You can blame the book "Through Gates of Splendor" for my extreme curiosity with the land and people of South America. I remember reading it probably 28 years ago and I was mesmerized with not only their tribe, but the idea of undiscovered people and lands. A few years ago, one of the desk clerks at work asked to be off for several weeks to go on a mission trip in Ecuador. I started telling her all about this book, and how through all the years I kept up with the families that were left behind, and the books and documentaries that were made, and also about how the man that was a part of the killing of the missionaries that were there is currently close friends with one of the deceased men's son. She looked at me wide-eyed and said , "yeah, we are staying in his house". And then I died. Any time that a NatGeo, Smithsonian, or Discovery Channel has anything based on the Amazon, the land, their cultures, I am glued to the TV. I remember reading a book that touched on the subject and life of an explorer that went missing in the '20's and neither he or his party were ever found. A week or so ago I saw a movie trailer for "The Lost City of Z", and I remembered that was the dude that I read about! I found the book the movie was based on with the same title, and I have been all up in it for days. In true Lisa-fashion, I can't just read a book. I have notes. I have note pads. I have sticky notes. Now I am elbow-deep in all of this, and I can't find a place to keep it all together, and I thought Hey! I have a blog! I can attach it to all the other crap I have on there! What Started It All For Me: Operation AucaNate Saint's aircraft was discovered in 1994, buried in the sand along the Curaray River. The frame was reconstructed and is now on display at the headquarters of the Mission Aviation Fellowship in Nampa, Idaho. Operation Auca was an attempt by five Evangelical Christian missionaries from the United States to bring Christianity to the Huaorani people of the rain forest of Ecuador. The Huaorani, also known by the pejorative Aucas (a modification of awqa, the Quechua word for "savages"), were an isolated tribe known for their violence, against both their own people and outsiders who entered their territory. With the intention of being the first Christians to evangelize the previously uncontacted Huaorani, the missionaries began making regular flights over Huaorani settlements in September 1955, dropping gifts, which were reciprocated. After several months of exchanging gifts, on January 3, 1956, the missionaries established a camp at "Palm Beach", a sandbar along the Curaray River, a few kilometers from Huaorani settlements. Their efforts came to an end on January 8, 1956, when all five--Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming, and Roger Youderian—were attacked and speared by a group of Huaorani warriors. The news of their deaths was broadcast around the world, and Life magazine covered the event with a photo essay. The deaths of the men galvanized the missionary effort in the United States, sparking an outpouring of funding for evangelization efforts around the world. Their work is still frequently remembered in evangelical publications, and in 2006 was the subject of the film production End of the Spear. Several years after the death of the men, the widow of Jim Elliot, Elisabeth, and the sister of Nate Saint, Rachel, returned to Ecuador as missionaries with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL International) to live among the Huaorani. This eventually led to the conversion of many, including some of those involved in the killing. While largely eliminating tribal violence, their efforts exposed the tribe to increased influence from the outside. The Huaorani People: The Huaorani, Waorani or Waodani, also known as the Waos, are native Amerindians from the Amazonian Region of Ecuador who have marked differences from other ethnic groups from Ecuador. The alternate name Auca is a pejorative exonym used by the neighboring Quechua natives, and commonly adopted by Spanish-speakers as well. Auca – awqa in Quechua – means "savage". They comprise almost 4,000 inhabitants and speak the Huaorani language, a linguistic isolate that is not known to be related to any other language. Their ancestral lands are located between the Curaray and Napo rivers, about 50 miles south of El Coca. These homelands – approximately 120 miles wide and 75 to 100 miles from north to south – are threatened by oil exploration and illegal logging practices. In the past, Huaorani were able to protect their culture and lands from both indigenous enemies and settlers. In the last 40 years, they have shifted from a hunting and gathering society to live mostly in permanent forest settlements. As many as five communities – the Tagaeri, the Huiñatare, the Oñamenane, and two groups of the Taromenane – have rejected all contact with the outside world and continue to move into more isolated areas. In traditional animist Waodani worldview, there is no distinction between the physical and spiritual worlds, and spirits are present throughout the world. The Waodani once believed that the entire world was a forest (and used the same word, ömë, for both). The Oriente’s rain forest remains the essential basis of their physical and cultural survival. For them, the forest is home, while