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

Behind the Bastards

This episode of 'Behind the Bastards' dissects Percy Fawcett, a British explorer often hailed as the real-life inspiration for Indiana Jones

Key takeaways

• Percy Fawcett's life story was deliberately crafted to resemble adventure novels he admired.

Main topics

• Percy Fawcett's mythologized legacy

Notable quotes

He had exactly, if you picture in your mind's eye, like a British explorer from the late Victorian, like early 20th century age. That's Percy Fawcett.

Conclusion

While Percy Fawcett's story inspired countless adventure heroes in pop culture, his true

Transcript preview

Speaker 7 (0:01) Welcome back Speaker 2 (0:05) 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, 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 (0:47) 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... Speaker 7 (1:03) Yay. Speaker 2 (1:04) Awesome. Speaker 7 (1:05) 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. I feel like Speaker 2 (1:20) 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. Speaker 3 (1:30) Have you ever heard of Percy Fawcett? I have not, but I have rarely heard a more villainous name. Like, that is a name that I assume he had a curly mustache. Speaker 2 (1:40) 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 20th century age. He's whoever you're picturing. If you're picturing like a British explorer from like 1900, that's Percy Fawcett. Hold on. Speaker 3 (1:58) Are we talking like Pith Helmet being carried in a sedan chair by people who live the place he just discovered? Oh my Speaker 7 (2:07) God. Speaker 2 (2:08) Yeah, look at that. Speaker 7 (2:10) Look at Speaker 2 (2:10) that guy. 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. The Speaker 3 (2:23) hat is a mystery. I've never seen this hat before. It looks Speaker 2 (2:27) like he's got a wood Speaker 7 (2:29) wear the jacket, though. Speaker 2 (2:30) Look, the whole fit's good. It's not a bad fit. There's Speaker 7 (2:34) a Speaker 2 (2:34) 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. Speaker 1 (2:45) This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 8 (3:22) Did you hear the new episode of the Hey Jonas podcast? We are at D23, so we'll see who stops Speaker 4 (3:27) by. The Speaker 8 (3:28) cast of Frozen stopped by. Kristen Bell, Josh Gad, and Idina Menzel. I Speaker 4 (3:32) auditioned for Frozen. What? For Kristoff. They said, okay, what are you going to be singing today? I said, I don't know. That Speaker 8 (3:37) must have been why you didn't get it. Oh, you probably won. Plus, John Stamos, Hayden Christensen from Star Wars, and more. Speaker 4 (3:43) And I guess I can share that, uh... No way. Listen Speaker 8 (3:46) to the latest episode of Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 5 (3:52) If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 6 (4:23) On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinheiro and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 2 (5:02) So, Percy Fawcett, some people would 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 and Steven Spielberg have been open about the fact that the character in the movies were inspired, like Star Wars, by pulpy adventure serials that the two encountered in their youth, right? Like Star Wars owes a lot to Flash Gordon, and Indiana Jones is more inspired by Zorro and kind of a melange of World War II 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, 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 40s and 50s. 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 in Sky History that 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. Speaker 2 (6:20) And that is true. 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 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, lost his life looking for a magical lost city in the Amazon. Right. Oh, it's a. Yeah. So that might be you in on. He's not a serious archaeologist. But Speaker 7 (6:56) was he a good was he a good writer? Like, did he was it was or like. Yeah, not bad. What are we working with here? Yeah. Speaker 2 (7:05) 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. Ryder Haggard, who are like the two guys who wrote some of the most influential novels in that genre. in the early 1900s. 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. Ryder 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 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 Dr. Alan Grant from Jurassic 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 of Percy is not accurate to the real man, right? Speaker 7 (8:15) Percy Speaker 2 (8:16) 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. I Speaker 7 (8:27) just rewatched the original Jurassic Park in the last couple of months. And what a great film. Laura Dern, honey. What a great film. Yeah. And Speaker 2 (8:39) Sam Neill, the recently tragically departed Sam Neill, 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 Neill's facial hair. Speaker 3 (8:51) More than that, I believe Sam Neill could have made it look good. Speaker 2 (8:54) I know. I think he could have made it look good. I'll say it. 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 7 (9:03) Pure soul. Speaker 2 (9:04) 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 listen to like credible folks who are experts in jungle exploration, they will tend to say that a better pick would have been a guy like Hiram Bingham. Hiram Bingham was a Yale professor and a groundbreaking archaeologist and World War I veteran. And he was one of the people who's... often credited with rediscovering Machu Picchu, right? So that's like, certainly seems more like the Indiana Jones like we want to believe would have existed, right? An actual like heroic 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 real Indiana Joneses actually looked more like the guy. And Sophie's going to show you a picture of Hiram Bingham. 