By BEATRIZ JAGUARIBE
Blank Spaces and Amazonian Imaginaries
LIBRARIES EVOKE other libraries. The turning of pages leads to other geographies of letters that emerge as tokens of memory. Reading in the Benson Latin American Collection and scanning the archives for references about the hinterlands of Brazil, I was reminded of another library, one whose volumes I had never read but whose atmosphere lingered in my mind. This library belonged to my paternal grandfather, Francisco Jaguaribe Gomes de Mattos (1881–1974). Filled with leatherbound volumes of European travel narratives, geographical treatises, maps, ethnographic studies, photographs, and artwork, the library was an emblematic space of lettered knowledge produced by non-Indigenous eyes.1
For decades, Francisco Jaguaribe Gomes de Mattos had been a close collaborator of Marechal Cândido Mariano Rondon (1865–1958), the famed explorer and “pacifier of Indigenous peoples” in the hinterlands of Brazil. As Rondon’s collaborator, Francisco Jaguaribe had developed and compiled a map of the enormous inland state of Mato Grosso, later partitioned into Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul in 1977.
By the 1920s, few places on Earth remained hidden to Western eyes. Yet huge swaths of the Amazonian rainforests in South America continued to challenge Western mapping. Cast as “blank spaces” on European maps and also in the cartography of the nations that contained portions of the Amazonian rainforest, these territories were inhabited by myriad Indigenous populations. Their inaccessibility, wildness, and Indigenous peoples made them fertile ground for a plethora of narratives, films, illustrations, and news reportage consumed mostly by urban audiences. Alternatively portrayed as a lush Eden or a terrifying green inferno, the Amazon evoked imaginaries that were and are very much produced by the congested landscapes of modernity.
With 60 percent of the Amazon ecosystem within its borders, Brazil became a focal point of exploration. Ethnographers, botanists, missionaries, land grabbers, gold diggers, and cartographers, among many others, all had very different stakes in the wilderness. During the first decades of the twentieth century, the explorations commanded by Brazilian military officer Cândido Rondon gained national renown. The so-called Rondon Commission was initially tasked from 1907 to 1915 with setting up telegraph lines across the states of Amazonas and Mato Grosso. As soon as that strenuous enterprise ended, it became outdated due to the advent of radio transmissions.
Later, the Rondon Commission became engaged in the inspection of the Brazilian frontier. Rondon’s exploration and, most of all, his policy of pacification toward Indigenous peoples attracted considerable attention due to the films, photographs, public lectures, and news reports that the commission itself produced.
Of the many prominent foreign explorers and ethnologists who ventured into the Amazonian region, none reached the celebrity status of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett (1867–1925), a British explorer who vanished into the wilderness of the upper Mato Grosso in 1925. Fawcett desired to find what he called the Lost City of Z, the ruins of a fabulous ancient civilization that would garner him fame and alter conceptions of Amazonian history.
I had perused archives in Rio de Janeiro and Paris, searching for material that would give me clues about the mapping expeditions in Mato Grosso. During my research at the Benson, I read about Fawcett’s exploits but have never had access to his archives, which are in the possession of his family in England. My comments on his expeditions are derived from a compiled bibliography, thus my intention here is not to provide original evidence. I wish to contrast Rondon’s and Fawcett’s approaches to the hinterlands because they reveal facets of differing modern conservative agendas. Each had a non-revolutionary, non-modernist repertoire of modern ideals. But their aims and tactics were quite different.
Fawcett’s search for an ancient city in the wilderness was premised on occultist beliefs that sought to retrieve clues from the past and from the transcendent. These esoteric inclinations were combined with his desire to rival twentieth-century archeological findings such as Hiram Bingham’s “discovery” of Machu Picchu in 1911. The narratives of former conquistadores and the gathering of tenuous material evidence also fueled his quest.
