Part One: Percy Fawcett: Real-Life Indiana Jones, or Deluded Psychic Racist?

There are a few candidates for the title "the real Indiana Jones" but Percy Fawcett is the man whose reputation most inspired our favorite fictional archaeologist. Unfortunately, he was a racist, a murderer and a weirdo occultist who led his own son to a horrific death for reasons of Magic.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we
tell you everything you don't know about the very worst
people in all of history. And this week we're going well,
we're actually going behind in some ways. We're going behind
almost everybody's favorite movie protagonist, Indiana Jones, by talking about
the guy who's often credited as being the real Indiana Jones,

(00:27):
Percy Fawcett. And as a spoiler, Percy Fawcett sucked ass.
But you know who doesn't suck is our guest today, Miriam. Miriam,
welcome back or welcome to the show. You are a
friend of the pod in the most literal sense of
the word, and also a friend of Live Like the
World Is Dying, which is a podcast that is also
the friend of our podcast.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
Yes, great to be here. Yeah that is me. I'm
part of an anarchist publishing collective called Strangers in a
Tangled Wilderness, and we do a podcast called Live Like
the World Is Dying, which I am both a friend
of and a podcaster of.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
Yay awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
I listeners, you'll notice a trend where I cheat work
by having my friends on a podcast so it feels
less horrible to be working on a Friday, So Miriam's
here and I'm very happy about it.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
I feel like most people work on a Friday, but
you know who doesn't work on a Friday is the
subject of our episodes this week, Percy Fawcett, because he's
been dead for decades. Miriam. Have you ever heard of
Percy Fawcett.

Speaker 3 (01:32):
I have not, but I have I have rarely heard
a more villainous name like that is a name that
I assume. He had a curly mustache.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
He had a mustache he had exactly if you picture
in your mind's eye like a British explorer from the
late Victorian, like early twentieth century age, and he looks
he's he's whoever you're picturing. If you're picturing like a
British explorer from like nineteen hundred, that's Percy fawsilh for
the Netflix.

Speaker 3 (01:59):
Are we talking? Are we talking like Pith Helmet being
people who live the place he just discovered?

Speaker 1 (02:07):
Oh my god, yeah, look at that.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
He's got a beautiful, curling mustache, like magnificent, and also
like a full beard, like he just came out of
the Amazon. He's wearing an explorer's pea coat. And some
sort of weird I honestly don't know what's going on
with his hat.

Speaker 3 (02:23):
The hat is a mystery. I've never seen this hat before.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
It looks like he's got a would wear the jacket
though where Look, the whole fit's good. It's not a
bad fit. There's a reason why he's the dude that
everybody's basing their like Indiana Jones style, like adventure archaeologist
characters on. It's because he did look pretty cool, so

(02:51):
Percy Fawcet. Some people would you say that because he
gets credited a lot as being the real Indiana Jones,
that's not like true in the most literal direct way.
George lucas Han's Steven Spielberg had been open about the
fact that the character and the movies were inspired, like
Star Wars, by pulpy adventure serials that they the two
encountered in their youth right. Like Star Wars, owes a
lot to Flash Gordon and Indiana Jones is more inspired

(03:12):
by Zoro and kind of a lounge of World War
Two era films, particularly a series of adventure b movies
starring actors like Alan Ladd and Charlton Heston with titles
like Secret of the Incas, and I think Heston's Secret
of the Incas is like one of the movies that
most directly inspired Indiana Jones. However, if you dig around
a little bit, you will find people saying that, like, well,

(03:33):
Percy is really the guy who inspired all the characters
who kind of Indiana Jones was based off of. So
Indiana Jones was inspired by these fictional characters from pulp
serials in the forties and fifties, and those pulp characters
were largely inspired by Percy Fawcett, and that is accurate.
To give you an example of how this usually gets
written out, I found an article on sky History that

(03:55):
said quote, possibly the individual most touted as an inspiration
for Indiana Jones is Percy Harrison Fawcett, a British Army officer,
surveyor and daring jungle explorer. Fawcett's life history reads like
the plot of an adventure novel or action film, and
that is true his life. His biography does read like
the plot of an adventure novel because he wrote it,
and he wrote it trying to ape adventure novels. Because

(04:17):
he was also a fan of the adventure novels that
a lot of people were writing at the time, and
he was deliberately kind of crafting an image for himself.
And the specific thing Fawcett dedicated his life to doing
is very Indiana Jones, because he spent his life and
in fact, dot lost his life looking for a magical
lost city in the Amazon. Right. Oh, like it's a
it's a yeah. So that you went on question he's

(04:41):
not a serious archaeologist, But was he a.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
Good Was he a good writer?

Speaker 3 (04:46):
Like?

Speaker 2 (04:47):
Did he was?

Speaker 1 (04:48):
What was or like? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (04:50):
Not bad?

Speaker 1 (04:50):
What are we working with here?

Speaker 2 (04:52):
Yeah? Reasonably good? Yeah, And you know, he's more to
the point, it's not just that he was a good writer,
because he did like write his own life story down
and he very much themed it off of things that
he'd read in adventure novels in some ways. But he
was also personal friends with Arthur Conan Doyle and h
Writer Haggard, who are like the two guys who wrote
some of the most influential novels in that genre in

(05:14):
the early nineteen hundreds. So all of the movies and
stuff that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were inspired by
when they made Indiana Jones were themselves inspired off of
novels by guys like h Writer Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle,
and they were friends with Percy Fawcett and wrote books
based on his exploits. Right, So it really is pretty
fair to call Percy Fawcett, if not like the real

(05:36):
Indiana Jones, then one of the main inspirations behind Indiana Jones. Now,
it's also fair to note that many modern adventure film
protagonists are at least partly inspired by Percy Fawcett. I
would say doctor Alan Grant from Jurasca Park and Nathan
Drake from The Uncharted Games both have a little bit
of Percy in them, or at least a little bit of
like the public vision of Percy, because the public vision

(05:59):
of Percy is not accurate to the real man.

Speaker 3 (06:02):
Right.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
Oh, Percy Fawcett was a fraud, He was a murderer,
and he was one of the most irresponsible fathers that
we have ever talked about on this show. Like in
the long list of horrible dads, he's up there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:14):
I just rewatched the original Jurassic Park in the last
couple of months, and what a great film. Laura Dern Honey, what.

Speaker 3 (06:25):
A great film.

Speaker 1 (06:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
And Sam Neil, the recently tragically departed Sam Neil, who
could have played Percy Fawcett. I bet he could have
grown a mustache of that caliber. I have that kind
of faith in Sam Neil's facial hair.

Speaker 3 (06:38):
I more than that, I believe Samuel could have made
it look good.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
I know, I think he could have made it look good.
I'll say I think he could have found a lost
city in the Amazon if he'd really wanted to, But
he didn't. He mostly wanted to hang out with his ducks.

Speaker 3 (06:51):
Pure soul.

