Percy's time at war. He'd hurried home and by January 1915 was back in the artillery. In his late 40s, he was too old for frontline service, but he fought a good war, ending as a lieutenant colonel. This is Henning trying to be nice to Percy Fawcett. Because actually, Henning knows that this isn't true. I think he was just trying to be polite.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Fought a good war is such a like.

• 40:23Robert Evans?

  He did not. He fought a, he did not.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  It sounds like so. It sounds like, you know, when, when the kid like strikes out in a baseball game, you're like, no, you did, you did good. Like, good try.

• 40:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's more accurate.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Fought a good war is such.

• 40:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's how, that's usually what people describe. It's like, well, he did, he did fine, you know, in World War I. The movie goes kind of crazy. It shows him leading a charge across no man's land during the Battle of the Somme. And again, he was an artilleryman. He stayed behind the lines. He was not charging into the fucking no man's land. He wasn't running at German machine gun nests, guys.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  He actually shot a German anaconda.

• 41:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he shot a German anaconda right in the belly. Yeah. As Henning stated, he stayed behind the lines, but he did not do what anyone would call fighting a good war. During research for the book Brazil That Never Was, author A.J. Lees happened by chance on a copy of a book titled Tommy, The British Soldier on the Western Front. And as he's just doing research on Fawcett, he's thumbing through this completely unrelated book, and he sees Fawcett's name listed in the index? And he's like, well, I should probably look into that, right? If I'm gonna be writing a book about the guy. Here's, here's a quote from his book. I leafed through to the relevant page, dealing with the problems encountered by the British artillery and quelling the German heavy guns, and read, "Perhaps the most notorious problem came in Sixth Corps in late 1916, when the Amazon explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett

• 41:46Robert Evans?

  arrived to take up the new post of Corps Counter-Battery Colonel. He immediately declared that he was not in the least bit interested in the innovative work being done on the detection of German guns by flash spotting and sound ranging. The only counter-battery shots which he would allow were those against targets clearly visible from British lines or those he had personally detected on his Ouija board."

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Fuck, yes. Oh, my God.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Love the Ouija board part.

• 42:16Robert Evans?

  These fucking idiots, these dipshits who serve under Percy Fawcett are like, oh, Colonel, we found that when the gun fires, if you count how much time happens between seeing the flash and hearing the explosion and then it landing, you can determine the distance and use that to directly determine the position of the German guns and thus shoot at them with our own guns and take them out. And Percy says, you're a fucking idiot. I've got a Ouija board. Like, that's literally what he's doing.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Percy's incredible.

• 42:43Robert Evans?

  It's so fucking funny.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Fuck your math. I've got a board game I can use to talk to ghosts.

• 42:48Robert Evans?

  Trying to spot the German guns and count how far they are away? No, we'll talk to ghosts about it. They told me where a city in the jungle is. It's hard to hear the Ouija board sometimes over the sounds of all of the men I've led to death in the jungle. But I think he's saying, there's a gun over there.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 43:06Robert Evans?

  So I gotta say, when I found, when I came across this fact, that's what made me decide to do an episode on Percy Fawcett. The fact that he's there at the front in the fucking 1916, trying to spot German cannons with a Ouija board? Beautiful stuff.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  That it's happening as an, an actual technique for this exists is amazing.

• 43:28Robert Evans?

  And historians wrote about it.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  It's not like you're out at sea before they have radar and you're like trying to guess where other, where enemy ships are. It's like, no, no, we have a way to do this. You're fucking around with a Ouija board.

• 43:41Robert Evans?

  You can actually triangulate the distance of artillery in a number of ways. But, okay, we're just doing nonsense, all right? And Lees, when he finds this fact in this book, he writes to John Henning. And Henning, who had written like, well, Percy fought a good war. And under this questioning, Henning kind of breaks down and admits like, so actually, my dad served under Fawcett in World War I? And maybe I have a couple of reasons to be annoyed by the guy other than Grant's book? And so Henning's father served under Fawcett and another, with another officer named Bragg. And the two, quote, "despaired when they learned that the mad psychic Fawcett had added nonexistent German gun emplacements to their highly accurate positions." In other words, Henning's dad and this other guy were trying to use like math to find out where the German guns were?

• 44:25Robert Evans?

  And Fawcett just kept sticking more pins in and being like, the ghosts have revealed another gun emplacement to me.

• 44:32Robert Evans?

  Such a cool guy.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  How did this guy not get shot in the back by his own men?

• 44:37Robert Evans?

  He really was like the, like the prime target for getting shot in the back by his own men. No officer ever deserved to be fragged more by his own guys.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Unbelievable. Like, like, really amazing he made it out without that happening to him.

• 44:51Robert Evans?