As a military officer, Rondon was an agent of the Republican State. He was also an ardent positivist whose pacification policy was premised on the promise of a modernity that would uphold “progress” and supposedly guarantee a better future. This did not entail an erasure of the past. On the contrary, Rondon sought to provide a nationalist cartography. According to Ramos Júnior, “One of the goals of this science was the production of a cartography of the national past, especially in regards to its visual aspect, the archeological artefacts and cave paintings” (2015:105, my translation). This nationalist cartography included vestiges of cultures that were incorporated as part of a Brazilian ethos. Such a Brazilian nationalist framework was entirely contrary to Fawcett’s search for an ancient city founded by “whiter,” “superior” Indigenous peoples unrelated to their Brazilian contemporaries.
In its modernizing impulse, the Rondon Commission was not only limited to the building of telegraph lines. They inaugurated schools, fomented scientific research, explored uncharted regions, and attempted to promote agriculture. Rather than harkening to a lost ancient city, their efforts and adherence to the positivist motto of “order and progress” slashed across the Brazilian flag were much more in consonance with the desires of modernity later embodied in what was to be the modernist city of Brasília, inaugurated on the central plateau of Brazil in 1960.
I am not, of course, proposing an affinity between Rondon and his followers and modernist architectural aesthetics, nor am I proposing a direct continuity between Rondon’s old-fashioned positivist project and later developmentalist projects of the 1960s. What I am suggesting is that the state promoted, at least rhetorically, the virtues of progress and modernization as essential to nation building. In the 1960s, the modernist capital of Brazil was cast as a beacon of modernity that purportedly would irradiate development in the vast interior of the nation.
Captain Jaguaribe, General Rondon, and Colonel Fawcett
I return to the memory of the dispersed library and the map of Mato Grosso because Francisco Jaguaribe’s expertise and knowledge played a discrete role in the clash between Rondon’s and Fawcett’s contrasting expeditionary projects.
In 1920, Jaguaribe was chief of the Cartography section of the Rondon Commission. Among his duties, as mentioned, he was in charge of producing a state-of-the-art map of Mato Grosso. General Cândido Mariano Rondon was the director of the Indian Protection Service and a famed explorer. Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, by then retired from the British army, was acknowledged as a fearless explorer. Captain Jaguaribe’s modest role in this dispute was to furnish maps for Fawcett’s ill-fated expeditions. He also purportedly refuted Fawcett’s press articles while stationed in Paris at the service of the Rondon Commission (Morel 1944:19).
A mestizo man descendent of Bororo, Terena, and Guaná Indigenous peoples and Spanish and Portuguese immigrants, Rondon was born in Mato Grosso and tenaciously paved his way in the military academy in Rio de Janeiro. During his training there, he fully embraced not only Auguste Comte’s sociological/philosophical postulates of positivism but also the French philosopher’s “religion of humanity,” and remained a staunch positivist throughout his lengthy life. Imbued with pacifist ideals, Rondon coined the motto that would guide his actions toward the Indigenous populations of Brazil: “Die if you must but never kill.”
Despite his pacifist approach, Rondon’s positivist agenda did not thwart the projects of the Brazilian state. To the contrary, his tactics were geared toward strengthening the presence of the state, pursuing the accumulation of scientific knowledge, promoting economic modernization, inducing Indigenous acculturation, and, ultimately, albeit unintentionally, consolidating the status of Indigenous people as subaltern subjects of the Brazilian state.
Colonel Fawcett, who considered himself an English gentleman of superior attributes, had garnered a considerable reputation as an undaunted explorer, extraordinarily resilient expeditioner, connoisseur of Indigenous customs, and seasoned surveyor. His fame had been consolidated by the British Royal Geographic Society, where he had received his training and absorbed racist theories then in vogue (Grann 2009:152). His surveying skills had been tested in expeditions on the borders between Bolivia and Brazil, and his military fame increased after his achievements during the First World War. In 1920, Colonel Fawcett was petitioning the Brazilian government to fund his expedition into the upper reaches of Mato Grosso, where he was determined to encounter the ruins of the lost city that he called Z.
In 1911, an Andean peasant named Melchor Arteaga led Hiram Bingham to the ruins of Machu Picchu. The encounter with the site Bingham hailed as the Lost City of the Incas brought the amateur American archaeologist from Yale unprecedented fame. Fawcett desperately wanted to surpass both Bingham (1875–1956) and his contemporary Hamilton Rice (1875–1956), who had made important incursions in the Amazonian region equipped with state-of-the-art technology. Fawcett also had a metaphysical bent. He was a follower of the Russian medium Madame Blavatsky (1831–1891), the founder of the Theosophical Society who professed the relevance of mystical experiences and revelations as means of encountering a transcendent realm.
