迷失Z城

The Lost City of Z is a very long way from a true story — and I should know
A new Hollywood film hypes Percy Fawcett as a great explorer. In fact, he was a racist incompetent who achieved very little

The new film The Lost City of Z is being advertised as based on the true story of one of Britain’s greatest explorers. It is about Lt-Col Percy Fawcett. Greatest explorer? Fawcett? He was a surveyor who never discovered anything, a nutter, a racist, and so incompetent that the only expedition he organised was a five-week disaster. Calling him one of our greatest explorers is like calling Eddie the Eagle one of our greatest sportsmen. It is an insult to the huge roster of true explorers. Had the advertisement been about a soap powder, it would fall foul of the Trade Descriptions Act.

Percy Fawcett joined the army immediately after school, with a commission in the artillery in 1886. The next 20 years involved garrison duty in Ceylon and postings in Malta and England. The only significant events were getting married and becoming a devotee (like many others) of the charlatan psychic Madame Blavatsky. Fawcett’s game-changer came in 1906, when he was 40. The army let him take the Royal Geographical Society’s course on frontier surveying. Far away in South America, Bolivia had just sold its rubber-rich province of Acre to Brazil, so it needed its new north-western boundary mapped. The Bolivians approached the RGS for a mature surveyor to do this. The society’s secretary asked the newly qualified Fawcett whether he wanted to go; he accepted, reported for duty in La Paz and was at work on the new Amazonian frontier by the end of the year. This survey was the best thing Fawcett did. But he described it as boring, because the new frontier was all along rivers. This was the height of the great Amazon rubber boom, so he and his team cruised from one comfortable rubber barraca to the next, taking their regular measurements.

Fawcett’s only publications were a series of papers in the Geographical Journal about his mapping work. But he kept a journal, and in 1953 his son Brian edited this and other papers into a book called Exploration Fawcett. He emerges from it as a typical Edwardian colonial officer — friendly with South Americans but looking down on them, appalled by the cruelty at some rubber stations, full of gossip about life on this remote but boom-rich backwater, and uninterested in nature apart from banalities about dangerous snakes and irritating insects.

In 1908, the Bolivians asked Fawcett to survey another of their frontiers with Brazil: a small river called Verde, far away at the north-eastern corner of the large landlocked country. The preparations were appalling. Fawcett took minimal supplies, since he was accustomed to being fed by rubber stations. This was the end of the dry season with the river at its lowest. So they soon had to abandon their boat and continue on foot. After only a week, all food was exhausted and they were really starving. Fawcett casually remarked that five out of his six peons died from the effects of this five-week disaster. This was the only expedition he led into unexplored territory.

The Bolivians invited Fawcett back in 1910, this time to map part of their boundary with Peru. It involved paddling up a frontier river called Heath and two meetings with indigenous peoples on the banks. The first group fired arrows and guns over their heads. But Fawcett waded ashore with presents and shouting a few words of ‘Chuncho’ (the Peruvian word for all forest peoples) that he had memorised but did not understand. That was the only time that Fawcett attempted any language other than Spanish. Further up the Heath river, Fawcett met a tribe he called Ecocha (now Ese Eja) whom he really liked. They were ‘embarrassingly hospitable’ with their food, so Fawcett spent a few days with them and recorded something of their ethnography. He returned for a second visit in 1911.

After a final survey for the Bolivian government in 1913, of the upper Beni river in the Andes, Fawcett went sightseeing in central Bolivia. He and two companions were paddled down the big Guaporé river. They stopped at Mequens on its Brazilian bank to visit the Swedish anthropologist Baron Erland Nordenskiöld and his attractive wife, who provided guides to take them on a walk inland to visit a people they called Maxubi (now Makurap). The Maxubi were friendly and hospitable, but continuing on a forest trail Fawcett met another tribe (probably Sakurabiat) to whom he took a violent dislike. When one aimed a drawn bow at him, Fawcett shot the man with a Mauser revolver — absolutely forbidden by Brazil’s Indian Service. He described them as he imagined Neanderthals or Piltdown Man to have looked: ‘large hairy men, with exceptionally long arms, and foreheads sloping back from pronounced eye ridges… villainous savages, hideous ape men with pig-like eyes.’ No Amazonian Indian has body hair or looks remotely like this — I know, because I have spent time with over 40 different peoples. These two groups, and the two on the Heath, were the only tribal people seen by Fawcett. He liked two of them. So it was strange that he wrote racist gibberish that ‘there are three kinds of Indians. The first are docile and miserable people, easily tamed; the second, dangerous, repulsive cannibals very rarely seen; the third, a robust and fair people, who must have a civilised origin.’

