![\"IMG_0819](\"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/IMG_0819-John-Hemming-at-home-2010.jpg\")
<\/a><\/strong>.<\/strong><\/p>\nJohn Hemming is the epitome of a certain sort of English gentleman<\/strong> \u2013 courteous, retiring and extremely modest.\u00a0 \u00a0Now 75, he was the Director of the Royal Geographical Society for over two decades.\u00a0 He has written definitive histories of both the conquest of the Incas and the tribes of the Amazon.\u00a0 But beneath the reserved exterior of this scholarly explorer lies a life of unusual adventure and risk-taking that began with the most remarkable story.<\/p>\n .<\/p>\n Looking back now across almost half a century, John can still not quite believe what happened: \u2018We just had incredibly bad luck.\u2019\u00a0<\/strong> For as a young man in 1961, he lost his closest friend, Richard Mason, who became the last Englishman to be killed by an undiscovered tribe in the Amazon.<\/p>\n .<\/p>\n I first met John 30 years ago when I was planning my own expedition to Peru to look for Inca ruins<\/strong>.\u00a0 He lived then, as he still does, in a quiet residential Kensington square.\u00a0 It was gracious and characteristic of him to advise me, as at that stage I had very little experience of my own.\u00a0 He led me down the dark hall of his house and then into a study lined with books about South America, with shafts of light coming down from high windows.\u00a0 In a curious way, that moment of entering his study with him felt like the first step in the process of discovery.<\/p>\n He told me part of the story then, and over the years I have filled in other sections,\u00a0 but it was only recently that we discussed at length not only the tragic events of the 1961 expedition but his later quest to find the perpetrators.<\/p>\n .<\/p>\n The expedition had begun so well<\/strong>. At first the three young men, all in their twenties, felt they were living a wonderful adventure. By night they slept in hammocks; by day they mapped the beautiful and uncharted country along the Iriri River, having fun naming the lakes and hills after their girlfriends, just as a blameless river had been called after Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s son Kermit when the ex-president led an expedition to the Amazon in 1913.<\/p>\n .<\/p>\n Their technique for getting through the jungle was simple. One of them would lead the path-cutting team of wood cutters. Aiming at a distant tree as a sightline, the leader would crash and hack his forward through the undergrowth, while two men widened the trail behind and the others followed.<\/p>\n John remembers it vividly:\u00a0 \u2018Sometimes we shot game – wild turkeys or tapirs – but generally we ate little and lost weight. We became pale from rarely seeing the sun, and were covered in bites and scratches. The compensation for all this effort was the beauty of virgin rainforest and the knowledge that no Westerner had ever trodden there before.\u2019<\/p>\n \u2018Richard was a wonderful leader<\/strong>. His Portuguese was poor, but his hard work and optimism commanded respect and inspired the men even when the going was toughest.\u2019<\/p>\n Yet progress proved slower than expected. Their stocks of food started to run down and John was dispatched to Rio de Janeiro to get more supplies and drop them back by parachute.<\/p>\n \u2018I had no money.\u00a0 To get to Rio, I had to barter a bottle of whiskey with a pilot, and then hitchhike my way from the airport into the city \u2013 where I found myself in the middle of an attempted \u00a0coup.\u00a0 The whole air force had been grounded.\u00a0 Somehow I managed to get an air-sea rescue team to help us and found myself flying back across the jungle in an enormous seaplane to be dropped off with the new supplies.\u00a0 Then we ran into a lightning storm. It was a surreal experience, seeing the lightning surround us and illuminate the jungle canopy by night.\u2019<\/p>\n \u2018In the middle of the storm, the co-pilot came back into the cargo-hold to tell me that they had picked up bad news on the radio. While I’d been away, the expedition had been attacked and someone had been killed. At that point they didn’t know who.\u2019<\/p>\n John found Kit Lambert in a complete and understandable state of shock. In today’s culture, Kit would have been more of a candidate for I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here <\/em>than an actual expedition to the jungle. \u00a0In later life he led a flamboyant and camp rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle with The Who.<\/p>\n .