Stoo said:
So that's where the name, Machete Landing/Junction, comes from! According to "Ultimate Guide" it's Machete Junction on a river (with a waterfall upstream) and in the "Sourcebook" it's Machete Landing on a lake. In the film, it's clearly a river so if one puts all the references together, Jock is waiting in a river that soon flows into a lake. The village in the UG painting could be the Hotivos' and not Barranca & Satipo's place.
Thanks for posting all those excerpts, Matt.
I don't own any of the role-playing stuff so it's much appreciated. Would love to know more about the Forrestal related info so maybe I'll resurrect his thread with the "Ulimate Guide" bits because I'm curious to know if West End Games is the source. Is there any more background on Jock?
Like Henry Jones Sr., I finally remembered to make use of what was already at my disposal. This book has been sitting on my shelf, but I never took the trouble to study it properly until now. The book is dated 1994, if that helps.
Machete Landing is an old mission, and comrpises a river house and open-walled storehouse looked after by a man named Paco. There is a rickety dock with Paco's steamboat. Of the old mission the church is in ruins and the old school has been turned into a stable for the pack animals. The only other building is 'Tequila Flats' - a rustic bar owned by Barranca and Satipo where they can put travellers up overnight.
The Hovitos village comprises one gigantic circular thatch-roofed building, under which all the villagers live. This is based upon real Amazonian villages I've seen in documentaries.
The original map of the temple was discovered by the 19th century explorer McHenry, who made it from pictographs found at the ruined Tec'na'al city complex which is two days' hike from the valley of the Chachapoyan idol temple itself.
Forrestal and Indy had been competitors since Indy's early days in archaeology, though they went to different universities. Indy remarks that "Forrestal must have hada virtual intelligence network throughout the world...Forrestal spent a lot more time in Central and South America than I had.He participated in digs at Aztec and Mayan sites, and was fluent in more Indian dialects than I knew existed. I'm sure he had contacts from Lima to Mexico City feeding him information, clues and maps to excavation site all along. So when he disappeared a little over a year ago, I was surprised. I knew he had been working to find an acient temple rumored to have a solid gold statue of the Chachapoyan fertility goddess, and had retrieved a treasure trove of artifacts said to have come from sites near the secret temple...First I contacted Princeton, where Forrestal had been teaching ancient history and archaeology. The history department was keeping his office under lock and key, but after a few months, when it was apparent Forrestal wasn't coming back, they sifted through all the junk and depositied all his papers in the library's archives. A quick trip down to New Jersey abd a few hours rummaging through Forrestal's notes in the library revealed a few notes on the ancient Chachapoyan warriors and their fertility goddess cult, as well as the names of two people and a town: Barranca and Satipo in Machete Landing. He also had reference to a volume in the University of Chicago library by a 19th Century American named McHenry who spent most of his life expploring the South American jungles - apparently Forrestal found some sort of map in there."
Indy had meanwhile "cabled an old stunt pilot friend" named Jock, "who was hopping around in Soth America doing various aerial jobs for American businesses. I asked him to check with his pilot buddies to see if anybody had flown Forrestal anywhere into the Peruvian highland jungles. After about two months Jock cabled back that he met a pilot who flew someone fitting Forrestal's description to a high lake in the Peruvian jungle - and Jock even copied the flight plan on one of his navigational maps for me..."
"At the University of Chicago I evaded suspicious librarians and jumped back into the stacks to find the musty old volume on McHenry that Forrestal had consulted. Forrestal had been clumsy, and had dogeared important pages and pencilled notes in the margins...but the map was missing."
Marcus Brody showed Indy a box of full of McHenry's memoirs in his museum archives "...and we found part of a map..."
At that point Indy receives the cable from Barranca and Satipo (Belloq had initiated this by telling them of Indy's interest in the temple).
And the rest is as quoted in my earlier posts. Indy flies in to the lake, meets the Peruvians, porters and pack animals, and they trek for one or two hours whilst Belloq is also tracking them. Jock finds a snake. (When they take off again after the dash to the lake, Jock takes Reggie from Indy and puts him into the pilot's section of the aircraft - this was in the novel, can't remember if he did that in the film).
As for Jock, the WEG Sourcebook says he "...used to be a stunt pilot in America's Midwest, flying airshows and aerial demonstrations. Flying in South America didn't promise more money than stunt flying, but the pace is a bit more attuned to Jock's personal tempo - besides, there are rumors of a flight-related tragedy in Jock's past. Jock enjoys life's simple pleasures - like fishing, listening to baseball on the radio, or playing with the numerous pets he keeps at his home somewhere in Venezuela."
Stoo said:
Really? That's not the way I see it since Barranca was most likey killed immediately while running away from the Hovitos. All the darts in his back suggest this and the Hovitos would have known where to look for the others. I can understand if they didn't want Belloq to know where the temple was but can't picture them showing up there seperately.
It was Belloq's supposition that Barranca lead the Hovitos to him and Indy, maybe they merely followed Barranca's trail back to its source after killing him. Belloq had already left the Hovitos to track Indy alone, since the Indians would not show him the secret temple. The Indians, however, needed to be in the vicinity in order to prevent the theft, that Belloq had warned them of, from taking place.
Matt
