Behind the Scenes Minis: Percy Theories

Holly shares additional details of Percy Fawcett's life, including theories about his interest in spiritualism leading him to some odd conclusions.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and happy Friday. I'm Holly Frey. And
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Oh boy, did we talk about
Percy Fawcett this week. For the whole week, yeah. And
Manuscript 512, an exploration in Brazil. Yep. And the really,

(00:26):
really awful ways Europeans treated the indigenous peoples there. Mm-hmm.
And all of it. There's so much extra fascinating stuff
that didn't make it, obviously, because there's tomes. There's so much.
There's so much. I am fascinated by Percy Fawcett. I
have zero hero worship of him, which is how a

(00:47):
lot of stories about him kind of get told. And
he was very accomplished, and I don't want to detract
from that. But there's also part of me that's like,
this is why people need therapy. Yeah. Because I just,
I mean, I really feel like a lot of his
draw away from Europe and his family into this life

(01:10):
of adventure had to do with stuff that he was
maybe not dealing with in other ways. But that's just
my take on it. There is a lot of interesting
stuff about him that I did not include. I also
will say reading his accounts is entertaining when it's not
the gross, condescending... racist stuff. Sometimes his turns of phrase

(01:32):
are quite funny. There was one that I wrote down
that said, the clean freshness of the Pacific welcomed us
when the fever-haunted Goyas River vomited us out on its
muddy tide. Oh, dear. And I was like, oh, look
at you. I quite like that. That's gross, but okay.
One of the other things we didn't talk about, and
it is part and parcel of that whole problem of

(01:54):
the way that these Indigenous people have been treated by
so many, is that when the skeleton was found, there
was apparently some sort of deal made that the people
that were spoken with that agreed to show that person

(02:16):
where Fawcett was buried, they were supposed to get some
sort of compensation out of it. And after the fact
they did, question mark. I mean, they did. But like
when I tell you what it was, you're going to
be like, because I was because it's so clearly another
of those instances of like these people have no sense

(02:37):
of what value is. So we'll just dump some worthless
crap on them. They literally did a flyover and they
dropped 10 pounds of glass beads and a roll of
fishing line that was worth seventy five dollars. And that's
what was reported in the paper as the fair trade
on all of this. And I'm just like, wow, OK, what? What? What? And, like,

(03:01):
you should hide that information, not publish it in the
paper like you're proud of it. Yeah. So gross. So gross.
There is also a PBS episode on Secrets of the
Dead about Fawcett and this expedition. Yeah. That is entertaining
to watch. Okay. And I don't want to, you know...

(03:24):
throw shade at anybody involved, but it definitely focuses a
lot more on the hocus-pocus side of things. Uh-huh. Which
is fun to talk about, but not worthy of being
in the episode. Uh-huh. Like, one of the moments in it...
And there is some very real, like, research and discovery
work that goes on in it, but there are also

(03:44):
some things that I'm like... Yeah. There is this one
through-line through it about how Fawcett had become... so fascinated
by mysticism and spiritualism, and specifically the writings of another
frequent appearer on the show, Helena Blavatsky. And he and

(04:08):
his wife Nina were kind of both on board with this,
and they had gotten, according to some scholars, to this point, having...
read a lot of predictions and, you know, kind of spiritual, like,
claims that there was going to be a white person

(04:29):
born who was going to eventually have children with someone
from one of the tribes of Brazil and that this
would be, like, the dawn of a new era of
humanity and that perhaps Nina and Percy thought that Jack
was that person. Okay. And that that is why he
chose to bring a son who had no experience in

(04:51):
exploration on a mission he himself noted constantly was incredibly dangerous. Yeah. Wow.
That's also super weird. And I don't know. And it's
one of those things that going back to conspiracy theories,
which we've been talking about, it's easy for people to
buy into that because there's no evidence against it. And
we know that he did some kooky spiritualism. And, like, similarly,

(05:16):
that goes along with the idea of, like, he never
intended to come back. He always meant to go and
live in this city if he found it. And, like,
that is why he vanished and no one's ever found anything.
He has hidden himself and is living like a god.
And it's like, well, you can't prove a negative, so
there's no... It's very weird. If it can't be found,

