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

Behind the Bastards

This episode continues the exploration of Percy Fawcett, the real-life inspiration for Indiana Jones, delving into his descent into occultism and

Key takeaways

• Fawcett's time in Ceylon was not just about exploration but therapeutic immersion in Eastern spirituality to heal from childhood trauma.
• His belief in mystical treasures was metaphorical—focused on spiritual enlightenment rather than literal gold or artifacts.

Main topics

• Percy Fawcett's occultism and Theosophy
• Spiritual exploration in Ceylon

Notable quotes

"The real treasure was in fact within you all the time."

Conclusion

Percy Fawcett's journey from a disciplined explorer to a delusional mystic reveals how personal trauma and spiritual obsession can

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:04) Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history, where I just thought I was about to sneeze, but I didn't. And so we're able to start now, as opposed to like three seconds later. Speaker 4 (0:15) Mazel tov, Robert. Unless I Speaker 1 (0:16) sneeze in like a second. There's no way to know. There's no way to know. It's really dusty out there right now. What with all the fire. Everything's on fire. Yeah. You know who's not on fire? In like a bad way. But in a good way, they are. Being on fire can mean a confusingly wide variety of things. Hello, Miriam. How are you? Speaker 2 (0:36) I'm doing good. I'm not on fire in any way that I'm aware of. Speaker 1 (0:40) Okay. Okay. Neither in a good nor a bad way. Speaker 2 (0:44) Yeah, I don't think so. Again, yeah, like you said, it can mean a lot of things. So, you know, I don't want to foreclose on every possibility. Yeah, Speaker 1 (0:53) that makes sense, you know. So whether or not you're on fire. I hope you're ready to listen to the next part of our series on the life of Percy Fawcett, the guy who was probably the most direct inspiration for Indiana Jones slash just like the archetype of like the gentleman adventurer, you know, and who also, as we're about to discuss, is going to go increasingly crazy over the course of this episode. Speaker 8 (1:20) This is an iHeart podcast. Speaker 6 (1:23) Guaranteed human. I'm Mungish Atikudur, and I'm back with a new season of my podcast, Skyline Drive. This time I talk to scientists, biopunks, curmudgeons, blues owners, super seniors, and Goa's top cryotherapy lab to try to understand this obsession with living forever and what it means for all of us. And I get into a bit of trouble along the way. I'd say probably start bone smashing. That doesn't work. Make it look more defined. They say it works. I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive How to Live Forever on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 7 (1:59) Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook. Each week, we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with Speaker 6 (2:07) their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicist for letting them do our show. We've Speaker 7 (2:13) had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stiller, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 8 (2:27) 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 3 (3:02) 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 1 (3:36) So when we left him off, he had first listened to his mom and broken up with his fiancee, and then years later gotten back together with her. He's converted to Buddhism. He's become a theosophist, and he's gotten really into the occult. And after being stood— Trained up as an adventurer and working briefly as a spy, he's finally wound up back in Ceylon in 1903, which he really likes because it's this place. It's filled with all these Buddhist temples. It's filled with what he sees as like these people who are seekers of the truth. There's a lot of not just like local Buddhists, but a lot of like white people who are really into the occult are in Ceylon and moving because it's really hip to travel to the east and travel to these parts of the world where there's people who are like Buddhists and Hindus because a lot of these Victorian age. and like slightly post-Victorian age white people are really into. like co-opting little bits of different Eastern religions and sort of like tacking them on to these pieces of like theosophy and other spiritualist like belief systems that are starting to be cobbled together as like a hobby. This is like a hobby for a lot of people, right? It stays Speaker 2 (4:41) fashionable for a while. It stays Speaker 1 (4:44) fashionable. And Percy's kind of using his military career as a way to also further his hobby in this way. Like he's really happy to be stationed here with his wife. And Nina seems to be as well. She was born there. So many descriptions of Percy Fawcett's life start... like depict the beginning of his