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 Jonesy 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 lot like Indiana Jones, actually. Like, he's got the hat. He's got the little cravat down around his neck. He looks like he's just been living completely outdoors for years at a time. He really does look like an explorer. Speaker 7 (10:46) Yeah, but none of... Look how hot Harrison Ford looks there. None of them look as hot as Harrison Ford. Speaker 2 (10:52) None of them look as hot as Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones. A very high standard. Speaker 3 (10:56) Harrison Ford. Unfortunately... Percy Fawcett does look quite cool there. He looks cool. I mean, not, he doesn't look well. No. He looks like he's dying in the jungle. He looks like he is dysentery, like 90 % dysentery. But the hat is working for him. I get the vibe. Speaker 7 (11:16) He doesn't look like, you know, Harrison Ford looks like a guy that could crash a plane. Yep. Speaker 2 (11:23) Well, Harrison Ford looks like a guy who's been getting like a surplus of calories and protein and thus has muscle mass, which Speaker 7 (11:30) nobody who's living in Speaker 2 (11:31) the jungle in 1905 does. Speaker 7 (11:33) But there's some great hats here as somebody who loves a hat. These are all Speaker 2 (11:40) good hats. I mean, three really solid hats in a row between the pictures of Percy Hiram and just a screenshot of Indiana Jones. Speaker 3 (11:47) Wow. Speaker 2 (11:48) Yeah. On the other hand, Speaker 3 (11:50) Percy Fawcett looks like if he tried to punch a Nazi, his arm would break in half. Speaker 2 (11:54) It would shatter. It would shatter immediately because Speaker 3 (11:57) he Speaker 2 (11:58) 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 the context of his search for the lost city that he called Z. And this became famous in around 2009 when author David Grand 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? It's 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. He just died. And then Grant in 2009 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 were like large urban society or semi-large urban like societies in the Amazon prior to European contact. Right. And that book was popular enough that in 2016, 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 Henry Costin. A Speaker 7 (13:20) guy who kind of looks... That guy is so famous. You're talking about Charlie Hunnam, the guy who is jacked Speaker 2 (13:28) from Speaker 7 (13:28) Sons of Anarchy. That guy is wildly famous. They're looking Speaker 2 (13:37) a little like Brad Pitt. Speaker 7 (13:38) It looks a little bit like Brad Pitt without being an abusive... Look, he's fine in the movie. Without the abusiveness of Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt sucks, guys. I'm sorry. Speaker 3 (13:47) Yeah. I have also never heard of Charlie Speaker 2 (13:50) Hunnam. Thank you. Thank you, Miriam. I Speaker 7 (13:52) have because handsome. That's fair. Yeah. Speaker 2 (13:55) 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 Graham's book, The Lost City of Z, is completely inaccurate. And this is going to disappoint some of you, those of you who read it. It disappointed me because I read Graham's book in like 2009 or 10, and I liked it. 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 Graham's book about Percy was... 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 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 Grant'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 Grant's book is succinct and brutal. Quote, it is a pity that a writer as good as Grant 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. Holy shit. It's really pretty brutal. Like, Fran did not do a good job with the Percy Fawcett story. I'm sorry. I love Speaker 7 (15:15) man-on-man crime. That was so cool. Speaker 2 (15:19) Henning, we're going to hear a lot from him in this, and he does not spare the rod on Speaker 3 (15:24) this book. Speaker 2 (15:26) It's beautiful stuff. Speaker 3 (15:28) I was surprised that when you were saying the book was really bad, and I have not read Lost City of Doom, but I have read Killers of the Flower Moon, and I... Okay, so a good writer telling lies is what we're talking about here. Speaker 2 (15:43) 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 have made about Grant'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 18th, 1867. We've even got a Harrison Ford connection. Exactly. Maybe they're related. That's not how names work, but it could be. He was born August 18th, 1867 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 members of the Yorkshire gentry. His family, the Fawcetts, had owned Scalaby 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. So Speaker 3 (16:46) their money is in castles and slavery. Speaker 2 (16:49) This is, I think, mostly post-slavery because we're talking like post-1830 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-post-slavery is when they make most of their money. I did look into that because once I heard shipping, I was like, OK, what year were they shipping stuff? It's suspicious. Speaker 1 (17:07) Because there was a certain Speaker 2 (17:07) age that would have been people. But I think they were mostly too late for that to 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 Bulb for what years of alcoholism had done to his nose, right? So, again, you have to be quite the drinker for people in, like, the 1870s and 80s 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