Was Torquay's Colonel Fawcett the real Indiana Jones?

With the fifth instalment of the Indiana Jones franchise released on June 28, we take a look at Torquay’s own fearless adventurer Col Percy Harrison Fawcett and ask if he could claim to be the real Indiana Jones?
There is a lot of excitement building for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, released this week. It will be the last outing for Indy, a character named after a dog, dreamt up by George Lucas in the mid-1970s and who was originally named Indiana Smith.
Raiders of the Lost Ark was created as a homage to 1930s action adventure serials like Zorro and Flash Gordon. It was mixed with Steven Spielberg’s desire to make Bond-style films and the filmmakers had a profile of the sort of hero they wanted in Fred C. Dobbs, the character played by Humphry Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948).
Lucas, Spielberg and script writer Lawrence Kasden met for brainstorming sessions in late January 1978 to create the first draft of a screenplay. Many of the ideas that defined Indiana Jones came from these sessions but we may never know for sure what or who inspired them.
Fawcett’s story was well known in the 1970s. Exploration Fawcett (1953) was a best-seller and along with other well-known adventurers like the American palaeontologist Roy Chapman Andrews, they may have influenced the character development.
Of all the candidates for a ‘real’ Indiana Jones, Fawcett probably has the best credentials.
In his early career he was a spy for the British government in Morocco. He was trained as an artillery officer and would later be decorated for his actions in World War One.
During the Edwardian period and the 1910s he spent many years exploring South America as a cartographer, surveyor and explorer. But his life away from exploration was equally colourful.
Fawcett had many influential contacts during his lifetime. The writer Rider Haggard was a personal friend and Conan Doyle attended one of his lectures at the RGS that included a description of the mysterious Ricardo Franco Hills. This appears to have seeded the idea for the book The Lost World (1912).
Fawcett’s later influence on the character of Indiana Jones seems undeniable. In Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull (2008) Indi even goes in search of a lost civilisation in the Amazon, following in the footsteps of the Conquistadores with his son!
This is basically the story of Fawcett’s last expedition in 1925 which ended in the disappearance of his entire party including his son Jack.
His disappearance created a legendary figure who continues to influence writers, filmmakers, playwrights and even game designers. The character of a lost explorer appears in Tintin as ‘Ridgewell’, as ‘Charles F. Muntz’ in Disney Pixars Up (2009) and Sky TV’s Hooten and the Lady (2016) among others.
While Fawcett’s influence on the popular culture of adventure and exploration is without question, if one man embodied the spirit of Indiana Jones it is certainly Col Percy Harrison Fawcett.