career as a boundary surveyor, as if it suddenly ignites a desire for exploration. And Gran's book, Chapter Eight, Into the Amazon, goes straight from Percy returning to England in 1902 to him then being in Bolivia like six or seven years later, which is like where the first adventure from the movie The Lost City of Z starts to. And that leaves out years of his life where he was like getting increasingly into Buddhism and theosophy in Ceylon. And it's kind of important because that's sets the stage for what's going to happen next. So from what I can tell, despite Percy's aptitude for surveying, he doesn't seem to have been particularly drawn to it as a career at this point. In 1903, his chief interest was a different sort of exploration, the search for lost treasures and esoteric truths via meditation and other forms of spiritual exercise. And because Percy's talking a lot about finding lost treasure, I think people draw this too much to like archaeology and think that he's often literally seeking like lost cities of gold. That's not the truth as much as he's speaking more metaphorically about these kind of spiritual treasures that he wants to uncover by finding places that are supposedly lost. Speaker 2 (6:09) So like the real treasure was in fact within you all the time? Speaker 1 (6:14) Yeah, but also the real treasure is going to make you and your son gods. Speaker 5 (6:19) He's not selfless in where he thinks this is going to bring him. It's still crazy, but it is different. Speaker 1 (6:27) Yeah. In the movie, Percy's depicted as an ambitious man weighed down by his father's reputation who's just like ready for any chance to become like a military hero. And the real Fawcett is exhausted by military life – of military life by 1903. But he was so good at cricket. He's so good at cricket. But he's made a vow not to kill anybody and cricket's only good for killing. Speaker 5 (6:51) Right, Speaker 2 (6:51) right. Speaker 1 (6:52) Yeah. A.J. Lee, who read through Percy's many letters – during this time, describes Fawcett as still captivated by Ceylon and his understanding of Buddhism. In fact, he may have returned there for what we would today call therapeutic purposes. Lee describes him as, quote, being captivated by the island's magic and mysticism, and with the help of fakirs and holy men, he began to extricate himself from the manacles of his unhappy childhood. So, in this account, too, it's not just that he wants to learn magic to become a powerful wizard, which is definitely part of it. But it's that he wants he's he's working through some shit. And like these these Buddhist holy men and these other sort of like mystics that are all kind of clustered in Ceylon are at least giving him Speaker 5 (7:34) an opportunity to like talk about his childhood. And that's not really a thing men of his stature get to do back in England. Speaker 2 (7:40) Men will literally go across the world to hunt for gold before going to therapy. And then trick themselves into going to therapy. Into going Speaker 5 (7:50) to therapy because the real gold is within you all the time, right? That's sort of what Percy's doing. Carol Gold is figuring out that your Speaker 2 (7:58) mom was kind of the Speaker 5 (7:59) worst. Your Speaker 1 (8:00) mom was Speaker 5 (8:01) kind of the worst. Speaker 1 (8:02) Yeah. So Percy and Nina both grow obsessed with Eastern mysticism during this time. She's also really into this stuff. They're a legitimately good match. She gets pregnant in Ceylon and Percy would later claim that before they announced to anybody that she's pregnant, quote, a deputation of soothsayers and Buddhists somehow found out. You're supposed to believe that they like. It was magic or something that they found out that he was going that his wife was going to have a baby. And they all show up to demand an audience with him because they've made predictions. There's a prophecy around this baby. And I'm going to quote from that Speaker 4 (8:35) didn't happen. Speaker 1 (8:36) AJ Lee's book. Yeah, Speaker 4 (8:38) that didn't happen. After Speaker 1 (8:39) the Speaker 4 (8:39) usual. Speaker 1 (8:39) Yeah. Speaker 5 (8:39) Yeah. I don't Speaker 1 (8:41) believe this really Speaker 5 (8:42) happened either. But I'm going to read you what Percy says Speaker 1 (8:44) happened. After the usual formalities, I was informed I was about to become the father of a son whose appearance was minutely described. I suggested that it was obvious that something of this sort might reasonably be anticipated, but that a daughter would upset the prophecy. No, I was to have a son. He was the reincarnation of a very advanced spirit, and my wife and I had been specially selected, et cetera, et cetera. Speaker 5 (9:06) I mean. Percy writes in the et cetera, et cetera. Speaker 4 (9:10) Bro, married couple. predicted to have child in early 1900s. We're at what? 1903 at this point? 