Before we said goodbye, she remembered something else about Fawcett. For years, she said, other people came from far away to ask about the missing explorers. She stared at me, her narrow eyes widening. “What is it that these white people did?” she asked. “Why is it so important for their tribe to find them?”
22
The world waited for news. “Any day now may bring a cable from my husband announcing that he is safe and is returning with” Jack and Raleigh, Nina Fawcett told a reporter in 1927, two years after the party was last heard from. Elsie Rimell, who corresponded frequently with Nina, echoed her sentiments: “I believe firmly that my boy and those he is with will come back out of that wilderness.”
Nina, who was living in Madeira with her sixteen-year-old daughter, Joan, beseeched the Royal Geographical Society not to lose confidence in her husband and proudly circulated one of Jack's last letters describing his journey into the wilderness. “I think it is quite interesting, as being the first experience of the kind as seen by a boy of twenty-two,” she said. Once, when Joan was competing in a long-distance swimming race in the ocean, she told Nina, “Mother! I feel I must succeed, because if I succeed today Daddy will succeed in finding what he is searching for, and if I fail- they will fail.” To everyone's astonishment, she won. Brian, who was then twenty and working at the railroad company in Peru, assured his mother that there was no reason to worry. “Father has got to his goal,” he said, “and is staying there as long as possible.”
By the spring of 1927, however, anxieties had become widespread; as a North American Newspaper Alliance bulletin declared, “Fear of Fawcett Fate Grows.” Theories abounded over what might have happened to the explorers. “Have they been killed by the warlike savages, some of them cannibals?” one newspaper asked. “Did they perish in the rapids… or have they starved to death in this all but foodless region?” A popular theory was that the explorers were being held hostage by a tribe-a relatively common practice. (Several decades later, when Brazilian authorities approached the Txukahamei tribe for the first time, they found half a dozen white captives.)
In September 1927, Roger Courteville, a French engineer, announced that while traveling near the source of the Paraguay River, in Mato Grosso, he had discovered Fawcett and his companions living not as hostages but as hermits. “Explorer Called Dupe of Jungle's Sorcery: Fawcett Forgetting World in Paradise of Birds, Wild Cattle and Game,” the Washington Post reported. Though some sympathized with Fawcett's apparent desire to “escape from a mechanical age and… from dank subway platforms and sunless tenements,” as one American newspaper editorial put it, others alleged that the explorer had perpetrated one of the greatest hoaxes in history.
Brian Fawcett, who had rushed to meet with Courteville, thought he “described Daddy exactly.” Yet, with each new telling, Courteville changed both his story and the spelling of his own name, and Nina ferociously defended Fawcett's reputation. “I was boiling over with indignation at the slur cast on my husband's honour,” she wrote to the RGS, and informed Courteville, “As the story grew and changed, there came an element of evil and malice into it. But thank God, I, [Fawcett's] wife, saw the discrepancies of the published statements.” By the time she had finished her campaign against the Frenchman, almost no one placed any credence in him or his story.
Still, the question remained: Where were Fawcett and his young companions? Nina was confident that her husband, having survived for years in the jungle, was alive. But, like Elsie Rimell, she realized now that something terrible must have happened to the expedition-most likely that the men had been kidnapped by Indians. “One cannot tell what hopelessness and despair might do with those boys,” Nina said.
Just as her concerns were mounting, a tall, impeccably dressed man appeared at her doorstep in Madeira. It was Fawcett's longtime rival Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice. He had come to console her, and assured her that even if the expedition had been taken hostage Fawcett would find a way to escape. The one person you need not worry about in the jungle is the colonel, Dr. Rice said.
Nina had so far resisted sending a rescue team, insisting that Fawcett and her son would rather die than have others lose their lives, but now, in her growing panic, she asked the doctor if he would be willing to go. “No better man could be selected to lead such an expedition,” she later said. To the shock of many of his colleagues, however, Dr. Rice decided to retire from exploring. Perhaps, at the age of fifty, he felt too old, especially after seeing what had happened to his seemingly invulnerable rival. Perhaps Dr. Rice's wife, who had lost her first husband and son in a tragic accident, prevailed upon him not to go back. Or perhaps he simply felt that he had accomplished everything he could as an explorer.
The Royal Geographical Society, meanwhile, declared in 1927 that “we hold ourselves in readiness to help any competent and well-accredited” search party. Though the Society warned that if Fawcett “could not penetrate and push through, much less can anyone else,” it was deluged with hundreds of letters from volunteers. One wrote, “I am thirty-six years of age. Practically Malaria-proof Stand 5…11… in my socks and am as hard as nails.” Another said, “I am prepared to sacrifice all, including my life.”
A few volunteers sought to escape a dreary home life. (“My wife and I have… decided that separation for a couple of years will do us both worlds of good.”) Some hoped to attain fame and fortune, like Henry Morton Stanley, who had located Livingstone five decades earlier. Others were simply drawn to the heroic nature of the quest-to see, as one put it, “whether there is the making of a man in me, or just clay.” A young Welshman, who offered to enlist with his friends, wrote, “We consider that there is a greater measure of heroism in this quiet adventure than, for example, in Lindbergh's spectacular triumph.”
In February 1928, George Miller Dyott, a forty-five-year-old member of the Royal Geographical Society, launched the first major rescue effort. Born in New York-his father was British and his mother American-he had test piloted airplanes not long after the Wright brothers and was among the first ever to fly at night. After serving as a squadron commander during World War I, he had given up flying to become an explorer, and though he did not quite fit the image of a rugged adventurer-he was five feet seven and weighed only a hundred and forty pounds-he had trekked across the Andes more than a half-dozen times and ventured through parts of the Amazon. (He had navigated the River of Doubt to confirm Teddy Roosevelt's once-disputed claims.) He had also been held captive for several weeks by an Amazonian tribe that shrank its enemies' heads.
For the media, Fawcett's disappearance had only contributed to what one writer called a “romantic story which builds newspaper empires”- and few were as adept at keeping the story ablaze as Dyott. A former managing director of a company called Travel Films, he was one of the earliest explorers to bring along motion-picture cameras, and he knew instinctively how to strike a pose and talk like a character in a B movie.
The North American Newspaper Alliance sponsored his rescue effort, which it advertised as “an adventure that makes the blood race… Romance, mystery-and Peril!” Despite protests from the RGS that the publicity was threatening the expedition's objective, Dyott planned to file daily dispatches with a shortwave radio and to film his journey. To succeed, Dyott, who had once met Fawcett, claimed that he would need “the intuition of Sherlock Holmes” and “the skill of a big-game hunter.” He pictured Fawcett and his companions “camped in some remote corner of the primeval forest, unable to come or go. Their reserve food supply must long since have been exhausted; their clothing torn to shreds or rotted to pieces.” In such a prolonged “hand-to-hand” combat with the wilderness, Dyott added, it was only Fawcett's “supreme courage that will have held his party together and instilled in them the will to live.”