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

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Cool Zone Media.

**Robert** (0:05)
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast by 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_1** (0:15)
Mazel Tov, Robert.

**Robert** (0:16)
Unless I 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. 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?

**Miriam** (0:36)
I'm doing good. I'm not on fire in any way that I'm aware of.

**Robert** (0:40)
Okay, okay, neither in a good nor a bad way.

**Miriam** (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, but.

**Robert** (0:52)
Yeah, 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.
So, when we left him off, he had first listened to his mom and broken up with his fiance, 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 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 these people who are seekers of the truth. There's a lot of not just local Buddhists, but a lot of white people who are really into the occult are in Ceylon and moving. Because it's really hip to travel to the East and to travel to these parts of the world, where there's people who are Buddhists and Hindus. Because a lot of these Victorian age and slightly post-Victorian age, white people are really into co-opting little bits of different Eastern religions and sort of like tacking them on to these pieces of like theosophy and other spiritualist belief systems that are starting to be cobbled together as like a hobby. This is like a hobby for a lot of people, right?

**Miriam** (2:29)
It stays fashionable for a while.

**Robert** (2:31)
It stays fashionable.
Percy's kind of using his military career as a way to also further his hobby in this way. 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. In Grant'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 and Ceylon. And it's kind of important because that 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 archeology 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.

**Miriam** (3:58)
So like the real treasure was in fact within you all the time?

**Robert** (4:03)
Yeah, but also the real treasure is going to make you and your son gods. He's not selfless in where he thinks this is going to bring him. Right? It's still crazy, but it is different. Yeah.