1903. Yeah. Like you're really not, you're really not doing. They Speaker 1 (9:25) describe a mole that Jack has perfectly. So Sophie, I'm sorry, but they described the mole. That means he's a reincarnation of a powerful spirit. Crazy Speaker 4 (9:32) thing that people have a mole. Wow. Yeah. Speaker 1 (9:36) It's Speaker 5 (9:37) super funny. The Speaker 2 (9:38) only Speaker 5 (9:38) baby with Speaker 2 (9:39) a mole actually. Actually. Never Speaker 5 (9:41) happened before. Speaker 1 (9:42) Their first son, Jack, was born in 1903. Tom Holland. Yeah, Tom Holland. And was probably named after Helena Blavatsky because Blavatsky's preferred nickname was also Jack, which is kind of why I think they named their son Jack. The Fossets make a big deal out of the fact that Jack is born on the anniversary of Buddha's birth. Although Percy then explorings that, like, well, Buddha's birth was Speaker 5 (10:05) over. there's a range of days that they all celebrate because they don't know exactly what one it is. And he was born on the one that everyone says is the most likely of the days. And Speaker 2 (10:13) I'm like, okay, okay. This very special baby was born on all those days. Speaker 5 (10:19) Yeah, he was born on every one of Buddha's birthdays. The Speaker 2 (10:21) mystical mole baby. Speaker 5 (10:21) All five of them or however many he's Speaker 2 (10:23) got. Speaker 5 (10:23) Ceylon, I don't know. Speaker 5 (10:26) I don't believe this either. Percy would later write that until he went to school, he was intermittently clairvoyant. Jack, Speaker 1 (10:32) right? That like his Speaker 5 (10:33) son was clairvoyant as a child Speaker 1 (10:35) until the school beat it out of him, basically. And he went on to add, and this is from a letter that Percy wrote to a magazine called The Theosophist in 1913. Both parents are psychic. He's like writing about his son. He's like, yeah, he was intermittently Speaker 5 (10:47) clairvoyant. By the way, both me and his mom are psychic. That does not come up enough in the Percy Fawcett literature that he desperately believed he was psychic and wrote about it constantly. Speaker 2 (10:58) Yeah, no, that should have to, we should have to like, that should be one of the first things you Speaker 5 (11:03) learn Speaker 2 (11:03) about a person, I think. People Speaker 5 (11:04) really should learn that. You should also have to read the like Speaker 1 (11:07) three paragraphs or something of him explaining how because his son Jack was born in Asia, he has slanted eyes. Oh no. That's Speaker 5 (11:14) Percy. That's Percy. Speaker 1 (11:16) Look, it's pretty rough. So from this point on, Nina and Percy would both refer to Jack as the special Speaker 2 (11:25) one. I'm sorry. I don't want to be distracted by this little racist thing. Let it out. Yeah. Did other people sort of two questions here. Did other people also think that the son looked like he might have, for example, had one Asian parent? And are we sure that I haven't heard that? Speaker 5 (11:49) It's not impossible. But I don't think that's the case. Speaker 2 (11:52) That would be very funny. I mean, I think it's probably just bad scientific racism. There's Speaker 5 (11:56) pictures Speaker 2 (11:56) of Jack. I've looked at pictures Speaker 1 (11:57) of Speaker 5 (11:57) Jack. Speaker 1 (11:58) I think this was him saying, as a baby, his eyes were slanted so you could tell that he had the spirit of a great Tibetan mystic or whoever, whatever kind of mystic. I don't know which country he thought the spirit came from. But I think it was the spirit of a great Eastern mystic. But Jack's white. That's also important. Speaker 4 (12:15) That jacket. Speaker 1 (12:16) That you were aware Jack is white. Speaker 4 (12:18) I'm looking at this image that I've quickly Googled. No. Speaker 1 (12:23) Percy's racial politics are fascinating. Like, we don't we don't Speaker 5 (12:27) make them like this anymore. No, Speaker 2 (12:29) it would take it would take a while to unpack all of them because he was born in Asia. Yeah, Speaker 5 (12:34) there's a lot going on here. Speaker 1 (12:38) he and Nina would both refer to their first son, Jack, as the special one or the great one. And like, you get the feeling because his youngest son wrote about being kind of like, Jack wasn't great. Like, Speaker 5 (12:47) first off, let me just say, he was kind of a dick. He wasn't even as funny as people think. Like, his youngest brother seems to have been kind of pissed by this. Speaker 2 (12:56) Yeah, I mean, I can see how that would happen. Speaker 5 (12:58) Yeah. Speaker 5 (13:01) The Speaker 2 (13:01) special one and the other one. The special one. Speaker 5 (13:05) Yeah. Look, we love all our children, but we only think one of you is the magical reincarnated spirit of a wizard, you know, or a mystic or whatever. Speaker 2 (13:13) I love all my children equally. The special one and