Speaker 2 (06:52):
Yeah, he was a nice man. So historians and experts
in Amazonian exploration tend to hate Percy Fawcett because he
was a fraud and a huge asshole. Right, And these
guys will often be like, well, there's other people who
we should who more deserve to be credited as being
like the real life Indiana Jones. If you, if you
listen to like credible folks who are experts in jungle exploration,

(07:15):
they will tend to say that a better pick would
have been a guy like Hiram Bingham. Him Bingham was
a Yale professor and a groundbreaking archaeologist and World War
One veteran. It was one of the people who's often
discredited with rediscovering Machu Pichu. Right, so that's like certainly
seems more like the the Indiana Jones like we want
to believe would have existed, right, an actual like heroic

(07:37):
soldier who was also a really good archaeologist. But if
you care about who most deserve to be memorialized by
Harrison Ford at his absolute sexiest, I think we have
to look at like which of these quote unquote Indian
real Indiana Jones is actually looked more like the guy.
And Sophy's gonna show you a picture of Hiram Bingham

(07:57):
and he looks like fine, but he does not look cool, right, Like,
look at this man. He's like he's completely clean shaven
for one thing, which is not cool looking in the jungle.
He does kind of have an Indiana Jones he hat on,
but everything about him is just like so clean and
well kimped like again, great scientist. But Sophie's next going
to show you another photo of Percy Fawcett looking a

(08:19):
lot like Indiana Jones. Actually, like he's he's got the hat,
he's got the little like cravat down around his neck.
He's he looks like he's just been living completely outdoors
for years at a time. He really does look like
an explorer.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
Yeah, but none of them look how hot Harrison Ford
looks there.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
None of them look as hot as Harrison Ford. None
of them look as hot.

Speaker 3 (08:40):
As a very high standard he. Unfortunately, Percy Fawcett does
look quite cool there, like looks cool, I mean not
he doesn't look well like. He looks like he's he
looks like he's dying in the jungle. He looks like
he is dysentery, like ninety dysentery. But but the hat

(09:01):
is looking for him.

Speaker 1 (09:02):
But he doesn't look like like you know, Harrison Ford.
Hat looks like a guy that could crash a plane.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
Yeah, but well, and Harrison Ford looks like a guy
who's been getting like a surplus of calories and protein
and thus has muscle mass, which nobody is living in
the jungle in nineteen o five does.

Speaker 1 (09:21):
But there's some great hats here, as somebody who loves
the hat.

Speaker 2 (09:26):
These these are all good hats, I mean, three really
solid hats in a row between the pictures of Percy
Hero just a stream shot of Indiana Jones.

Speaker 3 (09:34):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (09:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:36):
On the other hand, Percy Fawcett looks like if he
tried to punch a Nazi, his arm would break in half.

Speaker 2 (09:41):
And it would shatter. It would shatter immediately because he
hasn't had any iron in his diet in more than
a year. So if you've heard of Percy Fawcett, you've
probably heard about him in context of his search for
the lost city that he called Z. And this became
famous in around two thousand and nine when author David

(10:02):
Gran published a book, The Lost City of Z about
Percy Fawcett and his goal. Fawcett went missing searching for
this lost city that he told everybody was definitely in
the Amazon, and then pretty much died. He died somewhere
out in the jungle, right as a spoiler for where
this goes, and people went searching for him for years
to see if they could find Percy. There were rumors
that he was still hiding in the jungle. He wasn't.

(10:24):
He just died, and then Grand in two thousand and
nine publishes this book that's kind of a reappraisal of
Percy's legacy because we have found in the interim decades
since Percy went missing that there were large inhabited sections
of the Amazon, not in the way that Percy thought
there were, but in a way that has caused people
to kind of reappraise his legacy and be like, well,
he was kind of right about the fact that there

(10:46):
were like large urban society or semi large urban societies
in the Amazon prior to European contact, right. And that
book was popular enough that in twenty sixteen there was
a movie made based on the book, starring a guy
who looks kind of like Brad Pitt as Percy Fawcett
and Robert Pattinson as his friend Handy Henry Costen, a.

Speaker 1 (11:08):
Guy who kind of look that guy is so famous.
You're talking about Charlie Hunnhum, the guy who jack Brad
pitt Sons of Anarchy. Like, that guy's famous, and.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
I'm looking a little like Brad Pitt.

Speaker 1 (11:25):
It looks a little bit like Brad Pitt without like,
you know, being like a pusiveness of Brad Pitt. Brad
Pitt sucks, guys.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
I'm sorry, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (11:35):
I have also never heard of Charlie Hunhuam.

Speaker 2 (11:38):
Thank you, thank you, Miriam.

Speaker 1 (11:40):
I have because handsome that's fair.

Speaker 2 (11:42):
Yeah, I again, he looks kind of like Brad Pitt.
Robert Pattinson is way better in the movie, way better.
But the movie is completely inaccurate and the book, I
should also say, David Grant's book The Lost City of
z is completely inaccurate. And this this is going to
disappoint some of you, those of you who read it.
It disappointed me because I read Grand's book in like
two thousand and nine or ten, and I liked it.

(12:03):
He's a very good writer. If you've heard of his name,
or you think you've heard of his name, it's probably
because he wrote the book Killers of the Flower Moon,
which was turned into a widely celebrated film. But Grand's
book about Percy, while enjoyable, is completely fucking wrong about
every important detail pretty much about the man's life, right
to the point where actual experts on the Amazon and

(12:23):
the history of exploration in the Amazon are livid at
Gran and his book and the movie that was made
based out of it. One of Grand's major sources, a
guy he thanks profusely in his book and say I
couldn't have written this book without the book This Amazon
historian and explorer wrote is an explorer named John Henning
and John Henning's review of Grand's book is succinct and brutal. Quote,

(12:44):
it is a pity that a writer as good as
Grand chose to study this unimportant, disagreeable, and ultimately pathetic man.
It is an even greater pity that he decided to
inflate and distort so much of this sad story. It's
really pretty brutal. Do a good job with the Percy
Fowtsett story. I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 (13:02):
I love Man on man crime. That was so cool, and.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
We're gonna hear a lot from him in this and
he has he does not spare the rod on this book.
It's beautiful stuff.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
I was surprised that when you were saying the book
was really bad and I have not read I haven't
read Killers of the Flower Moon, and I was okay,
So a good writer telling lies is what we're talking
about here.

Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, I mean, I'm not an expert on this, but
the experts say that he willingly and knowingly distorted the
truth in his book to a massive degree. Right, That's
the allegation that a lot of experts had made about
Grand's book. I'm going to try not to distort the story.
We'll see how well I do. Percy Fawcett's tale begins,
as many bad things do, at the height of the
Victorian Age. Percy Harrison Fawcett was born on August eighteenth,

(13:54):
eighteen sixty seven.

Speaker 3 (13:56):
We even got a Harrison.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
Ford exactly who Maybe they're related. That's not how names work,
but it could be. He was born August eighteenth, eighteen
sixty seven in Torquay, near Devon, which is in like
the southwest tip of England. His mother had been born
Myra McDougall, and his father's family were old and aristocratic

(14:17):
members of the Yorkshire gentry. His family, the Fawcets, had
owned Scalabee Castle and probably got richest shipping magnates in
the East Indies. That's generally where people say most of
their money came from. His father was Captain m.