  It's astonishing. So after the war, Percy only grows more obsessed with his lost city. He'd given exactly one lecture to the RGS before the war in which he discussed the possibility of ancient ruins in the Amazon. As Jason Colavito summarizes, "Fawcett's public proclamations on the lost city of Z were fairly sober. He spoke of the possibility of a monumental city akin to those of Mesoamerica or the Inca." And that might seem like kind of plausible, because there are these big stone cities that are really fucking cool and crazy looking in other jungles, right? Why couldn't there be something like that in the Amazon? And so like, that makes sense to people. And Percy has another piece of evidence that he's able to pull up. He's found by this point, a, a report from 1753,

• 45:35Robert Evans?

  published by a Portuguese explorer who had run into what he described as a city in the jungle, deep in the Amazon. Percy had found, found this on like this document, like in, in some like government files in Rio de Janeiro. And he brought it forward and, and he, he would put this forward as like evidence that, no, no, there are credible accounts from white explorers that they found something in the jungle that resembles this city I've been talking about. And this account talks about this large, opulent city made out of stone. There's an entrance gate with these three huge arches. And it's all, it's covered in hieroglyphics of this indecipherable alphabet. Nearly all of the Fawcett myth today centers on this 1753 report, which Fawcett learns about after the war. Now, this is a, a real report. It does exist.

• 46:20Robert Evans?

  Other people have seen it. Like, it's been, basically, everyone who writes a book about him like goes to the library where it's stored and looks at this fucking thing as if it's gonna bring them more details. And this is the, an account by a Portuguese fortune hunter who goes searching in the Brazilian jungle for rumored lost gold mines. The party allegedly spent like 10 years in the jungle and never found anything. And one might argue their reports of a fantastical lost city that they brought back no evidence of might just have been an attempt to save face? Like, well, we always starving in the jungle for fucking years. But yeah, there's a, there's some stone stuff there, sure.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Did he maybe write this while he was trying to secure funding for the next expedition?

• 46:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, maybe he wanted to get some money out of someone, yeah. Whatever the truth, the fantastic city described in this paper is unlike anything Percy Fawcett or anyone else has ever uncovered in the Amazon. Jason Colavito, who wrote an article titled Percy Fawcett, Victim of a Theosophical Obsession, provides a translation and a summary of the sights of this purported city. Quote, "A black stone column of extraordinary greatness and atop it the statue of an ordinary man with one hand on his left hip and the right arm extended, pointing the index finger to the, to the north pole. Another statue depicted a beardless youth crowned with laurel. A great temple was a work of such amazing artistry that the writer was left in awe. Beyond the city was a river leading to a field of great tombs, all covered in writing. Much later, Barry Fell would declare the writing

• 47:41Robert Evans?

  based on hand-drawn copies in the manuscript, "Patolomeic Egyptian, and the city therefore classical." Right? So that's this report of like, this Egyptian almost looking city with hieroglyphics that are clearly of Western origin, you know?

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. A youth crowned with laurel sounds a little.

• 47:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Okay, doesn't sound like anything in the Amazon, but sure. As Henning noted in two articles of his own, "Anyone with experience in the Amazon knows finding a city of this description there would be impossible." The first thing that probably stands out to most of us is these claims of hieroglyphic writing. In his article, Jason Colavito accuses Grant of misleading his readers in a description of the report. Quote, "He edits the manuscript to remove all elements of the fantastic, listing only stone archways, a statue, roads, and a temple. He makes the city seem plausible by removing the improbable." And in a separate critique for the Times Literary Supplement, Henning accuses Grant of worse obfuscation than this. To bolster the notion that there might be a lost stone city in the Amazon forests, Grant quotes from one of my books,

• 48:40Robert Evans?

  "A German-led expedition in the 16th century that saw a large town that contained golden objects." What he does not make clear is that this was Philip von Huttens expedition of 1543 in the northern Andes of Colombia, and that the town was of the usual thatch and the gold was musica. When Grant himself visited the Upper Zingu River, he met the Amazon anthropologist Michael Heckenberger, who was excavating causeways and concentric ramparts around the current Kukiru village. Heckenberger explained to him why ruins of a stone city will never be found in lowland Amazonia. Stone is rare in a rainforest, whereas timber and thatch are super abundant, but are perishable to termites and to decay. Right?

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, you mentioned.

• 49:16Robert Evans?

  Cities?

• 49:17Speaker 01

  That they did earthworks because, and that makes sense. Whereas quarrying stone in the Amazon would be pretty hard, I imagine.

• 49:26Robert Evans?

  It's just not gonna happen, really. And the, and the extent you'd need for a massive stone city. And Grant leaves out a lot of details that would make this seem less plausible and make it clear that Fawcett isn't looking for a real place. He is looking for a fantasy. Right? Now, Grant does ultimately conclude that Fawcett's vision of Z was heavily influenced by his spiritual beliefs and not reality. But the fact is that Fawcett's entire conception of this lost city and the people who made it was from the jump, based on a theosophic fantasy. In other words, he believed there was a lost city in the Amazon because of the occult tradition he followed and because it talked of fallen cities and advanced elder races. He saw that 1753 report not as confirmation of evidence he'd actually found in the jungle,

• 50:10Robert Evans?

  but as confirmation of his religious beliefs that he took with him into the jungle. And yeah, like that's, that's the core of kind of what's happening here.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So he's genuinely looking for, for these like, um, philosophical ideals that don't, that are not a real thing. Um, and he's, and he's sort of pinned it on this thing written by somebody who, whose motives we don't know in the 17th century.