(05:38):
that theory can always persist. It's very kooky. That's also
one of the theories about the misinformation that appears about
the location of the camp. Like, some people are like,
it's a typo. Others are, he was trying to prevent
people from getting to the dangerous area. And then the

(06:00):
conspiracy theorist side of it is, he didn't want anybody
to find his stuff. Like, that he was really going
to hide. I don't know. It all seems super kooky
to me. There's also an interview with his granddaughter who
has a ring that was his that was found by
one of these expeditions. And it has the family motto

(06:21):
engraved on it in Latin, which is fear no obstacles.
And she says that she took this ring to a
psychic and that the medium dropped the ring and said
it had been covered in blood, like so much blood.
And that like it's just kind of helped foster this
very mysterioso version of his story, which I feel bad

(06:43):
because I'm such a skeptic where I'm like, I know
people want to believe this stuff, but I'm just like,
I think he died. I really like the, they died of,
I mean, I don't like it, but I'm more prone
to land on the, they either died of disease, got
very hungry, something went wrong because Raleigh had an injury

(07:03):
and there was no way he was going to be
able to keep up and either they stayed with him
in a dangerous place, or something happened. Like, that's more reasonable,
in my opinion, than any of the other explanations. Especially
because as more anthropologists have been doing work in the
area and they have gotten to know a lot of
the indigenous tribes there and they have talked, asked them like,

(07:26):
have your relatives ever talked about this person? Because the
idea of like a white dude just traipsing around with
his machete in the bush, like thinking he's going to
find stuff that sticks in cultural memory. And so a
lot of these people are like, oh yeah, my, my uncle,
my grandfather, my, you know, some ancestor talked about that guy,
but the, the stories are always very benign. Like, oh yeah, they,

(07:48):
They gave him some food and kind of pointed him
in the right direction. Like, it's never like, and then
they tried to murder him. Yeah. They had this musical
instrument and played it in a river. The accordion thing
is very good. I will say that is my favorite
thing I came across in all of the reading. And
it is so weird. Listen, this is another one of
those things where, like, that's not the marriage for me.

(08:11):
I can tell you that. No. No. Like if my
beloved just constantly was like, yeah, you're cool and everything,
but where I really want to be is in Brazil
without you. I would be like, huh, what is this
marriage exactly? I don't think I would enjoy that at all.
But again, everything's different on the inside than what people

(08:32):
outside of it can see. It's one of those things
where all of this, like the name of Percy Fawcett,
the name Lost City of Zed or Zee, those are

(08:53):
things I've heard. Not anything I've ever felt compelled to
go tracking down information on or spend a lot of
time thinking about. As a person who, you know, reads books,
science fiction and fantasy books sometimes. Sometimes the idea of
a lost city is a theme in literature. But it's

(09:16):
just like, this is not a particular person that I
have felt like I needed to go learn a ton
of stuff about because I was just like, I don't really...
I don't know. I don't know, man. I'm not in
any way saying we should not have done this episode.
It's actually really fun. And I know a lot of
people are very into his story and very into the

(09:36):
lost city that he thought that he was going to
find and it's just like not ever it's been a
thing that has just sort of skimmed across my consciousness
in a very superficial way not something i have ever
spent a lot of time devoting mental resources to right
well you're probably not also as into like the indiana
jones fandom as some of us Oh, sure, sure. Which

(09:58):
is part of it, right? A lot of those people,
that's how they get to Percy Fawcett. He's one of
the many names that come up in relation to... potential
inspirations past hosts of the show did a who was
the real indiana jones episode one time long ago in
the past and i went to just look and see
i was like i would because you had asked me

(10:20):
a while ago we've never done this right and no
one else did yeah and i did what i felt
like it was a pretty thorough search me too but
then when you mentioned indiana jones i went uh-oh The
Indiana Jones episode from past hosts. And when I went
and looked at that, he really is just mentioned by
name one time. There's nothing further else. Drive by. Oh,

(10:41):
here's another one that we're not talking about. Yeah. So, yeah.
Which is, I mean, that is the era, too, where
there were a lot of men like this who believed
that they were going to go conquer the world that
white men had not. Mm-hmm. yet, which comes with its
own gross baggage that I'm not a fan of. And I,
I think that's, I hope, here's my, for people that

