Percy Fawcett & the Giant Anaconda

Grove Koger

Lieutenant Colonel Percy Fawcett was a British artillery officer and member of the British Secret Intelligence Service (or MI6, as it’s more widely known) who served his country in one capacity or another in Malta, Ceylon, Hong Kong, and Morocco.

Fawcett’s father had been a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), and the son followed in his footsteps, joining the RGS and carrying out an expedition to South America in 1906. He went on to make six more expeditions to the continent, eventually becoming convinced that the remains of an ancient city—he called it “Z”—existed somewhere in the Amazon Basin.

If these events sound familiar, you may have read David Grann’s 2009 book The Lost City of Z or watched the movie based on it. Or perhaps you’ve read Exploration Fawcett, which was “arranged” from Fawcett’s “manuscripts, letters, log-books, and records” by his son Brian in 1953.

The explorer’s search for Z makes for a fascinating story, particularly since Fawcett may have been on the right track. However, I’m writing today about an incident recorded in Exploration Fawcett: an encounter with an enormous anaconda, which you see dramatized at the top of today’s post in a cover llustration prepared from Fawcett’s own pencil sketch.

“We were drifting easily along,” wrote the explorer, “in the sluggish current not far below the confluence of the Rio Negro when almost under the bow of the boat there appeared a triangular head and several feet of undulating body. It was a giant anaconda. I sprang for my rifle as the creature began to make its way up the bank, and hardly waiting to aim smashed a .44 soft-nosed bullet into its spine, ten feet below the wicked head. At once there was a flurry of foam, and several heavy thumps against the boat’s keel, shaking us as though we had run on a snag.

“With great difficulty I persuaded the Indian crew to turn in shore-wards. They were so frightened that the whites showed all round their popping eyes, and in the moment of firing I had heard their terrified voices begging me not to shoot lest the monster destroy the boat and kill everyone on board, for not only do these creatures attack boats when injured, but also there is great danger from their mates.

“We stepped ashore,” Fawcett continued, “and approached the reptile with caution. It was out of action, but shivers ran up and down the body like puffs of wind on a mountain tarn. As far as it was possible to measure, a length of 45 feet lay out of the water, and 17 feet in it, making a total length of 62 feet. Its body was not thick for such a colossal length—not more than 12 inches in diameter—but it had probably been long without food. I tried to cut a piece out of the skin, but the beast was by no means dead and the sudden upheavals rather scared us.…

“Such large specimens as this may not be common, but the trails in the swamps reach a width of six feet and support the statements of Indians and rubber pickers that the anaconda sometimes reaches an incredible size, altogether dwarfing the one shot by me. The Brazilian Boundary Commission told me of one killed in the Rio Paraguay exceeding 80 feet in length!”

Now I’m not a herpetologist, so I’m not qualified to speculate. And since I wasn’t with Fawcett, I’m scarcely in a position to call him a liar, as, according to his son, “experts” in London did.

What do others have to say about snakes?

An article in American Oceans tells us that “the largest anaconda ever recorded was over 30 feet long and weighed more than 500 pounds.” An article from the September 25, 2016, New York Post (not the most reliable source, I realize) described a 33-foot-long anaconda “found by terrified builders on a construction site in Brazil.” It weighed, claims the article, a “whopping” 882 pounds.

Even at this frightening size, however, we’re far short of Fawcett’s 62-foot specimen.

In conclusion, I’ll mention a similar report from the other side of the world. It seems that, in 1959, decorated pilot Remy Van Lierde, a colonel in the Belgian Royal Air Force, was flying a helicopter over the Katanga region of what was then the Belgian Congo when he spotted a snake that he estimated to be close to 50 feet long. According to the colonel, the snake reared its head as the helicopter passed over it again, leading Van Lierde to believe that it was prepared to strike at the helicopter had he flown any closer. The photograph above was taken by Van Lierde’s flying companion, and while it certainly seems to show a long snake, I don’t know enough about the vegetation growing around it to hazard an estimate to its length. And, just as in the case of Fawcett’s anaconda, I wasn’t there.