• 50:35Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 50:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And, and that, and that Grant is kind of taking this to make Fawcett look like more of a, a man searching for, more of a man outside of his time, you know, who, who believes in something that was eventually proven true. Cause we know there were some larger, you know, there were some much more habitation in the Amazon than like certainly Europeans thought there was in that day. Um, we do know that's true, but Fawcett's not thinking about that. Fawcett believes there's like a magical city of wizards that he can access through a portal. And it's like, Fawcett believes in some Lovecraft shit. That's what Percy Fawcett's really looking for in the jungle. He thinks fucking Cthulhu's in there. He thinks he's gonna, he's gonna run into a temple to fucking Azath or something like that. Right? Like he is not thinking, like this is, this is all fucking novels and fantasy shit.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. It, he's not a, a man out of time because, uh, sitting around and doing drugs had fully been invented by then. And like, that's how you, like both meditation and doing drugs.

• 51:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and to be fair, one thing Grant does point out is that Fawcett's Dreams of the City of Z had a lot in common with fiction stories that writers like H. Ryder Haggard, who were his friends, wrote, right? And that is a good point, but I, I don't think he carries it through to his conclusion, which is that like Percy just didn't know fantasy from reality. Like, I really do think that's what's going on here.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Like, if you're sitting around writing books about this idea, or like talking about how cool that would be, like, that's one thing, but you are like getting real, actual people killed, looking for this.

• 52:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Just like you probably got real people killed trying to hunt down German artillery with a Ouija board. Who knows who you shot? My God, man.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  There's no good way to die in World War I, but like dying because your commanding officer is using a Ouija board is like particularly bad.

• 52:25Robert Evans?

  Counter battery fire? My God. So Fawcett spends his post-war years trying to hunt down this fanciful place. In 1920, for some reason, he leads an expedition and he follows the route of a German anthropologist nowhere close to where he thought Z should have been. He was forced to abort the mission and try again in 1921, further down the Atlantic coast. He interviewed a bunch of local miners who knew nothing about a lost city. And this is kind of accidentally, one of the funny things about the movie is that it'll show Percy periodically just stumbling up to some man in the jungle and being like, have you heard of a city? And they'll be like, yeah, I don't know. Maybe, man. And then he'll, he'll just wander back into the jungle. And I think that is kind of what he's doing for, for some portion of this.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 53:07Robert Evans?

  Is like, have you heard rumors of a city? Yeah. Okay. And then off, off he goes back into the fucking jungle. Right?

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Like he's, he's trying to like live out that scene in the book or the movie of an explorer where they like hear from some guy in some bar that like, oh, the city's out. Like he's trying to make that scene happen for him in real life and is instead just like interrupting some dude doing like his, going about his day. Yeah. Have you heard any weird stories? And he's like, I don't know. Sure.

• 53:38Robert Evans?

  Sure, man. Yeah. Over there. Why don't you go back into the jungle?

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah. All the stories I've heard are about how you should get away from me.

• 53:48Robert Evans?

  You should be far away from my home. You look like you're riddled with disease, Percy.

• 53:54Robert Evans?

  And he was, he often was. Um, none of these voyages panned out and Percy Fawcett ran out of money. After going broke, again, he can't like give up this dream. So he embarks on a series of get rich quick schemes that all fail. In at least one instance, he seems to have at least both been conned and possibly robbed. He moves his family to California and they like lose everything. And I think like an oil scam. Um, there's a, yeah.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  He deserved it frankly.

• 54:22Robert Evans?

  He couldn't, he probably did. He did have it coming a little bit. Uh, yeah. You know who else has it coming?

• 54:28Speaker 01

  The products and services.

• 54:29Robert Evans?

  Sponsors of this show.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah. They have your money coming to them, I hope.

• 54:36Speaker 06

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• 55:18Speaker 06

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• 55:32Speaker 06

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• 55:39Speaker 06

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• 56:11Speaker 05

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• 56:15Speaker 05

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• 56:30Speaker 03

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• 57:09Speaker 03

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 57:15Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So, uh, by this point, the early twenties, his son, Jack, is a young man and both Nina and Percy, while Percy didn't really raise him, but Nina had raised him to believe that he was holy, a great spirit destined for some fine cosmic purpose. Jack tried to live up to this. He seems to have taken very seriously the fact that he was like the special golden boy. So he's trained constantly as a young man and expectation of the fact that one day dad's going to get enough money for the, the final big expedition that will take us to the lost city of Z. And I've got to go with him because my destiny's there. He and mom have both told me my whole life, my destiny's there.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  Oh, this kid's gonna die in a jungle.

• 57:55Robert Evans?

  So fucking doomed. Yeah. He's, he's gonna die in the jungle so bad.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  I mean, parental expectations are hard at the best of times, but like, I think what most people deal with is the like, you know, your father and mother and I worked very hard to send you to school and you better become a doctor. And like, that's rough. But like, you are a higher spiritual being. Um, is, that's, that's abuse.

