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The real James Bond and his extraordinary adventure

His name was Fleming. Peter Fleming. An Amazon explorer who joined MI6, he wrote a spy novel before his brother Ian invented James Bond

By Ben Macintyre
March 23 2017, 12:01am


Peter Fleming in Mato Grosso, Brazil, in 1932
KATE GRIMOND/PETER FLEMING ESTATE

“Exploring and sporting expedition, under experienced guidance leaving England June to explore rivers central Brazil, if possible ascertain fate Colonel Percy Fawcett; abundant game, big and small; exceptional fishing; ROOM TWO MORE GUNS; highest references expected and given. Write: Box 1150, The Times, EC4.”

So ran an advertisement in the personal columns of The Times on April 14, 1932, inviting readers to help to solve one of the greatest mysteries of the age: the disappearance, seven years earlier, of the explorer Percy Fawcett. It was answered by Peter Fleming, the elder brother of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, who was promptly dispatched to the Amazon as special correspondent for this paper.


Charlie Hunnam and Tom Holland in the film The Lost City of Z

Fawcett’s doomed expedition to find a lost Amazonian civilisation is given the epic film treatment in The Lost City of Z, starring Charlie Hunnam and Sienna Miller, released on Friday.

But Fleming’s subsequent journey to find the lost explorer was just as brave, quixotic and futile as Fawcett’s original quest, and much funnier: it revolutionised travel writing, gripped Times readers, and indirectly gave birth to one of the most celebrated and enduring characters in British literature: James Bond. For 85 years, the photographs and diaries recording that journey have remained in the Fleming family archive.

Peter Fleming was a product of Eton and Oxford, an excellent shot and, at the time he read the advertisement, an assistant literary editor of The Spectator longing for adventure and literary fame. At the age of 24 he had also just fallen in love with the actress Celia Johnson, his future wife, best known for her role in Brief Encounter.

Fleming was a dedicated Times reader, who would later work on the paper as a war correspondent and leader writer. “I always read the personal columns first,” he wrote. “And the news, if there is time, afterwards.” He and his school friend Roger Pettiward, a cartoonist on Punch, immediately signed on as the two additional guns, contributed £400 each to expeditionary funds and set sail for Sao Paulo with four other volunteers and a bullmastiff.

The Times-backed expedition was led by Robert Churchward, but came under the local leadership of one “Major George Pingle” (a pseudonym), an eccentric and overweight American who claimed to have a commission in the Peruvian army and a knowledge of the Mato Grosso, but almost certainly had neither. It was, Fleming late wrote, “a venture for which Rider Haggard might have written the plot and Conrad designed the scenery”.

For 3,000 miles Fleming and his companions canoed, rode, marched and hacked their way up river, but never got within 50 miles of the spot where Fawcett had vanished. The enterprise was chaotic, under-equipped and hampered by the “splendid incompetence” of its leaders.

They got caught up in revolution, dropped the expedition funds in a river, lost their Indian guides, suffered a variety of nasty ailments and faced extreme peril with perfect British sang froid. They admired the local animals and slaughtered them in vast numbers: birds, snakes, fish, turtles and capybara, the world’s largest rodent. Caimans, a dozy and diminutive cousin of the crocodile, were sitting ducks: “We acquired so great a contempt for these unenterprising creatures that, after we had killed well over one hundred in a month, we almost gave up shooting them.”

Fleming shared the imperial arrogance of his age. The local inhabitants, he wrote, were “nice, cheerful, rather silly people: children in most things. It was sad to see them being civilized.”

Simmering tensions among the explorers reached breaking point, and Pingle abandoned Fleming and two companions with a few days’ food, a wonky compass, a canoe, some guns and £10. Fleming pushed on, but when they spotted a group of Indians believed to be cannibals and the rains closed in, they sensibly decided to call it a day.

There then followed an undignified race back down the river rapids so Fleming could write up his story in The Times before Pingle published his rival version of events. Fleming won, but only just, and his articles appeared in November 1932.

The expedition had been a costly, hilarious, abject failure. Fleming concluded that Fawcett had probably perished at the hands of the Suya tribe but that if by some miracle he had survived he must have gone mad.

“Beyond the completion of a 3,000-mile journey, mostly under amusing conditions, through a little-known part of the world, and the discovery of one new tributary to a tributary to a tributary of the Amazon, nothing of importance was achieved,” wrote Fleming. “I was hardly any the wiser for having been to Brazil.”

Yet the resulting book, Brazilian Adventure, was a minor masterpiece, brilliantly subverting the established rules of travel writing. Fleming lampooned the absurdity of explorers’ chest-thumping tales of derring-do (including those of Fawcett) and gloried in the “atmosphere of caricature” that surrounded his own expedition: “If Indians approached us, we referred to them as the ‘Oncoming Savages’. We never said, ‘Was that a shot?’ but always, ‘Was that the well-known bark of a Mauser?” He deliberately eschewed the imperial-heroic tone, and warned: “As chapter gives place to chapter, and still no arrows stick quivering in the tent-pole, and still no tomtoms throb, the observant reader will get pretty fed up.”