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Richard Hannay Sets Out

Grove Koger

In my post about adventure fiction for November 1, 2023, I mentioned several candidates for the best example of the genre ever written, including John Buchan’s 1916 novel Greenmantle.

While not Buchan’s most widely read book, it gets my vote as his best. It also features the second appearance of Major-General Sir Richard Hannay, whom Buchan introduced as the protagonist of his short 1915 novel The Thirty-Nine Steps (William Blackwood & Sons)—undoubtedly his best-known work. Together, the two novels mark the opening stages of a fictional career that ended (on paper, at least) in 1940 with the publication of Sick Heart River, in which Hannay appears as a secondary character.

Buchan dedicated The Thirty-Nine Steps to his close friend Tommy Nelson, describing it as a “romance” in which the “incidents defy the probabilities and march just inside the borders of the possible.” That was a fair enough assessment in Buchan’s time, although in the early twenty-first century we’ve grown so used to the unlikely, in life as well as in art, that the description isn’t particularly compelling. Buchan also called it a “shocker,” but, once again, we’re well past the stage of being shocked.

In any case, The Thirty-Nine Steps sold an impressive 25,000 copies within a few months. Part of its success involved timing, of course. The year was 1915, the Great War (as it was known until a greater one erupted in 1939) had begun on July 28, 1914, and there were legitimate fears of German infiltrators.

The Thirty-Nine Steps opens in early 1914 when Richard Hannay’s frightened neighbor, Franklin Scudder, tells him that German agents are plotting to assassinate the Premier of Greece, Constantine Karolides, on a visit to London. In the wake of the crime, war is sure to follow. When Scudder is murdered a few days later, Hannay realizes that he himself is in danger and makes what he thinks is an escape to Scotland. However …

The Thirty-Nine Steps has been filmed several times, initially by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935. Hitchcock (or his scriptwriters, Charles Bennett and Ian Hay) introduced several changes to the plot that improved its credibility, and although critics rate the result highly, it strikes me, nearly a century on, as unconvincing.

Hannay followed The Thirty-Nine Steps in 1916 with a better, more substantial novel, Greenmantle (Hodder & Stoughton). Here, Hannay travels to Constantinople (which Buchan himself had visited in 1910), where he hopes to thwart German plans to foment a Muslim uprising against the allies. The novel reaches its climax in early 1916 at the Battle of Erzurum in eastern Anatolia. There was speculation at the time that the “Greenmantle” of the title was based on T. E. Lawrence, the famed “Lawrence of Arabia.” However, the character was apparently modeled on one of Buchan’s friends, intelligence officer and Orientalist Aubrey Herbert. In fact, Herbert’s granddaughter, Margaret Fitzherbert, wrote a biography of Herbert titled The Man Who Was Greenmantle (John Murray, 1983).

John Buchan was a man of many parts. Born in Scotland in 1875, he wrote a number of novels and histories, and, enobled as 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, served as Governor General of Canada from 1935 until his death in 1940. American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called him “the best Governor General Canada ever had.” You can read more about him in Andrew Lownie’s biography John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier (Constable, 1995).

Buchan once wrote that there were six literary categories ranging from “highbrow to solid ivory,” and that felt he belonged in the middle, in the “high-lowbrow” category. Robin Winks dubbed him “the father of the modern spy thriller,” and he has even lent his name to a subgenre—“Buchanesque.” It’s a lively mixture of espionage with adventure that features a protagonist distinguished by an aristocratic attitude to life, a taste for action, and a disdain for danger. Later examples include Geoffrey’s Household’s Rogue Male (Chatto & Windus, 1939) and Lawrence Durrell’s White Eagles over Serbia (Faber & Faber, 1957). We might even reach backward a few years to include Erskine Childers’ 1903 novel The Riddle of the Sands (Smith, Elder & Co). They’re short on character development, long on plot and action, and, as Buchan himself said of The Thirty-Nine Steps, their events “march just inside the borders of the possible.”

