The chronicles of the early El Dorado hunters that Fawcett cited only confirmed to many in the scientific establishment that he was an “amateur.” An article in Geographical Review concluded that the Amazon basin was so bereft of humankind that it was like “one of the world's great deserts… comparable with the Sahara.” The distinguished Swedish anthropologist Erland Nordenskiöld, who had met Fawcett in Bolivia, acknowledged that the English explorer was “an extremely original man, absolutely fearless,” but that he suffered from “boundless imagination.” An official at the RGS said of Fawcett, “He is a visionary kind of man who sometimes talks rather nonsense,” and added, “I do not expect that his going in for spiritualism has improved his judgment.”
Fawcett protested to Keltie, “Remember that I am a sane enthusiast and not an eccentric hunter of the Snark”-a reference to the make-believe creature in the Lewis Carroll poem. (According to the poem, Snark hunters often “suddenly vanish away, / And never be met with again.”)
Within the RGS, Fawcett maintained a loyal faction of supporters, including Reeves and Keltie, who in 1921 became the Society's vice president. “Never mind what people say about you and about your so-called ‘tall stories,' ” Keltie told Fawcett. “That does not matter. There are plenty of people who believe in you.”
Fawcett might have persuaded his detractors with delicacy and tact, but after so many years in the jungle he had become a creature of it. He did not dress fashionably, and in his house preferred to sleep in a hammock. His eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, like a doomsday prophet's, and even among the eccentrics at the RGS there was something vaguely frightening about what one official called his “rather queer” manner. After reports circulated within the Society that he was too intemperate, too uncontrollable, Fawcett grumbled to members of its council, “I don't lose my temper. I am not naturally tempestuous”-though his protestations suggested that he was being thrown into yet another pique.
In 1920, following the New Year, Fawcett used what little savings he had to move his family to Jamaica, saying that he wanted his children to have “an opportunity to grow up in the virile ambiente of the New World.” Although sixteen-year-old Jack had to leave school, he was delighted, because Raleigh Rimell had also settled there with his family, after the death of his father. While Jack worked as a cowhand on a ranch, Raleigh toiled on a United Fruit Company plantation. At night, the two boys would often get together and plot their incandescent futures: how they would dig up the Galla-pita-Galla treasure in Ceylon and crawl through the Amazon in search of Z.
THAT FEBRUARY, Fawcett left again for South America, in the hope of securing funding from the Brazilian government. Dr. Rice, whose 1916 journey had ended prematurely owing to the entry of the United States into the war, was already back in the jungle, near the Orinoco-a region north of the one Fawcett had targeted, which for centuries had been speculated to be a possible location of El Dorado. As usual, Dr. Rice went with a large, well-armed party, which rarely veered far from the major rivers. Ever obsessed with gadgetry, he had designed a forty-five-foot boat to overcome, as he put it, “the difficulty of bad rapids, strong currents, submerged rocks, and shallow waters.” The boat was shipped in pieces to Manaus, just as the city's opera house had been, and was assembled by laborers working around the clock. Dr. Rice christened the boat Eleanor II, for his wife, who accompanied him on a less risky leg of the journey. He had also brought along a mysterious forty-pound black box, with dials and with wires jutting from it. Vowing that it would transform exploration, he had loaded the contraption into his boat and taken it with him into the jungle.
One evening at camp, he carefully removed the box and placed it on a makeshift table. Slipping on a pair of earphones and twirling the dials as ants crawled over his fingertips, he could hear vague crackling sounds, as if someone were whispering from behind the trees-only the signals were coming from as far as the United States. Dr. Rice had picked them up using a wireless telegraphy set-an early radio-specially outfitted for the expedition. The device cost around six thousand dollars, the equivalent today of about sixty-seven thousand dollars.
Each night, as the rain dripped off the leaves and monkeys swung over his head, Dr. Rice would set up the machine and listen to the news: how President Woodrow Wilson had suffered a stroke and how the Yankees had purchased Babe Ruth from the Red Sox for $125,000. Although the machine could not send messages, it retrieved signals indicating the time of day at different meridians around the globe, so that Dr. Rice could more accurately fix longitude. “The results… far exceeded expectations,” remarked John W. Swanson, a member of the expedition who helped operate the radio. “Time signals were received at every locality where they were desired and a daily newspaper, published from news reports received from radio-stations in the United States, Panama, and Europe, kept the members of the expedition fully informed of current events.”
The expedition followed the Casiquiare, a two-hundred-mile natural canal that connected the Orinoco and the Amazon river systems. At one point, Dr. Rice and his men abandoned the boats and went on foot to explore a portion of jungle that was rumored to contain Indian artifacts. After cutting through the forest for about half a mile, they came upon several towering rocks with curious markings. The men quickly scraped away the moss and vines. The rock faces were painted with figures resembling animals and human bodies. Without more modern technology (radiocarbon dating wasn't available until 1949), it was impossible to determine their age, but they were similar to the ancient-looking rock paintings that Fawcett had seen and made diagrams of in his logbooks.
The expedition, excited, returned to the boat and continued to ascend the river. On January 22, 1920, two members of Dr. Rice's team were foraging along the shore when they thought they saw someone watching them. They bolted back to camp, sounding the alarm. In an instant, Indians fanned out on the opposite bank of the river. “A large, stout, dark, hideous individual gesticulated violently and kept shouting in an angry manner,” Dr. Rice later wrote in his report to the RGS. “A thick, short growth of hair adorned his upper lip, and a great tooth was suspended from the lower. He was the leader of a band of which some sixty were visible at first, but more seemed to spring up each minute, until the bank was lined with them as far up and down as we could see.”
They carried long bows, arrows, clubs, and blow darts. What was most striking, however, was their skin. It was “almost white in color,” Dr. Rice said. The tribesmen were Yanomami, one of the groups of so-called white Indians.
During his previous expeditions, Dr. Rice had taken a cautious, paternalistic approach when contacting tribes. Whereas Fawcett believed that the Indians should, for the most part, remain “uncontaminated” by Westerners, Dr. Rice thought that they should be “civilized,” and he and his wife had established a school in São Gabriel, along the Rio Negro, and several medical clinics staffed with Christian missionaries. After one visit to the school, Dr. Rice told the RGS that the change in the children's “dress, manners, and general appearance” and the “atmosphere of order and industry” were in “striking contrast to the squalid village of naked little savages” that had once prevailed.