Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

 

He was renowned as the "David Livingstone of the Amazon," and was believed to have such unrivaled powers of endurance that a few colleagues even claimed he was immune to death.

 

An American explorer described him as "a man of indomitable will, infinite resource, fearless"; another said that he could "outwalk and outhike and outexplore anybody else."

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

The London Geographical Journal, the preeminent publication in its field, observed in 1953 that "Fawcett marked the end of an age. One might almost call him the last of the individualist explorers. The day of the aeroplane, the radio, the organized and heavily financed modern expedition had not arrived. With him, it was the heroic story of a man against the forest."

 

Reading Orellano's account, he became convinced that the impenetrable jungle of the Matto Grosso concealed the remnants of an ancient civilization, which he named, simply, the City of Z.

 

For years, most scientists had dismissed Fawcett's theory, insisting that conditions in the jungle were too brutal to support a complex society.

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

In 1925, he set out to find it with his twenty-one-year-old son and his son's best friend. The world was watching. Fawcett was financed by the Royal Geographical Society in London, the world’s foremost repository of research gathered by explorers. Fawcett, then age 57, had proclaimed for decades his belief in the City of Z. His writings, speeches, and exploits had captured the imagination of millions, and reports of his last expedition were front page news.

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

Fawcett believed that only a small group had any chance of surviving the horrors of the Amazon. He had seen large forces decimated by malaria, insects, snakes, poison darts, starvation, and insanity. He knew better. He and his two companions would travel light, carry their own supplies, eat off the land, pose no threat to the natives, and endure months of hardship in their search for the Lost City of Z.

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

On May 29th, 1925, Fawcett telegraphed his wife saying that they were ready to enter unexplored territory in the region of the Upper Xingu, a tributary of the Amazon River. He said that they had sent the rest of the party back on account of the dangers posed by the local Indians, and that just the three of them would be going on. His message ended with the words; "You need have no fear of failure."

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

This was the last that anyone heard of the expedition. The three men vanished into the jungle and were never heard from again. Because he had survived several similar forays into the Amazon, his family and friends considered him to be near super-human. As before, they expected Fawcett to stumble out of the jungle, bearded and emaciated and announcing some fantastic discovery. It did not happen.

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

No sooner had the group disappeared than rumors of their fate began to circulate. Some thought they had met their death at the hands of the Indians, while others were convinced they had died of disease or fallen prey to wild animals.

 

Percy Fawcett's son Brian made two trips to the area to try to solve the mystery of their disappearance, but returned without success.

 

Their disappearance gave rise to what has been described as "the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century."

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

Over the years, the search for Fawcett became more alluring than the search for El Dorado itself. Rescue efforts, from the serious to the farcical, materialized in the years that followed, and hundreds of others lost their lives in the search. Rewards were posted. Psychics were brought in by the family. Articles and books were written.

 

An estimated one hundred people died looking for traces of the famed adventurer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

More than 75 years after Fawcett's disappearance, David Grann, a staff writer with The New Yorker, set out to discover what happened. His book, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, is the result, published in February 2009.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

Grann visited the Kalapalo tribe in 2005 and discovered that it had passed down an oral history about Fawcett, among the first white men the tribe had ever seen. The oral account said that Fawcett and his party had stayed at their village and then left, heading eastward. The Kalapalos warned Fawcett and his companions not to go that way—that they would be killed by the “fierce Indians” who occupied that territory—but that Fawcett insisted on going. The Kalapalos observed smoke from the expedition’s campfire each evening for five days before it disappeared.

 

The Kalapalos said they were sure the fierce Indians had killed them.

 

The book has already been optioned by Paramount Pictures and Brad Pitt's Plan B Production Company, and a movie is forthcoming. Benedict Cumberbatch has reportedly signed on to play Fawcett.

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

For the remainder of the twentieth century, El Dorado was consigned to the same category as crackpots and conspiracy theorists...