From top to bottom, the images in today’s post are of the cover of the first edition of The Thirty-Nine Steps; the covers of my Penguin paperback editions, with striking images by Stephen Russ (1919-1983); and the cover of my 2003 McArthur & Co. edition of Buchan’s biography, featuring a portrait from the National Crown Collection.

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Picturing Vesuvius

Grove Koger

In my post for April 6, 2023, I wrote about Italian painter Giuseppe de Nittis and the sketches and paintings he made of Vesuvius during the eruptions of the early 1870s.

In case your knowledge of the subject isn’t extensive, Vesuvius is the volcano that destroyed the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 CE. It lies on Italy’s west coast, towering over the Bay of Naples, and has continued to erupt periodically ever since—more than fifty times in all. There were eight major eruptions in the nineteenth century, including the one that de Nittis painted, with the last taking place March 17-23, 1944. I understand that, today, some two million people live nearby, a fact that deserves some thought …

Decades ago, my first wife and I spent an autumnal afternoon walking down the excavated streets of Pompeii. We were virtually the only visitors that time of year, and just about the only other living creatures in evidence were lizards and, some 2 or 3 feet above our heads, small flocks of sheep grazing on the grass growing on the unexcavated rooftops.

Any number of visitors to the area have left detailed accounts, starting with two letters by Pliny the Younger, who was a witness to the devastating destruction of 79 CE. His accounts are the only ones we have of that particular eruption, and may actually be the earliest accounts we have of any eruption.

More striking still are the paintings by the countless artists who’ve visited the picturesque Bay of Naples since then. The earliest surviving images seem to be those attributed to Italian painter Pietro Antoniani, who was born about 1740 and died in 1805. Later images, by Joseph Wright of Derby, William Turner, and geologist George Poulett Scrope, capture eruptions of 1774, 1817, and 1822, respectively.

Even when it’s calm, as it is today, Vesuvius is a striking sight, with its large cone, the Gran Cono, which dates from the 79 CE eruption, rising to a majestic height of 4,203 feet above the Bay of Naples.

In 1977, Capra Press of Santa Barbara, California, printed an attractive booklet pairing one of Pliny’s letters with an account of the 1944 eruption by French author F.J. Temple, who had served in the French Expeditionary Corps in Italy. The booklet also includes several etchings by American artist Arthur Secunda.

In the interests of comprehensiveness, I must add that Pliny the Younger is also the name of a triple India Pale Ale, said to be the world’s first, brewed by the Russian River Brewing Company of Sonoma County, California. Its alcohol content is 10.25 percent by volume, and I’m pretty sure that the staff in the brewery’s taproom, even though they’re probably not vulcanologists, like to refer to it as “volcanic.” The beer is a complement to the same brewery’s Pliny the Elder, an imperial, or double IPA, which comes in at a mere 8 percent.

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Gazing Inward with Michalis Economou

Grove Koger

If any of my readers are in the Greek capital on Monday, March 11, a visit to the Theocharakis Foundation is in order. A guided tour of the exhibition Michalis Economou: The Alchemy of Painting will be hosted by the Friends of the British School at Athens at 12:30 that day.

The exhibition, which was previously mounted at the Averoff Museum in Metsovo, features 116 canvases by the artist, who was born in Piraeus in 1884. He traveled to France in 1906, studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and touring Brittany and the south of France, before returning to Greece in 1926. Economou held his last exhibit, at the Public Theatre in Piraeus, in 1929, and died in Athens in 1933.

The exhibition is curated by Dr. Aphrodite Kouria, who points out that Economou “was endowed with a singular quality of gaze.” That gaze manages to convey what will strike viewers as the very souls of his subjects—simple buildings, trees, tiny figures in a landscape—by emphasizing their sensual exteriors. “I want to give feeling,” said Economou, “as much feeling as I can.”