• 58:19Robert Evans?

  Your father has to find enough money to lead an expedition into the jungle so that you can ascend through a portal.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 58:26Robert Evans?

  That's what they're teaching this boy.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Tell me about this portal. You've mentioned the portal a couple of times.

• 58:31Robert Evans?

  I have, I have. So by this point, if, if Fawcett's view of Z had ever been a belief in a real, physical city that someone could do archaeology on, it had morphed into a theosophic belief, into a sort of portal that might lead you to a place, or at least like a place where the veil of reality is thinner and one can commune with the secret masters of the world. Right? That's the, that's what he's looking for.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  You gotta, gotta get away from the thick veil we got over here.

• 58:58Robert Evans?

  Right. You gotta get to where the, to where the shimmer starts or whatever. Jack became a devoted spiritual practitioner. One friend described his slight aesthetic restraint as reminiscent of one of the knights of the Grail. So he's, he is like living like, like a, like a monk almost in order to prepare himself for his great purpose. Now I've mentioned H. Ryder Haggard several times. He's a, he's, he's, I mean, he's the creator of Alan Quartermain, right? Who was played by Sean Connery and Sean Connery's last movie, which was not very good, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Not a good movie. A, a better graphic novel.

• 59:32Robert Evans?

  Better gra, yeah. Pretty good graphic novel. Yeah. Um, he and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became close friends with Percy, not just because they loved stories of adventure, but because they were all spiritualists who were into the same weird occult shit. Doyle based his novel, The Lost World, on some of Percy Fawcett's absolutely falsified accounts of his adventures. And that's why I say that you can kind of say Alan Grant is inspired by Percy too, because The Lost World is one of the things that helped inspire Michael Crichton to write Jurassic Park and its sequel, The Lost World. They're somewhat different, very different books in a lot of ways, obviously, but it's, but you know, it's in this tradition and Percy Fawcett is a part of this tradition. He helps inspire these. You can draw a line from him to Jurassic Park in some ways, as well as to Indiana Jones. So.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  Which just means he could have, he could have stuck to writing novels. Like we could have a whole series of trashy novels by this guy that people would probably be facing.

• 1:00:24Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. They, they.

• 1:00:25Robert Evans?

  He could have maybe fed his family.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:28Robert Evans?

  Raised his kids.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  All kinds of stuff he could have done, gotten fewer people killed.

• 1:00:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, certainly would have gotten fewer people killed. Now, for his part, Haggard helped set Fawcett's doom into motion by bringing Percy. One day, this novelist comes to his friend's house with a small stone idol that he'd received from a fan in Brazil who claimed Indians somewhere in the interior had made it. And we have an illustration of this idol that H. Rider Haggard has, gets given by this fan. So if he'll show it to you now, it looks like an Egyptian idol. It's like a statue of a guy and he's holding like a tablet with either hieroglyphics or cuneiforms, whatever on it, right?

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Robert Evans?

  It does look kind of very Egyptian. It certainly seems like something you'd see in an adventure movie, or even like a Lovecraft thing, right? If you make that face a little fishier, that could work as like a Lovecraft sort of idol, right? There's something like this at the start of the short story, The Call of Cthulhu.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it looks like a good MacGuffin. It looks like you start out a movie with somebody finding this. You got a movie.

• 1:01:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you got a movie. This is all you need to start your journey of exploration. Nicolas Cage could vamp on this statue for 90 minutes at least.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Oh, he could do that with anything.

• 1:01:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:39Robert Evans?

  Fawcett became instantly convinced that this statuette came from one of the lost cities. So now there's more than one that Percy's convinced of.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Oh, cool.

• 1:01:47Robert Evans?

  Now, unfortunately for both-

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  One of the lost cities.

• 1:01:50Robert Evans?

  One of the lost cities.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Come on, my guy.

• 1:01:53Robert Evans?

  All right.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  You gotta find at least one before you can start talking about there being more than one, I think. God.

• 1:02:00Robert Evans?

  Now, unfortunately for-

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  NY. This is crazy.

• 1:02:02Robert Evans?

  Either of these guys. If you want to like, see, how much did these men really know about ancient artifacts? I found an article by the Archaeological Institute of America, which analyzed, you know, the illustration, at least we have of the statuette, and noted, however and wherever Haggard got the thing, it's a fake. The figure's costume and writing are on par with something from the prop department of Hercules Conquers Atlantis, and have no parallels in real artifacts. Fawcett took it to the British Museum, where he noted, "Experts were unable to tell me anything about the idol's origin. If not a fake, I was told, it's quite beyond our experience," which is a polite way of them to say to this respected explorer, "this is clearly a fake."

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. That's the, I think that's the polite British version of, like, looks like bullshit to me.

• 1:02:48Robert Evans?

