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

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Call zone media.

**Robert Evans** (0:05)
Welcome back 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's 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.

**Miriam** (0:48)
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 podcaster of.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:03)
Yay.

**Robert Evans** (1:04)
Awesome.

**SPEAKER_1** (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.

**Robert Evans** (1:20)
I feel like 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, have you ever heard of Percy Fawcett?

**Miriam** (1:32)
I have not, but I have rarely heard a more villainous name. That is a name that I assume he had a curly mustache?

**Robert Evans** (1:41)
He had a mustache. He had exactly, if you picture in your mind's eye, a British explorer from the late Victorian, early 20th century age. He's whoever you're picturing. If you're picturing a British explorer from 1900, that's Percy Fawcett.

**Miriam** (1:57)
Hold on. Are we talking pith helmet, being carried in a sedan chair by people who live the place he just discovered?

**SPEAKER_1** (2:07)
Oh my God.

**Robert Evans** (2:09)
Yeah. Look at that.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:10)
Look at that guy.

**Robert Evans** (2:11)
He's got a beautiful curling mustache, magnificent, and also a full beard. He just came out of the Amazon. He's wearing an explorer's pea coat and some weird. I honestly don't know what's going on with his hat.

**Miriam** (2:23)
The hat is a mystery. I had never seen this hat before.

**Robert Evans** (2:27)
Dare I say, he's got a-

**SPEAKER_1** (2:28)
Would wear the jacket though. Would wear.

**Robert Evans** (2:31)
Look, the whole fit's good. It's not a bad fit. There's a reason why he's the dude that everybody's basing their Indiana Jones style adventure archaeologist characters on. It's because he did look pretty cool.
So, Percy Fawcett, some people would you say that- because he gets credited a lot as being the real Indiana Jones. That's not true in the most literal, direct way. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had 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. Like, Star Wars owes a lot to Flash Gordon and Indiana Jones is more inspired by Zorro and kind of a loge of World War II era films, particularly a series of Adventure Bee 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, 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 is like the plot of an adventure novel or action film. 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?