FEAR OF FAILURE Percy Fawcett and Lost City

I will tell you a truth about explorers. Eventually they always find what they are searching for. The amazing part is that a lot of them have no idea what kind of quest they are actually on. And in early June of 1925, as intrepid explorer Percy Fawcett strode into the Amazon jungle, followed closely by his 22 year old son and a friend, Percy thought he was seeking the lost city of “Z”. He was wrong, but he still made it half way there. He found the “lost” part.

Colonel Percy Fawcett was “the last of a breed of explorers to venture into blank spots on the map with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose.” His true life adventures in the jungles of South America inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World”, and the cheesy Hollywood movie based on it. He was also, at least in part, the basis for the character of Indiana Jones. And for reasons that beg explanation, at the age of 58, Percy, a trained and accomplished engineer and surveyor, became obsessed with a ten inch tall stone figure of a bearded man.

The figure had been given to Percy by H. Rider Haggard, the author of  adventure novel “King Solomon’s Mines”. Haggard had purchased it in Brazil. “There is a peculiar property in this stone image,” wrote Percy, “felt by all who hold it in their hands. It is as though an electric current were flowing up one’s arm, and so strong is it that some people have been forced to lay it down.” There were, of course, a few things wrong about the statue. The figure was bearded, and a bearded native-American is about a common as a bearded Amazon catfish.   Also, the figure was carved out of basalt, and there is little to no basalt in the Amazon basin.  But Percy was determined.

First, he took the figure to the British Museum, where he was politely told, “If it’s not a fake it’s quite beyond our experience.” Now, you might have expected Percy to understand that bit of ‘science-speak’ to mean “it’s a fake”.  But Percy was no ordinary engineer. According to Richard Holmes, in his book “Tommy; the British Soldier in the Western Front”, during the winter of 1916 Percy was assigned to direct counter-battery fire along a section of British trenches. “The only counter-battery shots which he would allow were those against targets clearly visible from British lines - or those he had personally detected on his Ouija board.” I kid you, not.

I had better let Percy explain what he did next, because you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. “I could think of only one way of learning the secret of the stone image,” wrote Percy, “and that was by means of psychometry.” Yes; he consulted a psychic.

Holding the statue the medium had a ‘vision’. He saw “a large irregularly shaped continent stretching from the north coast of Africa across to South America”, complete with “processions of what looked like priests” dressed like the mysterious bearded figure. Then, the medium said, “…the whole land shakes with a mighty rumbling sound (and) …disappears under the water.” Percy now asserted, “…the connection of Atlantis with parts of what is now Brazil is not to be dismissed contemptuously.” I would would, but Percy wouldn't.

Now, a skeptic might contemptuously point out that any good con artist would know that Percy had written several articles about the kingdom of Atlantis for ‘The Occult Review’ magazine before meeting the little stone figure.  But while spoil a wonderful mystical adventure with facts?

Atlantis was the invention of the Greek philosopher, Plato. He weaved a tale of a great kingdom, where pure reason ruled supreme. This fascist utopia was destroyed only by a natural disaster, in, said Plato, a single day and a night. It was romantic, and absurd, and you could forest a planet with the trees turned to pulp for books identifying the location of the "real" Atlantis. And Percy, examining clues he had collected in ten years of exploring the Amazon, was certain the psych’s “reading” had merely confirmed that a colony of Atlantis was somewhere along the upper Xingu River, in southwestern Brazil And Percy knew exactly where to find it. “The central place I call "Z" -- our main objective -- is in a valley surmounted by lofty mountains. The valley is about ten miles wide, and the city is on an eminence in the middle of it…”

In the early spring of 1925 Percy, his son Jack, and Jack’s friend Raleigh Rimell, began their march into the Mato Grosso, Portuguese for “thick woods”. Before entering the unknown Percy sent a last letter to his wife, Nina, assuring her of his confidence. “You need have no fear of failure,” he wrote. He did not say anything about safety.

They crossed the upper Xingu (Shing-goo) River and the Rio Ticantins, and entered the domain of the Kurikuro, the Matipu and Nahhkwa peoples, all Carib speakers, survivors of first contact plagues, and victims of civilization and slavers, and deeply mistrustful of white men. For weeks the explorers fought tropical heat, poisonous snakes, biting insects, and predators who did not fear humans. When Percy’s party entered the camp of the Kalapalos tribe, the natives noted that both of the younger men were limping and ill, and that the “old man” looked very tired.

