That night, as Dyott and his men slept among the Indians, many in the party were uneasy. “We cannot predict the actions of [the Indians] for we know nothing about them except-and this is important-from these regions the Fawcett party disappeared,” Whitehead wrote. He slept with a.38 Winchester and a machete under his blanket.
As the expedition pushed on through the forest the following day, Dyott continued to question Aloique, and before long the chief seemed to add a new element to his story. Fawcett and his men, he now intimated, had been killed by the Suyás. “Suyás! Bung-bung-bung!” the chief yelled, falling to the ground, as if he were dead. Aloique's shifting explanations aroused Dyott's suspicions. As he later wrote, “The finger of guilt seemed to point to Aloique.”
At one point, as Dyott was reporting his latest findings over the radio, the machine stopped working. “Jungle Cry Strangled,” a NANA bulletin declared. “Dyott Radio Cut Off in Crisis.” The prolonged silence unleashed dire speculation. “I am so afraid,” Dyott's wife told reporters.
The expedition, meanwhile, was short of food and water, and some of the men were so ill that they could barely walk. Whitehead wrote that he “couldn't eat, my fever is too bad.” The cook's legs had swollen and were oozing a gangrenous pus. Dyott decided to press on with only two of his men, in the hope of finding Fawcett's remains. “Remember,” Dyott told Whitehead, “if anything happens to me, all my effects go to my wife.”
The night before the small contingent left, one of the men in Dyott's expedition party, an Indian, reported that he had overheard Aloique plotting with tribesmen to murder Dyott and steal his equipment. By then, Dyott had no doubt that he had found Fawcett's killer. As a deterrent, Dyott told Aloique that he now intended to take his entire party with him. The next morning Aloique and his men had vanished.
Soon afterward, scores of Indians from various tribes in the Xingu region emerged from the forest, carrying bows and arrows, and demanding gifts. With every hour a new canoe arrived with more tribesmen. Some of the Indians wore striking jewelry and had in their possession exquisite pottery, which made Dyott think that Fawcett's stories of an ancient sophisticated civilization might be true. But it was impossible to make further inquiries. As Whitehead put it, “Natives from tribes all over the territory, possibly two thousand of them, gradually were hemming us in from all sides.”
Dyott had exhausted his supply of gifts, and the Indians were growing hostile. He promised them that the next morning he would give each of them an ax and knives. After midnight, when the Indians appeared to be asleep, Dyott quietly gathered his men and set out in the expedition's boats. The men pushed off and floated with the currents. No one dared to strike a paddle. A moment later, they heard a group of canoes upriver coming toward them with more Indians, apparently heading to their camp. Dyott signaled to his men to pull their boats to the side of the river and lie down. The men held their breath as the Indians paddled past them.
At last, Dyott gave the order to row, and the explorers began to paddle furiously. One of the technicians got the wireless radio to work long enough to relay a brief message: “Am sorry to report Fawcett expedition perished at the hands of hostile Indians. Our position is critical… Can't even afford time to send full details by wireless. Must descend the Xingu without delay or we ourselves will be caught.” The expedition then dumped the radio, along with other heavy gear, to hasten its exit. Newspapers debated the team's odds. “Dyott's Chance to Escape Even,” one headline ran. When Dyott and his men finally emerged from the jungle, months later-sick, emaciated, bearded, mosquito pocked-they were greeted as heroes. “We want to luxuriate in the pleasant and heady atmosphere of notoriety,” said Whitehead, who was subsequently hired as a pitchman for a laxative called Nujol. (“You can be sure that no matter what important equipment I have to discard, my next adventure will see me taking plenty of Nujol along.”) Dyott published a book, Man Hunting in the Jungle, and starred in a 1933 Hollywood film about his adventures called Savage Gold.
But by then Dyott's story had begun to collapse. As Brian Fawcett pointed out, it is hard to believe that his father, who was so wary of anyone knowing his path, would have left Y marks on trees. The gear that Dyott found in Aloique's house may well have been a gift from Fawcett, as Aloique insisted, or it may have come from Fawcett's 1920 expedition, when he and Holt had been forced to dump much of their cargo. Indeed, Dyott's case rested on his assessment of Aloique's “treacherous” disposition-a judgment based largely on interactions conducted in sign language and on Dyott's purported expertise in “Indian psychology.”
Years later, when missionaries and other explorers entered the region, they described Aloique and the Nahukwá as generally peaceful and friendly. Dyott had ignored the likelihood that Aloique's evasiveness, including his decision to flee, stemmed from his own fears of a white stranger who was leading an armed brigade. Finally, there was Bernardino. “Dyott… must have swallowed hook, line and sinker what he was told,” Brian Fawcett wrote. “I say this because there was no Bernardino with my father's party in 1925.” According to Fawcett's last letters, he had brought with him from Bakairí Post only two Brazilian helpers: Gardenia and Simão. Not long after the expedition, Nina Fawcett released a statement declaring, “There is consequently still no proof that the three explorers are dead.”
Elsie Rimell insisted that she would “never give up” believing that her son would return. Privately, though, she was despairing. A friend wrote her a letter saying that it was natural that she was so “down,” but pleaded with her, “Do not lose hope.” The friend assured her that the true fate of the explorers would soon be made known.
ON MARCH 12, 1932, a man with brooding eyes and a dark mustache appeared outside the British Embassy in São Paulo, demanding to see the consul general. He wore a sports jacket, striped tie, and baggy pants tucked into knee-high riding boots. He said it was an urgent matter concerning Colonel Fawcett.
The man was led in to see the consul general, Arthur Abbott, who had been a friend of Fawcett's. For years, Abbott had held out faith that the explorers might materialize, but only a few weeks earlier he had destroyed his last letters from Fawcett, believing that “all hope of ever seeing him again had gone.”
In a later sworn statement, the visitor said, “My name is Stefan Rat-tin. I am a Swiss subject. I came to South America twenty-one years ago.” He explained that, nearly five months earlier, he and two companions had been hunting near the Tapajós River, in the northwest corner of Mato Grosso, when he encountered a tribe holding an elderly white man with long yellowish hair. Later, after many of the tribesmen had got drunk, Rattin said, the white man, who was clad in animal skins, quietly approached him.
“Are you a friend?” he asked.
“Yes,” Rattin replied.
“I am an English colonel,” he said, and he implored Rattin to go to the British consulate and tell “Major Paget” that he was being held captive.
Abbott knew that the former British ambassador to Brazil, Sir Ralph Paget, had been a confidant of Fawcett's. Indeed, it was Paget who had lobbied the Brazilian government to fund Fawcett's 1920 expedition. These facts, Abbott noted in a letter to the Royal Geographical Society, were “only known to me and a few personal friends.”