{"id":3089,"date":"2017-04-13T15:31:35","date_gmt":"2017-04-13T14:31:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?page_id=3089"},"modified":"2017-04-16T18:31:49","modified_gmt":"2017-04-16T17:31:49","slug":"the-lost-city-of-z-how-to-make-enemies-in-the-jungle","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?page_id=3089","title":{"rendered":"The Lost City of Z:\u00a0 \u00a0How to Make Enemies in the Jungle"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a longer version of articles written for both the London Evening Standard <\/a><\/em>and the<\/a> Washington Post<\/a> <\/em>when The\u00a0Lost City of Z<\/em> was released .<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

“Writer and explorer Hugh Thomson argues that new movie The Lost City of Z<\/em> gives a totally false impression of its real-life hero.”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>With many a jungle drum, this week sees the release and promotion of The Lost City Of Z.\u00a0 <\/em>Based on the bestselling book of the same name by David Grann, the film proudly proclaims <\/a>that it is \u2018based on an incredible true story\u2019<\/strong> in which heroic British explorer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) \u2018journeys to the Amazon and discovers the traces of an ancient, advanced civilization\u2019.\u00a0And yet it is a quite bizarre distortion of the truth, as anyone who has led expeditions to South America knows. \u00a0<\/strong>Watch the movie and you might come away impressed by the dedication and perseverance of Fawcett.\u00a0 He is portrayed as a misty-eyed and misty-voiced romantic, inspired by Kipling\u2019s poem to \u2018Go and look behind the ranges \u2013 Something lost behind the ranges.\u00a0 Lost and waiting for you.\u00a0 Go!\u2019\u00a0 The movie is played out as one long elegy for his death, with accompanying strings.<\/p>\n

The exploration of the Amazon has been one of the epic undertakings of the last few centuries and is still ongoing: uncontacted tribes are still being found in the jungle.\u00a0 It has seen many heroic figures. But Fawcett was not one of them.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You will search the anthologies of exploration in vain for a mention of his name.\u00a0 Later explorers have found him something of an embarrassment. He is not listed in most of those anthologies for one simple reason:\u00a0 he never discovered anything.\u00a0 Moreover, he was a fantasist who believed in the occult and the Theosophy of Mme Blavatsky, so is regarded \u2013 and this is to put it kindly \u2013 as a complete flake.\u00a0 If anything, he is thought of as the Lord Lucan of the exploring world<\/strong>, whose most dramatic achievement was to get himself lost.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In the movie, Fawcett is portrayed as a matinee idol who single-mindedly pursues a noble quest, not as a grandstanding publicist.\u00a0 Equally misleading is the way in which he is shown as the only voice who stands up for the Indians he encountered, while all around him less enlightened old codgers proclaim their savagery. He makes a passionate speech in the Indians\u2019 defence at the Royal Geographical Society (\u2018the native does deserve our sympathy\u2019) and comes across as being enlightened and liberal in his views.<\/p>\n

But the reality is rather different.<\/strong> The distinguished historian of the Amazon, John Hemming, has described Fawcett as in fact having \u2018ugly racist notions about the Native Americans\u2019<\/strong>.\u00a0 Fawcett described one tribe he encountered as \u2018large, hairy men, with exceptionally long arms, and with forehead sloping back from pronounced eye ridges \u2013 men of a very primitive kind\u2026 villainous savages\u2026 great apelike brutes who looked as if they had scarcely evolved beyond the level of beasts.\u2019<\/p>\n

Nor is the argument that he was just \u2018of his time\u2019 admissible. There were plenty of contemporary explorers of the Amazon who recognised the qualities of the indigenous people. Theodore Roosevelt, no less, an explorer before he became president, had been impressed by precisely the same Indian tribe of Nambiquara.<\/p>\n

As David Grann admits in his book \u2013 although you will find nothing of it in the film \u2013 Fawcett was deeply conflicted about his suspicion that there might once have been an earlier civilisation in the Amazon.\u00a0 He could not reconcile this with his poor opinion of the Indian tribes, so postulated the existence of \u2018white Indians\u2019 who had in some way travelled across the Atlantic from Europe and brought civilisation with them.\u00a0 Hemming has described Fawcett as a Nietzchean explorer, who sprouted \u2018eugenic gibberish\u2019 and was obsessed with the exotic and the occult.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Percy Fawcett was first sent to Bolivia and Brazil<\/strong> to do map surveying work in 1906, seconded from his duties as a British officer. \u00a0He returned in 1914, after having heard stories about a huge ruined city \u2018said to have been seen by Portuguese bandits north of Minas Gerais in 1743\u2019.\u00a0 Even by the standards of South America, that is old and second-hand information, from an unreliable source.<\/p>\n