Speaker 3 (14:33):
So their money is in castles and slavery.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
This is I think mostly post slavery, because we're talking
like post eighteen thirty is when they make their fortune.
I'm not saying that doesn't mean that it wasn't sketchy,
but I think it was post Slavery's when they make
most of their money. I did look into that because
once I heard shipping, I was like, Okay, what air?
What year were they shipping stuff? Because there was a
shatain age it was that would have been people, but
I think they were mostly too late for that to

(14:58):
have been where they got their fortune. His father was
Captain Edward Boyd Fawcett, who Grant's book describes as a
Victorian aristocrat and member of the Prince of Wales's inner circle,
and that does seem to have been accurate. He was
also a famously good cricket player. Alas, Edward Fawcett loved
to drink, and by the time Percy was born, he'd
acquired the nickname Bob for what years of alcoholism had

(15:20):
done to his nose. Right, So he's again, you have
to be quite the drinker for people in like the
eighteen seventies and eighties to be like, Wow, you're kind
of drinking a little too hard, aren't you. Like you're
going a little bit off the wagon there, my man,
Like that means you've got a serious problem. So Edward
was almost the platonic ideal of the rich, young fel

(15:42):
sun fuck up from an aristocratic British family. He cheated
on his wife constantly, and he pissed away the family
fortune gambling and getting drunk. One of his kinsmen described
him as a good man gone wrong. But the things
this person cites his evidence that Fawcett was ever a
good man had nothing to do with morality. He described
him as a balliol, scholar and fine athlete, yachtsman, charmer,

(16:03):
and wit equerry to the Prince of Wales. And again,
none of those are things that make me think he
was a good man. Like, okay, like he was well connected,
and he was charming and funny. That doesn't mean he
wasn't drinking in an asshole?

Speaker 1 (16:16):
Right?

Speaker 3 (16:17):
Could sail a yacht? Real good?

Speaker 1 (16:19):
Is?

Speaker 2 (16:19):
Yeah? Well, I think bad people can say a yachts
like Mark Zuckerberg, for example. But yeah, this does reveal
kind of something important about the culture of Percy and
his Faucet were born to help expand and lead. For
members of the upper class in the British Empire, being
good at sports was proof that you were a good person,

(16:41):
and not just a good person, but a perfect living
embodiment of colonial values. Right when when Percy's dad's friends
say he was a good man because he used to
be a great athlete. That's not that they don't think
that's weird, because they are. Like the purpose of sports
in the height of the British Empire is to make
soldiers for the British Empire. Cricket, which is the sport

(17:02):
that Percy and his dad are both known for being
best at, originated around the seventh century CE, and by
the sixteen hundreds it had become popular among the nobility.
As much as anything, playing sports meant that you were
rich enough to have time for something that wasn't hard
labor or worship. Cricket spread through Britain's early colonies, and
the first cricket club came to India in seventeen ninety two.

(17:22):
It soon became a passionate thing for soldiers to engage
in per an article in The Collector by Greg Bahyer.
For the most part, cricket was an obsession of the military,
and there were even complaints of British officers taking up
valuable logistics space by bringing their cricket gear on military campaigns.
One such complaint was received before the Battle of Isla Nwanda,
where the British suffered their biggest ever defeat to indigenous forces.

(17:44):
So is it possible that the British lost to the
Zulus there because they were too obsessed with playing cricket. Unlikely,
but not impossible.

Speaker 3 (17:51):
Yeah, I can picture some Victorian era British officer like
leaving behind the guns to bring a couple extra crates
of cricket whites or whatever they've doteyet.

Speaker 2 (18:03):
Just like I can kind of picture like US soldiers
maybe fucking off on patrol duty and getting ambushed because
they're paying attention to who's winning the super Bowl or
something right, like they're turning through a radia or some shit. Easy. Easy.
So the fact that Edward Fawcett, Percy's dad, was considered
one of the best cricket players of his generation means that,
prior to his fall into disrepute, he would have been

(18:25):
one of the more lauded military officers of his era,
because being good at cricket was about as good as
being good in actual warfare in this period of time.
By the time Percy himself was born, cricket was valued
not just as a game in and of itself, but
as a way to induct young men into imperialist values
and make them better soldiers. This is very directly stated
in educator Peter Crowhurst's website British Empire eighteen fifteen to

(18:49):
nineteen fourteen quote. As public schools began to turn out
English Christian gentlemen, the British government came to see these
schools as providing the training character needed by Britain's colonial
servants working in far flung parts of the Empire. But
the last quarter of the century, when Britain justified imperial
expansion by claiming Britain had a mission to civilize the
undeveloped parts of the world, it was the values transmitted
by cricket that helped to tie the colonies and its

(19:11):
peoples to Britain. And let maybe.

Speaker 3 (19:14):
Sound to know what the values it included in cricket are.

Speaker 2 (19:18):
Great, I'm glad you asked that question, Mariam. So those
values are supposedly a competitive spirit and a selfless dedication
to the team, right, and they see that as transferring
like pretty directly to making you a selfless soldier who's
willing to sacrifice for their comrades in the Empire. This
is why Lord Wellington is said to have mused that
the Battle of Waterloo had been first quote fought on

(19:41):
the playing fields of Eton right. Wellington was claiming that
the reason why he beat Napoleon at Waterloo is that
his officers learned the values that made them great soldiers
through playing sports. That that's what made them able to
beat Napoleon and his officers. Right. This is like something
Wellington said, So maybe we should like take it seriously,
not necessarily as a literal evidence of how well cricket

(20:04):
worked at making soldiers, but as as a sign of
the place that cricket held in like English culture in
this period of time. Probably no single piece of media
better embodies this than a poem by Sir Henry Nubolt
himself born in eighteen sixty two, titled Play Up, Play Up,
and play the Game. This is a poem about how

(20:24):
sports is supposed to make boys into great imperial soldiers.
I'm going to read you the first couple stanzas of it.
There's a breathless hush in the close tonight, tend to
make in the match, to win, a bumping pitch in
a blinding light, an hour to play in the last
man in. And it's not for the sake of a
ribboned coat or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
but his captain's hand on his shoulders, smote, Play up,

(20:46):
Play up, and play the game. The sand of the
desert is sodden, red, red with the wreck of the
square that broke, the Gatlings jammed, and the colonel dead,
and the regiment blind with dust and smoke. The river
of death has brimmed its banks in England's far and
honor and name. But the voice of a schoolboy rallies
the ranks. Play up, play up, and play the game.
You see what they're saying there, right, bully shit? Yeah?

(21:12):
First off, pretty good poem technically, right, But second.

Speaker 3 (21:16):
Really like affirms the decision to cut gym class.

Speaker 2 (21:20):
Right, really do we need to stop kids from playing sports?
Keep them inside on the computer. Get these boys in
front of a screen, or they're going to conquer India? Like,
I don't know. Look, we have not invaded Afghanistan since
creating TikTok, That's all I'm gonna say.