the other ones also. Speaker 1 (13:18) Percy is seeing like a Buddhist mystic is indistinguishable from Merlin. Like, let's be honest. I'm not saying that's accurate to the Buddhist mysticism, but that's what Percy thinks about these people. Speaker 1 (13:30) In 1906, Percy is called up for duty by the new president of the Royal Geographic Society, a no-nonsense military man named Sir George Taubman Goldie. In The Lost City of Z, this is how Grand describes him. Famous for his keen intelligence and volatile temper, he had an almost single-handedly imposed the British Empire's control over Niger in the 1880s and 1890s. He had shocked Victorian society by running off to Paris with a governess and was an unrepentant atheist who championed Darwin's theory of evolution. Goldie is my favorite fact about this guy is he apparently always kept poison on his person so Speaker 5 (14:02) that he could kill himself if he were rendered handicapped immediately. Like that's the kind of dude that this man is. So just shockingly weird Speaker 1 (14:10) men. Only the only people who reach high levels in the RGS. Like all of the maps were made by crazy people. So Speaker 2 (14:17) not carrying poison because he was like behind enemy lines and like he was caught and tortured. Just like if he fell down and broke his hip real bad. Speaker 5 (14:26) If I have to be in a wheelchair, I want to be out immediately. It's got to be on site for Goldie. He will not handle being taken care of. No one is caring for Goldie. Speaker 2 (14:37) There was an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation where Worf tried to do this. He does have Worf's attitude. Yes, that's right. Worf tries to get his son to stab him to death when a box falls on him. Speaker 1 (14:49) If you want to imagine Sir George Taubman Goldie calling in Percy for this meeting as Michael Dorn, I won't stop you. And you Speaker 2 (14:57) won't be Speaker 1 (14:57) entirely wrong. Speaker 2 (14:59) That's the direction I'm going with this. Speaker 5 (15:01) Yeah, yeah. All right. Speaker 1 (15:02) So Michael Dorn calls Percy in and asks if he's ever been to Bolivia. Goldie shows him a map and he says it's full of blank spaces and explains that Bolivia, Brazil and Peru are all up in arms over the precise extent of their borders. Now, we just did episodes on the dictator of Paraguay, Francisco Solano Lopez, and the war of the Triple Alliance that occurs not far from here. A border dispute helps lead to it. In Gran's book, The Lost City of Z, Gran wrongly writes the boundary issues between Paraguay and its neighbors caused the war. That's not true. There were boundary issues that were inherent to conflicts between those countries previously, but the war Speaker 5 (15:42) was caused because Francisco Solano Lopez was a fucking maniac who wanted to get involved in Uruguay and politics and then invaded Brazil, Argentina, and tried to invade Uruguay. It was not caused by a boundary dispute. Speaker 5 (15:55) Anyway, I just I had to correct Speaker 1 (15:57) Grant on that as well. Speaker 2 (15:59) Boundary dispute usually means more than like, oh, we thought the line was over here and you thought it was a half mile this way. Like, it's usually more like we want more of your stuff. Speaker 5 (16:09) Yeah, we really want these mines is generally Speaker 1 (16:12) and that's what's happening here, right? It's mines and rubber is generally what's what's at like the root of these. But also when the boundaries were set up, people couldn't make good maps. Like we didn't have the ability to really make high quality maps. And so the boundaries were also not fixed. Like it very much is a problem that was going to need to be solved. The first thing Percy does here is good. Like it was necessary for some motherfucker to get out and map some of these rivers. And when I say he was mapping them for the first time. The way that's depicted in the movie is he's going into a place like no one's ever been back from. That's nonsense. There were stations all up and down the river. People knew how to sail it. That doesn't mean there were maps of it, right? Speaker 5 (16:55) Right. That you could like set boundary lines on. Those are two different kinds of Speaker 2 (17:00) things. It's very possible to live somewhere for- hundreds and thousands of years and not know the coordinates of it. Speaker 1 (17:06) Right, exactly. That's what needs to be done. Someone needs to go through and do that pain in the ass work and actually lay out where the boundaries are, right? And so the British part of why the RGS is getting involved here, even though none of these are British territory, is that there's a lot of like money involved in particularly the rubber trade at this point. And the British are worried there's going to be a war over some of these boundary disputes, as there are periodically. And they're like, well, maybe if we can