But his potential sponsors at the Royal Geographical Society lapped it up. This was an age of heroic exploration, when the poles had just been reached and Machu Picchu discovered.\u00a0 Fawcett received the financial backing to pursue the glory that he had never found in his military career.\u00a0 He talked evocatively of how there might be \u2018ruins incomparably older than those in Egypt\u2019.\u00a0 Naming this chimera as \u2018the lost city of Z\u2019 showed his flair for publicity \u2013 and no wonder Hollywood has finally come calling, even if they have taken a century to do so.<\/p>\n

When Fawcett disappeared in Brazil in 1925<\/strong>, together with his 21-year-old son Jack and another companion, it caused a public outcry and journalistic sensation.\u00a0 A series of privately-funded expeditions were mounted to find him. Occasional sightings of a lone white man somewhere in the jungle \u2013 even if thousands of miles from where Fawcett had last been seen \u2013 were enough of an excuse for editors of the day to raise the story again.<\/p>\n

What most likely happened to Fawcett<\/strong> \u2013 again, not something you will learn from the movie \u2013 has been painstakingly re-created by distinguished Amazon historian John Hemming<\/a>, in his 2003 book \u201cDie If You Must,\u201d and documentary-maker Adrian Cowell<\/a>, in his 1960 book \u201cThe Heart of the Forest.\u201dIt seems that Fawcett\u2019s racism led him into \u2018dangerous attitudes to the Indians\u2019, risking both his own life and that of his son.\u00a0 He recognised that tribes could be naturally hospitable; but failed to recognise that they also expected any visitors to be equally liberal.<\/p>\n

Previous and current expeditions to the Amazon would always take quantities of presents. Fawcett did not, while still availing himself of anything the Indians could give him.\u00a0 Moreover George Dyott, the leader of one of the expeditions sent to find Fawcett after his disappearance, was told by Indians that Fawcett had broken an unwritten rule of forest travel<\/strong>.\u00a0 He had seen two canoes moored up on the back and simply taken them.\u00a0 Naturally the Nahukw\u00e1, whose canoes had been stolen, did not react well.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

Likewise when Fawcett shot a duck \u2013 and much is made in the movie of his prowess as a marksman \u2013 he refused to share it with his Indian helpers.\u00a0 He also struck a young Indian boy who was playing with his knife. As Hemming remarks, \u2018striking an Indian in anger is a deep insult.\u00a0 The Xingu Indians are infuriated by any aggression against a child, since they are deeply affectionate parents\u2026 And native hunters invariably share out their game.\u2019<\/p>\n

Brazilian anthropologists the Villas Boa brothers \u2013 legendary in Amazonia for their longstanding work protecting the Indians \u2013 commented that \u2018Fawcett was the victim, as anyone else would have been, of the harshness and lack of tact that all recognised in him.\u2019<\/p>\n

So why is none of this in the film?<\/strong> \u00a0And how is it that an incompetent who never achieved any discoveries \u2013 and was a racist blunderer to boot \u2013 has suddenly got the full Indiana Jones treatment?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Much of the answer lies in the original book by David Grann<\/strong>, published in 2009.\u00a0 This is far more intelligent and nuanced than the movie, as one would expect from a staff writer on the New Yorker<\/em>. But even in that, the process of mythologisation has already begun – and some of what David Grann wrote tongue-in-cheek has been taken at face value.<\/p>\n

John Hemming<\/a>, as the acknowledged expert on the history of the Amazon, was one of the first people that David Grann consulted about Fawcett. In The Lost City Of Z, <\/em>Grann describes how he went to London and met him at the Royal Geographical Society \u2013 and how in writing the book, he \u2018would have been lost without Hemming\u2019s three volume history on the Brazilian Indian\u2019.<\/p>\n

So Hemming was puzzled when the book was published to find that Grann had ignored or inflated so much available material about Fawcett. In a review for the Times Literary Supplement<\/em>, he commented that Grann had been seduced by the \u2018jungle as green hell\u2019 genre of travel writing, with fanciful pages about ferocious piranhas, huge anacondas and even cyanide-squirting millipedes. Whereas Grann suggests that as many as 100 people lost their lives in search of Fawcett,\u00a0Hemming corrects the record: one person died. He went on to note that Fawcett explored a very small area of the Amazon, far less than many others. He self-mythologised to an unusual degree, presenting quite mundane journeys in the jungle as if they were Homeric odysseys, even if they were along previously travelled routes.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

John Hemming has led many expeditions to the Amazon himself and his conclusion was damning:<\/p>\n

