The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
On a cold January day in 1925, a tall, distinguished gentleman hurried across the docks in Hoboken, New Jersey, toward the SS Vauban, a five-hundred-and-eleven-foot ocean liner bound for Rio de Janeiro. He was fifty-seven years old and stood over six feet, his long arms corded with muscles. Although his hair was thinning and his mustache was flecked with white, he was so fit that he could walk for days with little, if any, rest or nourishment. His nose was crooked like a boxer's, and there was something ferocious about his appearance, especially his eyes. They were set close together and peered out from under thick tufts of hair. No one, not even his family, seemed to agree on their color -- some thought they were blue, others gray. Yet virtually everyone who encountered him was struck by their intensity: some called them "the eyes of a visionary." He had frequently been photographed in riding boots and wearing a Stetson, with a rifle slung over his shoulder, but even in a suit and a tie, and without his customary wild beard, he could be recognized by the crowds on the pier. He was Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, and his name was known throughout the world.
He was the last of the great Victorian explorers who ventured into uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose. For nearly two decades, stories of his adventures had captivated the public's imagination: how he had survived in the South American wilderness without contact with the outside world; how he was ambushed by hostile tribesmen, many of whom had never before seen a white man; how he battled piranhas, electric eels, jaguars, crocodiles, vampire bats, and anacondas, including one that almost crushed him; and how he emerged with maps of regions from which no previous expedition had returned. He was renowned as the "David Livingstone of the Amazon," and was believed to have such unrivaled powers of endurance that a few colleagues even claimed he was immune to death. An American explorer described him as "a man of indomitable will, infinite resource, fearless;" another said that he could "outwalk and outhike and outexplore anybody else." 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."
In 1916, the Royal Geographical Society had awarded him, with the blessing of King George V, a gold medal "for his contributions to the mapping of South America." 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. Among them was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was said to have drawn on Fawcett's experiences for his 1912 book The Lost World, in which explorers "disappear into the unknown" of South America and find, on a remote plateau, a land where dinosaurs have escaped extinction.
As Fawcett made his way to the gangplank that day in January, he eerily resembled one of the book's protagonists, Lord John Roxton: Something there was of Napoleon III, something of Don Quixote, and yet again something which was the essence of the English country gentleman &hellip; He has a gentle voice and a quiet manner, but behind his twinkling blue eyes there lurks a capacity for furious wrath and implacable resolution, the more dangerous because they are held in leash.
None of Fawcett's previous expeditions compared with what he was about to do, and he could barely conceal his impatience as he fell into line with the other passengers boarding the SS Vauban. The ship, advertised as "the finest in the world," was part of the Lamport & Holt elite "V" class. The Germans had sunk several of the company's ocean liners during World War I, but this one had survived, with its black, salt-streaked hull and elegant white decks and striped funnel billowing smoke into the sky.
"It's up to you, Jack," Fawcett said.
The two were talking after Fawcett had come back from his 1921 expedition. While Fawcett had been away, Nina had moved the family from Jamaica to Los Angeles, where the Rimells had also gone and where Jack and Raleigh had been swept up in the romance of Hollywood, greasing their hair, growing Clark Gable mustaches, and hanging around Hollywood sets, in the hopes of landing roles. (Jack had met Mary Pickford and loaned her his cricket bat to use in the production of Little Lord Fauntleroy.) Fawcett had a proposition for his son. Colonel T. E. Lawrence -- the celebrated desert spy and explorer better known as Lawrence of Arabia -- had volunteered to go with Fawcett on his next journey in search of Z, but Fawcett was wary of choosing a companion with a powerful ego who was unaccustomed to the Amazon. As Fawcett wrote to a friend, "[Lawrence] may be keen upon S. American exploration but in the first place he probably requires a salary I cannot pay him and in the second place excellent work in the Near East does not infer the ability or willingness to hump a 60 lbs pack, live for a year upon the forest, suffer from legions of insects and accept the conditions which I would impose." Fawcett told Jack that, instead of Lawrence, he could take part in the expedition. It would be one of the most difficult and dangerous expeditions in the history of exploration -- the ultimate test, in Fawcett's words, "of faith, courage, and determination."
Jack didn't hesitate. "I want to go with you," he said.
Nina, who was present during these discussions, raised no objections. Partly, she was confident that Fawcett's seemingly superhuman powers would protect their son, and, partly, she believed that Jack, as his father's natural heir, would possess similar abilities. Yet her motivation seems to have gone deeper than that: to doubt her husband after so many years of sacrifice was to doubt her own life's work. Indeed, she needed Z just as much as he did. And even though Jack had no exploring experience and the expedition entailed extraordinary danger, she never considered, as she later told a reporter, trying to "hold" her son back.