Speaker 3 (21:38):
So really good point.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
Yeah, yeah, these are the values that young Percy is
going to grow up absolutely doused in. Right, And the
fact like when he's being praised is being a great
cricketer he's being praised is like you're going to be
a very good soldier for the British Empire, right man.
At the same time as he's growing up and he's
getting you know, going to school and getting into sports,
he's watching his father come completely collapse as a human being.

(22:02):
Over the course of Percy's childhood, He's going to squander
two fortunes and basically abandon his family until he dies
of consumption at age forty five. Percy doesn't really know
his dad very well. He mostly just knows that his
dad let the entire family down. His mother, Myra is
obviously a victim here, but she's going to take her
frustrations with life and her husband out on her kids.

(22:25):
Grant's book quotes a family member is saying her unhappy
married life caused her much frustration and embitterment, inclining her
to caprice it injustice, particularly to her children and grandads.
Percy later confided to Arthur Conan Doyle that his mother
was all but hateful. In his pseudobiography Exploration Faucet, Percy
wrote diplomatically, perhaps it was all for the best that
my childhood was so devoid of parental affection that it

(22:47):
turned me upon myself, right, And that's basically that's Percy's
claim about himself is that his dad's basically gone and
his mom is really mean, and so he just kind
of focuses on himself, right as opposed to like his
family or anything else. Like it turns him inward, and
it makes him a very it's going to make him
like a quiet and kind of he's obsessive, but about

(23:11):
like things that other kids don't really understand, are not
really interested in. Right, He's going to be like searching
for gold as a little kid repeatedly. This is something
he's really interested in. And I get the feeling he
just kind of falls into these fictional and nonfictional stories
of like exploration and these like great you know, lost
treasures and whatnot, because it's it's a fantasy life, and
any fantasy life is better than his like life at home.

Speaker 3 (23:34):
Right, Hey, I don't get the sense that that's much
of an outlier in like the parenting style of the
British aristocracy of the nineteenth century. Like I think even
if you had a like living, healthy father who was
at home, Like the style in that class at the
time was like pay somebody else to beat your children

(23:54):
far away from you. Was like how they parented.

Speaker 2 (23:58):
And yeah, and so that extent, probably the biggest impact
his parents out of him is that his dad is
a failure right, as opposed to his dad being like
distant and non affectionate and a drunk, but also a
success right. That would have made for a different kind
of childhood somewhat, because he does seem to have some
degree of like shame over his dad, especially as a
younger kid and man. He has an older brother named Edward,

(24:22):
and he loves his older brother. Edward's athletic but also
very bookish, and so Percy's going to like take after
his older brother. And when his older brother gets into
like weird esoteric spiritual stuff, Percy's going to follow him
there too. Like most kids of the upper class, Percy
is sent to expensive public schools. And when we talk
about public schools in this period of time, we're talking

(24:42):
about private schools actually, like that's how we would describe
them today, but they'll usually call them public schools back then. Now,
the system that kind of governs life in the schools
that Percy's going to, these boarding academies, We've talked about
it before in this show. It's called the prefect fagging system, right,
and yes, this is where the slur it comes from, right,
but this predates that also, like they don't mean it

(25:05):
as that specific slur, but that is like one of
the origin points of the slur. And the prefect fagging
system was a way of organizing kids in boarding schools
and training them and letting them kind of like train
each other through abuse that was common in the most
prestigious institutions of learning in the British Empire. To talk
about that a little bit, I want to quote from
an article in the History of Education Quarterly by Paul Nash.

(25:28):
Under the prefect fagging system, senior boys are given a
major role in governing the school, wielding discipline and carrying responsibility.
They are called variously prefects, monitors, or prepostors, chosen according
to many criteria, including physical and intellectual prowess. The principal
consideration in their selection, apart from seniority, has traditionally been
character Usually the prefects are members of the sixth form,

(25:49):
and while in some schools all members of the sixth
they are granted privileged status. The two bodies are not
customarily identical. At the other end of the scale, new
boys entering the school begin by serving as fags for
senior boys. Their duties consist of almost anything the fag
master cares to impose, from cooking and running errands to
blacking shoes and kindling fires. And that is kind of
a tame look at how the system works. This is

(26:13):
built on physical and psychological abuse and encouraging physical and
psychological abuse of boys. Sexual abuse is so common to
have been almost universal, at least in some periods of time.
You'll hear some differences, but the number of boys who
experienced some degree of sexual abuse under this system is
like most of them, one way or the other. Like

(26:33):
it's a deeply abusive and messed up system the most
it's basically.

Speaker 3 (26:38):
Like just institutionalized, yeah, unimaginably bad bullying.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
Yes. And this is, by the way, what the House
system and everything in Harry Potter's based on. She doesn't
call it the prefect fagging system, but she uses the
term prefects and like head boys and stuff, right y,
That's what it's all based.

Speaker 3 (26:52):
On the exposure that I've had to This also is
did you ever read the book Boy by Roald Dahl?
Was like early autobiography. He describes acting, you know, in
this role, and I just I mean, it's been like
literal decades since I've read it, but I remember one
of the things he was required to do for like
the boy he was assigned to was go into the

(27:16):
like outdoor privy before him and sit on the toilet
seat to melt the ice on it and warm it warm,
and being complimented on having like a nice warm bottom
by the boy for whom he is doing. Like, I
hate that. I'm just gonna let that sit there because
I don't feel like I'm gonna like analyze.

Speaker 2 (27:37):
That's one of the tamer stories. Yeah, that you're gonna
get out of this system.

Speaker 3 (27:42):
Yeah, that is like that is the g rated version
of what must have been going on.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
It's yeah, to make to make the boys who make
the British Empire, you gotta do some fucked up stuff now,
speaking of things that are inherently abused. No, anyway, here's
some ads and we're back. So the most we get

(28:11):
about his experiences under this pretty brutal schooling system from
Percy is an insistence that being caned regularly quote did
nothing to alter my outlook. In other words, all that
abuse didn't change me, Like, don't worry it didn't. It
didn't affect me at all. In the book Brazil That
Never Was, aj Lees, who extensively studied Fawcett's life, writes

(28:32):
that by all accounts, he was a sensitive and rather
solitary child who during school holidays would go hunting for
treasure near his home, which is a very cute thing
for a kid who's enduring all this shit to want
to do, Like, you have to have some sympathy for
him in this era, just like desperately wanting anything but
the life that he's got. Hard not to sympathize with that.

Speaker 3 (28:56):
Very expensive abuse is still abuse.

Speaker 2 (28:59):
Very expensive of abuse. Yeah. And while there is some suggestion,
some evidence that the heavy expectations and demand placed on
the young men of his station chafed him, he also
excelled as a student and in sports, first as a
cricket player as grand Rights in his book, spectators noticed
an almost maniacal determination about his style of play. One
observer said that Fawcett invariably showed the bowlers it takes

(29:21):
something more than ordinary to dislodge him. Once set. He
gets a reputation for physical toughness, he's really he's almost
immune to physical discomfort. That's how people will always talk
about Percy his entire life. He's just incredibly tough, Like
he does not mind being in a horrible pain and discomfort,
and he's willing to He's willing to endure that longer

(29:41):
than most people can. And this is going to be
his really his superpower his entire life. The only way
he's able to do the things he does is because
he just doesn't mind being in a horrible agony for
years at a time.

