Fitzcarraldo (1982) is a remarkable movie by the visionary German directer Werner Herzog. It concerns a man, around the turn of the (last) century, who is obsessed with bringing opera to the remote region of Peru where he lives. In order to finance this dream, he decides to exploit a new rubber-tapping area by hauling a riverboat from one river system to another. The many disasters Herzog encountered in trying to make the movie were chronicled in the even more remarkable documnetary Burden of Dreams by Les Blank.
Fitzcarraldo was a real person, based (according to some sites) on Brian Sweeney FitzGerald, an Irishman whose name was rendered as Fitzcarraldo or Fitcarrald in Spanish. Unlike the movie version, the real Fitzcarraldo dismantled the riverboat and hauled it across the divide piecemeal, rebuilding it on the other side. (Herzog had a real riverboat hauled intact over a much steeper divide, thus far outdoing the feat of the original Fitzcarraldo.)
In 1998-1999, I worked on a project in the area of Fitzcarraldo’s exploits, on the lower Urubamba River in Peru. A town in the area was called Fitzcarald, and from one of our field camps we could see the “Pass of Fitzcarraldo,” over which he hauled the riverboat, far in the distance. The legend of Fitzcarraldo is a black one in the region, as he armed one group of Indians against others to help him develop the rubber trade - promoting a bloodbath that was still remembered in the traditions of my Machigengua and Yaminahua guides, who had been on opposite sides of the conflict.
I’m interested in learning more about the original FitzGerald. A web search pretty much just yields links to the movie. Does anyone know what original sources Herzog employed in developing the script for the movie? Has anyone come across a good account of the Rubber Boom that details the story of Brian Sweeney FitzGerald?
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