Of course, Raleigh had to come, too. Jack said that he could not do the most important thing in his life without him.
Raleigh's mother, Elsie, was reluctant to permit her youngest son -- her "boy," as she called him -- to join such a dangerous venture. But Raleigh was insistent. His movie aspirations had foundered, and he was toiling in menial jobs in the lumber industry. As he told his older brother, Roger, he felt "unsatisfied and unsettled." This was his opportunity not only to earn a "pile of dough" but also to make good with his life.
Fawcett informed the RGS and others that he now had two ideal companions ("both strong as horses and keen as mustard") and tried once more to secure funding. "I can only say I am a Founder's Medallist &hellip; . and therefore deserving of confidence," he maintained. Yet the failure of his previous expedition -- even though it was only the first in an illustrious career -- had given his critics further ammunition. And with no backers, and after exhausting what little savings he had on his previous expedition, he soon found himself bankrupt, like his father. In September 1921, unable to sustain the cost of living in California, he was forced to uproot his family again and return to Stoke Canon, England, where he rented an old, ramshackle house without running water or electricity. "All water has to be pumped and huge logs have to be sawn into blocks -- all additional labour," Nina wrote to Large. The work was grueling. "I broke down utterly about 5 weeks ago and was very seriously ill," Nina said. Part of her wanted to run away and escape all the sacrifices and burdens -- but, she said, "the family needed me."
"The situation is difficult," Fawcett admitted to Large. "One learns little from a smooth life, but I do not like roping others into the difficulties which have dogged me so persistently &hellip; It is not that I want luxuries. I care little about such things -- but I hate inactivity."
Heckenberger told me that scientists were just beginning the process of understanding this ancient world -- and, like the theory of who first populated the Americas, all the traditional paradigms had to be reevalu-ated. In 2006, evidence even emerged that, in some parts of the Amazon, Indians built with stone. Archaeologists with the Amapa Institute of Scientific and Technological Research uncovered, in the northern Brazilian Amazon, an astronomical observatory tower made of huge granite rocks: each one weighed several tons, and some were nearly ten feet tall. The ruins, believed to be anywhere from five hundred to two thousand years old, have been called "the Stonehenge of the Amazon."
"Anthropologists," Heckenberger said, "made the mistake of coming into the Amazon in the twentieth century and seeing only small tribes and saying, 'Well, that's all there is.' The problem is that, by then, many Indian populations had already been wiped out by what was essentially a holocaust from European contact. That's why the first Europeans in the Amazon described such massive settlements that, later, no one could ever find."
As we walked back into the Kuikuro village, Heckenberger stopped at the edge of the plaza and told me to examine it closely. He said that the civilization that had built the giant settlements had nearly been annihilated. Yet a small number of descendants had survived, and we were no doubt among them. For a thousand years, he said, the Xinguanos had maintained artistic and cultural traditions from this highly advanced, highly structured civilization. He said, for instance, that the present-day Kuikuro village was still organized along east and west cardinal points and its paths were aligned at right angles, though its residents no longer knew why this was the preferred pattern. Heckenberger added that he had taken a piece of pottery from the ruins and shown it to a local maker of ceramics. It was so similar to presentday pottery, with its painted exterior and reddish clay, that the potter insisted it had been made recently.
As Paolo and I headed toward the chief's house, Heckenberger picked up a contemporary ceramic pot and ran his hand along the edge, where there were grooves. "They're from boiling the toxins out of manioc," he said. He had detected the same feature in the ancient pots. "That means that a thousand years ago people in this civilization had the same staple of diet," he said. He began to go through the house, finding parallels between the ancient civilization and its remnants today: the clay statues, the thatched walls and roofs, the cotton hammocks. "To tell you the honest-to-God truth, I don't think there is anywhere in the world where there isn't written history where the continuity is so clear as right here," Heckenberger said.
Some of the musicians and dancers were circling through the plaza, and Heckenberger said that everywhere in the Kuikuro village "you can see the past in the present." I began to picture the flutists and dancers in one of the old plazas. I pictured them living in moundshaped two-story houses, the houses not scattered but in endless rows, where women wove hammocks and baked with manioc flour and where teenage boys and girls were held in seclusion as they learned the rites of their ancestors. I pictured the dancers and singers crossing moats and passing through tall palisade fences, moving from one village to the next along wide boulevards and bridges and causeways.