Speaker 3 (29:52):
I thought that works out great for everybody who goes
along with.

Speaker 2 (29:56):
Yeah, it makes him a safe guy to be friends with,
That's what it makes him. One of the stories they
tell about him is when he's playing a rugby game
once and he keeps playing after losing both of his
front teeth, like it doesn't slow him down at all.
It's just been smashed in cool stuff. After Percy graduates
the British equivalent of high school, he gains admission to

(30:16):
the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. Now, in spite of
his education, this is not what Percy wants for himself.
He does not want to be a soldier, but his
mom wants to see him in uniform and probably one
imagines she wants to see her son succeed where her
husband had failed, and his older brother doesn't do this.
His older brother, I think, is just like I've got
other plants and bounces to go right about magic as

(30:39):
a spoiler for what we'll be talking about him a
little later. So Percy goes to the military academy and
it sucks. The military academy is also an incredibly abusive
place for boys. Percy is paysed relentlessly as all the
rest of his peers. One common game, and they always
call them games even though he's are. Some of the
most psychotically violent things you can hear about is to

(31:01):
have young cadets burn their skin on a hot poker.
That's one fun game. Is like how long can you
burn your skin with this branding iron? Another fun game? Yeah,
classic classic game. Another great game is they have kids
stand on a table and then they kick the legs
out from underneath the table and see like, can you
not flinch and just like fall down straight with the
table or do you jump like a coward? Right now,

(31:25):
I can't say exactly how this influenced him throughout his life.
Faucet is going to be very critical of British culture, right,
not in a way that rejects holy its racism or
even imperialist values. But he will see himself his whole
life as a kind of social dissident, and one does
suspect that the brutality of his education may have influenced that. Right.
He is a he is a loyal soldier of the Empire,

(31:47):
and he's also very critical of like the mainstream culture
within the Empire. In eighteen eighty six, Percy is commissioned
as an artillery officer. As John Henning wrote in a
critical summary of the man's life for The Spectator, the
next twenty years involved garrison duty and Ceylon and postings
in Malta in England. The only significant events were getting
married and becoming a devotee like many others of the

(32:08):
Charlatan psychic Madame Blavatsky. And we've had We've done several
episodes on Helena Blavotsky. She's a she's a hoot. This
is the lady who advins theosophy, and theosophy is a
few generations on. Some of the people who, like our
ideological descendants of hers, become the Nazis, right, are become
the original occult weirdos that were in the nazis. Right,

(32:31):
that's like one of the things you can tie to
Blovotsky kind of although she herself was not not that
she wasn't racist.

Speaker 3 (32:38):
Yes, she did come up with the whole the root races.

Speaker 2 (32:41):
The root races and all this kind of stuff too, right, Yes,
so like a lot of Aryan theory has its roots
in Blovotsky. Now, that description by Hinning also leaves out
some important facts, as he stated, Percy's going to be
stationed in Ceylon, which is part of modern day Sri
Lanka uh. And he's there actually as like an eighteen
or nineteen year old, and before he turns twenty, so

(33:01):
when he's still a teenager, he finds himself first drawn
to Buddhist mysticism. And this is like he's he's stationed
in a Buddhist country and he see there's all these,
you know, very old temples that have been around forever,
and he's just immediately drawn to like old things, and
he finds himself much more intrigued by Buddhism than he
is by Christianity. He grows obsessed with Gala peta gala,

(33:22):
which is a famous rock formation in Ceylon that he
seems to have believed had hid some sort of treasure.
He thinks that this rock formation, that's a natural rock
formation that were probably like, was a king buried nearby.
And the way he came upon this belief is telling.
He's just sort of like talking to people, and he
finds a local man who describes himself as a descendant
of the Kandian kings and assures him that there's a

(33:43):
king's hoard buried somewhere near the rocks. We have no
evidence this is anything but a local grifter, right, He's
like hanging out in a terroist trap and a guy's like, yeah,
I'm descended from the old kings, and I'll tell you
where gold is for a price.

Speaker 3 (33:56):
Right.

Speaker 2 (33:57):
That's that's the feeling I get from here. I don't
think Percy's stumbled upon anything other than a guy who's
telling him what he wants to hear. But Fawcett decides
to carry out his first expedition based on this information,
and he digs around the area. All he finds are
some pottery shirts and and you know, he doesn't document
those in any useful way, so we don't know if
those were like recent or if he actually found something old.

(34:19):
He doesn't find any gold, so he doesn't really care, right,
but this failure is not going to do anything to
discourage him, right, This is sort of his like gateway
drug of exploring for like lost antiquities.

Speaker 3 (34:31):
Well, it's so it's so frustrating and interesting. Like you said,
he got intrigued by Buddhism. But like when you when
you are in a Buddhist country intrigued by Buddhism, like
you have the opportunity to like go and study Buddhism
with Buddhists, you know, and like go and learn about
the religion and how it's practiced and like what ideas
people are kicking around in there. And instead he like

(34:54):
found some dude who was like there's gold there maybe,
and like that's what he find Like that's the part
he latches onto. And like, I don't know, I know
some Buddhists they're not they're not big repositories of secret gold.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
Bodhists really encouraged searching for gold. I think desires bad.

Speaker 3 (35:12):
Actually, Yeah, it's such a it's just such a like
disappointing way to take that that interest.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
It's it's it because he is he is gonna get really,
he's going to become a Buddhist, although I don't know
that most Buddhists would recognize what Percy thinks Buddhism is
as as Buddhism, because his Buddhism is also wrapped up
deeply in a lot of these weird kind of spiritualist
beliefs that are circulating through like the hip chunks of
European culture at the time. So it's it's very much

(35:41):
like it's more, it's more accurate to say that he
is intrigued by a mix of Buddhism and what like
white people are writing about Buddhism that's largely a fantasy,
you know.

Speaker 3 (35:52):
Right, like Blavatsky's like conversations with Buddhist ghosts or whatever exactly.

Speaker 2 (35:57):
Stuff like that is as much of an influence on
him as like anything that we would call actual, like
Buddhist theology. So not long after he fails to find
this king's ransom, the Archduke friends Ferdinand visits Ceylon and
there's a huge party thrown to celebrate. Percy attends, but
his grand notes he did not meet Ferdinand, which is
sad because this probably was going to be one of

(36:18):
the last chances he would have gotten to meet the guy.
But he spots a more alluring figure, a girl who
seemed no more than seventeen or eighteen. Her name was
Nina Agnes Patterson, and she was the daughter of a
colonial magistrate. So he sees this teenage girl and he's
like twenty or twenty one at this point, right, so
we're not talking about this would not no one would
notice this is a weird age gap at the time.

(36:39):
She's seventeen or eighteen, he's twenty or twenty one. That's
not even all that really weird today, right, And they
kind of are making eyes with each other, and he
can't talk to her directly because it's Britain in the
fucking eighteen nineties or whatever. So he manages to set
up a meeting and they find out they have some
similar interests. Particularly they both like ancient archaeology, and they

(37:01):
both think Buddhism is really cool.