When Fawcett was in the cattle country of central Bolivia in September 1914, news came of the outbreak of war. So he hurried home and by January 1915 was back in the artillery. In his late forties, he was too old for frontline service; but he fought a good war, ending as Lieutenant-Colonel.

In one of his pre-war lectures to the RGS, Fawcett had spoken of possible ancient ruins in the Amazon forests. He was now told about a scrap of paper dated 1743 in which bandeirantes imagined that they had seen a deserted city in the jungles. (The bandeirantes were slavers who scoured the interior of Brazil for Indians to capture. Although most of these thugs were illiterate, others did write reports about their travels — none of which said a word about seeing ruins.) Fawcett gave this imaginary ‘lost city’ the codename Z, and finding it became an obsession.

The easiest forest tribes to visit in Brazil were on the headwaters of one of the Amazon’s southern tributaries, the Xingu. A German anthropologist had contacted a dozen amiable peoples there in 1884; and since then they had been visited by seven groups of anthropologists or Indian Service officials. All had walked in by the same trail. So in 1920 Fawcett tried to follow this route — even though it was nowhere near where the chimera city might have been. His plans went wrong, so he got no further than a ranch halfway along the trail. In 1921 he searched for the mythical city down on the Atlantic coast, by train inland from Salvador da Bahia; but, hardly surprisingly, the miners there knew nothing.

In 1925, by now penniless but desperate, Fawcett tried again to reach the upper Xingu tribes. He now took two inexperienced ex-public schoolboys, his son Jack and Jack’s friend Raleigh Rimmel. The old surveyor made two suicidal pronouncements. One was that the trio should travel light, with nothing more than small packs. Everyone in Amazonia knew that you could not cut trails and keep your team fed with fewer than eight men. (I can confirm this, having done months of such cutting and carrying.) But Fawcett sent their pack animals and porters back, and continued with only his two novices. His other dictum was that Indians would look after them. This was equally dangerous. The Xingu tribes pride themselves on generosity; but they expect visitors to reciprocate. All expeditions in the past four decades had brought plenty of presents such as machetes, knives and beads. Fawcett had none. He committed other blunders that antagonised their hosts. So it was only a matter of days before they were all dead.

Twenty years later, Chief Comatsi of the Kalapalo tribe gave a very detailed account of Fawcett’s visit, reminding his assembled people of exactly how they had killed the unwelcome strangers. But the German anthropologist Max Schmidt, who was there in 1926, thought that they had plunged into the forests, got lost and starved to death; this was also the view of a missionary couple called Young who were on another Xingu headwater. The Brazilian Indian Service regretted that Fawcett, who was obsessively secretive, had not asked for their help in dealing with the Indians. They felt he was killed because of the harshness and lack of tact that all recognised in him.

Such was the sad tale of this incompetent, whose only skill was in surveying. But the disappearance of an English colonel while searching for a mythical ancient city in tropical rain forests was a media sensation. Two expeditions went to try to learn more. There was revived interest in the 1950s with the publication of Exploration Fawcett and the Kalapalo chief’s account of how they killed the Englishmen. Then it was forgotten until 2009 when David Grann, a talented writer, published The Lost City of Z. Unfortunately, Grann hyped the story out of all proportion and wrongly depicted Fawcett as a great explorer.

As he cheerfully admitted, Grann had no experience of rainforests. But he let his imagination run riot, with pages about ferocious piranhas, huge anacondas, electric eels (actually a fish that has never killed a man), frogs ‘with enough toxins to kill 100 people’, ‘predator’ pig-like peccary, ‘sauba ants that could reduce the men’s clothes to threads in a single night, ticks that attached like leeches (another scourge) and the red hairy chiggers that consumed human tissue. The cyanide-squirting millipedes. The parasitic worms that caused blindness…’ and so on. Everyone who know tropical forests, including me, knows that almost every word of this is nonsense.