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Garden Cities of the Xingu

 

 

Long after Percy Fawcett had been forgotten, satellite imagery and fly-overs revealed more than 200 huge geometric earthworks carved in the upper Amazon basin near Brazil's border with Bolivia. Spanning 155 miles, the circles, squares and other geometric shapes form a network of avenues, ditches and enclosures built long before Christopher Columbus set foot in the new world. Some date to as early as 200 AD.

 

An estimated 2,000 structures remain hidden beneath the jungle canopy, vestiges of vanished societies. The structures point to a "sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society", says the journal Antiquity. which has published the research.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

The structures were created by a network of trenches about 36ft wide and several feet deep, lined by banks up to 3ft high. Some were ringed by low mounds containing ceramics, charcoal and stone tools. It is thought they could have maintained a population of 60,000 – more people than in many medieval European cities.The feat, requiring sophisticated engineering, canals and roads, rivals Egypt's pyramids.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

The findings follow separate discoveries further south, in the Xingu region, of interconnected villages known as "garden cities". Dating between 800 and 1600, they included houses, moats and palisades.One of these, a civilisation called Kuhikugu, may have actually existed near where Percy Fawcett was looking, as discovered recently by archaeologist Michael Heckenberger and others.

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

"In pre-Columbian villages, we can expect that the landscape was much more densely occupied and used more intensively and according to more rigidly defined divisions and schedules. Where today (2006) there are three villages of about 500 people (with only one of 350 a decade earlier), there were over 20 settlements in at least two clusters, with the larger first-order settlements ranging over 10 times the residential area of the modern Kuikuro village. These multi-centric settlement hierarchies encompass a small territory of about 400 km2. It is hard to say what the exact scale of communities or regional populations was, but the size and configuration of the settlements themselves is quite clear. Plaza villages, like today, were critical social nodes and tied into elaborate socio-political networks. Primary roads and bridges are oriented to plazas, or more accurately, are ordered by the same spatial principles, which also order domestic and public space, creating a cartography and landscape that was highly partitioned and rigidly organized according to the layouts of settlements and roads."

Michael Heckenberger

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

Long ago, Ebenezer Howard proposed a model for lower-density urban development, a “garden city,” designed to promote sustainable urban growth .The model proposed networks of small and wellplanned towns, a “green belt” of agricultural and forest land, and a subtle gradient between urban and rural areas. The pre-Columbian polities of the Upper Xingu developed such a system, uniquely adapted to the forested environments of the southern Amazon.

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

Archaeologists had long believed that the jungle soil was too poor to support agriculture.

 

Even as evidence of the garden cities were coming to light, reports began to emerge of a magical soil that was being mined and sold to small farmers on the fringes of the Amazon basin. This soil was said to have extraordinary, transformative properties. And it appears that it is virtually immortal.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 18, 2014 by Flex Mentallo

[Flex Mentallo]

 

It is known as terra preta, literally "black earth". And it turns out that it does have the properties claimed for it and was made by adding a mixture of charcoal, bone, and manure - sufficiently fertile to support the large populations described by Orellana.

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

So what happened to the Xingu and the Omaguas? Both survive, though the Omaguas population is now very small. What was the nature of Orellano's illness? It may be that he carried measles or smallpox to the region, to which the local populace would have had no resistance. Their structures, made of wood, would have been rapidly swallowed up by the jungle once deserted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

 

The survivors melted into the jungles to escape the successive waves of conquistadors and missionaries. But evidence remains of past greatness in their rituals.For instance the semi-nomadic descendants of the Omagua, Umana, and Cambeba tribes (all of whom speak the Omagua language) are distinguished by having a hereditary, yet landless, aristocracy, a historical anomaly for a society without a sedentary, agrarian culture.

 

Indeed in some villages, fully half the tribe are "royalty", with the right to wear certain costumes and perform tribal dances and rituals, while the other half stand and watch.