According to David Grann in his book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (2009:288), “by 1924 Fawcett had filled his papers with reams of delirious writings about the end of the world and about a mystical Atlantean kingdom, which resembled the Garden of Eden. Z was transformed into the ‘cradle of all civilizations’ and the center of one of Blavatsky’s ‘White Lodges,’ where a group of higher spiritual beings helped to discover the fate of the universe. Fawcett hoped to discover a White Lodge that had been there since ‘the time of Atlantis’ and to attain transcendence.”
In 1920, the meeting between Rondon, Fawcett, and Brazilian president Epitácio Pessoa was not auspicious. Fawcett adamantly refused Rondon’s offer of a mixed English-Brazilian expedition. Pessoa only gave him minimal funds. Although he considered Brazilians unfit to participate in the expedition, Fawcett relied on the maps that were being charted by Captain Jaguaribe (Morel 1944:41; Rohter 2019:309).
Fawcett’s 1920 expedition was a fiasco—a fact that Rondon eagerly publicized. In his fine biography of Rondon, Larry Rohter notes that this episode did not reveal Rondon’s best side (2019:310). Rondon gloated over Fawcett’s defeat not only because his services had been shunned but also because he was adamantly against foreign expeditions that excluded Brazilian engagement (309–311).
Desperately Seeking Fawcett
When Colonel Fawcett returned to Brazil in 1925, he had obtained financing with the American Newspaper Alliance, American Geographical Society, the Museum of the American Indian, and funds from Nelson Rockefeller Jr. Aside from American support, the Royal Geographical Society also provided instruments. Together with his eldest son, Jack (1903–1925), and Jack’s best friend Raleigh Rimmel (1901–1925), Fawcett left New York amid a flurry of publicity. He, Jack, and Rimmel vanished into the wilds of Mato Grosso and were never found.
Burgeoning through the years from a steady outpouring of media news, narratives, reportage, a film, and numerous rescue expeditions, Fawcett’s fame continues to blossom. Exploration Fawcett (1953), which gathers writings supposedly penned by Fawcett and compiled by his younger son, Brian (1906–1984), reveals many inconsistencies between the coordinates of his whereabouts given in the book and the notes scribbled by Fawcett in his secret papers stored with family descendants (Grann 2009:103). Czech playwright Misha Williams contended that Fawcett did not wish to be found or to return to Western modernity. In a plotline that echoes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Williams imagines that Fawcett sought to create a cult around his son Jack based on the theosophic credo and the founding of a secret community (Thorpe 2004).
Lost Cities and Future Cities
Among the numerous writings on Fawcett’s demise, many written in Portuguese and overlooked by American and English authors, the Brazilian writer and journalist Antonio Callado produced a singular account, Esqueleto na lagoa verde (Skeleton at the Green Lagoon), first published in 1953. In 1952, Callado ventured into the region of the Xingu in Mato Grosso with Brian Fawcett, Percy Fawcett’s younger son.
While in Rio de Janeiro, Brian Fawcett met with Francisco Jaguaribe and Cândido Rondon. During this meeting, Jaguaribe refuted some of Percy Fawcett’s cherished beliefs. One of them concerned the existence of the “Morcego” Indigenous peoples, who supposedly slept in caves during the day. When Brian quizzed Jaguaribe about the existence of the Morcegos (or Bats), their existence was adamantly denied (Rohter 2019:311).
Fawcett’s fate remained elusive, as the different Indigenous peoples he encountered produced varying versions of his trajectory and the material vestiges of his expeditions were dispersed. The mystery persisted because, as Callado aptly commented, “There is nothing more solid than a legend, and P.H. Fawcett identified himself with one of the core legends of humanity: that of the abandoned city” (Callado 1961:30, my translation).
The encounter with a version of El Dorado, the uncovering of a city devoured by nature, and the deciphering of a lost civilization would not only grant Fawcett a prominent place in the halls of fame, it would also allow him to reposition the trajectory of modernity through an inaugural act of the past. The ruins of the past were to be the emblems of the future of a modernity that would cease to be disenchanted. Rationality, calculation, and capitalist gain would be subsumed by higher transcendental glory.
