Prior to 1910 several expeditions tried to explore the Heath from but resulted in failure and loss of life from hostile Native attacks.

Just prior to his expedition in 1910, Fawcett stopped at a rubber camp on a near the Heath and two Peruvian officers stationed there gave him the latest information. “You can’t get up that river,” one of them asserted. “The savages are so bad that it’s certain death! They are in their thousands--not merely a few here and there as on most rivers, but in thousands. Two companies of soldiers tried to make it not so long ago, but so many were killed that they had to abandon the attempt and get back at once. I tell you you don’t see those savages at all--you don’t know they’re anywhere about until suddenly arrows are flying past your ears, slapping into the canoes and transfixing men right and left! Those arrows are poisoned, too; let one just scratch you and you’re done for!” “What about that German, Heller?” put in the other. “He set off up the Heath with twenty canoes, and forty men on the banks to scour the bush on either side. It made no difference. The attacks came from the forest, and there was appalling loss of life before Heller managed to back off and retreat with the survivors. He had kept going for nine days, but that was the limit. It can’t be done, I tell you!”  A Bolivian Major in charge of a frontier post at the mouth of the Heath gave him more warnings.  “It’s impossible,” he said. “The Guarayos are bad, and there are so many of them that they even dare to attack us armed soldiers right here! We have to be constantly on the alert. To venture up into the midst of them is sheer madness.” Fawcett’s reply was “All the same, we’ll have a shot at it.”

 

Fawcett's party began with 12 members in 3 canoes; 6 English and 6 Bolivian. Five were Bolivian soldiers who escorted the group for a five days and then separated and returned to their post at the Heath’s mouth.  The others carried Fawcett, several soldiers and a doctor. Fawcett poled and paddled his canoes from the Heath’s mouth up into it’s headwaters, mapping the river, but was forced to withdraw before discovering the source. He had encounters with hostile natives and was attacked at one point but was able to befriend them. He struggled with dangerous animals and venomous insects, including giant snakes and vampire bats, and had to navigate past hundreds of rapids. He was forced to turn back before finding the source and retreated by crossing through the jungle until he reached the larger Tambopata River where he built rafts and then descended back to civilization.

 

Fawcett was a famous South American explorer in the early part of the twentieth century. He was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and some of his explorations were followed by the world public in newspapers and periodicals. His expeditions were inspiration for countless books, movies and theatrical plays, including: The Lost World by his friend and author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and books by friend Sir H. Rider Haggard, author of classics King Solomon’s Mines and She. Many believe he was a model for the Indiana Jones character. He disappeared searching for a lost civilization he believed existed in the deep Amazon in 1925 and was never heard from again.

 

Colonel Fawcett's map of the Heath River shows a spot marked as the source. However, he never set foot on the source but only reached into the Heath headwaters before he was forced to retreat down the Tambopata River. He clarifies the confusion in a Royal Geographic Society meeting.

 

MEETINGS : ROYAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY 

The Geographical Journal, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Apr., 1916), p. 317

CORRESPONDENCE.

The Source of the River Heath.

In Colonel Sir T. Holdich’s interesting paper on the “Peru-Bolivian Boundary Commission” in the February Journal, I notice (p. 110) that “Fawcett’s Survey of the Heath River… was accepted, but not his source of that river.”

                  Fawcett writes: "May I be permitted to suggest that there has been a misapprehension?

                  I never actually visited the source of the Heath, but only traced the river to the junction of two streams near the source, the actual point being indicated on my map of 1910. The remainder, dotted in the map, was purely supposititious, the course of the small streams having been estimated by the general contour of the mountains.

                  My work in 1910 was to trace the main course of this hitherto unknown river ; and not only were the experiences of the small party extremely exacting, as it always is in ascending small rivers, but the terms of the International Treaty governing this section of the frontier rendered any detail of the numerous small streams forming the head of the Heath quite unnecessary at that time ; whilst the lateness of the season, combined with  the need of reaching the junction of the Lanza and the Tambopata, and a subsequent descent of the latter to Astillero with a party rather the worse for its adventures, rather curtailed time for any attention to unnecessary detail.

                  The paper leaves the impression that surveys did not agree, whereas in point of fact I had not and never have actually visited the Heath above the last point of which I have recorded the geographical co-ordinates, which I put roughly as some 10 miles from the head of the largest stream which formed the river."

P.H. Fawcett (Lieut.-Colonel).