Fawcett himself gave a simple account of his four surveying journeys for the Bolivian government. But for Grann, ‘in expedition after expedition… he explored thousands of square miles of the Amazon and helped redraw the map of South America’. Fawcett admitted that he was ‘a greenhorn in the jungle’ and knew nothing about nature. But Grann wrote that he moved ‘inch by inch through the jungle, tracing rivers and mountains, cataloguing exotic species… [until] he had explored as much of the region as anyone’.

For Grann, Fawcett was competing against other explorers ‘who were racing into the interior of South America’. The only study that Fawcett made after leaving school in 1886 was his RGS surveying course. He never mentioned any library research. But for Grann he was ‘almost unique’ in viewing 16th- and 17th-century chronicles ignored by other scholars; he re–evaluated El Dorado chronicles and consulted ‘archival records’ and ‘tribesmen’ in ‘piecing together his theory of Z’. Not a word of this was true, either.

Grann wrote that, as an author, he would have been lost without my three-volume, 2,100-page history of Brazilian Indians and five centuries of exploration. He quotes quite often from my books. So he had no excuse for describing Fawcett’s brief visits to three indigenous villages as the ‘discovery of so many previously unknown Indians’, from whom ‘he learned to speak myriad indigenous languages’, and adopted ‘herbal medicines and native methods of hunting [so that he] was better able to survive off the land’. Equally absurd was his rubbish about cannibalistic tribes, blow guns with poisoned darts, or Kuikuro menacing him with ‘gleaming spears flickering’ from the undergrowth (they never used spears, or had metal even, before their contact 130 years ago).

When the colonel vanished, Grann writes that ‘scores’ of explorers tried to find him, and that ‘one recent estimate put the death toll from these expeditions as high as 100.’ Actually, only one search expedition reached the Xingu, led by George Dyott in 1928. (It found that the three Englishmen had been killed by Indians.) The only other expedition was in 1932, but it got only as far as the Araguaia river far to the east. The death toll from these two attempts was zero. In 1935 a ridiculous actor called Albert de Winton went by himself to the Xingu and was killed by Indians who wanted his gun. So if we count him, the death toll is one — well short of Grann’s 100.

These and a great many other passages are artistic licence and hype of an absurd order. Hollywood believed everything Grann wrote, and then hyped it up more. People wishing to learn about the maverick colonel should consult his own fairly modest memoir — not the recent fantasy book and film about him. But I could recommend scores of writings by real explorers.

John Hemming is a Canadian explorer; the three volumes of his history of Brazilian Indians are Red Gold (1978), Amazon Frontier (1985) and Die If You Must (2004)

今天看了一部电影，名字叫做《迷失Z城》。在我的理解当中，它探讨的是一个有关理想主义的主题。我很喜欢。

故事发生在一战前后的英国，主角Percy是个英国少校，因为接受了去南美测绘地图的任务而走上探险家之旅。他在亚马逊流域的丛林里发现了人类文明的遗迹，因而坚信这里曾经存在过一个遗失的文明。为向世人证明自己的发现，他再三重返亚马逊。最终，在与长子共同前往的第三次探寻中，他们丧生于一个原始部落。

我非常喜欢这部电影所给的结局，这也是它对于理想主义者的命运所给出的一种理解。在影片最后，主角Percy和他的儿子被原始部落的印第安人围困，死亡已是注定。在观看的那个时刻，其实我很紧张，因为我不知道编剧会给出他们怎样的一个结局。内心深处我其实很害怕这时出现一路天降的奇兵，把父子解救，最终寻梦者荣归故土，出现一派大团圆的喜乐景象。因为这样的结局，不是超级英雄，就是童话。但我也同样害怕看到理想主义的灵魂就这样赴死，让影片在墓碑、眼泪与阴霾中收场。那样未免太过悲伤，对理想主义这个信条本身而言，也太过残忍。

而这部影片在结局上的高明之处就在于，它既承认了现实，也展现了美——影片既没拍Percy和儿子遇害的不幸画面，也没给出家人悼念的哀痛场景。它是这样展现的，Percy和他的儿子安详地接受了印第安人在将他们献祭前所做的一系列宗教仪式，随后他们二人被众人抬起前往火堆。在广袤苍穹下高举火把的微光里，在举目旷野中林间吹过的清风里，在地球远端亚马逊部落的神秘文明里。这一刻，我的解读是，这才是理想主义者可以接受的结局。理想主义者一生都走在朝圣的路上，连死亡也最终成为了他们朝圣的一部分。在非理想主义者看来，这死亡的结局或许是不幸的，但对于理想的圣徒而言，路途本身即目的，这样的人生已经无憾了，不是吗？

