Fawcett then did something that shocked Costin so much that he would recall it vividly even as an old man: the major untied the handkerchief around his neck and, waving it above his head, waded into the river, heading directly into the fusillade of arrows. Over the years, Fawcett had picked up scraps of Indian dialects, scribbling the words in his logbooks and studying them at night, and he called out the few fragments of vocabulary he knew, repeating friend, friend, friend, not sure if the word that he was shouting was even right, as the water from the river rose to his armpits. Then the arrows ceased. For a moment, no one moved as Fawcett stood in the river, hands above his head, like a penitent being baptized. According to Costin, an Indian appeared from behind a tree and came down to the edge of the river. Paddling out toward Fawcett in a raft, he took the handkerchief from Fawcett's hand. “The Major made signs for him to be taken across,” Costin later recounted in a letter to his daughter, and the Indian “poled back to his side with Fawcett kneeling on his flimsy craft.”
“On climbing the opposite bank,” Fawcett said, “I had an unpleasant anticipation of receiving a shot in the face or an arrow in the stomach.”
The Indians led him away. “[Fawcett] disappeared into the forest, and we were left wondering!” Costin said. The party feared that its leader had been slaughtered until, nearly an hour later, he emerged from the jungle with an Indian cheerfully wearing his Stetson.
In such fashion, Fawcett made friends with a group of Guarayos. “[They] helped us to make camp, remaining in it all night and giving us yucca, bananas, fish, necklaces, parrots, and in fact of all they had,” Fawcett wrote in one of his dispatches.
Fawcett did not carry a craniometer and relied instead on his eyes to record observations of the Indians. He had been accustomed to meeting tribes that had been conquered by whites and acculturated by force, their members weakened by disease and brutality. By contrast, these hundred and fifty or so forest Indians seemed robust. “The men are finely developed, and of a warm brown, black haired, good looking and well clothed in dyed cotton shirts, plenty of which were in course of manufacture in their huts,” Fawcett wrote. He was struck by the fact that, unlike the emaciated explorers, they had substantial resources of food. One Guarayo crushed a plant with a stone and let its juice spill into a stream, where it formed a milky cloud. “After a few minutes a fish came to the surface, swimming in a circle, mouth gaping, then turned on its back apparently dead,” Costin recalled. “Soon there were a dozen fish floating belly up.” They had been poisoned. A Guarayo boy waded into the water and picked out the fattest ones for eating. The quantity of poison only stunned them and posed no risk to humans when the fish were cooked; equally remarkable, the fish that the boy had left in the water soon returned to life and swam away unharmed. The same poison was often used for toothaches. The Indians, Fawcett was discovering, were masters of pharmacology, adept at manipulating their environment to suit their needs, and he concluded that the Guarayos were “a most intelligent race of people.”
After his 1910 expedition, Fawcett, suspecting that the Indians of the Amazon held secrets long overlooked by historians and ethnologists, started to seek out various tribes, no matter how fierce their reputation. “There are problems to solve out here… which shout for someone to undertake them,” he informed the RGS. “But experience is essential. It is a folly to enter the unexplored parts without it-and in these days suicide.” In 1911, he resigned from the boundary commission to pursue inquiries into the burgeoning new field of anthropology. Once, not far from the Heath River, Fawcett was sitting with Costin and the rest of his team eating when a band of Indians encircled them with drawn bows. “Without any hesitation,” Costin wrote, “Fawcett dropped his belt and machete, to show he was unarmed, and advanced toward them, hands above his head. There was a slight pause in doubt and then one of ‘los barbaros' [the savages] put down his arrows and walked to meet him. We had made friends with the Echojas!”
Over time, this became Fawcett's signature approach. “Whenever he came upon the savages,” Costin said, “he would walk slowly towards them… with hands stretched in the air.” As with his method of traveling in radically small parties, without protection from armed soldiers, his means of establishing relations with tribes, some of which had never before seen a white man, struck many as both heroic and suicidal. “I know, from persons who have informed me, how he crossed the river in front of a whole tribe of hostile savages, and simply by his bravery induced them to cease firing, and accompanied them to their village,” a Bolivian official reported to the Royal Geographical Society of Fawcett's meeting with the Guarayos. “I must say they are indeed very hostile, because I have been among them myself, and in 1893 General Pando not only lost some of his men, but also lost his nephew, and the engineer, Mr. Muller, who, tired of the journey, decided to cross from one of the rivers up to the Modeidi, and up to this day we have not heard anything about them.”
Fawcett's ability to succeed where so many others failed contributed to a growing myth of his invincibility, which he himself began to believe. How could one explain, he wondered, “standing deliberately in front of savages with whom it was vital to make friends, arrows fixing past one's head, between one's legs, even between arm and body, for several minutes, and yet being untouched”? Nina also thought that he was indestructible.
Once, after he had approached a hostile Indian tribe with his modus operandi, she informed the RGS, “His encounter with the savages and the way he handled them is one of the bravest episodes I have ever heard of- and I am glad he behaved as he did-personally, I have no fears whatever regarding his safety, for I am so certain that on occasions like that he will do the right thing.”
Costin wrote that on their five expeditions Fawcett invariably made friends with the tribes they met. There was, however, one exception. In 1914, Fawcett sought out a group of Maricoxis in Bolivia, of whom the other Indians in the area had told him to be wary. When he made his usual overtures, the Indians reacted violently. As they came in for the kill, Fawcett's men pleaded for permission to use their guns. We must fire, Costin yelled.
Fawcett hesitated. “He did not wish to do so, for we had never fired before,” Costin recalled. But at last Fawcett relented. Later, Fawcett said that he had ordered his men to fire only at the ground or in the air. But, according to Costin, “we could see that one [Indian] at least had been hit in the stomach.”
If Costin's account is correct, and there is little reason to doubt it, then it was the one time Fawcett violated his own edict, and he was apparently so mortified that he doctored his official reports to the RGS and concealed the truth his entire life.
ONE DAY, WHILE staying with a tribe of Echojas in the Bolivian region of the Amazon, Fawcett stumbled across further evidence that seemed to contradict the prevailing notion that the jungle was a death trap in which small bands of hunter-gatherers led a miserable existence, abandoning and killing their own to survive. Fawcett had reinforced this image with accounts of his own harrowing journeys, and he was stunned to find that, like the Guarayos, the Echojas had stockpiled mass quantities of food. They often used the Amazonian floodplains, which were more fertile than terra firma, to grow crops, and they had developed elaborate ways of hunting and fishing. “Food problems never bothered them,” Fawcett said. “When hungry, one of them would go off into the forest and call for game; and I joined him on one occasion to see how he did it. I could see no signs of an animal in the bush, but the Indian plainly knew better. He set up ear-piercing cries and signed to me to keep still. In a few minutes a small deer came timidly through the bush… and the Indian shot it with bow and arrow. I have seen them draw monkeys and birds out of the trees above by means of these peculiar cries.” Costin, an award-winning marksman, was equally amazed to watch the Indians succeed where he, with his rifle, failed again and again.