  You're a fucking idiot, dude. That's bullshit. That's nothing. I'm sorry, man. But Fawcett just listens to the "it's quite beyond our experience" part. Again, you can't be kind to these people. They're crazy. You have to be direct to them. Otherwise, they're going to take their son and his friend to die in the jungle. Now, on Daunted, Fawcett sought to learn the "secret of the stone image," that's what his words, "by having a medium hold the figure in complete darkness and write down any impressions. The psychometrist saw a large continent between Africa and South America. Long prior to the rise of Egypt, there are elaborate temples with beautifully carved columns and processions of what looked like priests, including a high priest or leader, wearing a breastplate similar to the

• 1:03:29Robert Evans?

  one in the figure. Then disaster struck. Volcanoes and violent eruption, flaming lava pouring down their sides. The whole island shakes with a mighty rumbling sound. The sea rises as if in a hurricane, and a huge portion of land on both east and west sides disappears under the water."

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  Is this Atlantis?

• 1:03:46Robert Evans?

  Myth. It's an Atlantis myth. Yeah, he thinks he's going after Atlantis and it's in the Amazon.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Awesome. Awesome.

• 1:03:54Robert Evans?

  He's gonna get his kid killed doing this? It's really funny, though.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  And again, he thinks it's from Atlantis because a psychic-

• 1:04:02Robert Evans?

  He doesn't say Atlantis, but that's Atlantis.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  Held it in the dark.

• 1:04:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, he went, he did try to get his first opinion from an actual, you know, reputable expert.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:04:14Robert Evans?

  And when they didn't know anything, he went to, yeah, he went to a psychic. And she said it was from Atlantis.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:04:21Robert Evans?

  So, Fawcett, who published a number of articles in The Occult Review magazine, believed in the existence of Atlantis and was convinced that he could find a remnant of its advanced population. After all, the psychometrist saw the high priest take the very idol Fawcett possessed and hand it to another priest with instructions to retain it carefully and in due course, deliver it to an appointed one, who in turn must pass it on at length until it comes into the possession of a reincarnation of the personage it portrays, when numerous forgotten things will through its infinities be elucidated. In other words, this medium says like, "Oh, I'm seeing as the city falls, they're handing this idol off and say, pass it on until you find the man who can deliver it to the reincarnation of our great priest."

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  And we've already set up that he thinks his son is a reincarnation.

• 1:05:06Robert Evans?

  He thinks it's his son? Yeah.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 1:05:10Robert Evans?

  So he thinks H. Rider Haggard's given him a little statue of his boy in the past? It's really funny.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Well, this'll end well.

• 1:05:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is gonna end great. In his own book, based on extensive letters between Nina and Percy discussing this, A.J. Lee has come to believe that Percy grew so obsessed with the lost city of Z because it thought it would lead him to an underground Great White Lodge where he could execute what he and Nina had taken to calling "the great scheme," and they capitalized each of the first letters in those words.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  I don't want any Great White Lodges executing any great schemes. Thank you. No, please.

• 1:05:45Robert Evans?

  This is a great scheme. You're gonna love this scheme. He would send word to Nina after finding it, the city, whereupon she, along with other sympathizers, would join the three men and form a community on the Brazilian Plateau broadly modeled on the one Harold Large had created. Now, I gotta stop you there. Harold Large was a wizard and a friend of the Fawcettes from New Zealand. And in 1907, Large had founded an experimental magical community named the Havlock Work in New Zealand. This was a free love and also art and like woo focused place where everyone could like fuck and make art and do sex magic, I think, is the basic idea behind this commune.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  I mean, that honestly, that sounds fine if people want to do that.

• 1:06:23Robert Evans?

  To do in New Zealand. Like, not the middle of the Amazon with just you and your son and his friend. That's kinda crazy.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  I would even venture to say, maybe go back to England and do it there.

• 1:06:35Robert Evans?

  Go back to England, anywhere.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  But, yeah, I mean, you know, it's fine. People are gonna be wizards.

• 1:06:42Robert Evans?

  I don't know much about this free love wizard community. But I will say that his largest focus was that like, the modern world is destroying us. It's this tyrannical place that is like destroying the human soul. And so we have to create these communities so that like enlightened beings can gain the actual psychic power that they're supposed to have, or something like that. I think is the basic idea behind the Havlock Work. And so the Fawcettes are so inspired by what their friend Large is doing, that they kind of work this into their vision of what's gonna happen when Percy finds this mystical city, right? That he'll sin for his wife and all of their friends, and they'll all move to this like place where the veil of reality is thin in the Amazon, and they'll live forever

• 1:07:23Robert Evans?

  as like free love wizards, I guess. I think that's the basic idea. And it's important that you note that Percy's bringing his son to this place, but the commune isn't gonna have a place for Jack, which I guess is good, because that would be kinda weird, because his parents are both gonna be, I guess, fucking all their friends there. I'm gonna continue from Lee's book.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  I wish there was a responsible adult taking over for this kid, but I don't think they're gonna find him in the wizard commune, frankly.

• 1:07:50Robert Evans?

  No, they have not. To continue from Lee's book, he's like 19 or 20 or something right now. He's a young adult. Right? No, no, no, he's gotta be older than that. He's gotta be in his early twenties, because he was born in like 1903, right? Yeah, early twenties. So Lee's writes, "Jack Fawcett would be handed over to the Earth Guardians, and his physical body would be taken over by an ancient other. He would then depart Brazil and set up a new lodge near Trincomali and Ceylon. There, a new colony of evolved beings would wrest control from national governments and become the masters of the universe, guiding the human race back to a new beginning."

