I told him about my plans to trace Fawcett's route.
“You got the Fawcett bug, huh?” he said.
By then, I had it more than I cared to admit, and I said simply, “It seems like an interesting story.”
“Oh, that it is. That it is.”
When I asked how he had escaped from captivity, he stiffened slightly in his chair. He explained that, after he and his group were transported up-river, the Indians had forced them out of the boats and up a massive clay embankment. At the top, the Indians posted guards and set up a makeshift camp. Lynch said that he had tried to make a note of everything and everyone-to find a weak spot-but darkness soon enveloped them, and he could distinguish his captors only by their voices. Strange noises emanated from the forest. “Have you ever heard the sound of a jungle?” Lynch asked. I shook my head. “It's not what you imagine,” he went on. “It's not really loud or anything like that. But it's always talking.”
He recalled how he had told his son, James, Jr., to try to sleep, and how he, too, eventually collapsed from exhaustion. He wasn't sure how long he had nodded off, he said, when he opened his eyes and saw, in the morning sunlight, the tip of a spear flickering in the forest.
He turned around and saw another gleaming point, as more and more Indian men, all armed, emerged from the forest. There were over a hundred of them. James, Jr., who had also been woken up by the noise, whispered, “They're everywhere.”
“I told him everything was going to be okay, though I knew it wasn't,” Lynch recalled.
As the tribesmen formed a circle around Lynch and his son, five older Indians, who appeared to be chiefs, sat down on wooden stumps in front of the group. “That's when I knew our fate was about to be determined,” Lynch said.
The young Indian who had led the original assault stepped forward and argued angrily before what appeared to be a council; occasionally, after he made a point, several Indians pounded their wooden clubs in assent.
Others addressed the chiefs, and every so often an Indian, who spoke some broken Portuguese, translated for the benefit of Lynch and his group, explaining that they were being accused of trespassing. The negotiations went on for two days. “There would be these endless hours of debate, and we didn't know what was going on,” Lynch recalled, “and then this translator would sum up everything in a single sentence. It was, like, bam, ‘They will tie you over the river and let the piranhas eat you.' Or, bam, ‘They shall cover you in honey and let the bees sting you to death.' ”
Just then the door to Lynch's office opened and a young man walked in. He had a round, handsome face. “This is my son, James, Jr.,” Lynch said.
He was now twenty-five and engaged to be married. When James, Jr., learned that we were discussing the Fawcett expedition, he said, “You know, I had a lot of romantic notions about the jungle and this kind of finished that.”
Lynch said that the tribe began to target his son, touching and taunting him, and Lynch thought about telling him to bolt into the forest, though death there was no less certain. Then Lynch noticed that four of the chiefs seemed to defer to a fifth one, who appeared to be the least swayed by the violent exhortations. As several Indians indicated that they intended to tie up his son and kill him, Lynch rose anxiously and approached the fifth chief. Relying on the Indian translator, Lynch said that he was sorry if his men had offended his people in any way. Assuming the role of a chief, Lynch said, he began to negotiate directly with him and agreed to hand over his group's boats and equipment in exchange for the party's release. The elderly chief turned and spoke to the council for several minutes, and, as he did, the Indians became more riled. Then the council fell quiet, and the commanding chief said something to Lynch in an unflinching voice. Lynch waited for the translator, who seemed to struggle to find the words. Finally, he said, “We accept your gifts.”
Before the council could change its mind, Lynch obtained his radio, which had been confiscated by the tribe, to send an SOS with his coordinates, and a bush plane was dispatched to rescue them. The value of the ransom came to thirty thousand dollars.
Lynch said that he was the last member of the party to be released and that it wasn't until he boarded the plane and was safely in the air that he thought about Colonel Fawcett again. He wondered if Fawcett and his son had also been taken hostage, and if they had tried and failed to proffer a ransom. Looking out the airplane window, Lynch recalled, he could see the embankment where he and his team had been held for three days. The Indians were gathering their things, and Lynch watched as they faded into the forest.
“I don't think anyone will ever solve the mystery of Fawcett's disappearance,” Lynch said. “It's impossible.”
On a computer on Lynch's desk, I noticed a satellite image of jagged mountains. To my surprise, it was for Lynch's next expedition. “I leave in two days. We're going to the top of the Andes.”
“Not me,” James, Jr., said. “I have a wedding to plan.”
James, Jr., said goodbye to me and left the room, and Lynch talked about his upcoming adventure. “We're looking for this plane that crashed in the Andes in 1937,” he said. “No one's ever been able to find the thing.” He sounded excited, when, in the midst of his explanation, he stopped and said, “Don't tell my son, but I wouldn't mind tagging along with you. If you find anything about Z, you must tell me. Please.”
I said I would. Before I left, Lynch offered some advice. “First, you need a top-notch guide, someone who has ties to the tribes in the area,” he said. “Second, you need to go in as quietly as possible. Fawcett was right: too big a party only calls attention to itself.” He warned me to be careful. “Remember: My son and I were lucky. Most of these Fawcett expeditions never come back.”
14
There was no epiphany, no bolt of lightning. Rather, the theory developed over time, with a clue here and a clue there, in fits and starts and with unexpected turns, the trail of evidence reaching as far back as his days in Ceylon. At Fort Frederick, Fawcett had first learned that it was possible for a great kingdom to seclude itself in the jungle and, after time had taken its inexorable toll, for its palaces and thoroughfares to vanish under creeping vines and roots. But the notion of Z-of a lost civilization concealed in the Amazon-began truly to take hold when Fawcett encountered the hostile Indians he had been warned to avoid at all costs.
In 1910, he was riding in canoes with Costin and several other companions, exploring an unknown part of the Heath River in Bolivia, when seven-foot-long poisonous arrows started to rain down, boring into the side of the canoe. A Spanish friar once described watching a companion who had been hit by such a weapon: “The moment that it struck him he felt a great pain… for the foot in which he had been wounded turned very black, and the poison gradually made its way up through the leg, like a living thing, without its being possible to head it off, although they applied many cauteries to it with fire… and when it had mounted to his heart, he died, being in great pain until the third day, when he gave his soul to God, who had created it.”
A member of Fawcett's team dived into the water, shouting, “Retire! Retire!” But Fawcett insisted on pulling the boats to the opposite bank, as arrows continued to cascade from the sky. “One of these came within a foot of my head, and I actually saw the face of the savage who fired it,” Costin later recalled. Fawcett ordered his men to drop their rifles, but the barrage of arrows persisted. And so Fawcett instructed one of the men, as further demonstration of their peaceful intentions, to pull out his accordion and play it. The rest of the party, commanded to stand and face their deaths without protest, sang along as Costin, first in a trembling voice, then more fervently, called out the words to “The Soldiers of the Queen”: “In the fight for England's glory, lads / Of its world wide glory let us sing.”