Speaker 1 (37:03):
Now.

Speaker 2 (37:03):
In addition to that, Nina is an early women's rights activist,
and Percy's pretty tolerant on that issue. For the day.
I'm not gonna call him like whoa committed necessarily comparatively,
so I think he actually is pretty much okay with
women voting, which is like a reasonably good at the time.
I guess you have to say, I'll take what we

(37:24):
can get.

Speaker 1 (37:25):
I wish that, like, in terms of things we could
bring back. I think my friends should have to meet
anybody who wants to date me before I meet that person.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
Yeah, that's that's not quite how it worked back then. No, No, basically.

Speaker 3 (37:39):
They should just have to run the gauntlet of your friends.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
Yeah, someone should make an app for that.

Speaker 1 (37:45):
I don't know if that would work out well for me.

Speaker 2 (37:48):
We'd have fun, Yeah, just like a pinball game where
you just have to bounce off all of this whoever
you want to flirt with, like close friends and relatives
until you need approval. Yeah. If we want to really
drop birth rates, that's how to do it. Oh gosh,
Percy and Nina fall madly in love, as aj Lee
summarizes in his book. After a courtship that lasted two years,

(38:09):
Cheeky as Faucet named nicknamed Nina because she always had
to have the last word, and Puggy, as Nina called
him because of his bulldog tenacity, were engaged to be
married they called each other cheeky and puggy. This is
one of the things that the movie gets right, and
it does sound as insufferable as you imagine. All need
to be next to these dude cheeky? Come over here?

Speaker 3 (38:28):
Who plays who plays her? They didn't call each other
that in public? I would I would die?

Speaker 2 (38:33):
They sure did, They sure did.

Speaker 1 (38:36):
Who played her in the movie? Robert?

Speaker 2 (38:38):
Oh, I don't know. I didn't even know the name
of the guy who looks like the other guy whose
name I can't remember right now, Sophie. I don't remember
her name. But Robert Pattinson's in the movie, and he's
pretty good he's gonna be here.

Speaker 1 (38:49):
Everybody knows Robert Pattinson's name.

Speaker 2 (38:53):
So this is where the problems start, right they they're
courting for two years, they're finally engaged to be married,
but they come in they run into an issue because
Nina and Percy had selfishly only bothered to ask themselves
if they wanted to be married, and they hadn't consulted
the most important authority on that question, Percy's mom, and
Myra does not want Percy to get married. Now we

(39:16):
don't really know why she doesn't like this match. But
she starts spreading rumors first that her own son is
a slee's bag who sleeps around constantly. So she first
tries to just convince Nina that Percy's cheating on her,
and that doesn't work, I think, because Percy's kind of
visibly frightened by the idea of sex. If you know Percy,
it's just kind of obvious he's not cheating on anybody.

(39:38):
Look at this man. He's scared of his own dick.
He's certainly not sleeping around your.

Speaker 3 (39:44):
Mom spreading rumors that you're a scumbag.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
It's so funny, it's so and they're not believable, incredible.

Speaker 3 (39:52):
Every single dynamic in this family is so fun.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
Was played by Cianna Miller. Also didn't Tom Allan's in
this movie as a fat time this is.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
He's the boy, He's Percy's son who dies.

Speaker 1 (40:07):
Oh sensational, what an odd It's a.

Speaker 2 (40:11):
Fun movie, totally inaccurate, totally inaccurate, totally inaccurate, but like
and it's.

Speaker 1 (40:16):
From twenty sixteen, which feels very twenty sixteen.

Speaker 2 (40:20):
It's a very twenty sixteen movie. It's a great Robert
Pattinson performance though, as they all are because Myra's plan
to convince Nina that Percy's cheating on her does not
Worklander h Yeah, Myra pivots to spreading rumors that Nina
is no longer a virgin.

Speaker 1 (40:36):
Per the books, such a bitch.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
She sucks really bad. I wish I knew more about
why Myra sucks this bad, but myras sucked.

Speaker 1 (40:45):
Well.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
Anybody who's like in the public paying attention to these rumors,
it's just going to be like, Okay, these two sluts
seem to be into each other, so it's great.

Speaker 2 (40:53):
Two horn dogs are made for each other. God. Per
the book Brazil that Never was phf Percy Harrison Fawcett
felt he had no alternative but to break off their
engagement in forming Nita in a letter, you are not
the pure young girl I thought you to be. So
this absolutely devastates after because because he falls for everything,

(41:15):
anyone who tells him there's treasure, he'll spend years looking
for it.

Speaker 1 (41:18):
He's an idiot, apparently, now what a dumbass.

Speaker 2 (41:25):
So this is devastating to Nina obviously, and she leaves
se long. It's fucked up. Percy continues being deployed to
modern day Sri Lanka and he establishes a reputation for
himself as intelligent and reliable, but also kind of a
narcissist who's in love with his own voice. His commandant
at the time more or less describes him that way.

(41:46):
For his part, Percy does not seem to have been
fulfilled with the life of a colonial officer. He does not.
This isn't what he wants for himself. He's much more
in love with the path his brother Edward has taken.
Rather than getting into the military and becoming an officer,
Edward becomes a writer and a mountaineer and gets deeply
into Theosophism the new religion created by Helena Blovotsky. Now

(42:07):
Blovotsky is this major figure in the spiritualist movement of
the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, and Edward
is one of her most gifted followers and collaborators. An
article for a Cult World by lux Fair notes that
a key aspect of Blovotsky's belief system was the idea
of quote a brotherhood of advanced souls who formed the
hidden government of the world and direct the course of

(42:27):
human knowledge. And while her most common term for this
organization was the Great White Lodge or great White brotherhood,
and while Blovotsky's success so that's what she tends to
call this, and the white and there really gets emphasized
by some people. Blovotsky's successors are going to alter and
add to this concept over time. But historian K. Paul

(42:49):
Johnson argues that quote, the actual great White Lodge of
Bolovotsky's time was a network of Hindu spiritual and political
leaders who worked with her during her time in India
to oppose the British colonial guy and the activities of
Christian missionaries. These conclusions have been sharply attacked by modern theosophists,
but Johnson offers substantial evidence for his case, and it
cannot be dismissed out of hand. Now. As noted, that's

(43:12):
an interpretation worthy of debate, the idea that these great
white masters with this network of like Hindu spiritual and
nationalist leaders who were kind of fighting against the British
like imperial possession of their land. But Graham argues and
cites some support for this argument too.

Speaker 3 (43:29):
Right.