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:08:27Robert Evans?

  So that's the best explanation I've seen is what Percy thought he was really doing out in the fucking jungle. I gotta give my son up to these spirits so that he can take over governing Ceylon, and then me and my wife will get to fuck in the jungle with our friends forever. I think that's kind of the idea, as far as I can tell.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  He's signing over his son's actual body to a spirit.

• 1:08:49Robert Evans?

  To the Earth Guardians.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:08:50Robert Evans?

  To the Earth Guardians, yeah, who are gonna give his body to another. Don't know what happens to Jack's spirit. That's actually kind of unclear.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hope it gets a break from all this. This kid never had a chance. No.

• 1:09:03Robert Evans?

  It's about to. So as evidence that, yeah, Jack was fucked from the jump, as evidence that the Fawcettes really believed this stuff, Lee's includes in his book a letter that Jack wrote to Large, the guy with that commune in New Zealand in 1924, and this is Jack. "I begin to look upon Ceylon as my own private property now, and feel quite annoyed to think there are thousands of strangers laying down the laws there. You seem to think we shall soon go, and that always cheers us up. Where clairvoyants fail, we always say, 'Well, HL did not say that,' or 'HL says we must go, and he knows.'" So this guy, Henry Large, definitely gets them killed too, right? He's for sure a part of this. He's a huge lead of blame.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  "I begin to look on Ceylon as my private property?"

• 1:09:47Robert Evans?

  Look, how could this not go to your head? And that, you get a bit of that from his younger brother, who writes the book, like, who edits his dad's notes into the book Expedition Fawcett, because he's like, Jack wasn't a great spirit. He was kind of a dick sometimes. And I think he probably was an asshole.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  I mean, again, it, it, this is a little bit too much cultic belief for like one child. Like this kid is gonna be messed up.

• 1:10:10Robert Evans?

  I could both say he was probably pretty annoying to be around because he thought he was a god. But also that's, he, what else could have happened here?

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, if he made it into, into his like mid to late twenties and, and got away from his parents, I, I would, it would be, you know, his responsibility to figure things out and become a, a better person, but I'm guessing he doesn't get that chance.

• 1:10:31Robert Evans?

  He doesn't. And even then, like, it's not just his parents, as, as that letter shows, guys like Large, who are like famous and like rich and very like well-regarded, keep coming up to him and saying, yep, you're definitely this, a great spirit in there. Yep. Yep. You're gonna become a god and rule over Ceylon one day, my boy. Like, it's not just his parents. Like, he's really getting this reinforced by a lot of adults who should know better.

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And who are like, using him to play out like, just their sort of spiritual fantasies, just like stuff they think would be cool.

• 1:11:02Robert Evans?

  No, and they're pissed because World War I happened and it kind of proved that like, the world isn't just like getting better, even though you thought it was, like, things are really bad actually, and they're about to get worse. And all these people just want to like, break away and go fuck somewhere pretty, uh, and do magic.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  You know, whom's among us.

• 1:11:20Robert Evans?

  But you, you can do that without like sacrificing all of your, like, for example, you could have just written some books, Percy, and like, bought a house, done that. It's an option.

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  That's a lovely option. Sounds great.

• 1:11:33Robert Evans?

  I'm not doing an episode on H. Rider Haggard, you know? I mean, maybe I should, actually. Cause he and Large are definitely two of the people besides Percy who are most to blame for what happened. Next. In 1925, broken aging, Fawcett put together one last hail mary of an expedition. It included Jack and his son, Jack's best friend, Raleigh Rimmel. Before going, Percy visited a psychic named Helen Berry. She claimed to have been born into a mysterious mystical order dedicated to preparing human beings for important spiritual tasks. And she basically tells him, oh yes, the statue Percy is a statue of yourself as a priest in a past life, and you must take it into the jungle. Also, and this is something Lee's writes in his book, other mediums that Fawcett contacted around this time,

• 1:12:18Robert Evans?

  provided him with advice on the exact location of the South American Lodge and answered some of his other uncertainties, such as whether humans can have sexual relations with elementals.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  I'm so glad you cleared that up.

• 1:12:30Robert Evans?

  I, I, I love that.

• 1:12:33Robert Evans?

  First off, that should tell you what Percy's really thinking about with this journey is like, the sex magic is a big part of this for him, I think. I don't think that gets enough credit in any of the books about this.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Again, it's so, many people do sex magic without getting anyone killed. Like,

• 1:12:47Robert Evans?

  Exactly. Very rarely do they get people killed. This is not anti-sex magic. This is an anti-whatever-the-hell Percy Fawcett's doing podcast.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  Whatever you're into, you know, but like,

• 1:12:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  It's, and it's amazing how many psychics he seems to find who, um, tell him what he wants to hear.

• 1:13:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  Weird how that works out.

• 1:13:07Robert Evans?

