The Lost City of Z: Chapters 18–25

Yet the failure of his previous expedition—even though it was only the first in an illustrious career—had given his critics further ammunition.

“My father’s impatience to start off on his last trip was tearing at him with ever increasing force,” Brian later recalled. “From reticent he became almost surly.”

“From reticent he became almost surly.”
Fawcett began to lash out at the scientific establishment, which he felt had turned its back on him.

He added, “I enjoy immensely the life and teachings of Buddha [which] came somewhat as a surprise to me in their absolute adherence to my own ideas. You notice his dislike of creeds and dogma.”

Nevertheless, Fawcett knew that an airplane could carry even the most inept explorer to extreme places.

Fawcett found Lynch, who was fifty-six, to be a “highly respectable man of unimpeachable character and excellent repute.”

Within days, he had secured thousands of dollars by selling the story rights for Fawcett's expedition to the North American Newspaper Alliance, or NANA—a consortium of publications that had a presence in almost every major city in the United States and Canada.

Yet the venture had already become an international sensation, prompting John D. Rockefeller Jr., the scion of the billionaire founder of Standard Oil and an ally of Dr. Bowman, to step forward with a check for forty-five hundred dollars, so that “the plan can be initiated at once.”

“He did precipitate this exploration, which is something to his credit, and The Gods select curious agents for their purposes sometimes,” Fawcett wrote the RGS.

The history of the interaction between brancos and indios—whites and Indians—in the Amazon often reads like an extended epitaph: tribes were wiped out by disease and massacres; languages and songs were obliterated. One tribe buried its children alive to spare them the shame of subjugation.

“At least forty million people [are] already aware of our objective,” Fawcett wrote his son Brian, reveling in the “tremendous” publicity.

One article said, “No Olympic games contender was ever trained down to a finer edge than these three reserved, matter-of-fact Englishmen, whose pathway to a forgotten world is beset by arrows, pestilence and wild beasts.”

Brazilian authorities, fearing the demise of such an illustrious party on their territory, demanded that Fawcett sign a statement absolving them of responsibility, which he did without hesitation.

Jack and Raleigh immediately gave the animals names: an obstinate mule was Gertrude; another, with a bullet-shaped head, was Dumdum; and a third, forlorn-looking animal was Sorehead.

The Bakairís are not paid, are raggedly clothed, mainly in khaki govt. uniforms, and there is a general squalor and lack of hygiene which is making the whole of them sick.

Jack tried to conduct a rudimentary autopsis. “They are small people, about five feet two inches in height, and very well built,” he wrote of the Indians.

He seemed to be unraveling; he had already suffered from jaundice, his arm was swollen, and he felt, as he put it, “bilious.”

He seemed to be unraveling; he had already suffered from jaundice, his arm was swollen, and he felt, as he put it, “bilious.”

He and a few other villagers, the reporter wrote, fled across a river and “witnessed throughout the night the macabre dance of their enemies around their slaughtered brothers.”

After passing through the territory of the Suyás and Kayapós, the expedition would turn eastward and confront the Xavante, who were perhaps even more formidable.

Paulo and I were not alone in trying to conjure a denouement to the Fawcett saga. Dozens of writers and artists had imagined an ending where none existed, like the earlier cartographers who had conceived of much of the world without ever seeing it.

In such a prolonged “hand-to-hand” combat with the wilderness, Dyott added, it was only Fawcett’s “supreme courage that will have held his party together and instilled in them the will to live.”

Like Fawcett, Dyott had developed over the years his own idiosyncratic methods of exploring.

Dyott wrote of the Nahukwá, “These new denizens of the forest were as primitive as Adam and Eve.”

The night before the small contingent left, one of the men in Dyott’s expedition party, an Indian, reported that he had overheard Aloique plotting with tribesmen to murder Dyott and steal his equipment.

Indeed, Dyott’s case rested on his assessment of Aloique’s “treacherous” disposition—a judgment based largely on interactions conducted in sign language and on Dyott’s purported expertise in “Indian psychology.”

It said that he had been taken prisoner by a tribe and entreated, “Please send help.”

Insisting that she had “trained” herself to remain impartial, she acted, in case after case, as an arbiter of any evidence.

The village, which had about a hundred and fifty residents, was highly stratified. These people were not wandering hunter-gatherers. Chiefs were anointed by bloodlines, as with European kings.

Fawcett, Cummins reported, eventually collapsed in a state of delirium: “The voices and sounds became a distant murmur as I now faced the greyness of death. It is a moment of unearthly horror...a time when the universe seems implacable and abiding loneliness apparent as the destiny of man.”

Instead, relying on the means that Dr. Rice had pioneered decades earlier and that were now more affordable, he rented a tiny propeller plane and, with a pilot, canvassed the jungle from the air.

But, as the plane got closer, they realized that it was simply an outcropping of freakishly eroded sandstone.

And, as the days wore on, he began to fear what he had never allowed himself to consider—that there had never been a Z. As he later wrote, “The whole romantic structure of fallacious beliefs, already rocking dangerously, collapsed about me, leaving me dazed.”

Brian started questioning some of the strange papers that he had found among his father's collection, and never divulged.

As Cummins, channeling Fawcett, put it, “My story is lost. But it is a human soul's vanity to endeavor to disinter it and convey it to the world.”

During that time, he had battled everything from malaria to virulent bacteria that made his skin peel off.

He said that Fawcett was easy to dismiss as “a crank”; he lacked the tools and the discipline of a modern archaeologist, and he never questioned the shibboleth that any lost city in the Amazon had to have European origins.

Anna Roosevelt, a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt’s who is an archaeologist at the University of Illinois, has excavated a cave near Santarém, in the Brazilian Amazon, that was filled with rock paintings—renditions of animal and human figures similar to those that Fawcett had described seeing in various parts of the Amazon and that bolstered his theory of Z.

This means that the Amazon may have been the earliest ceramic-producing region in all the Americas, and that, as Fawcett radically argued, the region was possibly even a wellspring of civilization throughout South America—that an advanced culture had spread outward, rather than vice versa.

Scientists have admittedly not found evidence of the fantastical gold that the conquistadores had dreamed of. But the anthropologist Neil Whitehead says, “With some caveats, El Dorado really did exist.”