get this all mapped out, we can settle that ahead of time. And both countries are willing to have the British do it because they're seen as like a neutral party. Right. Speaker 1 (17:39) So in Grant's book, he describes the area that Percy is going to map as several hundred miles of nearly impassable terrain. And he continues with language that is going to do that. Like, this is very clearly written, expecting there to be a movie made of your book, The Lost City of Z. Quote, the expedition would take up to two years and there was no guarantee that its members would survive. Disease was rampant in the region and the Indians who had been attacked mercilessly by rubber trappers murdered interlopers. And this is how the movie depicts things, too. Like, as soon as Percy and his small team, including Robert Pattinson, set off on, like, this primitive rickety raft down the river, they're ambushed by Indians with bows. One man is wounded, and he falls into the water, and Speaker 5 (18:20) he Speaker 1 (18:20) gets tangled in a fishing net, and the piranha eat him alive. Oh, shit. Speaker 5 (18:24) That's a fantasy. That's a complete fantasy. Speaker 1 (18:27) Both depictions of this voyage are complete fantasies, both David Grand's depiction in his book and the depiction of the movie made off of his book. Now, some of that is because Percy Fawcett lied about his own adventures. He was a huge fan of adventure novels, and he couldn't resist making claims. Not in his actual, like, the paperwork he submitted to the RGS was always really good. Most people seem to agree. But he would give public speeches, and he would, like, write articles where he would make lavish claims, like that he had shot an attacking anaconda. 49 feet long and the spine with his 44, 10 feet below its wicked head and killed it right before it could murder them all. And like, first off, it's, I mean, it's Speaker 5 (19:07) theoretically possible for an anaconda to get that big, but. They haven't, like on record, been Speaker 1 (19:12) quite as big as the one he was claiming. And also they don't act that way. I found a critique of Fawcett by Hugh Thompson, another veteran. Thompson is like a real explorer, like today, who's led, I think it's Peru where he's done a shitload of expeditions, but he's led a lot of expeditions into the jungle. And he writes, quote, those who've traveled on the Amazon know that it is in reality mundane, soapophoric, and almost dreamlike. Very little happens slowly. It is perfectly possible. Speaker 1 (19:46) It's just a fantasy. Like, and there are crazy ass animals in the Amazon, but you don't see them. Because they don't want to be near you. They're scared of people usually, right? You have to kind of go out of your way and they're not generally going to attack you unless you're a huge fucking asshole. The thing that's going to kill you is the same thing that's going to kill you in most places of the world where people die from the environment. It's little bugs that give you diseases. Speaker 2 (20:11) Yeah. Or like you get a blister on Speaker 5 (20:14) your foot and die of gangrene. And it gets infected because of the water and your foot rots off. Yeah. Speaker 1 (20:22) One thing every actual jungle explorer I have ever read from will point out is that if your narrative of an Amazon exploration has stories about being constantly attacked by deadly fauna, it's a lie because that doesn't really happen very often. Fawcett's first real life trip was mapping the Upper Heath River. The movie shows him mapping the Rio Verde first. He doesn't do that until years later. Here's how an actual world-renowned expert on the region, John Henning, described Fawcett's first trip mapping Heath. 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 baraka to the next, taking their regular measurements. Again, the movie shows them like fighting off death at every single turn. In reality, they're going down to different places that all have food and like a pretty comfortable raft. There's Speaker 5 (21:15) people all around. All they're doing is just some math, basically, right? And Percy's Speaker 1 (21:20) work here does make history, but in the rather pedestrian sense of like, oh, well, we finally have a map for this area that we didn't have a map before, rather than like, well, this bold adventurer carved a path through the howling wilderness to make this great discovery. And in the movie, at the end of this first voyage, he finds a bunch of pottery shards and ruins in the jungle, which is what leads, convinces him that there's this lost city in the Amazon. That's not what happens. In reality, Fawcett does, once he comes back to England, he gets famous for doing this because it was good work and no one had before. And he was also good at like self-mythologizing, right? Once he gets back to England, he's not just telling people about the actual mapping he did. He's