Brazil That Never Was by A.J. Lees

Author:A.J. Lees
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

He then handed me a copy of a page of writing from one of the logbooks where Fawcett had noted the location of Dead Horse Camp. The corrected coordinate that Brian had pencilled in above the original was the same as the one his father had given to the North American Newspaper Alliance in his last communication, so a mistake seemed likely. But it was conceivable that the location of Dead Horse Camp given in his May 29 letter to the Royal Geographical Society had been deliberate and designed to put competitors off his trail. Based on the corrected coordinates, Dead Horse Camp would have been by the Rio Batovi in a surviving piece of forest not far from the Kamukuakua Falls.

Misha told me that after his first trek to the Serra do Roncador, he returned to Cuiabá and, on the second leg of his journey, headed for Dead Horse Camp before travelling on to the Serra dos Apiacas near Alta Floresta. As it was impossible to travel east–west in Amazonia, he had then been obliged to come back once more to Cuiabá in order to visit Juína, Aripuana and Fontanillas, on the Rio Juruena. On arriving in Juína a man had said to him: ‘You crazy going to Fontanillas. No one ever returns.’

During his travels in the Mato Grosso Misha was told many fanciful stories about Fawcett’s likely fate but, in the end, he had come back with nothing new and a firm belief that it was a complete waste of time searching for fresh clues in the forest. On his return, he was contacted by a literary agent called Barbara Levy and invited to meet Fawcett’s granddaughter. At their first meeting, Rolette Montet-Guerin, a violinist in the Welsh National Orchestra, had congratulated him and said he had been the first investigative journalist to search for her grandfather since Albert de Winton Jones.

Misha had brought a selection of Fawcett material for me to go over including Brian’s unpublished biography of his father. He was sympathetic to my aims but warned me that closure was impossible: ‘Once you have read and digested all this you will know as much as any man living about the external events that defined Fawcett’s life, but I am afraid learning the truth will not bring back the carefree days of your youth.’

As I sat in his front room surrounded by ‘the secret papers’, one of the first pieces to catch my attention was a letter to The Theosophist that PHF had written in 1913, ten years after his first son’s birth, and which included a photograph of Jack as a child:

Sir,

The following facts which have not been unfamiliar to my friends may interest a large section of your readers who waver, as so many do, between scepticism and confidence in the occurrence of supernormal phenomena. Auto-suggestion would seem no explanation under the circumstances.

I had been residing with my wife in Hong Kong for some months, when early in 1903 it was deemed desirable for

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