(11:04):
love his story. Mm-hmm. I mean, I hope you don't
hate hearing that I'm not his biggest fan, but after
wading through all his writing, there's so much gross racism
in there. And it's like, in one breath, he can
praise one group of people, and in the other, say
the most disgusting things about another. Right, right. And I

(11:26):
just can't square with that. Again, sure, you can do
that he's a product of his time, and I do
understand that Particularly among explorers like that, like people with
his mindset, that was probably going to be what was happening.
There was always this sense of white superiority and like, well,

(11:47):
I have these things. We have modern civilization, so they're
lesser than us. And I just hate it. And I
hate reading some of that writing because it literally turned
my stomach in some cases. I'm like, how can people today...
tell his story like he was this kind, respectful person
to Indigenous cultures. Yeah. He was kinder than many, but

(12:09):
he was still really condescending and really racist. And that
was very problematic for me. This is why. I like
sort of exploration stories, travel stories. They are fun a
lot of the time. But I definitely have some women
explorers that have been, they sort of flit up onto

(12:31):
my short list and then they disappear again because I
will be like, oh, that sounds really interesting. And then
I'll go read some of the things that they said
and go, nevermind. Less interesting. I did not actually want
to read that level of like derision and condescension about
the people that were inviting you into their home to

(12:51):
feed you while you were on this journey. Yeah. I
will say that. One of the things that is interesting
about his writing, and I didn't like track this in
any kind of real data analysis way, but it does
almost seem like he is more critical of the, using

(13:15):
his term, civilized parts of South America, like the cities
where there are things like hotels and more like what
would be recognizable. as a city to somebody who came
from Europe. Whereas when he gets into actually interacting with
some of the indigenous peoples, it almost seems like it's

(13:37):
a little less so, but I don't know. And I
feel like some of that is kind of him. It
comes off as me, again, this is my lens and
maybe I have my own problems. It comes off as
a little boasty of like, well, I had a great
relationship with them because I'm smart enough to have learned
how to communicate with them. And it's like, oh, okay, cool. Cool. Again,

(13:59):
why did you bring two young men who had no
experience on what you said was the most dangerous journey
you were ever going to do? Right. Right. You are
not all that, my good man. You did a lot
of things I could not do. Yeah. But also, what? Yeah,
it's weird. The hero worship of him weirds me out
a little bit. Mm-hmm. But the hero worship of most

(14:20):
people weirds me out a little bit. So, you know,
take it with that flavor. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, fascinating.
But I'm glad that we got to discuss it. I'm
also glad that there have been more people that have
gotten more information from the descendants of people he may

(14:42):
have encountered. Particularly that account... And that was actually pretty
soon thereafter. The account where that one tribe is saying, no,
we actually were kind of keeping tabs on them because
we were worried about them. And after we didn't see
smoke for a few days, we went to check, but
that's the last we saw of them. Could that be

(15:02):
a cooked up story? Sure. But that seems to make
more sense, again, to a person that's like, I'm just
going to go into the bush and find this lost
city with very... Little support, which just seems foolish. That's
the part I keep getting back to you. I know
you think that's nimble, but it just sounds foolish. Anyway,

(15:26):
that's my take on Percy Fawcett, which maybe people don't like.
If you love to hero worship him, I'm so sorry,
but not for me. Here's what I hero worship. people
who are really kind to one another. It's my favorite thing.
So if you are headed into your weekend and you
have time off, maybe you have time to just do
a kind gesture. Do something nice for a stranger. That

(15:47):
always makes me feel so good. That'll fix some ills
in your heart. If you don't have time off, I
really hope everybody is kind to you if you're working,
especially if you're in a service job. I hope people
are nice to you. and not jerks, but I know
that's not often the case. So pretty please, everybody be
nice to people in service industry jobs and any job.
Just be nice to each other. Take care of yourself.

(16:07):
I hope you find time to relax. If you have
a lot of time to devote to reading, there's a
lot of writing by Percy Fawcett if you want to
read it. We will be back here on Monday with
a brand new episode. We will also be back tomorrow
with a classic. Stuff You Missed in History Class is

(16:29):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
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