Speaker 2 (43:29):
His attitude is that Percy has drawn to theosophy because
it's a counter cultural movement that rejects aspects of British
imperial dogma. And in his book he quotes historian Janet Oppenheim,
who wrote a biography of Blovotsky and argued that Blovotsky's
philosophy had particular appeal quote for those who wanted to
rebel dramatically against the constraints of the Victorian ethos. However,

(43:50):
they perceive that elusive entity. And I do think that
describes Percy, and I think that describes Edward too. These
are guys who want to rebel from aspects of the
culture they're born in, and that's what draws them to theosophy.
Edward Fawcett became one of a number of Theosophists who
converted to Buddhism and threw his support behind nationalist religious
figures in Southeast Asia who opposed imperial rule. And Edward

(44:13):
was close enough to Blovotsky that he helped her research
and write her eighteen ninety three book The Secret Doctrine.
Percy's brother helps Helena Blovotsky write The Secret Doctrine, and
in eighteen ninety he travels to Ceylon and takes the Ponzil,
or the Five Precepts of Buddhism. So in eighteen ninety
before Percy shows up there, Percy's brother goes to Ceylon

(44:33):
and becomes a Buddhist. And when you take these five
precepts and agree to them, it means, among other things,
that you're vowing not to drink, not to murder, and
not to commit adultery. And Edward's conversion to Buddhism is
so noteworthy that local newspapers report on it at the time.
You can find press clippings from like these local Ceylon
papers talking about how incredible it is that this British member,

(44:56):
the oldest son of a famous family in the Empire,
has converted to Buddhism. It's kind of a big deal.
And Percy, who kind of worships his older brother at
this point, follows him not long after and takes the
ponceal himself and converts to Buddhism. This is something he
does publicly, and this is something that there's like press about.
So it's a pretty big deal that both of the

(45:17):
Fawcett brothers have done this. And one thing I do
think Graham gets correct is that or Graham gets correct,
is that this is an act of political protest, right
the Fawcett Brothers. Converting to Buddhism is not an a
political act, and it's particularly a big deal that Percy
does this because he is an agent of the colonial
military of the British Empire and is converting to the

(45:38):
faith of a colonized people and promising I won't kill anybody.
And there's a way you could even see that as
kind of potentially treasonous, right if you're a member of
the British military that is supposed to keep this possession
locked down, and you're both converting to the possessed people's
religion and saying I refuse to kill, you're kind of
saying I won't fight for Great Britain. You kind of

(46:01):
are right. Yeah, he is a dissident in some ways.

Speaker 3 (46:04):
You are certainly saying that does he stop.

Speaker 2 (46:10):
Kill at one person? He's gonna kill one person? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (46:13):
Wow?

Speaker 2 (46:14):
You know who else has killed at least one person.

Speaker 3 (46:17):
At least one at least at least one.

Speaker 2 (46:19):
At least one before breakfast most days. My god. Anyway,
maybe you'll.

Speaker 3 (46:24):
Be next Robert Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (46:26):
There's no way to know. With our supervisors, sponsors, advertisers,
what am I talking you.

Speaker 1 (46:31):
Don't got I threatened the audience.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
It's not a threat. It's just kind of a promise.
You know, if you hang out around your sponsors long enough,
people die around them. There's no way to know, there's
no way to statistics.

Speaker 3 (46:41):
Really, Yeah, Lee ed justly edgly.

Speaker 2 (46:52):
And we're back. So in eighteen ninety six, Percy is
transferred from Ceylon back home to attend a course in gunnery.
He gets stationed with a volunteer unit I think in
Ireland at this point, and life goes on for a
few more years. In eighteen ninety eight, Nina Patterson marries
an army captain named Herbert Pritchard. Right, so it takes
her a few years to deal with the shame and

(47:14):
shock of percy mom breaking off the engagement because his
mom right about her. But she marries this other guy,
Herbert Pritchard, and he's like fourteen or fifteen years older
than her. It is not going to be a long partnership.
Like right after they get hitched, they moved to Alexandria
and he almost immediately dies of anthrax exposure three months,

(47:34):
four months after their wedding something like that. And I
don't know how true this is but any book about
Fawcett that you're going to read will cite what were
apparently this guy's last words to Nina. I do wish
you and Fawcett will come together again. To me, you
have been a perfect wife, and I have thanked God
in my prayers for having given you to me. But
I feel sure you are meant for Fawcett and I

(47:55):
am just an interloper. I don't know how much I
believe that because they were to gether inn.

Speaker 1 (48:01):
That shits not real. That's me.

Speaker 3 (48:06):
If I were a lady who had been publicly shamed
and slu shamed and my first and I was about
to become a wealthy widow, I would definitely go around
telling people that his last words to me had been
I really hope you get back together with your ex boyfriend.
That would be great for me.

Speaker 2 (48:24):
Yeah, you're real. I love it if you were to
fuck the guy who broke up with you because his
mom accused you of infidely that's my greatest hope for you.

Speaker 1 (48:33):
My wife is okay.

Speaker 2 (48:36):
Now that you really aren't a version anymore. I hope
that you that you do this. I don't know that's weird,
but maybe maybe it's true. Probably not. My guess, given
that he died of anthrax exposure. My guess is that
his last words were more like, oh god, the anthrax,
it hurts so bad.

Speaker 3 (48:52):
I think.

Speaker 1 (48:54):
I think his last words are probably.

Speaker 2 (48:56):
Ah, yeah, yeah. That that seems more credible.

Speaker 3 (49:00):
So there's a lot of liars in this story, and
they're making lying into an art form, and I appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (49:06):
Yeah, I love it. They love it. Now. What does
everyone does seem to agree on is that by the
time Nina's first husband dies, everyone seems to have learned
that Mayra lied about Nina not being a virgin, right like,
Percy learns that at some point before her husband dies
that he was tricked by his mom, and this really
fucks him up for a while. And once he learns

(49:27):
that she's single again, he finds her and he gets
down on his knees and he begs for her forgiveness,
and Nina forgives him. The two are married on January
of nineteen oh one. This causes a permanent breach between
Percy and most of the rest of the Fawcett family
that does not seem to have concerned him too much.
I don't know how much you don't hear a lot
about him and the rest of his family after this point.

(49:48):
I don't know if he was like bummed about them
not being close or if this was kind of a good,
ridden sort of situation.

Speaker 3 (49:55):
Do we know why his family didn't like this lady?
She seems like the only thing we've heard about.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
Just sucks. I think his mom sucked, So she is
one thing I can't imagine. She is an outspoken stuff
like they didn't call him suffragettes in England, I don't think.
But she's an outspoken advocate for women's rights, and that
may have pissed off Percy's family. None of the sources
I found specify why, though, so I just I honestly
don't know. That would be kind of my theory. Maybe

(50:23):
she's too outspoken about women's rights, but I actually genuinely
don't know. So next, Percy is going to leap towards
a great change in the next kind of stage of
his life because the military bores him right. He doesn't
want to stay an officer forever. He doesn't want to
keep getting shipped around the Empire. He's desperate for some
new field of endeavor where he can prove himself and

(50:45):
his father had once been a member of the Royal
Geographical Society and the RGS. We hadn't known how to
make good maps for very long, because in order to
make like a really quality modern map, you need to
be able to get both latitude and longitude, and always
forget which of them, I think it's longitude. You need
like access to a good clock of some sort, like

(51:05):
you need to be able to tell the time in
order to get the information you need to make a
good map. And so until people could carry like watches
that worked around with them, it was kind of hard
to do very good mapping, right. There are other things
that had to be invented too, but it's the point
is that by the time Percy's born, the Royal Geographical
Society has spent the last like several decades finally mapping