\u2018It is a pity that a writer as good as Grann chose to study this unimportant, disagreeable and ultimately pathetic man.\u00a0 It is an even greater pity that he decided to inflate and distort so much of this sad story.\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

To be fair to David Grann, the playfulness of his tone is a mitigating factor. He presents the world of the explorer as if it is more hyperreality than actual, which in Fawcett\u2019s case it was.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
my first edition of ‘Exploration Fawcett’<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As a boy I had a copy of Exploration Fawcett<\/em>,<\/strong> a posthumous collection of his writings.\u00a0 The cover shows an illustration that Fawcett\u2019 drew of a monstrous anaconda as long as a canoe menacing the intrepid explorers and their Indian helpers as Fawcett raises a gun to shoot it.\u00a0 \u2018Hardly waiting to aim,\u2019 he recounted, \u2018I smashed a .44 soft-nosed bullet into its spine, ten feet below the wicked head.\u2019<\/p>\n

One should remember that Fawcett was inspired in his descriptions of his jungle journeys by adventure novels such as Jules Verne’s La Jangada <\/em>and the works of Rider Haggard<\/strong>. All featured trusty companions, unreliable natives and clues given by some ancient chronicle. The relationship between Edwardian writers and explorers was a symbiotic one. Arthur Conan Doyle knew Fawcett well (they shared an interest in spiritualism), and he based The Lost World<\/em> on some of Fawcett’s fanciful accounts. \u2018Isn\u2019t anything possible in South America?\u2019 Conan Doyle once remarked, and it became a place where the imagination was licensed to recount the wildest of tales, whether presented as fact or fiction.\u00a0So, to a certain extent Fawcett\u2019s tall stories \u2013 and now Hollywood\u2019s \u2013 have given the world a version of exploring in the Amazon that it wanted and could recognise from fiction, however far from the truth it may be. The movie presents a\u00a0cartoon Amazon where human skulls line the entrance to the Indian camp.<\/p>\n

Grann himself is self-deprecating.\u00a0 He admits that he knows nothing of the jungle and, to begin with, little about Fawcett.\u00a0 As a travel writer, he adopts the approach of the ing\u00e9nue: \u2018Hey, I\u2019m just from New York. I don\u2019t know much about this, but I\u2019m going to tell you anyway.\u2019<\/strong>\u00a0 This allows him to present some of Fawcett\u2019s more far-fetched claims as if he is a kid enjoying the antics of a carnival artist on stage. So what if the guy claims to be the strongest man in the world.\u00a0 Who cares if any of this is true or not when it\u2019s so much fun?<\/p>\n

However, any such subtleties have been completely lost in this clumsy adaptation for the screen by director James Gray<\/strong>, who has taken Fawcett at face value.\u00a0 The narrative compulsion to make Fawcett a hero has won out over the far more interesting story of how a fantasist managed to persuade the world that he was doing something of significance \u2013 a Billy Liar of the Amazon.<\/p>\n

Almost everything has gone wrong in Gray\u2019s clumsy adaptation for the screen.\u00a0 For a start, he has written his own script and then filmed it with great reverence – almost always a mistake.<\/p>\n

There are some real clunkers in the dialogue:<\/p>\n

\u2018What do you know of Bolivia.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018In South America?\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"
Fawcett and his son Jack surrounded by ‘hostile Indians’ in this ‘comic-book version of the Amazon’<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Well, yes, of course, it\u2019s the Bolivia in South America, which other one did you think he was talking about!\u00a0 This is comic book stuff. Every line is either signposted or signalled. Guffaws erupted around me in the preview theatre when for the very first shot of Fawcett in the jungle we see a snake slithering between his legs.\u00a0 Nor does Charlie Hunnam<\/a>\u2019s leaden depiction of Fawcett help.\u00a0 He plays the character as if everything he says are his last words \u2013 which over a lengthy 140 minute movie, makes the whole experience feel like the longest dying pause in history.<\/p>\n

At one point Fawcett proclaims, \u2018it will be a long way before we reach Amazonia,\u2019 and the long-suffering audience may well feel the same.\u00a0 What a shame that Benedict Cumberbatch did not play the part, as at one point envisaged<\/a>: he could have brought out more of Fawcett\u2019s flawed character and disturbed hinterland.\u00a0 James Gray has pretensions to being a film auteur<\/em> \u2013 but this is a movie that wants to be Apocalypse Now<\/em> and ends up as\u00a0Monty Python in the Jungle<\/em>.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

The only virtue of this lumpen behemoth of a film is if it draws attention to the unfolding discoveries in the Amazon at the moment.\u00a0 For although Fawcett may have done so for all the wrong grandstanding reasons, his suspicion that there may have been earlier civilisations in the Amazon has proved correct (and this was the saving grace of David Grann’s original book, which helped draw attention to recent archaeological findings).<\/p>\n