The Kalapalos tried to convince Percy to turn back, or at least rest with them for a few days. But so close to his goal, the explorer insisted in pressing on. The villagers followed the men’s campfire smoke receding into the jungle for five evenings, and then…nothing. Young men sent to follow the trail came to the last campsite and reported that the jungle beyond was undisturbed. It seemed as if Percy and his two companions had simply vanished off the face of the earth.

Percy had left strict instructions behind, that if his expedition should fail to reappear, no one was to come looking for them. It was too dangerous. So of course, over the following decades, the jungle was invaded by 13 separate expeditions searching for Percy. More than a hundred men died looking for the man who took practical advice from an Ouija board. Occasionally a compass or other tool would be discovered in a villager’s hut, and linked to Percy Fawcett. But the men were never found. Nina Fawcett was convinced her husband had been captured by an Indian tribe, and claimed to have received telepathic messages from him as late as 1934. But she died a widow, anyway.

Like all such mysteries, there were a thousand solutions offered. Fawcett was killed by the Kalapalos, or another tribe deeper in the woods. The entire party died of injury or illness, or animal attack. They were kidnapped and held for decades in the jungle, eventually becoming chiefs or priests or lunch. Or they descended into the earth and spent their days living with a subterranean society. Eventually, none of it mattered.

I am sorely tempted to simply say they were fools following a fool’s errand, seduced by a myth of their own creation, searching for mysticism in a prosaic universe. Eventually everyone who had been fascinated by Percy Fawcett’s story grew old and forgetful and passed into the great unknown themselves. And with time the story became not even worth the re-telling. Until…
America archeologist Michael Heckenberger has recently found some 20 pre-Columbian settlements in the area where Percy Fawcett believed “Z” was located. Each of these cities, connected by causeway highways across the swampy jungle floor, supported between two and five thousand people, giving the entire area a population of perhaps 100,000 people. All in all, it would appear that Percy Fawcett's only mistake was that he had underestimated the Indians of the Amazon, and over rated Plato.

Percy Fawcett failed because he was so intent upon finding a piece of European history in South America, that he missed his great city of "Z", even while he climbed the walls of its moat. And those amongst us who have not been similarly mistaken, have not failed, but we have not really risked much, either.

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LUCKY PEOPLE The Lost Dutchman Mine

I must tell you that your parents were right; the world is not fair. Some people succeed while you fail because they are more talented than you are, or more persistent or prettier, and some are smarter...and some are just so lucky they could walk through a car wash and not get damp. Jacob Waltz, on the other hand, almost drowned in the middle of a desert.

To be fair it was what was once called a once in a hundred year rainstorm. The clouds above central Arizona opened up on Wednesday, 18 February, 1891, and by the next morning the Salt River, which ran past Jacob’s property north of Phoenix, had risen 17 feet. The channel had grown to a mile wide. In the Rio Satillo Valley, the eighty year old retired miner was forced to lash himself to a tree and spent that night, and the following Friday, day and night, with just his head and shoulders above the cold pounding waters.

The Sacramento, California "Sunday Union" reported on the 22nd, that “The northern edge of this flood…entered the city of Phoenix, flooding out many of the poorer families….About a hundred adobe houses fell in…The churches and public buildings have been thrown open to the shelter-less, and a subscription started for their benefit, but many families are still without protection. The river began to fall Friday afternoon…”

That Saturday, 21 February, 1891, one of Waltz’s neighbors found the old man shivering in the ruins of his home, crouched atop his soaked bed. He refused to leave unless his heavy candle box came out with him. The Samaritan brought Waltz and his meager possession into Phoenix. Luckily, the now destitute Jacob was matched with a compassionate small businesswoman named Julia Elena Thomas, who had a spare room and a bed. In fact, Julia was probably the only lucky thing that ever happened to Jacob.

Because, besides being compassionate Julia was curious, and susceptible. She cared for the difficult old man as best she could, in part because Julia became intrigued by the heavy candle box Jacob insisted on keeping under his new bed.

Before the development of electricity, oil for lamps was expensive to buy and transport. So farm and ranch homes were usually lit by candle. Tallow candles were made from farm animal fat, and every rural home had a candle box. Strength was not a requirement, merely protection from the rats and mice attracted to the tallow’s odor. So the wood was thin but coated with a paint or varnish. The boxes were usually a foot to a foot and a-half long and a foot deep, but usually no more than six inches wide. The top slid into place, making for a nearly air tight closure without the need for weighty hardware.

But Jacob’s box was too heavy to be holding candles, or papers, or keepsakes. What could a broke, sick, old man hold so dear that he risked his life to stand guard over it, while soaking wet, in a collapsing flooded adobe? Eventually Julia peeked, but all she found inside were about 50 pounds of rocks. But it was enough to start her imagination racing. As the months passed Julia teased out Jacob’s story, and it seemed the old man had spent most of his life chasing gold.