(51:29):
all of these parts of the world that had never
had what we would consider to be like a modern map.
Right most places, even that doesn't mean people didn't know
what was there. It means that there was not like
a modern map in the made to the standards of
like modern map reading. And so the RGS has kind
of made it its its mission in life in the
eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds to cover all of

(51:50):
these blank spaces of the map, right, And so that's
a very intriguing thing. It's a very sexy thing to
be doing. Like, if you're a Victorian gentleman, one of
the coolest hobbies you can have app is geography is
going out and helping to make maps, right, And so
the RGS is a really hip thing to be a
part of. So Percy and Nina get to work making
a child, and Fawcett starts training to use the tools

(52:12):
of a geographical surveyor. He goes to take it, takes
classes with the RGS. The RGS has like a course
that you can take to become an explorer, Like they'll
teach you how to make maps and also how to
like introduce yourself to native populations and try to communicate
with them. There's there's like actual instruction on all these
different things that's varying degrees of effective and problematic. Right, Yeah,

(52:34):
I bet that.

Speaker 3 (52:35):
I bet that class on how to introduce yourself to
native people, boy, was really something.

Speaker 2 (52:41):
Yeah, yeah, you stopped by shooting. No, they weren't quite
that bad. Usually, So his instructor noted quote he was
extremely quick at learning anything new, and although he'd never
used a sextant or an artificial horizon before, he caught
onto using both tools with remarkable speed. He's noted by
his instructors like the things that it took people years

(53:01):
to get good at, he very quickly became good at.
He's when it comes to the actual technical tools of
using surveying equipment, he's excellent at least he seems to
be right. I don't know how to do any of
this stuff, so I can't judge it. I have to
go by what this guy says. Unfortunately, his education in
being an explorer included more than just technical instruction. One
of his course books was written by Sir Francis Galton

(53:23):
and was titled Hints to Travelers. And you've probably heard
of Galton. He was a famous mathematical genius who contributed
to many fields, most notably early genetic science. He was
also a gigantic racist and is the guy most often
credited with creating eugenics. Sir Francis Galton is the father
of eugenics, and his interests extended to map making and exploration.

(53:43):
He was an explorer as a younger man, and in
his Guide to Adventurers he described foreign peoples as the
lower civilized nations or savages, and insisted some races are
inferior to others in volume and complexity of brain. So
he's not Percy's not just getting taught how to use
map tool. You know, there's some other shit in that class.

Speaker 3 (54:02):
Yeah, it's important for your navigation lessons to come with
just a doll up of racism.

Speaker 2 (54:10):
You can't navigate properly unless you're a bigot. You know,
everybody knows that. That's uh, I don't even know. I
don't have a bit to make about that action. So
Fawcett graduates, he does well enough in his map and
racism class that he gets sent off on a mission, well,
not a mission of discovery. He actually gets sent off
as a spy. Because one thing that the British government
has realized is that if we have the RGS sending

(54:32):
people around the world to make maps, folks are used
to the idea that there might just be some nerdy
scientists around making maps. And if we instead of nerdy
scientists and spies, the sky is the nerdy scientists. They
can do a lot of like spy work for the
Empire without necessarily getting caught, and that's what Percy gets
sort of inducted to do. Per the book Brazil that
never was. He was sent by the Foreign Office to

(54:54):
Morocco to investigate Sir Henry MacLean, a British officer considered
to be the power behind the Sultanate, and you're report
back on the threat post by France and Germany. So
he's given a spy mission. It's not really that evil
a spy mission, to be honest, Like he's spying on
another British officer for the most part, and he's kind
of looking at like what are the French and the
British doing in Morocco. He does this competently. He seems

(55:17):
to have done a reasonably good job. He does not
seem to have been discomfited by the fact that his
government wanted him working as a spy instead of an explorer.
But he's also not you know, I think it's that
he was good enough at this that he probably could
have got more spy work from the government. I don't
think he really likes this. He's interested in exploration, he's
not interested in spying for the government. Very much. He's

(55:39):
going to do the best job he can. But once
this is finished, he doesn't seem interested in continuing to
follow down that road, and instead he gets back into
the military, and he's stationed in Ireland for a time
after his return, and then to Malta and then to
Hong Kong and then finally in nineteen oh three, back
to Ceylon. And Ceylon is where he's going to have
his first son, Jazz, and it's where he's going to

(56:01):
start going really crazy. Yeah, Tom Holland, this is when
he gives birth to baby Tom Holland or his wife does.
I don't think Percy does. That would be that would
be odd. But yes, this is where Tom Holland comes
into the picture. Sophie, you're very correct. We'll talk about
Tom Holland in part two of the Percy Fawcett Story,
the Tom Holland story.

Speaker 3 (56:21):
I'm just so glad Tom Holland got to play a
dying Victorian child, which it sounds like the role he
was born to play, especially ten years ago.

Speaker 2 (56:30):
The moment you meet Tom Holland's character in that movie,
you're waiting for him to die, like you're like, all right,
how are they going to kill you. You look like
the kind of boy who needs to die.

Speaker 1 (56:41):
Cool, mirim you have anything you want to plug at
the end here of part one.

Speaker 3 (56:47):
Sure, I'm so excited to find out how this guy
ends up lost in the jungle and dead. But yes,
I am a host of Live Like the World Is Dying,
a podcast for what feels like the end times aka
these times. And it's like, if you, you know, want
to learn about disaster preparedness, but are not somebody who

(57:09):
wants to like hide in a bunker with all of
your beans, you know, instead, maybe you can like learn
about how you can acquire skills and build community, and
you know, also hear about other people who are doing
cool stuff like that. It's a lot of fun. Check
us out. The podcast is a project of Strangers in
a Tangled Wilderness, which is the publishing collective that I'm

(57:30):
a part of, And we have books and zines and
if you support us on Patreon, we'll send you zcenes
in the mail. And that's cool. People like getting scenes
in the mail.

Speaker 2 (57:38):
They like getting zines, perhaps even a map to a
lost city that you can go with your young son
and lead him to his death. En you know, they can.

Speaker 3 (57:46):
Haven't published so many maps to lost cities to get
people killed. But you know, who knows what the future
may hold.

Speaker 2 (57:54):
There's time, there's nothing stopping you. It's apparently legal as
far as I'm aware.

Speaker 1 (57:59):
Boy howdy, we'll be back for part two.

Speaker 2 (58:02):
Yeah, but between part one and part two, go die
in the jungle. You know, if that's what you want
for yourself, you don't do that.

Speaker 1 (58:09):
Don't do that.

Speaker 2 (58:10):
Why not a lot of people are saying it's a
great thing to do. Just one person, Percy said.

Speaker 1 (58:15):
That, Yeah, yeah, yeah, don't do that.

Speaker 2 (58:17):
Bye anyway, see you tomorrow.

Speaker 1 (58:22):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes,
but Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping
every Tuesday and Thursday. It remind me of Netflix. You
don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog,

(58:45):
continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel YouTube dot com
slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about forty percent
of you, Statistically speaking,