The problem in the past was that, for obvious reasons, while great Andean civilisations like the Incas could build in stone \u2013 and so Machu Picchu, for instance, has been magnificently preserved \u2013 in the Amazon, the only available material was wood;\u00a0 however grandiose the civilisation, it naturally rotted away.\u00a0 Yet recent archaeological techniques have revealed how pre-Columbian tribes successfully converted the shallow topsoil of the rainforest into rich black earth \u2013 and has given credence to early accounts by conquistadors of great civilisations they glimpsed when first floating down the Amazon.<\/p>\n

\"\"
John Hemming<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I led expeditions to the Peruvian Andes from the 1980s on, I also went to John Hemming for advice and he told me something which I\u2019ve never forgotten:\u00a0 \u2018That while anyone might be able to find a ruin in South America,\u2019 – although even this does not seem to have applied to Fawcett, who never did\u00a0 \u2013 \u2018it can take a lifetime to understand what it means.\u2019<\/p>\n

For the process of exploration should be as much intellectual as physical. Interpreting complicated new data about possible lost civilisations is a fascinating test of mental agility and one which Fawcett was ill prepared for.\u00a0 He was a serving army officer and as such was good at surveying the disputed border between Brazil and Bolivia. But he knew nothing of archaeology and anthropology and so when it came to his wild goose chases after scraps of unreliable evidence and theorising about the existence of early civilisations, he was way out of his depth.<\/p>\n

There is an old and wise explorer\u2019s maxim \u2013 \u2018you only ever find what you are looking for\u2019 – so that unless you have a profound knowledge of your subject, be it Inca or Amazon culture, you will never be able to interpret or indeed find anything of value.<\/p>\n

Those who\u2019ve travelled widely on the Amazon know that it is in reality mundane, soporific and almost dreamlike, with very little in the way of action ever occurring. It is perfectly possible to travel for days without seeing any wildlife, let alone \u2018giant anaconda\u2019, which will of course have been alerted by the noise of oncoming canoes. In its broader stretches, the Amazon is more green suburbia than green hell, \u00a0where nothing happens, slowly.<\/p>\n

Hollywood, of course, wants action and it also wants heroes. But even in a post-truth world, there is only so much distortion of the facts that is admissible.\u00a0 And in this case it is also unnecessary.<\/p>\n

If the filmmakers had been looking for a real hero to make a movie about, they could have found one much closer to home.\u00a0 At the same time as Fawcett was getting lost in the jungle, the American explorer Hiram Bingham made some genuine and extraordinary discoveries of Inca ruins \u2013Machu Picchu being just the most famous.\u00a0 He was also an academic at Yale, who had, unlike Fawcett, made scrupulous studies of the historical material, and was deeply sympathetic to the Indian population. Standing well over six foot in his Fedora and knee-length boots, it is he, not Fawcett, who was the original swashbuckling model for Indiana Jones. Moreover, in later life he married a Tiffany heiress, had seven sons and became a Senator.\u00a0 Plenty for Hollywood to get its teeth into.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Embrace of The Serpent<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There is a fascinating movie to be made about exploration in the Amazon. This isn\u2019t it. Those wanting more illumination should see the Oscar-nominated Embrace Of The Serpent <\/em><\/a>which came out last year, made by South Americans and with a silverine, elegant charm to which The Lost City of Z<\/em> can only aspire.<\/p>\n

And anyone heading out to a dinner-party this evening should perhaps remember to take a reciprocal bottle or face consequences from the natives.\u00a0 While those going to see the movie in its opening week may need sleeping tablets, resilient buttocks \u2013 and a healthy dose of scepticism.<\/p>\n

In a curious way, the willful ignorance of this film echoes the willful ignorance of Fawcett himself.\u00a0 Why stick to the facts when you can play to a myth? But even if truth may sometimes be stranger than fiction, that is not a licence to invent it.\u00a0 For this is indeed an incredible story. But not a true one.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hugh Thomson has led many expeditions to Peru, as recounted in his book The White Rock: An Exploration of the Inca Heartland<\/a>, <\/em>which was a New York Times Notable Book.<\/em><\/p>\n

Follow Hugh on http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/HughThomsonBooks<\/a> and on Twitter @Hugh_Author<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a longer version of articles written for both the London Evening Standard and the Washington Post when The\u00a0Lost City of Z was released . \u00a0 “Writer and explorer Hugh Thomson argues that new movie The Lost City of Z gives a totally false impression of its real-life hero.”   With many a jungle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":1121,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-without-sidebar.php","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3089","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3089"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3089"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3094,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3089\/revisions\/3094"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}