The Lost City of Z: Chapters 1–4

The London Geographical Journal, the preeminent publication in its field, observed in 1953 that “Fawcett marked the end of an age. One might almost call him the last of the individualist explorers. The day of the aeroplane, the radio, the organized and heavily financed modern expedition had not arrived. With him, it was the heroic story of a man against the forest.”

And every few years, when he emerged from the jungle, spidery thin and bedraggled, dozens of scientists and luminaries would pack into the Society’s hall to hear him speak.

What was true about the region—serpents as long as trees, rodents the size of pigs—was sufficiently beyond belief that no embellishment seemed too fanciful.

One newspaper exulted, “Not since the days when Ponce de León crossed unknown Florida in search of the Waters of Perpetual Youth...has a more alluring adventure been planned.”

He knew that his main rival, Alexander Hamilton Rice, a multimillionaire American doctor who commanded vast resources, was already entering the jungle with an unprecedented array of equipment.

Jack was, as his brother, Brian, put it, “the reflection of his father”: tall, frighteningly fit, and ascetic. Neither he nor his father smoked cigarettes or drank.

The ship’s brochure touted the Vauban's “perfect ventilation secured by modern appliances,” which helped to “counteract the impression that a voyage to and through the tropics is necessarily attended with discomfort.”

Despite his interest in the sea, he wrote to his wife, Nina, who was his staunchest supporter and served as his spokesperson whenever he was away, that he found the SS Vauban and the voyage “rather tiresome”: all he wanted was to be in the jungle.

It meanders past the Rio Negro and the Rio Madeira; past the Tapajós and the Xingu, two of the biggest southern tributaries; past Marajó, an island larger than Switzerland, until finally, after traversing four thousand miles and collecting water from a thousand tributaries, the Amazon reaches its two-hundred-mile-wide mouth and gushes into the Atlantic Ocean.

After months of inundation, many of these and other rivers explode over their banks, cascading through the forest, uprooting plants and rocks, and transforming the southern basin almost into an inland sea, which it was millions of years ago.

Then the sun comes out and scorches the region. The ground cracks as if from an earthquake. Swamps evaporate, leaving piranhas stranded in desiccated pools, eating one another’s flesh.

For five months, Fawcett had sent dispatches, which were carried through the jungle, crumpled and stained, by Indian runners and, in what seemed like a feat of magic, tapped out on telegraph machines and printed on virtually every continent; in an early example of the all-consuming modern news story, Africans, Asians, Europeans, Australians, and Americans were riveted by the same distant event.

Because so many seekers went without fanfare, there are no reliable statistics on the numbers who died.

Not only had previous search parties failed to discover the party’s fate—each disappearance becoming a conundrum unto itself—but no one had unraveled what Lynch considered the biggest enigma of all: Z.

To reach Dead Horse Camp would require traversing some of the Amazon’s most intractable jungle; it would also entail entering lands controlled by indigenous tribes, which had secluded themselves in the dense forest and fiercely guarded their territory.

In 1971, she famously summed up the region as a “counterfeit paradise,” a place that, for all its fauna and flora, is inimical to human life.

Rains and floods, as well as the pounding sun, leach vital nutrients from the soil and make large-scale agriculture impossible.

Because the land had provided so little nutrition, Meggers wrote, even when tribes had managed to overcome attrition from starvation and diseases, they still had to come up with “cultural substitutes” to control their populations—including killing their own.

The traditionalists, in turn, charge that the revisionists are an example of political correctness run amok, and that they perpetuate a long history of projecting onto the Amazon an imaginary landscape, a fantasy of the Western mind.

Most recent expeditions had relied on the coordinates for Dead Horse Camp contained in Exploration Fawcett, but, given the colonel’s elaborate subterfuge, it seemed strange that the camp would be that easy to find.

And so, before plunging into the jungle, I set out to England to see if I could uncover more about Fawcett’s zealously guarded route and the man who, in 1925, had seemingly vanished from the earth.

Even with a rifle and a sword, though, he looked like a boy—“the callowest” of young officers, as he called himself.

Fawcett, who was an inveterate dog lover, shared his room with seven fox terriers, which, in those days, often followed an officer into battle.

Although Ceylon (today Sri Lanka) was renowned as “the jewel box of the Indian Ocean,” the colonial administrator had placed little credence in such an extravagant tale and passed the documents to Fawcett, who he thought might find them interesting.

But, unlike most of the aristocratic officer corps, he had little money. “As an impecunious Artillery lieutenant,” he wrote, “the idea of treasure was too attractive to abandon.”

It was also a chance to escape from the base and its white ruling caste, which mirrored upper-class English society—a society that, beneath its veneer of social respectability, had always contained for Fawcett a somewhat Dickensian horror.

Gentlemanliness, though, was about more than propriety. Fawcett was expected to be, as one historian wrote of the Victorian gentleman, “a natural leader of men...fearless in war.”

Sports were considered the ultimate training for young men who would soon prove their mettle on distant battlefields.

By the time Fawcett graduated, almost two years later, he had been taught, as a contemporary put it, “to regard the risk of death as the most piquant sauce to life.”

Now, as Fawcett slipped away from the secluded base in Ceylon with his treasure map in hand, he suddenly found himself amid verdant forests and crystalline beaches and mountains, and people dressed in colors that he had never seen before, not funereal blacks and whites like in London, but purples and yellows and rubies, all flashing and radiating and pulsating...

He began to call her “Cheeky,” in part, one family member said, because “she always had to have the last word”; she, in turn, called him “Puggy,” because of his tenacity.

“I was very happy and I had nothing but admiration for Percy’s character: an austere, serious and generous man,” Nina later told a reporter.

He was too much of a loner, too ambitious and headstrong (“audacious to the point of rashness,” as one observer put it), too intellectually curious to fit within the officer corps.

Marion Meade, one of her most dispassionate biographers, wrote that during her lifetime people across the globe furiously debated whether she was “a genius, a consummate fraud, or simply a lunatic. By that time, an excellent case could have been made for any of the three.”

As the historian Janet Oppenheim noted in The Other World, “For those who wanted to rebel dramatically against the constraints of the Victorian ethos—however they perceived that elusive entity—the flavor of heresy must have been particularly alluring when concocted by so unabashed an outsider as H. P. Blavatsky.”

In 1890, he traveled to Ceylon, where Percy was stationed, to take the Pansil, or five precepts of Buddhism, which includes vows not to kill, drink liquor, or commit adultery.

On another occasion, according to family members, Percy Fawcett, apparently inspired by his brother, took the Pansil as well—an act that, for a colonial military officer who was supposed to be suppressing Buddhists and promoting Christianity on the island, was more seditious.

Over the years, his attempt to reconcile these opposing forces, to balance his moral absolutism and cultural relativism, would force him into bizarre contradictions and greater heresies.

One day Fawcett set out from Fort Frederick, trekking inland through a morass of vines and brambles.

He wanted to become what Joseph Conrad had dubbed “a geography militant,” someone who, “bearing in his breast a spark of the sacred fire,” discovered along the secret latitudes and longitudes of the earth the mysteries of mankind.