这部电影当中，除了大主题的诠释非常精彩之外，由充满理想主义的主人公与周围环境所牵发的冲突中展现出的诸多子题也同样精彩。

第一个是家庭。一个受到远方强烈召唤的人要怎么和家庭妥协，这是每一个与理想主义有关的故事都逃不过的话题。在影片的中后部分，不仅仅是男主人公Percy本人要再次前往荒原，连他的儿子也提出要一同前往。这对一个妻子和母亲来说，不太残忍了吗？但他的妻子却同意了，点头时她说了一句话，至少这句话让我明白了这对矛盾要怎么化解。她的这句话是—— “难道我还有其他选择吗？” 没错，她其实是没有选择的。这是她的聪慧，因为她知道，当自己拥有的是一个被上帝选中与被梦想击中的丈夫时，她哪里有选择。远方是他的destiny，这就好像是基因里写定的密码子，无法变更。所以我觉得，这对矛盾的真正解决，不应该再是哪一方所谓的牺牲，而应该是彼此对事实的承认。

第二个子题是文明。这部影片赤裸裸地将文明的脆弱与人性的不堪展现在了观众眼前。在探险团队第二次进入荒林时，队伍中加入了一个投机主义的英国官员。他本想通过此行扬名立万，但不料途中险象丛生。在其他成员还能坚守文明的底线，绝境中尚能互相帮助时，他却一个人偷光了其他队员所有的储备。本该是“人与人”之间的对垒，在这极限的境遇中却倒退成霍布斯笔下“狼与狼”的厮杀。本该是代表人类最高文明的团队，去寻找更低等的原始文明，在这个过程中，“文明人”自身却堕落成了“野蛮人”，莫不是一个巨大的讽刺。

第三个子题是理想主义者的锋芒。对过于耀眼的东西，人们捧不了的时候，便去挖，鲁迅讲的一点也不错。Percy之于前述的英国官员便是这样一个捧不了，就开始挖的对象。这似乎是很难想象的，面对一个在绝境中仍愿对自己出手相救、仁至义尽的对象，人怎能做到抛却良心反咬一口？其实不是人心太坏，是理想主义者的光芒太耀眼。对于这个世界上大多数的人而言，理想主义者无非是他们的一面照妖镜，前者越是鞠躬尽瘁，后者越是被衬托得体无完肤。这或许会是理想主义者在人性发展尚不健全的社会中不得不承受的反扑。

但这部影片，还不是我今天最深切的感悟。因为，如果说黑土代表的是眼前，而麦田代表的是远方的话，《迷失Z城》还只展现了麦田，即理想这一个维度。现实生活中，不是每个人都会成为上帝的选民；相反，在更多的情况下，黑土才是我们每个人的人生题里给定的题干。

那在必须深耕黑土的人生里，麦田的存在有意义吗？

当然有。

同样是在今天，我还听了黑土麦田的创始人秦玥飞的一场讲座。我知道如今的他很有影响力，从社会认可度这个层面来说，也很成功，但今天这些都不曾令我惊诧。令我惊诧的始于下面这张图片，



这时他在去中国农村前，也是他在离开耶鲁前，所拍的最后一张照片。原来他过去是这样一个fancy的留美青年！原来他在耶鲁曾是一支摇滚乐队的drummer，一个典型的美国嬉皮士！我感叹的是，一个人该有多大的弹性，才能在两种截然不同的生活方式与职业角色中切换自如，并各持本色。

而这样的人，我相信他们的心中一定既有黑土，也有麦田。

我们是处在如此长尾的一个时代，以致很多选择的结果要在多年以后才能初现回报。所以很多人更愿意，甚至说是只关注短期回报，结果我们不停地奔跑，不断地焦虑。如果人生能够多一个维度，坚信一件自己做的事情有价值，我猜想绝不济在时代中这么奔命。

我还是羡慕理想主义者的，因为时间好像在他们的身上走得特别稳定，也特别缓慢。