About Misha Williams

About the writer

For twenty years Czech-born writer/director Misha Williams has pursued the mystery of Colonel Fawcett. In between working in television and theatre, Williams has financed his own research to get to the heart of the mystery.

He went to Mato Grosso in Amazonia and followed in Fawcett's own footsteps as well as investigating the false routes taken by the misguided "rescue expeditions" of Commander Dyott in 1928 and Albert de Winton in 1932.

First Williams set off from Cuiaba, Fawcett's base in the centre of Brazil and headed North-East where he was pretty certain Fawcett had not gone but was eager to confirm this in his own mind. The Xavantes and Kalapalos (wrongly accused of killing Fawcett in various accounts) were certainly not encountered by the explorer, though they killed many other whites before and after Fawcett's time. Anyway by 1925, East of Cuiaba was already infiltrated by whites and not the sort of remote area that Fawcett was seeking for setting up his secret "Great Scheme".

Williams then returned to Cuiaba and from there went directly North to "Dead Horse Camp", the fabled geographic point from where Fawcett sent his last letters home. It now emerges from the "Secret Papers" that Fawcett invented the co-ordinates to confuse any "rescue parties" following him. The place where Fawcett shot his injured horse in 1921 is not nearly as far north as the co-ordinates he gives in his last letters in 1925.

Fawcett intended to go North-West to found a colony as has emerged from the family correspondence. The rivers Teles Pires or Rio Sangue (The River of Blood) are the obvious canoe routes for travelling in this direction.

Williams then took a North-West route from Cuiaba. Although he had at that time no inkling that "The Secret Papers" would reveal this was the actual route, he had an intuition that the 1932 Stephan Rattin sighting was authentic. He headed for Apiacas and then the Rio Bonfin a tributary of the Teles Pires where the Swiss trapper is supposed to have made contact with a captive white English colonel.

Williams also went to Fontanilhas on the Juruena River into which the River of Blood flows. This is a probable location for the expedition's objective. Here he traded for some beautifully crafted spears and headdresses with the wild Canoero tribesmen who still live and dress in the native traditional way.

On returning to Britain he worked again for BBC television and was approached by the literary agent of the Fawcett family who had heard of his researches. He met Fawcett's daughter Joan, now very elderly and living in Switzerland. She gave him complete access to her papers and recorded reminiscences of her father and brother Jack who she knew until the age of fourteen. She directed him to the contents of the secret trunk that was kept in Britain at the home of her daughter and son-in-law , and they kindly lent it to him for ten years. During this period he was able in his spare time to analyse countless handwritten Fawcett papers, some in very poor condition and so uncovered the totally new angle on the Fawcett mystery.

The whole saga he dramatized from direct transcripts of real conversations and astounding real life events. We now have the astonishingly revealing play "AmaZonia".

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