The folders contained more than two decades of correspondence between Fawcett and officials at the Society. Many of the letters were addressed to Reeves or to Sir John Scott Keltie, who was the RGS secretary from 1892 to 1915 and later its vice president. There were also scores of letters from Nina, government officials, explorers, and friends concerning Fawcett's disappearance. I knew it would take me days, if not weeks, to go through everything, and yet I felt delight. Here was a road map to Fawcett's life as well as to his death.
I held one of the letters up to the light. It was dated December 14, 1921. It said, “There is very little doubt that the forests cover traces of a lost civilization of a most unsuspected and surprising character.”
I opened my reporter's pad and started to take notes. One of the letters mentioned that Fawcett had received “a diploma” from the RGS. I had never seen any reference to the Society having given out diplomas, and I asked the archivist why Fawcett had been awarded one.
“He must have enrolled in one of the Society's training programs,” she said. She walked over to a bookshelf and began to riffle through journals. “Yes, right here. He apparently took a course and graduated around 1901.”
“You mean he actually went to school to become an explorer?”
“I guess you could call it that.”
6
Fawcett didn't want to be late. It was February 4, 1900, and all he had to do was get from his hotel in Redhill, Surrey, to No. 1 Savile Row, in the Mayfair district of London, but nothing in the city moved- or, more accurately, everything seemed to be moving. Billboard men. Butcher boys. Clerks. Horse-drawn omnibuses. And that strange beast which was invading the streets, scaring the horses and pedestrians, breaking down on every curb: the automobile. The law had originally required drivers to proceed at no more than two miles per hour with a footman walking ahead waving a red flag, but in 1896 the speed limit had been raised to fourteen miles per hour. And everywhere Fawcett turned the new and the old seemed to be at war: electric lights, scattered on the fancier granite streets, and gas lamps, lodged on most cobblestoned corners, glowing in the fog; the Tube bolting through the earth like one of Edward Fawcett's science-fiction inventions, and bicycles, only a few years earlier the smartest thing on the footpaths and now already fusty. Even the smells seemed at odds: the traditional stench of horse dung and the newer whiff of petrol. It was as if Fawcett were glimpsing the past and the future at once.
Since he had left England for Ceylon fourteen years earlier, London seemed to have become more crowded, more dirty, more modern, more rich, more poor, more everything. With over four and a half million people, London was the biggest city in the world, larger than Paris or New York. Flower girls yelled, “All a growin' and all a blowin'!” Newspaper boys cried, “ 'Orrible murder!”
As Fawcett pushed his way through the crowds, he no doubt struggled to keep his clothes free of the soot from coal furnaces that had mixed with fog to form London's own species of grime, a tenacious black mixture that penetrated everything; even the keyholes on houses had to be sheathed with metal plates. Then there was the horse manure-“the London mud,” as it was politely called-which, though swept up by street urchins and sold door-to-door as garden fertilizer, was virtually everywhere Fawcett stepped.
Fawcett turned onto an elegant street in Burlington Gardens, away from brothels and blacking factories. On the corner was a handsome stone house with a portico. It was No. 1 Savile Row. And Fawcett could see the bold sign: ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY.
As Fawcett entered the three-story house-the Society had not yet moved near to Hyde Park-he was aware that he was stepping into an enchanting place. Over the front door was a half window in the shape of a hemispherical lantern; each pane represented the parallels and meridians of a globe. Fawcett would have walked past the office of the chief clerk and his two assistants, past a stairwell that led to a council room, until he arrived at a glass-roofed chamber. Sunlight filtered in, illuminating, through dusty shafts, globes and chart tables. It was the map room, and usually sitting at the far end, on a dais, was the man Fawcett was looking for: Edward Ayearst Reeves.
In his late thirties, with a receding hairline, beakish nose, and neatly trimmed mustache, Reeves was not only the map curator but also the chief instructor of surveying-and the person primarily charged with turning Fawcett into a gentleman explorer. A skilled draftsman, Reeves had started working at the Society in 1878, at the age of sixteen, as an assistant to the previous curator, and he never seemed to forget that sense of awe that newcomers felt upon arrival. “How well I remember it all,” he wrote in his autobiography, The Recollections of a Geographer. “With what pride, and yet with what fear and trembling I first entered the precinct of this wonderful place of which I had read in books, and from which explorers had been sent out to all parts of the world and returned to tell of their marvelous discovery and heroic adventures.” Unlike many of the bellicose, wild-eyed members of the Society, Reeves had a warm, gentle manner. “He had an innate capacity for teaching,” a colleague said. “He knew exactly how to put a point so that the most obtuse student could grasp it.”
Fawcett and Reeves eventually went up to the third floor, where the classes were held. Francis Galton had advised each recruit that he would soon find himself admitted into “the society of men with whose names he had long been familiar, and whom he had reverenced as his heroes.” Taking the surveying course about the same time as Fawcett was Charles Lindsay Temple, who could regale his colleagues with stories of his time in the Civil Service in Brazil; Lieutenant T. Dannreuther, who was obsessed with collecting rare butterflies and insects; and Arthur Edward Seymour Laughton, who was gunned down by Mexican bandits in 1913, at the age of thirty-eight.
Reeves got down to business. If Fawcett and the other students heeded his instructions, they could become the next generation of great explorers. Reeves would teach them what cartographers had not been able to do for most of history: fix their position anywhere. “If you could blindfold a man, and take him to any spot on the earth's surface, say somewhere in the middle of Africa, and then remove the bandage from his eyes, he could [if properly trained] show you on a map, in a short time, the exact spot upon which he stands,” Reeves said. Moreover, if Fawcett and his colleagues dared to climb the highest peaks and penetrate the deepest forest, they could chart the world's remaining undiscovered realms.
Reeves displayed a series of strange objects. One looked like a telescope attached to a circular metal wheel, with various screws and chambers. Reeves explained that it was a theodolite, which could determine the angle between the horizon and celestial bodies. He demonstrated more tools-artificial horizons, aneroids, and sextants-and then led Fawcett and the others up to the roof of the building, to test the equipment. The fog often made it hard to observe the sun or the stars, but now they could see well enough. Latitude, Reeves said, could be found by measuring the angle of the noon sun above the horizon or the height of the North Star, and each of the students tried to use the devices to fix his position, an extremely difficult task for a beginner. As Fawcett took his turn, Reeves watched in astonishment. “He was extremely quick at learning anything new,” Reeves recalled. “And, although he never used a sextant and artificial horizon before for star observation, I remember the first night he tried he brought the stars down into the artificial horizon, and took excellent altitude right away without any difficulty. Anyone who has attempted this will know that as a rule it is only done after considerable practice.”