He had been born in Germany. And he had chased the shinny metal across the Atlantic. He had worked in the gold mines of North Carolina and Georgia and Mississippi. He could not mine for himself, however, because only an American citizen could own a mineral claim. In 1848, at 38 years old, in Natchez, Mississippi, Jacob had filed a letter of intent to apply for citizenship. But his intentions were put on hold when he chased the California gold strike of 1849. But again, Jacob was unlucky. Like most of the 49ers, he found no gold.

In July of 1861 Jacob finally became an American citizen, in Los Angeles. In 1863 Jacob joined a wagon train bound for the new gold fields around Phoenix, Arizona. Over the next few years he filed three claims for mines in the Bradshaw Mountains. But they produced nothing. In 1868 he homesteaded 160 acres in the Salt River Valley. Every winter Jacob would wander the bitter wilderness of the nearby Superstition Mountains, searching for gold. And, like a lot of other bearded prospectors in the area, Jacob made ends meet by working the Vulture Mine every summer.

Henry Wickenburg had traveled in the same wagon train that had brought Jacob Waltz to Arizona. but unlike Jacob, Henry was lucky. Within a few weeks of arriving in the Phoenix area, Henry stumbled upon a vein of quartz that eventually produced $200 million worth of gold and silver, what Henry called the Vulture Mine. But very little of that fortune went to Henry, in part because Henry sold the mine after a few years (and eventually died broke), but mostly because of something called “highgrading”.

“Freighters would line up at the mine with wagons to transport the gold ore. As soon as they were out of sight of the mine, the freighters would begin picking through the ore, pocketing the best nuggets. "Highgrading" was the name of this practice, stealing the highest grade pieces of ore. In fact, freighting for the Vulture was more profitable than mining it. Several nearby mine owners closed down their mines to become freighters for the Vulture…It was widely known among the prospectors that working at the Vulture for a few months could provide them with a grubstake for the rest of the year…Miners would often work the mine during evenings and weekends for their own benefit. The early owners of the mine treated harshly anyone caught doing personal mining. Later owners may have silently condoned personal mining when they were not able to pay their workers.”

(http://www.jpc-training.com/vulture.htm)

Every successful hard rock mine in the nineteenth century suffered these deprivations, and that is why all modern mines include stamps and smelters on their premises. Nothing leaves the mine site except at least slightly refined gold - now small enough to be under guard.

Jacob never told Julia he highgraded the ore in his candle box from an established mine like the Vulture. If he had, she probably would not have believed him, for Julia, like Jacob, had been bitten by the gold bug. Instead, she pressed the old man for more details about his hidden mine in the mountains. Eventually the sick old coot was forced to admit that he had a mine. But where was this bonanza? Although he never produced a map, in infuriating slowness the old man confided obscure details, almost as if he were stringing Julia along to ensure he kept a roof over his head. He told Julia that with a short climb from his mine you could see the peak known as Weever’s Needle, but from the Needle you could not see his mine…You could see the military trail that ran through the Mountains from his mine, but you could not see the mine from the trail…You had to crawl through a hole to see the gold in his mine…that near his mine was a rock shaped like a face…and that the setting sun shown on the entrance of his mine. This was about all that Jacob shared about the source of the ore in his candle box, before he died of pneumonia in Julia's spare bed, on 25 October, 1891.

The ore in Jacob’s box brought $4,800 from the assay office – a lot of money in those days. And that proved the case for Julia. Jacob had a mine hidden in the mountains; where else could the ore have come from? A year later the "Arizona Enterprise" noted in its pages that Julia had sold her business (an ice cream parlor) and was actively prospecting the Superstitions, searching for Jacob’s “missing” mine. She even attracted a few financial backers. But after a few more unproductive seasons, Julia lost her financing. I guess Julia was just not very lucky.

But she finally made money off Jacob’s mine, once she gave up trying to find it herself, once she switched to selling maps to Jacob’s “Lost” mine, for $7 apiece. And because Jacob had been born in Germany, making him a “Deutsch man” or ‘Dutchman’ to parochial American ears, the magical mystery was marketed as the “Lost Dutchman Mine.”

You too can find the Lost Dutchman Mine. All you need is a map and an understanding of the intricate and complicated stories weaved to explain how once located, a source of immense and instant wealth could have become lost again, and why, with some 2,000 people every year searching for it in the Superstition Mountains Wilderness Area, "The Lost Dutchman Mine" could have remained lost for a hundred years. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is that all those people before you have just been more unlucky than you. And just around the next bend, up the next canyon, or after the next scratch off lottery ticket, you too could be the luckiest person in the world. It could happen.

