without a trace
by Douglas Messerli
A.J. Lees Brazil That Never Was (Kendal,
Cumbria, U. K.: Notting Hill Editions, 2020)
Published in a small 7 1/2 x 4 3/4 format, A.
J. Lees’ Brazil That Never Was itself was a kind of illusional
publication for me. Although the cloth-bound book was only 139 pages in
length—and that with photographs, chapter breaks, and heavy leading between
lines—it took me weeks to read, despite the fact that I was almost mesmerized
by the little book from its first chapter. Now I admit I am a slow reader and
that I had numerous other projects upon which I was working while I perused its
pages. But I’ve never quite taken so long to devour a work which totally
interested me.
Moreover, I kept having to remind myself throughout that Lees’ work was
not a fiction, but a book apparently based on facts, the successful British
neurologist becoming so incredibly involved in a childhood fantasy about a
country far away from British shores that he finally had to himself take a
short voyage into the Amazon landscape. Certainly, he would not be the first
“mad” Englishman to be enticed into the vast Amazonian wilderness. Evelyn
Waugh’s desperate attempt to reach Manaus in the Brazilian interior became the
basis of his fiction Handful of Dust; and you might fill a entire wall
of your library with books and films about European males’ failed journeys or
their dreams of travel into the seemingly enchanted forests—which most
Brazilians know to be also a fallen paradise due to the terrible effects of the
rubber barons and others who raped the land and destroyed numerous tribes
living within the South American equivalent of Conrad’s “heart of darkness.”
Lees’ fascination began innocently enough when his school-teacher father
presented him with a dog-eared copy of Exploration Fawcett which told of
Colonel Percy Fawcett’s several voyages into the Amazonian forests throughout
the 1910s and 20s, ending in his 1925 search with his son and his son’s best
friend for a lost city of the Amazon from which they never returned.
Fanned by the steaming smokestacks of the vast cargo ships in the
Liverpool harbor, the young Lees created an imaginative alternative to the drab
landscape in which he lived.
and escaped into the dank shadows of Liverpool. ...The SS
Hilary was not the only steamer destined for Brazil. The
SS Raphael was leaving that evening on the evening tide
with a cargo of pianos for Santos, and the SS Herdsman was
bound for the chocolate port of Salvador Bahia. Cotton bales
arrived on red duster ships from São Paulo, and sacks of
Pernambuco molasses were unloaded at Huskinsson Dock.
As we waited, separated from the shops by the towering dock
wall, unfamiliar scents of Brazil drifted in on the side streams
of the North Atlantic. [p. 6]
Gradually over the years he perceives that the book not only has
continued to fascinate him, but had drawn numerous others to the Amazon jungles
in search of Fawcett and two companions. Twenty years after having left
Liverpool, he had read in London about a wildlife documentary filmmaker, Ridout
who, visiting a store in Cuiabá was given a ring by a woman whose husband had
been awarded it “for services rendered,” [p. 23], which when he showed it to
the Fawcett family back in England was immediately recognized, from the
military inscription Nec asperra terrent (“hardships hold no fear”), as
being an authentic remnant of Colonel Percy.*
Returning to his studies of his childhood book, Lees’ begins to perceive
that the book was actually written by Fawcett’s other son Brian, and slowly
through amazing coincidences and contacts with others who have followed the
Fawcett legend over the years, the author gradually starts to piece together a
fantastic tale that is far more fabulous than the actual events surrounding
Fawcett’s search of his “lost city.” Indeed, the third illusion of this book is
that it truly concerns a journey to the Brazilian heartland, while in truth the
story Lees has to tell comes straight out of dusty British libraries, crumbling
letters loaned to him by Fawcett’s daughter and Fawcett’s now 80 year-old
supporter, Sir John Scott Keltie, as well as stories and gossip by family
members, students of the occult, and science-fiction writers. This book’s
primary journey into the jungle of Amazonia is reconsidered more through
libraries and Lees’ laptop computer than through steamers or airplanes heading down to Rio.
Lees takes the reader into Fawcett’s lost city of the Amazon through the mental
acuity of his research abilities rather than any glide of canoe down the amazon
or tromp of foot through the dark undergrowth of poisonous snakes or arrows.
But
what he finds there sin that in the character of Fawcett lies a darkness of
mind every bit as mad as Conrad’s Kurz’s ramblings in the Congo. Long
fascinated by the occult, the writings of Madame Helena Blavatsky, the tales of
buried treasures, and his own science fiction fantasies, Fawcett’s search for
his “Lost City” likely ended his own life and killed his supposedly “magically
gifted” son Jack and his friend, who sounds to me to have been possibly Jack’s
gay lover.
