![]() ![]() After only a week, all food was exhausted and they were really starving. So they soon had to abandon their boat and continue on foot. This was the end of the dry season with the river at its lowest. Fawcett took minimal supplies, since he was accustomed to being fed by rubber stations. In 1908, the Bolivians asked Fawcett to survey another of their frontiers with Brazil: a small river called Verde, far away at the north-eastern corner of the large landlocked country. He emerges from it as a typical Edwardian colonial officer - friendly with South Americans but looking down on them, appalled by the cruelty at some rubber stations, full of gossip about life on this remote but boom-rich backwater, and uninterested in nature apart from banalities about dangerous snakes and irritating insects. ![]() But he kept a journal, and in 1953 his son Brian edited this and other papers into a book called Exploration Fawcett. The housing crash we’re heading for might not be the one you thinkįawcett’s only publications were a series of papers in the Geographical Journal about his mapping work. John Hemming corrects the Fawcett record on our podcast: This was the height of the great Amazon rubber boom, so he and his team cruised from one comfortable rubber barraca to the next, taking their regular measurements. But he described it as boring, because the new frontier was all along rivers. This survey was the best thing Fawcett did. The society’s secretary asked the newly qualified Fawcett whether he wanted to go he accepted, reported for duty in La Paz and was at work on the new Amazonian frontier by the end of the year. The Bolivians approached the RGS for a mature surveyor to do this. Far away in South America, Bolivia had just sold its rubber-rich province of Acre to Brazil, so it needed its new north-western boundary mapped. The army let him take the Royal Geographical Society’s course on frontier surveying. Fawcett’s game-changer came in 1906, when he was 40. The only significant events were getting married and becoming a devotee (like many others) of the charlatan psychic Madame Blavatsky. The next 20 years involved garrison duty in Ceylon and postings in Malta and England. Percy Fawcett joined the army immediately after school, with a commission in the artillery in 1886. Had the advertisement been about a soap powder, it would fall foul of the Trade Descriptions Act. It is an insult to the huge roster of true explorers. Calling him one of our greatest explorers is like calling Eddie the Eagle one of our greatest sportsmen. Greatest explorer? Fawcett? He was a surveyor who never discovered anything, a nutter, a racist, and so incompetent that the only expedition he organised was a five-week disaster. ![]() The new film The Lost City of Z is being advertised as based on the true story of one of Britain’s greatest explorers. 3: John Hemming on why Percy Fawcett wasn’t the great explorer of Hollywood myth: We’re closing 2017 by republishing our twelve most-read articles of the year. ![]()
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