If you’re otherwise engaged on March 11, Michalis Economou: The Alchemy of Painting runs through May 12, 2024, at the B & M Theocharakis Foundation for the Fine Arts and Music, 9 Vasillis Sofias & 1 Merlin, Kolonaki, Athens.

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The Dodecanese Islands & Modern Greece

Grove Koger

March 7 is an important date in modern Greek history. It was on this day in 1948 that the Dodecanese Islands, which lie in the Southeast Aegean Sea, formally became part of Greece.

Although their inhabitants were for the most part ethnic Greeks, the islands had been under Ottoman, or Turkish, rule since the early sixteenth century. Their modern name came into use in the early twentieth century, when the twelve (dódeka) islands that enjoyed particular legal privileges under the Ottomans were dubbed the Dōdekanēsos, or Dodecanese, by other Greeks. The independent Greek nation had itself come into being in the early 1820s, and had grown in area over the following century as a result of a series of conflicts and treaties.

Most of the Dodecanese Islands, seen above in red in a Wikimedia Commons map created by Pitichinaccio, had passed into Italian control as a result of the Italo-Turkish War of 1911-12. Although the subsequent Treaty of Ouchy of October 18, 1912, provided for their return to the Ottomans, the outbreak of the First Balkan War on October 8 of that year and the First World War on July 28, 1914, led to continued Italian occupation. During World War II, after signing the Armistice of Cassibile with Italy on September 3, 1943, British forces attempted to capture the islands from occupying German troops, but the attempt failed. Subsequently, the Germans deported and murdered almost all of the islands’ Jewish population.

However, members of Britain’s Special Boat Service maintained a vigorous campaign of guerilla operations throughout the period, contributing in part to eventual British victory. German commander Otto Wagener was forced to surrender on May 8, 1945, passing control of the islands to Britain, which in turn formally ceded the islands to Greece on March 31, 1947. The official ceremony marking their integration with Greece took place the following year on March 7, and was celebrated throughout the islands and the rest of Greece. The photograph you see at the top of today’s post, for instance, shows British officers handing over control during a ceremony on the island of Kalymnos.

It had been a long, long struggle.

You can read a personal account of the Special Boat Service in The Filibusters: The Story of the Special Boat Service by John Lodwick (Methuen, 1947; reprinted as Raiders from the Sea by the Naval Inst. P., 1990.) And for a personal account of the British occupation, see Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953) by Lawrence Durrell.

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Ushering in March with Lucio Piccolo

Grove Koger

I’ve scheduled today’s post for March 1 in honor of Italian poet Lucio Piccolo.

I understand that Piccolo is well-known in Italian literary circles, but to the rest of the world, he’s probably remembered (if at all) as being a first cousin of Giuseppe Tomasi, the Prince of Lampedusa and author of the 1958 novel The Leopard. Piccolo (or, to give him his title, Baron Lucio Piccolo di Calanovella) was born in Palermo, Sicily, in 1901, and lived a secluded life with his mother, brother, and sister in a country house near Capo d’Orlando on the northern coast of the island. (That’s its garden colonnade you see below).

Piccolo wrote of his poems that he hoped “to evoke and fix a particular Sicilian world … which is now about to disappear.… I mean that world of baroque churches, of old convents, of the souls proper to these places, passed away here without leaving a trace.” It’s that world that he describes obliquely in “Mutable World” (“Mobile universe di folate”), which appeared in the 1956 collection Baroque Songs and Other Lyrics (Canti Barocchi E Altre Liriche). Here is a translation by Sonia Raiziss and Alfredo de Palci:

Mutable world of gusty
rays, of hours without color, of perennial
flux, the pomp
of clouds: an instant and look—the changed
forms dazzle, millenniums sway.
And the low door’s arch and the worn
sill of too many winters, are a fable in the abrupt
glory of the March sun.

The poem, which is a marvel of suggestion and compression, also appears in the 1972 Princeton University Press volume Collected Poems of Lucio Piccolo, translated by Brian Swann and Ruth Feldman, but their version doesn’t strike me as being quite as felicitous.

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