Rondon never lived to see Brasília and probably would feel at odds with its architecture and lack of streets. But his native state of Mato Grosso became one of the main bulwarks of the agribusiness in Brazil, and vast terrains have been utterly depleted by deforestation. The city of Cuiabá, described by Fawcett as “impoverished and backward” (Grann 2009:196–197), has become one of Brazil’s many featureless cities of modernity.
In his old age, Rondon altered somewhat his views about Indigenous acculturation by supporting the creation of the Xingu Indigenous Park. His brand of modernity, with its positivist belief in the “religion of humanity,” also endorsed the positivist notion that the “living are always increasingly and necessarily governed by the dead.” Not the dead that appear in the spiritualist séances, but the dead whose accumulated knowledge the living inherit. In a contradictory knot, the positivist pantheon, with its glorification of the dead, crosses paths with Indigenous ancestral cults. Yet the messages of the dead are entirely different, and the echoes of the positivist pantheon are mostly unheard. ✹
Postscript2
Percy Harrison Fawcett’s fame was largely built on his disappearance. As a controversial figure, he continues to elicit contradictory evaluations. His depiction in David Grann’s bestseller as a great explorer in search of an ancient city is belied by other experts. In volume 3 of Die If You Must: Brazilian Indians in the Twentieth Century, a history of Indigenous peoples in Brazil, the prominent British historian John Hemming, director of the Royal Geographic Society from 1975 to 1996, criticizes Fawcett’s racist views, writing, “In addition to this eugenic gibberish, Colonel Fawcett was obsessed with the exotic and the occult. In a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society in London 1910, he had spoken of ‘rumors of old ruins . . . hidden in the forests of the Amazon basin’” (Hemming 2003:78). Hemming comments on the film The Lost City of Z (2017, dir. James Gray), based on Grann’s book, in a newspaper article: “Greatest explorer? Fawcett? He was a surveyor who never discovered anything, a nutter, a racist, and so incompetent that the only expedition he organized was a five-week disaster” (Hemming 2017).
Renowned British neurologist and writer Dr. Andrew Lees, author of Brazil That Never Was (2020), had a lengthy exchange with playwright Misha Williams, who obtained access to all of Fawcett’s papers. Lees’s research of the Fawcett archive corroborates Williams’s assertions that Percy Fawcett had intended to pursue the “grand scheme” of setting up a cult in the wilderness.
Beatriz Jaguaribe was the spring 2024 Tinker Visiting Professor at LLILAS. She is professor in the School of Communication (ECO) at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).
Notes
- For further research on the mapping of Mato Grosso, see Beatriz Jaguaribe, “Cartografia e desmemória: uma crônica da carta do Mato Grosso,” Serrote no. 41 (July 2022): 168–189 (Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro). A revised English version of this essay will be published in the journal Public Culture, 2025.
- This article was originally published without the Postscript in the print version of Portal magazine, volume 19 (2024).
References
Callado, Antonio. 1961. Esqueleto na lagoa verde. Rio de Janeiro: Departamento de Imprensa Nacional.
Grann, David. 2009. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. New York: Vintage.
Hemming, John. 2003 Die If You Must: Brazilian Indians in the Twentieth Century. London: Macmillan.
___. 2017. “The Lost City of Z is a very long way from a true story—and I should know.” The Spectator, December 29.
Lees, A.J. 2020. Brazil That Never Was. London: Notting Hill Editions.
Morel, Edmar. 1944. E Fawcett não voltou. Rio de Janeiro: Seção de Livros, Empresa Gráfica “O Cruzeiro.”
Ramos Júnior, Dernival Venâncio. 2015. “Cartografias do passado, arqueologias do presente: as ideias de Percy Harrison Fawcett sobre a Amazônia,” Revista de História da UEG 4, 2 (August–December): 97–113.
Rohter, Larry. 2019. Rondon, uma biografia. Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva.
Thorpe, Vanessa. 2004. “Veil lifts on jungle mystery of the colonel who vanished.” The Guardian, Sunday, March 21.