Even Lees’ rendition of the backstory about Jack calls up a kind of
exotic mix of Asian religious beliefs spiced-up with theosophist ramblings,
hack psychology, and dreamy semi-scientific pipedreams. While living in what
was then called Ceylon in 1903, Fawcett was approached in his hotel by a
delegation of soothsayers and Buddhists who petitioned an audience with him
wherein they revealed that his pregnant wife would bear a son on May 19, during
the celebration of Buddha’s anniversary, who would have a mole on the instep of
his right toe, and that his toes instead of running in the normal sliding scale
would be grouped in equal-sized pairs.
The child born on May 19th, in fact, precisely
had the mole and toe abnormalities. Fawcett also notes in his letters that the
boy had a rather recognizable “obliquity of the eyes,” [p. 74] hinting that in
his father’s mind his son had bodily connections to the Asian people
themselves, with evident ties perhaps to the Buddhist monks who had foretold
his birth. Fawcett, accordingly, treated Jack as special for the rest of his
life, even though, as Lees gleans from his brother Brian’s comments, he was
basically lazy, unlearned, and untalented. At least it explains why Jack and
his friend were chosen to accompany him on his search. But what he was
searching for is almost beyond explanation.
Believing—from his readings of Blavatsky—that there was a “vast
underground labyrinth that contained Inca tombs [which] stretched from Cuzco to
Lima and on the south into Bolivia,” that could be entered through tunnels
marked only by ciphers “visible when the sun hit the rocks and a certain
angle,” Fawcett extended the concept of tombs and lost cities as being related
to what he believed existed in the Amazon jungle as well. With his
contemporaries such as Dion Fortune, Algernon Blackwood, and Aleister Crowley,
Fawcett argued in the December 1922 issue of The Occult Review
that the Great White Brotherhood was under the authority
of fifteen spiritually developed trans-dimensional human
beings from parallel versions of Venus, the moon and Mars.
He believed that mankind’s hope and destiny lay in the
hands of the Earth Guardians or “Adepts,” who inhabited
six underground lodges located in continents that had once
been home to great civilisations. The lodges extended
into the astral plane and were surrounded by an impenetrable
wall of mental matter. Under those lodges were the occult
schools, located all over the world except for Europe, from
where they had been forced to withdraw after the terrors of
war. [p. 83]
In short, we have now entered a territory of
faith that spurred on Fawcett’s falsely reported scientific expeditions into
Brazil that has more links to a high racist fantasy akin to L. Ron Hubbard’s
science-fiction fantasies behind his foundation of Scientology than with any
rational search for unknown Brazilian prehistoric civilizations. What to most
people of the day seemed like one of the last great adventures into the unknown
wilds, was actually an extraordinary farcical voyage into insanity. Sorry to say,
it seems almost condonable that the looney trio met up with a primitive
cannibal tribe who, as rumor has it, shrunk their skulls as evidence of their
consummation.
To
give him credit, Lees does not judge these crackpot concepts as much as he
thoroughly explores the various absurd avenues through which the Fawcett
writings, correspondence, and histories lead him. And even after he recognizes
that Fawcett’s explorations and what his childhood imagination imbued those
adventures were little more than nonsense, he still must prove to himself by
actually traveling to Manaus, the starting point for all travels into the
jungle, to see for himself. What he discovers is even more mundane than the
fantasies of the mad mind of Fawcett:
Manaus was just another place. It was not the exceptional
enclave I thought I knew. I realised that what I had seen with
my own eyes could never compete with the flashbacks of my
dead past. [p. 120]
The real Manaus as he describes it a page
earlier smells of a “nauseous stench of diesel” and appears as an urban
landscape consisting of “A Shell garage, rows of shops with roller shutters
defending their windows, overhead bridges, corrugated iron shacks, sallow walls
covered in graffiti, bracketed streetlights, telephone wires, parking lots
filled with trucks, and a Coca Cola bottling plant....” [p. 117] Inside a tall
perimeter fence patrolled by guards “were 600 global corporations including
Honda, Gillette and Yamaha.” [p. 117]
If
I felt several layers of illusion as I read Lees’ book, perhaps he reflected
the Liverpoolian lad’s own sense of illusion in regarding his own childhood
vision. Only when he travels on a silkwood dugout for a ways down the Rio Negro
does he briefly find himself in a world where “time had collapsed.” [p. 125]
Clearly this, however, is not a world in which he can exist, and when he
returns to society, almost smelling of nature, he realizes, as he puts it, that
“trying to recapture those magic moments [of his childhood vision] was as
impractical as trying to look for the path of the SS Hilary in the
ocean.” A ship leaves no track, just as Fawcett’s mad march into the interior
left no evidence of his even having entered it. The past is nothing but the
past.
*The fascination with Fawcett continues with
the 2016 film, directed by James Gray, The Lost City of Z.