<\/p>\n The two men\u2019s main concern was that there might be a further attack<\/strong>, \u00a0so they hurried with the rest of their team to the relative safety of the one air-strip they could reach, Cachimbo, which John remembers as being \u2018as isolated in the jungle as a small island in the South Atlantic\u2019.<\/p>\n The Brazilian authorities flew in some medics and a platoon of \u2018jungle troops\u2019 \u2013 who, it seems, looked like they would have been more at home in the nightclubs of Rio. \u00a0John asked if the body could be cremated.\u00a0 \u00a0He was told that first there would have to be an examination \u00a0to make sure that he hadn’t been killed by other members of the expedition;\u00a0 they all had to return to the scene of the death.<\/p>\n For John, it was a terrible journey<\/strong>: \u2018We walked sombrely back along that familiar trail, sleeping at an old camp site. I remember it all as dreamlike, with the landmarks along the trail seeming unreal and the once-cheerful camp gloomy and strangely sinister. The medics embalmed Richard’s body and we carried it out, wrapped in canvas and slung under a pole, for eventual burial in the British cemetery in Rio de Janeiro.\u2019<\/p>\n While like Kit, John was still in deep shock, he did try as best he could to rationalise his friend\u2019s death.\u00a0 As Kit and he agreed, at least it had been almost instantaneous – it could as well have been a crash in one of the fast cars that Richard was so fond of driving.<\/p>\n And then John did something which some might find surprising<\/strong>.\u00a0 He decided to leave a gift of machetes for the unknown attackers, hoping that they would conclude that the white men were well-intentioned.\u00a0 This was in the tradition of earlier Amazon explorers like Colonel Rondon.<\/p>\n The question that naturally haunted John was how the attackers had come across Richard in supposedly uninhabited jungle:\u00a0 had they seen the smoke flares lit by the team for several days to guide John’s plane when it made its expected parachute drop \u2013 and were they from an unreported village nearby or a long range hunting party from tribes known to be living in the far distance?<\/p>\n For many years it remained an unresolved mystery<\/strong>. \u00a0At least by carrying one of the jungle arrows back to an academic in Oxford (\u2018I felt very conspicuous on the train\u2019), \u00a0John was able to get an identification for the tribal group who had committed the murder: the Panar\u00e1, at that time uncontacted by the outside world, but feared as savage and violent by neighbouring Brazilian tribes who called them \u2018The Men With Heads Cut Round\u2019 because of their pudding bowl haircuts.<\/p>\n In the decades that followed<\/strong>, John continued working in other areas of the Amazon and became a well-known expert on its history. \u00a0It was not until 40 years later that he finally came face to face with the particular tribe who had killed Richard.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>\u2018I assumed that all the Panar\u00e1 involved in Richard’s death would by now be dead, and that their descendants would have forgotten that distant ambush. They had suffered too many calamities of their own since then.\u00a0 Within two years of their first face-to-face encounter with the outside world in 1973, their numbers had fallen from 600 to 80.\u00a0 They were also forced off their tribal land by gold prospectors and cattle-ranchers.\u00a0 The Brazilian Government\u2019s Indian Service had restricted access to them as a result. But when by chance we were able to reach the new Panar\u00e1 village when visiting another tribe nearby, I found that they did remember that first contact with a white man.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/a>\u00a0They had been room-mates at Oxford and had already developed a taste for exploration:\u00a0 Richard had crossed South America by Land Rover, while John had managed to get a berth on a freighter to Peru.\u00a0\u00a0 They recruited a third member, the unlikely figure of Kit Lambert, an old schoolboy friend of Richard\u2019s who was later to be the Who\u2019s manager, and set off.<\/p>\n<\/a>Only on landing did John discover what had happened<\/strong>. Richard Mason had been alone and going back down a trail they had previously cut. After months of exploring what the expedition had been told was uninhabited jungle, they had long stopped worrying about Indian attacks. But that is exactly what seemed to have taken place. The others had come across his body carefully laid out on the path, surrounded by 40 arrows and 17 heavy clubs.\u00a0 A bag of sugar was spilled nearby, untouched – as was a lighter.\u00a0 Nothing had been taken.<\/p>\n