the outside world is considered unsafe: living in the forest offered protection from being attacked and enslaved by Spanish Conquistadors, cultural deprivation from Jesuit and Franciscan Missionaries and Inquisition tribunals. In short, as one Waodani put it, “The rivers and trees are our life.” In all its specificities, the forest is woven into each Waodani life and conceptions of the world. They have remarkably detailed knowledge of its geography and ecology. The Waodani believe that all life exists spiritually and physically and do not observe a separation between these states of being. To the Waodani as many other cultures the directions North, South, East and West are sacred. They believe that a person who dies walks a trail to the afterlife from the West to the East, which has a large anaconda snake lying in wait. Those who have not led a good life will not escape the snake and not be able to travel east, instead they will journey to the West and return to Earth to become animals, often termites. This underlies a mix of practices that recognize and respect animals, but does not shield them from harm for human use. Hunting supplies a major part of the Waodani diet and is of cultural significance. Before a hunting or fishing party ensues the community Shaman will often pray for a day to ensure its success. Traditionally, the creatures hunted were limited to monkeys, birds, and wild peccaries. Neither land-based predators nor birds of prey are hunted. Traditionally there was an extensive collection of hunting and eating taboos. They refused to eat deer, on the grounds that deer eyes look similar to human eyes. While a joyful activity, hunting (even permitted animals) has ethical ramifications: “The Guarani [Waodani] must kill animals to live, but they believed dead animal spirits live on and must be placated or else do harm in angry retribution.”To counterbalance the offense of hunting, a shaman demonstrated respect through the ritual preparation of the poison, curare, used in blow darts. Hunting with such darts is not considered killing, but retrieving, essentially a kind of harvesting from the trees. While never hunted, two other animals, the snake and the jaguar, have special significance for the Waodani. Snakes are considered "the most evil force in the Guarani [Waodani] cosmology", particularly the imposing (though nonvenemous) anaconda, or obe. A giant obe stands in the way of the forest trail that the dead follow to an afterlife with the creator in the sky. Here on earth, snakes are a bad omen, and killing them is traditionally considered to be taboo. Mincaye (left) has become especially close with Nate Saint's son Steve, who lived in the tribe for many years. Because he had killed Steve Saint's father, Mincaye felt a special responsibility in raising him. A kinship bond was developed, and Mincaye adopted Saint as his tribal son. After the Saint family came to live permanently with the Huaorani in 1995, Mincaye considered the Saint children his grandchildren Colonel Percy Harrison FawcettSince the film "The Lost City of Z" just came out, you can find all shorts of shenanigans on the internet right now. I'll just stick to the books and accounts of the people that knew Colonel Fawcett personally, his diaries, and I am still currently reading "The Lost City of Z" by David Grann. The movie review I read said that it is very watered down, nothing at all like the first hand accounts of the book. Here is some stuff that I found: This was written by Leighton Gage- Paramount has chosen Brad Pitt to play Percy Fawcett in an upcoming version of David Grann’s non-fiction book The Lost City of Z. It’s going to be, according to them, an Amazonian mystery/thriller. (The part of Colonel Fawcett is actually played by Charlie Hunnam, Brad Pitt is a producer of the film) And that virtually guarantees to muddy the waters still further about the death of the English explorer who was swallowed up by the Brazilian jungle back in 1925. Grann, in his book, doesn’t really solve the mystery of what happened to Fawcett. But he does reject the account of Orlando Villas-Bôas. Orlando, who died in 2002, was a sertanista, a kind of wilderness explorer peculiar to Brazil, and the country’s Indian expert par excellence. He spent many years living among the tribes, spoke their languages, established first contact with many of them, and was instrumental in determining a just government policy toward all the indigenous peoples. I knew Orlando Villas-Bôas personally. He was neither a liar nor a boaster, and his life was packed with more adventure than that of anyone I ever knew. Why, then, should he make things up? Orlando claimed (and I believed him) to have heard the true story of what happened to Fawcett from one of the murderers, a member of the Kalapalos tribe. Grann visited the Kalapalos in 2005 and got an “oral account” of the incident. Orlando was there 54 years earlier, in 1951, and spoke to people who were there at the time. Both accounts agree in some regards: They agree that Fawcett and his men stayed in the village of the Kalapalos. They agree that Fawcett and his companions had a mishap on the river and lost most of the gifts they’d bought to placate the Indians. They agree that most of the members of Fawcett’s expedition were sick by the time they contacted the Kalapalos. (And, therefore, a danger to the tribe.) Then the two accounts begin to differ. According to Grann, the expedition set off to the eastward. The tribesmen, he said, warned Fawcett not to go that way, because the region was inhabited by “fierce Indians”. But Fawcett decided otherwise. And disappeared. End of story. (And this is going to make a mystery/thriller?) Grann, however, does not relate, and perhaps never discovered, three additional precipitating incidents. And those incidents, for Orlando Villas-Bôas, were of more moment than sickness and/or the absence of gifts. According to Orlando:
That final incident, according to Orlando, sealed the fate of Fawcett and his men. The Indians waited until the next morning, allowed the expedition to get some distance down the trail and then ambushed and killed them all. Orlando told me one thing more: in those days, he said, the Kalapalos didn’t lie. They dissembled, but they never told an untruth. He’d asked a direct question, for which he didn’t receive a direct answer. Thus he knew from the get-go there was something afoot. It took him, he said, hours and hours of conversation to extract a frank account of what had really happened. Colonel Percy Fawcett was one of the most famous British explorers of his day, a friend of writers Arthur Conan Doyle and H. Rider Haggard. He had a strong interest in Atlantis and the occult, and after years of exploring South America, speculated that the ruins of a lost ancient city called Z laid somewhere in the unmapped territory of the Amazon. Fawcett believed the city was built by an advanced civilization, once writing to his son Brian that he expected “the ruins to be monolithic in character, more ancient than the oldest Egyptian discoveries. Judging by inscriptions found in many parts of Brazil, the inhabitants used an alphabetical writing allied to many ancient European and Asian scripts.” He even heard rumors that a strange source of light would illuminate the insides of the buildings, “a phenomenon that filled with terror the Indians who claimed to have seen it.” After two previous expeditions in the early 1920s that ended in failure, Fawcett set out for a third expedition with his 21-year-old son Jack and Jack’s friend Raleigh Rimell in 1925. Fawcett suspected that Z was located somewhere in the jungles of Mato Grosso, a little-explored region full of dangerous insects, unfriendly Indian tribes, and piranha-infested rivers. By May 29th, about 5 weeks into the expedition, Fawcett and his two young companions arrived at the outpost where Fawcett had left off in his last search. He gave their native guides a letter written for his wife, and then dismissed them back to the state capital of Cuiaba. 2 years passed without anybody hearing from the team again, and some began to fear that they were dead. The Royal Geographical Society’s George Miller Dyott organized an expedition to find the Fawcett party in 1928, but they came up with nothing. There were rumors that the trio was still alive, either the captives of hostile Indians or volunteers who had given up civilization and gone native. In the 90 years that have passed since their disappearance, over 100 people have been killed trying to look for them. Missionaries in the early 1930s reported hearing stories about a tall, blue-eyed white man in the area who was forced to marry an Indian chief’s daughter. There were also sightings of a white baby boy said to be the son of either Fawcett or Jack. Fawcett’s wife believed that the men were still alive, and claimed to have received a psychic message from her husband in 1934. Psychic Geraldine Cummins also reported receiving a telepathic message from Fawcett in 1936, and received four more communications until 1948, when he told her that he was dead. Further venturing into inanity, some people in the theosophist and flying saucer communities believed that Fawcett really did find Z, which was actually a subterranean city full of UFOs and beautiful red-haired people. Moving onto more “plausible” rumors, there were also stories of Fawcett being killed. One man in 1949 claimed that Fawcett and Rimmell were dead, and he had seen their shrunken heads. Author Harold Wilkins in 1952 heard that another man was shown Fawcett’s shrunken head by an Indian chief. The same year, Brazilian indigenous activist Orlando Vilas Boaz reported that the party was killed by the Kalapalo Indians. He discovered some bones in the area, but later examination showed that the remains weren’t Fawcett. Another theory suggests that Fawcett intentionally went missing so he could establish a remote theosophist-influenced commune. Fawcett’s son Brian made several trips to Brazil in the 1950s to search for his father and brother himself, but he was unable to find any more information about what happened to them. (Article and photos by bizarreandgrotesque.com/2015/08/16/british-explorer-percy-fawcett-and-the-ancient-lost-city-of-z/ By Randall Floyd Special Columnist The forest in these solitudes is always full of voices, the soft whisperings of those who came before.... With those words, written in 1925, Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett embarked on a mission to find a city he believed was part of legendary Atlantis. The British explorer's expedition pushed into the heart of Brazil's Mato Grosso