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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