  You'll, you'll note that that psychic's telling him a little bit different thing from the last one, right? And he interprets them all a little differently, but it never, the fact that no one's ever saying exactly the same things never really dissuades Percy. It makes, maybe these people are all just kind of making shit up separately, right?

• 1:13:25Robert Evans?

  So, as for why this 1925 expedition winds up being Percy's last, here's John Henning again. The old surveyor Percy made two suicidal pronouncements. One was that the trio should travel light with nothing more than small packs. Everyone in Amazonia knew that you could not cut trails and keep your team fed with fewer than eight men. I can confirm this, having done months of such cutting and carrying. But Fawcett sent their pack animals and porters back and continued with his, with only his two novices. His other dictum was that Indians would look after them. This was equally dangerous. The Zingu tribes pride themselves on generosity, but they expect visitors to reciprocate. All expeditions in, in the past four decades had brought plenty of presents, such as machetes, knives and beads.

• 1:14:08Robert Evans?

  Fawcett had none. And this is a thing that, when people have talked to the actual indigenous folks who were alive at the time, as a number of expeditions did, they'd all be like, well, he kept asking for food and he didn't like have anything. Like, he wasn't doing the thing you're supposed to do, which is where you like, give us a gift. And like, sometimes they stole shit, sometimes they were rude. You hear different stories. Some of them are true, some of them probably aren't. But like, the one thing that comes through is that they were seen as rude. And they were seen as rude in part because they didn't bring anything with them. And it is, it's actually kind of rude to like stumble into a place you've never been and don't understand starving to death because you didn't bring enough shit. And they'd be like, hey, guys, can I have your food? Can me and my bud, my kids have your food? Sorry, can we have like all of it? We are starving.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  And it's not like,

• 1:14:51Robert Evans?

  It's kind of a dick move.

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  If, if that happens because like, wow, you know, something really bad happened to you, you're boat wrecked, like whatever.

• 1:14:58Robert Evans?

  Of course we'll help you out. Man, shit happens. It's the jungle. Yeah.

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  You on purpose didn't bring the stuff you had the resources to bring because you had this idea based on your refusal to study and learn from the indigenous people.

• 1:15:11Robert Evans?

  You're, you're a white man. We know the shit white people have access to. You shouldn't be bringing stuff with you, first off. We've seen others. And also, we know you Percy by this point. You kind of have a reputation for being a cheapskate.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  But, but the psychic said he was entitled to it, so.

• 1:15:30Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right. He had to take over Ceylon.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  You know what? I'm, it's nice that just once, um, the, the white male entitlement will,

• 1:15:40Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  Get this guy what he deserves.

• 1:15:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He and his son and his son's buddy, uh, who all die.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  I feel less good about that.

• 1:15:48Robert Evans?

  They all die. They all die probably horrifically. These are probably not good deaths. They are never heard from again. They send a couple of letters early in their expedition, then they just disappear. And we have no idea what happened to them unless you take the highly credible accounts of local tribesmen who say they were murdered for being dicks or going in a place they shouldn't have gone, or a combination of the two, right? Now, there are some other plausible theories. Maybe they got lost and sick because they didn't bring enough stuff. Maybe there's even one account that they were mercy killed because some locals were like, oh, you guys are gonna get yourselves murdered. And we know the people you're going to get murdered by are really fucked up. So we're actually gonna kill you now out of kindness, because we can't stop you. You're clearly deranged, but we don't want you to suffer. That is one of the accounts.

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  I mean, is, is it also possible that they found a portal that led them to Atlantis and their king's there now?

• 1:16:41Robert Evans?

  Maybe they found a portal. Has anyone been to Sri Lanka ever? I don't know. I've never heard of a person from Sri Lanka. It's possible. No way to know, other than by briefly researching if there's things in, oh, yep. Yeah, yeah. Turns out whole country.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:16:56Robert Evans?

  Is it governed by the ghost of a white boy? Nope. Nah, it's not.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  Okay, so not that then.

• 1:17:01Robert Evans?

  So, not that then. I'm sorry, guys. I, I did a little bit of research there. Turns out not. That was my bad. That was my bad.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  That's weird. This Ouija board says they totally made it. Wow.

• 1:17:11Robert Evans?

  Oh, okay. Well, two sources, different things, you know? That means it's in dispute if we're the New York Times.

• 1:17:19Robert Evans?

  I'm not interested in litigating like what exactly happened to Fawcett and the, his kid and his kid's friend, because it's not really a mystery. They did a stupid thing in a dangerous place and they die, right? That's what happened to them.

• 1:17:33Robert Evans?

  Large and Nina corresponded for years after Percy went missing. And there's some really upsetting passages in their letters in, in the book Brazil That Never Was, where Nina is clearly really worried about her son and her husband. And Large is like, don't worry, I know they're going to be fine. They're gonna come out of the jungle. Percy will be out of the jungle any day now. Don't you worry. And he, she really gets strung along for a while there. It's kind of a bummer.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  That's a bummer. Yeah. That sucks.

