Paradise With Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay. Robert Carver

Francisco to seek his fortune, but in his body he was the scarred, muscular, hard-bitten middle-aged man who had lived rough across the Pacific for decades, an experienced seaman who had lived under the lash, and a silver mining engineer to boot. The latter persona had been illiterate, nameless and left-handed; the former discovered he had genteel manners, was well-spoken and wrote in a fine, educated hand. He even recalled French poetry and Latin oratory he had learnt at school. He had saved some money – not a fortune, but enough to return to England. He had spoken fluent, colloquial Spanish after his years in Mexico, Texas and California, but the blows to his head in the mine accident had erased all that – and he had become right-handed once again. But he still spoke English with an American accent – and he could still use his weapons. My grandfather Roy was one of several family members who were shown his prowess as he blew a line of empty bottles off the top of a wall, using both his revolvers. He had not missed a single bottle, my grandfather recalled – twelve bullets had hit twelve bottles.

      The return of Charlie Carver caused a sensation. His family recognized him immediately: he had changed, of course, but was still in essence the same man in voice and body. When the two brothers saw each other for the first time in three decades they both spontaneously burst into tears. Charlie was now more or less broke. His half of the great fortune had long ago been disbursed to charity, but his brother Bertie then made an outstandingly generous move. He split his own half of the inheritance in half, and gave one half to his brother.

      There, by rights, the story should have ended. Now a wealthy man, with enough money to last him the rest of his days, Charlie Carver should have settled down to comfortable provincial obscurity. But he didn’t. He was still gripped by the fever of the silver mines. He had become convinced, like many others, that there was still a hidden Inca city lost in the jungles on the borders of Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil, a city founded on the wealth of one of the richest silver mines in the Americas. In the 1780s the revolt of Tupac Amaru, a direct descendant of the last Inca rulers, caught the Spanish authorities by surprise. The whole eastern province of what is now Bolivia, then part of the viceroyalty of Peru, was closed to the Spanish for several years. Systematically, the rebels destroyed the extensive gold and silver mines of the region, the survivors retreating eventually into impenetrable jungle to escape the revengeful Spanish. There they founded an Inca city-state which had as its currency and metal of utility the great hoard of gold and silver that the rebels had seized. Iron and copper had they none, so their plates, their knives and forks, their tools and implements were all made of either silver or gold; they also blended these two elements, making that precious metal known to the ancients as electrum. The Spanish never found the lost mines. Those who had known of their existence had been murdered in the rebellion, and the rebels had hidden and destroyed the entrances to these once profitable enterprises. Unlike El Dorado, these mines were not a myth – they had been producing gold and silver under Spanish tutelage before Tupac Amaru’s rebellion. Using old maps, a North American had found one of these hidden mines in the late 19th century, which when opened up began to produce huge quantities of rich gold ore. So, if the quest was a fantasy, it was a least a fantasy with a strong basis in factual history.

      Charlie Carver had acquired a map. He would not show it to anyone, would not tell anyone where he had got it, nor would he even say in which London bank vault he had deposited it. He made his plans calmly and carefully. Now, thanks to his brother’s generosity, he had the money to equip a serious expedition. He interviewed a number of candidates for his proposed venture into the jungle to search for Tupac Amaru’s lost city, sometimes called Paititi. One of the young hopefuls was a certain Fawcett, later to be known as Colonel Fawcett, who was to lose his life in the South American jungles looking for just such a lost city of gold. The two did not hit it off. Charlie Carver found Fawcett excessively romantic – a dreamer caught up in a web of fantasy involving a lost Atlantis in the depths of the South American rainforest. Also, and perhaps as pertinently, Fawcett had no money to contribute to the expedition. Eventually a suitable, tough, hard-bitten American was found, equipped with dollars instead of romance, and the two of them set off for Buenos Aires by ship, then up the Paraguay and Parana rivers on the Mihailovich steamer to Asunción, Concepción and eventually up into the tropical wilderness, still unmapped, right on the borders of Bolivia and Brazil.

      The old pattern repeated itself. At first, regular letters were received by the family at home in England – then silence, nothing. A long, an overlong silence. Enquiries began to be made by anxious relatives and the British Embassy in Asunción was stirred into action. There was no news. Once again, Charlie Carver had simply vanished into the blue. This time, though, there was to be no miracle, no reprieve. The last people who had seen Charlie and his American partner alive were a small group of Spanish Catholic missionaries, working with Indians only just contacted by whites, on the very edge of known territory. The two explorers had stayed with the priests for several days before departing for the interior, into a region no whites were thought to have ever penetrated before. The smoke of their camp fires had been seen in the distance, coiling up into the sky for several days – then nothing. Some six months later, newly contacted semi-Christianized Indians appeared at the mission with several objects of European manufacture, shreds of cloth, buttons, and a smashed gold-plated, full-hunter pocket watch – manufactured in New York, with Charlie Carver’s name engraved inside it, together with his family address in England. It was all that remained of the expedition. Somewhere in the interior the two men had been killed by hostile Indians. The Indians who brought in the pathetic remains did not even know the tribe which had carried out the attack – they had traded the objects with another tribe, who had had them from yet another. The watch was returned to England, and was even repaired. My grandfather Roy showed it to me when I was a young boy, flicking open the front to show me Charlie’s name engraved in Victorian copperplate script. It still had many dents and bruises on its shell which no amount of repair could ever redress. Somewhere in the jungle the remains of Charlie Carver and his partner lay for ever lost to the outside world. Like so many Europeans they had searched for treasure in America only to find death.

      That, too, should have been the end of the story. But it wasn’t quite. Colonel Fawcett, the rejected candidate, got a job as a boundary surveyor in South America, and after his experiences there returned again and again to try to find the lost city of gold and silver, until he too lost his life in the attempt. But before he died he told his great friend the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about his theories, about a lost Atlantis in the jungle, Phoenician traders on the River Amazon, about the lost city of Paititi, and about Charlie Carver and his expedition. This information, as we shall eventually see, Conan Doyle eventually put to very good use.

      After my book on Albania had been published the distinguished author and former Times foreign correspondent Peter Hopkirk, who had been instrumental in getting my first book published, asked me ‘Where are you going next? You can go anywhere now, you know.’ I replied that I was going to go to Paraguay. ‘Why?’ I explained to him about my great-great-grand-uncle Charlie Carver. ‘To do an “in-the-footsteps-of” book, then?’ he asked skeptically. ‘The trail will be a bit cold after, what, a hundred years.’ No, I replied, not at all. I had no interest in ‘in-the-footsteps-of’ travel books. Besides, Charlie’s footsteps were only too well known – he walked into virgin jungle and was killed by Indians, end of story. What I was interested in were the half-made, half-abandoned places in the world, like Albania and Paraguay – and one could see Paraguay as a sort of South American Albania – lawless, piratical, bandit-ridden and corrupt, where neither tourists nor travel writers usually penetrated. And there was something else. South America had attracted the Spanish and countless other European adventurers who hoped to make their fortunes out of the river of silver and gold that had flowed, at such cost in human misery and suffering, after the Conquest. Yet quite another vision of America had also seized the imagination of the European mind. America could become a place of redemption, a place where the human spirit could be reborn, remade and refined. From its first discovery America had been a realm where imaginary Utopias could be set, and a place European dreamers could actually set sail for, arrive in and set up ideal communities which would, it was hoped, become beacons to mankind. Paraguay, from the first, had been a place which attracted Utopians and idealists. First the Jesuits had experimented with their Reducciones, theocratic communities of Christianized Indians ordered by a multinational caste of Jesuit priests; later 19th-century German nationalists,