The book was an instant bestseller, becoming the most successful travel book published between the wars. “I am putting it in the highest class,” wrote Evelyn Waugh. The New Yorker called Brazilian Adventure “one of the most amusing and engaging travel records ever written”. Fleming single-handedly invented a new subgenre of travel writing, adventurous but self-mocking, hair-raising but tongue in cheek, a style later echoed by writers such as Eric Newby and Redmond O’Hanlon. Fleming was hailed and admired as a daredevil of a very British sort, not least by his younger brother.

While Peter was toiling through the Amazonian jungle trying and failing to find Percy Fawcett, Ian Fleming had been struggling as a stockbroker. Ian idolised his dashing older brother — handsome, cosmopolitan, patriotic, fearless and a dead shot with a pistol — and later used him as one of the models for James Bond.

Peter was also a spy. As a correspondent for The Times, he travelled in Manchuria and Russia, and is believed to have sent reports to MI6 (he was not the first nor the last spy to use The Times as a convenient cover for intelligence gathering). During the war he worked on irregular warfare for British intelligence, first setting up guerrilla groups as potential resistance to the expected German invasion, then for the Special Operations Executive in Greece and later in India as head of D Division, responsible for military deception operations in southeast Asia.

In 1952 Peter published a forgettable spy novel, entitled The Sixth Column, about a thriller writer who creates a protagonist with marked similarities to Bond. A year later Ian, who had also worked in wartime intelligence, published Casino Royale, featuring a debonair spy with a licence to kill who bore more than a passing resemblance to his glamorous older brother.

Ian Fleming once said that Bond was “a compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the war”. Yet chief among these was Peter Fleming, who helped to create 007 by having a personality with Bond-like aspects, a successful writing career that prompted Ian to try his hand at fiction and a spy book that eerily prefigured Ian’s literary career.

It seems likely that the entire James Bond phenomenon had its roots in sibling rivalry, and Ian Fleming’s veneration for his brother, the globe-trotting, gun-toting adventurer-spy.

Ian’s fame would swiftly eclipse that of Peter (though the latter was the better writer). Yet Brazilian Adventure is still in print, a classic of travel literature and a testament to heroic British failure. Other cultures may celebrate success, but in this country we prefer people who don’t manage to do what they set out to do, who fail magnificently and fall spectacularly at the last hurdle, or the first: such as Fawcett, Fleming, Captain Scott or Eddie the Eagle.

“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” says the voiceover to The Lost City of Z. We are content when our heroes reach what they grasp for, but even happier when they don’t.

Peter Fleming described his hunt for Fawcett as “intrinsically valueless and . . . absolutely satisfying”. Yet he and his adventurous spirit indirectly and accidentally inspired James Bond, the most valuable literary franchise in history.

And as Peter Fleming wrote: “It began with an advertisement in the Agony Column of The Times.”

I followed in my grandfather Peter Fleming’s footsteps
By Georgia Grimond

In March 2016 I set off from Rio to see if I could get as far as my grandfather Peter Fleming and his companions did on their trip in search of Colonel Percy Fawcett in 1932. They too started in Rio, covering more than 3,000 miles, often paddling along rivers or thrashing through undergrowth. Eventually they were defeated by hunger, exhaustion, injury and infighting and turned round about ninety miles along a tributary of the River Araguaia. After three days, travelling by plane, pick-up and boat, I was merrily motoring down the Tapirapé river on a drizzly afternoon passing with remarkable ease the farthest point that the original team had reached.

The river was full and lined with thick, glossy vegetation. I suspect that apart from a few simple houses, little has changed and relatively few have passed along the riverbanks since my grandfather’s days. By contrast, much of the rest of Mato Grosso has been deforested to make way for industrial-scale agriculture. The state is Brazil’s biggest producer of soya and the landscape is divided into vast fields, criss-crossed with dirt roads along which lorries thunder, shipping out bounty.

The indigenous people have been ushered into villages on land demarcated by the government. In the Thirties they moved freely, living as they always had done, off the land. The original expedition sought help from the Karajá and the Tapirapé people, employing their men as guides. My grandfather wrote fondly of them, noting their sense of humour and describing the Tapirapé as “warm-hearted and uncritical”. Even then, however, he saw difficulties ahead. “Both tribes had a certain quality of remoteness in their nature; both had a stake in some world which we could never know,” he wrote in Brazilian Adventure.

I visited the Carajá and Tapirapé. These days they speak Portuguese as well as their native language and they spoke of how the climate is changing, of the pollution in their rivers and their fight to protect their territory. They have electricity and access to the internet, which is revolutionising their ability to communicate and mobilise, but vices such as drugs, alcohol and junk food are ever tempting. With scarce jobs and no land on which to hunt there is often little to do but laze in hammocks.

One night I watched a Tapirapé school graduation ceremony. The students wore the elaborate traditional dress of beaded jewellery, red and yellow feather headdresses, sleeves of eagle down and dark markings on their faces and bodies. As certificates were handed out, speeches given and the teenagers danced, family and friends watched, taking photos and filming on camera phones. It looked to be a happy, if fragile, marriage of ancient culture and modernity.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/times2/spy-explorer-failure-the-man-007-was-really-based-on-3t200m2dl