• 1:17:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Modern historiography has proven Fawcett's theory about a lost city sort of right, if you squint. We do know that the Amazon was much more densely peopled prior to the arrival of white people and disease. I think one of the, one of the, uh, one theory is that during roughly the medieval period, what we'd call the medieval period, there would have been a population of between 1.5 and as much as like two to two and a half, maybe even three million people living in the Amazon, which is much more densely people than certainly the, the Europeans knew it to be after contact. And they did have, we have also found evidence using radar scans of what very likely were semi-large urban communities around where Percy expected to find Z.

• 1:18:38Robert Evans?

  These were not cyclopean stone cities or modern metropolises, but we're talking, you know, populations of in the thousands, you know, five or 6,000, not millions, right? These are not like vast, you know, things. But these were fairly advanced sites created by fairly advanced cultures. And one very, you know, prominent theory suggests that a lot of the Amazon was crafted intentionally over a long span of time as basically a giant living grocery store, a food forest, right? And so we should look at the Amazon not at like, as like this, this right, this primeval unspoiled wilderness that people never advanced in, but as a thing that people shaped and changed and engineered to a significant extent in order to better suit their own needs and provide them with a more comfortable lifestyle.

• 1:19:21Robert Evans?

  And then they all got sick and died. A lot of them, not all of them, but a lot of them got sick and died. And so a lot of the, the larger communities that had existed were gone by the time Europeans were fucking around there. And they were just like, it's complete wilderness, which is not really the case probably, right? We don't know for sure. These are theories, you know?

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  And none of those people were ancient Greeks or ancient Egyptians.

• 1:19:42Robert Evans?

  We know that. They definitely weren't ancient Greeks and Egyptians. Yeah. That's a hundred percent confirmed. Yes.

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:19:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, I do want to quote once more from an article by Hugh Thompson, who's that, he's that Peruvian scientist and adventurer who led numerous expeditions. And he wrote this of Fawcett for the Washington Post. As Grant acknowledges in his book, again, you will find nothing of it in the film. Fawcett was deeply conflicted about his suspicion that there might have been an earlier advanced civilization in the Amazon, a suspicion that for all the wrong reasons he was right about, although he himself never found anything to prove it. He could not reconcile this with his poor opinion of the Indian tribes. So he postulated the existence of white Indians who had somehow traveled across the Atlantic from Europe and brought civilization with them, right? And that's all you deserve to remember Percy Fawcett as. He was a crank who got his kid killed.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  And if he'd been less racist and paid attention to what people there said and how they lived, then he probably wouldn't have died. So like, congratulations, white man dies of racism. That's actually kind of cool.

• 1:20:43Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  Too racist to live.

• 1:20:45Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:20:46Robert Evans?

  Yep. Cool.

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  Miriam, you got anything you want to plug? Um, yeah, there's this secret lost city in the jungle, actually. No. So I would like to plug my podcast, which I do with members of my anarchist publishing collective that I'm in, which is called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. Your friend Margaret Kiljoy is also in that collective. So she is also on the podcast a lot. The podcast is Live Like the World is Dying, and it is a podcast for people who feel like shit's getting pretty fucked up and we'd like to talk about what to do about it.

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  And also, we're not trying to hide in a bunker with beans, but build community and skills. And also, beans are good, you know, but we're just-

• 1:21:38Speaker 07

  Beans are good.

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  We're mostly anti-bunker, I would say. But yeah, we got, we got stuff going on over there. We're Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness on some various social media platforms, and check us out.

• 1:21:53Speaker 07

  Sweet.

• 1:21:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, check it out. And check out the Amazon. You know what? I'm gonna go on an expedition down there and find a commune, or a place for a commune, and then some ghosts. And I don't know, I think one of us will wind up ruling an island in Southeast Asia. Pretty good chance. If you just go to the jungle, just buy a, buy a plane ticket to Brazil or anywhere with a jungle, just fly there and start walking. Just walk out, you'll find me.

• 1:22:16Speaker 07

  Oh, Robert.

• 1:22:17Robert Evans?

  Just go into the jungle and just get moving.

• 1:22:19Speaker 07

  Bad news. My Ouija board just told me if you do that, you'll die.

• 1:22:23Robert Evans?

  Well, I don't believe your Ouija board. It wasn't right about the artillery stuff.

• 1:22:28Robert Evans?

  Good night, everybody.

• 1:22:32Speaker 07

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

• 1:23:06Speaker 06

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

• 1:23:47Speaker 06

  If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the

• 1:23:51Speaker 05

  world to hide the body. But someone will find it. He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly. They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff, and they said, maybe she'll find out where this girl is. I saw him, Violet. Backhanded her. Pow!

• 1:24:13Speaker 05

  Listen to The Devil's Quarry, Season Two, in the Bone Valley feed, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:24:28Speaker 05

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 1:24:31Speaker 03

  Here's what you missed.

• 1:24:32Speaker 05

  People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait, hold up. They changed all of that? Yes. It's real. This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency.

• 1:24:43Speaker 03

  It's raw.

• 1:24:43Speaker 05

  White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade.

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  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 1:24:51Speaker 05

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

• 1:24:55Speaker 03

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:24:58Speaker 02

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.