where, on May 30, he proudly boasted in a letter to supporters back home: ``You need have no fear of failure.'' That was the last anyone heard from the colonel. His disappearance shocked and saddened millions around the world who were cheering on his attempt to find ``Z,'' the name he had given the lost city. The quest had begun five years earlier when Col. Fawcett read an 18th-century document at Brazil's National Library in Rio de Janeiro. The document supposedly revealed how a Portuguese explorer had found an ancient, walled city constructed in the style like those of ancient Greece. A military engineer by trade, the 53-year-old Briton had sought lost cities in the jungles of Ceylon as well as South America. Like other adventurer-explorers of his day, Col. Fawcett believed in the legend of Atlantis. It seemed likely to him that survivors of this doomed continent reached South America, where they built cities and temples in an attempt to re-create their destroyed civilization. The old Portuguese document was the proof he needed to confirm the existence of the Atlantean city of Z. Later that year he set out to find the city, but the expedition was cut short by his companions, who quickly had their fill of aggressive insects, deadly snakes, blood-sucking bats, exotic diseases and tangled undergrowth. In 1925, Col. Fawcett, now 58, tried again, this time financed by newspaper companies hungry for his story and by England's Royal Geographical Society. On April 20, he marched from the town of Cuyaba, taking his son, Jack, his son's 18-year-old friend Raleigh Rimell, and two Mufuquas Indians, who deserted him seven months later. A search party in 1928 found a small trunk believed to belong to the missing explorers but nothing else. They were told that hostile natives had killed the three white men soon after they entered the heavy forest. Indians drove the rescuers out of the region before they could confirm the stories. Col. Fawcett's fate remained a mystery. In 1930, American reporter Albert de Winton tried to track Col. Fawcett down, but he, too, vanished in the jungle. A year later, a Swiss trapper, Stefan Rattin, reported that he had come upon an old Englishman living as a well-cared-for prisoner for a group of Indians. Although the man had not given his name, Mr. Rattin's description and the man's circumstances raised hopes that Col. Fawcett had at last been found. But when Mr. Rattin returned to rescue the putative Col. Fawcett, he and two partners also disappeared. For decades afterward, Mato Grosso travelers reported meeting gaunt, English-speaking oldsters along the jungle paths. But no real trace of the British explorer or his two companions was ever found. There have been reports of blue-eyed, white-skinned Indians in the rain forest, said to be offspring of the young Jack Fawcett. Bones unearthed in 1950 and identified as Col. Fawcett's did not, in fact, match the descriptions of any of the three explorers. And there has been speculation that Col. Fawcett's supposed route of march was entirely fictitious - that he had taken quite another path to Z and vanished. In all probability, the fate of the intrepid explorer and his two companions will forever remain a mystery (From phfawcettsweb.org/) James MurrayJames Murray (21 July 1865, Glasgow – February 1914) was a biologist and explorer. In 1902, he assisted the oceanographer, Sir John Murray, with a bathymetric survey of Scottish freshwater lochs. Murray undertook both biological and bathymetric surveys. In particular, he contributed to tardigrade and bdelloid rotifer science: describing 113 species and forma of rotifer and 66 species of tardigrade. In 1907, at the age of 41, he served under Shackleton on the Nimrod Expedition where he was in charge of the base camp. In 1913, he co-wrote a book about the expedition, titled Antarctic Days, with George Edward Marston (1882–1940), a fellow member of the expedition. In 1911, at 46, he joined with the explorer Percy Fawcett, Henry Costin and Henry Manley to explore and chart the jungle in the region of the Peru-Bolivian border. Murray, unused to the rigors of the tropical regions, fared poorly. Eventually Fawcett diverted the expedition to get Murray out, such was his condition. He briefly dropped out of sight, having been recovering in a house in Tambopata. He reached La Paz in 1912, learning that he was thought to have died. Murray, angry at perceived mistreatment at Fawcett's hands, wanted to sue, however friends at the Royal Geographical Society advised him against it. In June 1913, he joined a Canadian scientific expedition to the Arctic aboard the ill-fated Karluk as oceanographer. The ship became trapped in the Arctic ice in August 1913. Eventually, Murray mutinied against the captain and departed across the ice with three others, none of whom were seen or heard from again.
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Lisa DoddI enjoy sports, binge watching TV, food, reading, and slightly bearded men. Most popular blog posts from my previous Blog:
How I Died (Again) Lily is Here! The "Miracle" Diet Zesty Lemon Shrimp My Apologies to Shelby County, AL The Evolution of My Hair My Night Stalking Dale Murphy The Worst Late Night Snack Ever Questions from God Louisiana! Archives
December 2023
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