"If I was to die it was a fine spot for it"

                                            Violet Cressy-Marcks in 1930

A wonderfully understated anecdote from 1929 tells you all you need to know about intrepid English traveller Violet Cressy-Marcks.

Violet was slogging her way up the Amazon at the time; sleeping on the ground at night, her revolver under her cheek.

She’d been in the swampy rainforest for months. She was weak and malnourished. But she was content, happy even, and her gruelling journey was approaching its end. 

Then, one night, misfortune struck.

“I was awakened by something that seemed to be pulled over me…” writes Violet in Up the Amazon and Over the Andes. “I glanced down and was horrified to see a snake.”

Now Violet had handled snakes before, at Cairo zoo. But “that was one thing and this was another”, she notes dryly. “A snake crawling over one at night time is a clear and not a pleasant proposition.”

Violet didn’t panic, however. Reluctant to fire her gun for fear of scaring off her Indian guides, she simply grabbed the reptile firmly, crawled out of her mosquito net, walked fifty yards to a rock, and “smashed its head”.

But her troubles didn’t end there. “The wretched thing had bitten me below the knee the moment I had stretched out my hand for it,” she writes, almost as an afterthought. “I didn’t know whether it was poisonous or not, but the beast had a flat head and as I know some of that kind are poisonous I took no chances.”

Producing a scalpel from her medicine chest, Violet immediately began some impromptu field surgery, cutting across the bite and pushing into the wound permanganate of potash, a disinfectant. “I wasn’t happy for a little time,” she writes, unhappily.

Yet still Violet remained calm. Rooting around in her luggage she then found a mirror and, for the first time in many weeks, examined her face to see if the snake’s venom was doing its work and whether perhaps she was “going black or grey or had a queer colour on my lips”.

The result was somewhat encouraging. “Except I seemed a great deal thinner, with big dark rings under my eyes, nothing seemed to be amiss - foam at the mouth was lacking and all my other imaginative ideas,” she writes.

“I decided on coffee, a walk and sleep, and if I was going to die it was a fine spot for it and I was at peace with the world - so any way there was nothing to worry about.”

And Violet was right: there was nothing to worry about.

Next morning she woke early, still very much alive. Despite an intensely painful leg, Violet and her Indian companions broke camp at 6am, their usual time, and headed west towards the distant peaks of the Andes.

* Read more about Violet's hair-raising journey in her classic travel book Up the Amazon and Over the Andes

Percy on song

Amazon explorer Col Percy H Fawcett

Good old Col Percy Harrison Fawcett. Mad as a monkey of course. Who else would devote half his life to looking for lost civilisations in South America? But he was also a professional English army officer of the old school, tough and tenacious. And it’s this curious mix of hard-headed soldier and kooky eccentric that no doubt caused him to react so memorably when, in 1910, he came under attack from Amazonian Indians.

Percy was heading up the Heath River in Peru when it happened. He was in dangerous territory. He’d been warned not to venture there. But off he’d gone anyway, his small party poling its way up the murky river in canoes. And predictably, on the seventh day, the men rounded a bend and ran straight into a group of “Guarayo” warriors who wasted little time in sending their way a hail of poisoned arrows.

Percy and his men found themselves pinned down on the other riverbank, the deadly missiles zipping over their heads and thumping into the ground around them. But they held fire: retaliation would surely only seal their fate. And instead Percy tried raising both hands and shouting “peace overtures” across the water at the bowmen. This proved unsuccessful. “The arrows,” Percy wrote, “flew thicker than ever!”

Then inspiration struck. Among Percy’s men was one Gunner Todd, a musical fellow who happened to be travelling with his accordion (as you do). Todd was directed to sit on a log and start playing, stamping his feet to keep time. A “mad sing-song” followed, strains of “Onward, Christian Soldiers”, “Bicycle Made For Two” and “Swannee River” bellowing through the rainforest. “Ludicrous…” Percy later conceded, “Anyone coming on this scene would have said we were all roaring drunk.”

Ludicrous or not, it worked. Mystified Indians, their faces painted, began emerging from cover. Seizing the moment, Percy hopped into his canoe and paddled over to greet them. Incredibly, friendly relations were quickly established. Laughter and back-slapping followed. By dusk, Indians and explorers were old pals and Gunner Todd and his accordion once again took centre stage. “We slept well that night,” Percy wrote, “for no one was required on guard.”

You can read more in Exploration Fawcett, an entertaining account of Percy's adventures complied from his letters, log-books and papers