Just before sundown, he would finally signal to his men to set up camp. Willis, the cook, was in charge of preparing supper and supplemented their powdered soup with whatever animals the group had hunted. Hunger turned anything into a delicacy: armadillos, stingrays, turtles, anacondas, rats. “Monkeys are looked on as good eating,” Fawcett observed. “Their meat tastes rather pleasant; but at first the idea revolted me because when stretched over a fire to burn off the hair they looked so horribly human.”
While moving through the forest, Fawcett and his men were more susceptible to predators. Once, a pack of white-lipped wild pigs stampeded toward Chivers and the interpreter, who fired their guns in every direction as Willis scampered up a tree to avoid being shot by his companions. Even frogs could be deadly to the touch: a Phyllobates terribilis, which is found in the Colombian Amazon, has enough toxins in it to kill a hundred people. One day Fawcett stumbled upon a coral snake, whose venom shuts down the central nervous system of its victim, causing the person to suffocate. In the Amazon, Fawcett marveled, the animal kingdom “is against man as it is nowhere else in the world.”
But it wasn't the big predators that he and his companions fretted about most. It was the ceaseless pests. The sauba ants that could reduce the men's clothes and rucksacks to threads in a single night. The ticks that attached like leeches (another scourge) and the red hairy chiggers that consumed human tissue. The cyanide-squirting millipedes. The parasitic worms that caused blindness. The berne flies that drove their ovipositors through clothing and deposited larval eggs that hatched and burrowed under the skin. The almost invisible biting flies called piums that left the explorers' bodies covered in lesions. Then there were the “kissing bugs,” which bite their victim on the lips, transferring a protozoan called Try-panosoma cruzi; twenty years later, the person, thinking he had escaped the jungle unharmed, would begin to die of heart or brain swelling. Nothing, though, was more hazardous than the mosquitoes. They transmitted everything from malaria to “bone-crusher” fever to elephantiasis to yellow fever. “[Mosquitoes] constitute the chief single reason why Amazonia is a frontier still to be won,” Willard Price wrote in his 1952 book The Amazing Amazon.
Fawcett and his men wrapped themselves in netting, but even this was insufficient. “The piums settled on us in clouds,” Fawcett wrote. “We were forced to close both ends of the [boat's] palm-leaf shelter with mosquito-nets, and to use head-veils as well, yet in spite of that our hands and faces were soon a mass of tiny, itching blood-blisters.” Meanwhile, polvorina, which are so small they resemble powder, hid in the hair of Fawcett and his companions. Often, all that the men could think about was insects. They came to recognize the different pitch of each insect's wings rubbing together. (“The Tabana came singly, but advertised their presence by a probe like the thrust of a needle,” Fawcett said.) The bugs tormented the explorers to the point of madness, as a diary of a naturalist who went on a later expedition with Fawcett showed:
10/20: Attacked in hammocks by tiny gnat not over 1 /10; inch in length; mosquito nets no protection; gnats bite all night allowing no sleep.
10/21: Another sleepless night account of blood-sucking gnats.
10/22: My body mass of bumps from insect bites, wrists and hands swollen from bites of tiny gnats. 2 nights with almost no sleep-simply terrible… Rain during noon, all afternoon and most of night. My shoes have been soaked since starting… Worst ticks so far.
10/23: Horrible night with worst biting gnats yet; even smoke of no avail.
10/24: More than half ill from insects. Wrists and hands swollen. Paint limbs with iodine.
10/25: Arose to find termites covering everything left on the ground… Blood-sucking gnats still with us.
10/30: Sweat bees, gnats and “polverinahs” (blood-sucking gnats) terrible.
11/2: My right eye is sadly blurred by gnats.
11/3: Bees and gnats worse than ever; truly “there's no rest for the weary.”
11/5: My first experience with flesh and carrion-eating bees. Biting gnats in clouds-very worst we have encountered-rendering one's food unpalatable by filling it with their filthy bodies, their bellies red and disgustingly distended with one's own blood.
Six months into the expedition, most of the men, including Chivers, were sick with fever. They were overcome with insatiable thirst, skull-splitting headaches, and uncontrollable shivering. Their muscles throbbed so much that it was hard to walk. They had contracted, in most cases, either yellow fever or malaria. If it was yellow fever, what the men feared most was spitting up mouthfuls of blood-the so-called black vomit- which meant that death was near. When it was malaria-which, according to one estimate, more than 80 percent of the people then working in the Amazon contracted-the men sometimes experienced hallucinations, and could slip into a coma and die. At one point, Fawcett shared a boat with four passengers who fell ill and perished. Using paddles, he helped to dig their graves along the shore. Their only monument, Fawcett noted, was “a couple of crossed twigs tied with grass.”
One morning Fawcett noticed a trail of indentations on a muddy bank. He bent down to inspect them. They were human footprints. Fawcett searched the woods in the vicinity and discovered broken branches and trampled leaves. Indians were tracking them.
Fawcett had been told that the Pacaguara Indians lived along the banks of the Abuná River and had a reputation for kidnapping trespassers and carrying them into the forest. Two other tribes-the Parintinin, farther to the north, and the Kanichana, in the southern Mojo plains-were said to be cannibalistic. According to a missionary in 1781, “When [the Kanichana] captured prisoners in their wars they either kept them forever as slaves or roasted them to devour them in their banquets. They used as drinking cups the skulls of those whom they had killed.” Although Westerners were fixated on cannibalism (Richard Burton and some friends had started a soiree called the Cannibal Club) and often exaggerated its extent in order to justify their conquest of indigenous people, there is no question that some Amazonian tribes practiced it, either for ritualistic reasons or for vengeance. Human meat was typically prepared two ways: roasted or boiled. The Guayaki, who practiced ritualistic cannibalism when members of the tribe died, cut bodies into quarters with a bamboo knife, severing the head and the limbs from the trunk. “The head and the intestines are not treated according to the same ‘recipe' as the muscular parts or the internal organs,” explained the anthropologist Pierre Clastres, who spent time studying the tribe in the early 1960s. “The head is first carefully shaved… then boiled, as are the intestines, in ceramic cooking pots. Regarding the meat proper and the internal organs, they are placed on a large wooden grill under which a fire is lit… The meat is roasted slowly and the fat released by the heat is absorbed gradually with the koto [brush]. When the meat is considered ‘done' it is divided among all those present. Whatever is not eaten on the spot is set aside in the women's baskets and used as nutriment the next day. As far as the bones are concerned, they are broken and their marrow, of which the women are particularly fond, is sucked.” The Guayaki's preference for human skin is the reason that they call themselves Aché Kyravwa-“Guayaki Eaters of Human Fat.”
Fawcett studied the forest around him, looking for Indian warriors. Amazon tribes were expert at stalking their enemies. While some liked to announce their presence before an attack, many used the forest to enhance their stealth. They painted their bodies and faces with black charcoal and with red ointments distilled from berries and fruits. Their weapons-blow darts and arrows-struck silently, before anyone had time to flee. Certain tribes exploited the very things that made the forest so hazardous to Fawcett and his men-dipping the points of their weapons in the lethal toxins from stingrays and dart frogs or using biting soldier ants to suture their wounds in battle. In contrast, Fawcett and his party had no experience in the jungle. They were, as Costin confessed during his first journey, “greenhorns.” Most were sick and debilitated and hungry-the perfect prey.