The romance of the jungle

It is so sad to read about the Mato Grosso now, at least it is for anyone who, like me, was a boy in the 1950s. When the vast rain forest of the Amazon makes the news at all it is in stories about economic predation, logging and genocide. The Mato Grosso has shrunk and become a victim, which for us was the ultimate in adventure, romance, and horror, with all of it so safely far away.

For it had everything: lost cities in the jungle, lost treasures, lost wisdoms, as well as savage tribes which could shrink your head to the size of a cricket-ball, snakes as long as streets, pirana fish that in minutes could whittle you down to your wish-bone, and those other, even more terrifying (if intriguing) fish, whose names we could never remember, which, being very small, could leap out of the Amazon along the arc of your pee and straight up your dick. And never come down again. But mainly the Mato Grosso had Colonel Percy Fawcett, an Englishman who disappeared into it in 1925 and never came back. It was Fawcett who held the whole repertory cast together.

Everyone had heard of him because of one book which became an international bestseller, Expedition Fawcett, compiled from the Colonel’s letters and notes in 1953 by his son Brian. David Grann’s book is the latest of many attempts to discover what happened to him (it is thought that a hundred people have died in the course of these attempts). But what makes it so different from the others is that it appears at a time when the world has forgotten Fawcett.

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Stephen Daisley

David Lammy’s imperial overreach

In the late 1960s I was a reporter on the Times, when, intent on establishing its credentials as a newspaper, it actually sponsored an expedition into the Mato Grosso, hoping this would result in lost cities in the jungle, giant snakes, and Fawcett.