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FOOD FIGHT- The Siege of Belgrade

I can’t help feeling a little sorry for Merzifonly Kara Mustafa Pasa (above). He looks so sad in his portrait. He comes down in history as despised for his petty meanness and infamous for his avariciousness. But the truth may be that his greatest sin historically was having been born with the perfect skills to be a second in command. He was a brilliant organizer. His attention to detail and precision was legendary. He could calculate a bribe as quick as greased lightening. But what he needed was a firm will to make the right decisions. Unfortunately, his Sultan, Mehmed IV, had an ambition for war but found he didn’t like living in a tent. So in 1683 he went home from the war early. And that left Kara Mustafa alone at the top, a Grand Vizier with no limits on his fastidious obsession with detail, with profit, nor on his blind faith in violence as a negotiating position.

Sultan Mehmed IV (above) was always trying to convince people that he was who his titles said he was. He made his first entrance into history as an infant when his father, in a fit if temper, threw his baby son down a toilet. The servants rescued the boy, but Mehmed bore the scar from that experience, physically on his forehead (ala Harry Potter), and figuratively on his ego, his entire life. Instead of a cold simple diplomatic declaration of war - or more practically, a disarming surprise attack - on 31 March, 1683 Mehmed sent Austrian Hapsburg King Leopold I a letter dripping with adolescent bravado.

Mehmed IV informed Leopold (above), “…We will destroy your little country with our Army… Above all WE order you, to wait for us in your city…so WE can behead you…We will exterminate you and all of your followers, as you are the lowest creatures of God, as all unbelievers are, and erase you from the face of the earth. WE will expose the big and little to gruesome pains first and than give them to a vicious death. Your little Empire, I will take from you and its entire population I will sweep off the earth.”

In the realm of braggadocio Mehmed IV letter has to rank right up there with George Bush’s 2004 invitation to the Iraqi resistance to “Bring it on.” Still, it wasn’t as if either side needed a reason for this new war. The Christians and the Muslims had been butchering each other in the Balkans for 300 years, since the fall of Constantinople. In the first century of these wars Vlad the Impaler (Christian) made his reputation having 20,000 Ottoman P.O.W’s impaled on stakes. And then he had lunch. Things just got worse from there. As Andrew Wheatcroft explains in his recent book, “The Enemy at the Gate”, “Many of the horror stories of these wars are true: the massacres and the atrocities, the endless lines of newly enslaved Hungarians in Sarajevo on their road of tears to Istanbul….The Hapsburg armies also flailed men alive, impaled prisoners, took slaves, raped captives. Savagery was a weapon of war used by both sides.” This was ethnic cleansing practiced by experts.

During the winter of 1682-83 Kara Mustafa prepared the way to war. He oversaw the building and repairing of roads and bridges up to the border between Austria and Ottoman Hungry. Supply depots were established for ammunition and food. And then, in early May of 1683, an Ottoman army of 150,000 men under the direct command of Mehmed IV marched easily from Istanbul to Belgrade, just 300 miles from the Austrian capital of Vienna.

But after reaching the border between war and peace the Sultan handed over command to Kara Mustafa and returned to his hunting parties in Istanbul. And from that moment things started to go wrong with the expedition.

A month later, now under Kara Mustafa’s command, an advance guard of 40,000 Tartar cavalry reached the outskirts of Vienna. Remembering the note from Mehmed, King Leopold gathered up 80,000 of the residents of Vienna and ran to the west, to Linz, leaving just 5,000 citizens behind in the Austrian capital, defended by 11,000 soldiers and 370 cannon.

Kara Mustafa felt he had to offer the commander of Vienna a lesson in Ottoman diplomacy. The lesson was proffered in the little village of Perchtoldsdorf, 6 miles east of Vienna, where King Leopold had a summer estate.

On 16 July,1683,  called upon by Mustafa to surrender, the citizens first tried to defend their town, and only when that proved hopeless did they surrender. It was too late. Mustafa released his troops who “…massacred the surrendered garrison with their sabers, slaughtered noncombatant civilians, and then incinerated a church and tower packed with women and children.” (World History of Warfare; Archer & Ferris)

However this bravado did not have the intended effect of destroying the enemies’ will to fight. “The Viennese responded by impaling severed Turkish heads in full view of their trenches and later flayed live captives.” (ibid) Mustafa had no choice now but to lay siege to Vienna.

And here technology was on the side of the defenders, thanks to the invention of the “trace italienne”, also known as the Star Fort. This design replaced vertical masonry walls which had defended Constantinople and which were easily knocked down by sold artillery shot.

Instead, as Wikipedia explains, “forts became both lower and larger in area…” Low brick curtain walls filled with earth absorbed enemy shells. Cannon embrasures allowed defenders to safely target any enemy artillery positions. An exterior ditch or moat kept enemy cavalry and troops at a distance." Mustafa would either have to accept the massive causalities of a direct assault or take the time to undermine the forts. With odds in his favor of 800 to 1 the direct assault might well have worked. But Kara Mustafa instead ordered his men to begin digging.

All through August the Ottoman engineers tunneled, hollowing massive galleries underneath Vienna’s outer defenses. In early September, when these were packed with gunpowder and exploded, an almost 12 mile line of fortifications simply collapsed; the fall of Vienna was only a matter of time. The defenders were almost out of food. Then, on 6 September, 1683, as the Austrians prepared for the literal last ditch defense of their city, out of the muddy waters of the mighty Danube River, arose a hero; Jan Sobieski, King of Poland.

Sobieski’s original not-so-heroic plan had been for an alliance between himself, France and the Ottomans against Leopold’s Austria. But finding Mehmed IV was not interested in sharing the booty from Vienna , Sobieski joined up the Austrians instead. The newly christened “Holy League” had about 80,000 men outside of Vienna, still giving Mustafa a numerical advantage of almost 2 to 1. But the Ottoman army was divided between fending off Sobieski and attacking Vienna. Mustafa refused to delay his assault. The last fortress had already been undermined, the charges planted and the fuses set. Whatever happened with Sobieski’s army, the final act of the siege would be played out on 12 September, 1683.

The Polish King chose as his battle ground a hill (Kahlen Berg) rising 1,500 feet above the Danube flood plain just outside the walls of Vienna. On this hill a large part of the Ottoman army was camped, including Mustafa’s own red tent. But anticipating Sobieski’s plan, at four that morning, Mustafa launched a spoiling attack against the Holy League’s troops.

As the armies threw themselves against each other all morning long on the hill, the Ottoman engineers were finishing their preparations underground. At about one that afternoon they lit the fuses and sealed the mine from their end. But an Austrian counter-mining operation then broke into the underground gallery and at almost the last second stopped the fuses. Vienna would not fall this day. Kara Mustafa had run out of time.

Sensing the Ottoman forces were exhausted, at about five o’clock Sobieski launched a massed cavalry attack (20,000 men and horses), led by his distinctive “winged angels”. The Polish riders slammed into the Ottoman troops, and swept them from the hill.

By 5:30 that afternoon Sobieski was entering Mustafa’s personal tent and the Ottoman army was in full retreat toward the twin cities of Buda and Pest. Kara Mustafa had lost 15,000 dead and wounded and 5,000 captured, while the “League” had 5,000 dead. As history tells the tale, Sobieski got the glory while the Hapsburgs got the empire.

To celebrate the miracle of victory the bakers of Vienna invented a new pastry, twisted into a crescent in remembrance of the Ottoman crescent flags. In Austria the pastry is called a “Vienniuserie”. When Marie Antoinette introduced the treat to France in 1770, it was given the name by which the rest of the world knows it; the “croissant”. A more suspect legend says Sobieski introduced the bagel to commemorate the stirrups of his victorious cavalry, and that Europe’s first taste of cappuccino was in bags of coffee left behind by the fleeing Ottoman troops, or perhaps what was left behind was some tasty “Vienna Roast” coffee. There may be an element of truth in some or all of these stories, but true or not, they are legendary.

Mustafa regrouped his forces at Belgrade, and put them into defense positions, in case the Austrians tried to quickly follow up their victory. But Sobieski and Leopold’s armies were as exhausted as the Ottoman troops, and the Hapsburg prince was not interested in taking undue risks. Leopold knew that time was on his side, now.

The final casualty of the battle of Vienna was Kara Mustafa himself. On 25 December, 1683, a date with little meaning to a Muslim, the soldiers came for him. He waited for them with his collar open, and stretched his neck so they might wrap the traditional silk rope around his throat. Ever attentive to details, his last words to the assassins were, “Be certain to tie the knot correctly.”

Then several men pulled the knot tight until the life was squeezed out of him. His decapitated head was carried to Istanbul and presented to Mehmed IV in a velvet bag.

His grave was disgraced and lost by conquering Hapsburg armies a generation later, and his headstone now rests in along the Bugarian/Turkish border town of Edirne, as either a warning or a promise, depending on which side of the border you are standing on.

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