What I Am Reading: "The Lost City of Z" by David Grann

I will admit that reading about Hiram Bingham's treks through the Andes put me in a mood for other South American exploration fare, so the Percy Fawcett story was a logical place to turn. This book on the subject was written by David Grann, a writer for the New Yorker who also wrote Killers of the Flower Moon and a lot of good longform articles.

Percy Fawcett was a British explorer who disappeared in the Amazon in 1925 while searching for, as the title indicates, the lost city of "Z," which he had himself hypothesized. Grann himself recreates Fawcett's journey into the jungle (as many "Fawcett nuts" had before him) in an attempt to solve the mystery. I've been familiar with the story for a long time, as I was a bit of a Victorian explorer enthusiast back in the day. Grann describes Fawcett as the last of the Victorian explorers; at a time when other explorers, like Fawcett's maybe-rival Alexander Hamilton Rice (who also explored with Bingham at one point) were putting modern technology such as radio and airplanes to use, Fawcett was still heading off to hack the jungle solo with a machete. Fawcett was a bit of a loner and a bit of a crank (increasingly so), who held to the values of civilization while still remaining aloof from its practice. He was restless in society, and always took off from home on another expedition before too long. He was a gentleman-explorer, not a specialist in any area, who had been trained in the rudiments by the Royal Geographical Society.

He had started out as an army officer, looking for hidden jewels while on leave from a garrison in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). After his training by the RGS at the turn of the century, he was sent first on a brief intelligence-gathering mission in Morocco, then loaned to a boundary commission in South America. This job was his first exposure to the Amazon, where he discovered that he had the luck or constitution to avoid the worst of its diseases and threats. He finished mapping the Brazilian/Bolivian border a year earlier than expected.

On his second expedition, also a mapping expedition, he discovered why many scientists of the time (and subsequently) considered the region to be a "counterfeit paradise." Despite the dense vegetation and animal population, it was analyzed that the region's heavy rainfall leached most of the nutrients out of the soil, thus rendering it unfit for agriculture. Similarly, the parasites, predators, and scavengers of the jungle killed off any livestock, and any potential game was too dangerous or too well-hidden to provide sustenance. As a result, most thought that the Amazon could not support any kind of large-scale civilization; though at the time of the book's writing archaeologists such as Michael Heckenberger were starting to challenge that assumption.

Fawcett also disbelieved this assumption. His ideas regarding a theoretical metropolitan-sized lost civilization arose from an interesting amalgamation of scholarship, experience, and prejudice. To start with, some of his ideas came from the old Conquistador chronicles of El Dorado and other advanced civilizations in the jungle, usually disbelieved by other scholars because of the "counterfeit paradise" situation. Furthermore, Fawcett had a fair amount of close interaction with the indigenous peoples of the Amazon (he pursued a strict nonviolent policy of engaging with them, even when they were violent in return), and thought that they were more advanced than racist and social-Darwinist whites gave them credit for; he thus thought that such a civilization was indeed possible. On the other hand, he too held many of these same beliefs of his time, and thus thought that the vanished advanced civilization had been imposed from outside, possibly by ancient Europeans. He gathered evidence for his theory through small-scale archaeology during his mapping expeditions and the tales of other travelers in previous centuries.

Fawcett was a strict, exacting leader, and often burned out his traveling companions from overwork. Each expedition made him a little more fanatical, and competitive with other explorers within the context of both Amazon exploration and the projects financed by the Royal Geographical Society (he complained especially about the attention lavished in this era on Antarctic exploration). Before World War One, he had been a celebrated explorer, and his expeditions had attracted considerable interest from the British public; who in this Edwardian era had looked for any reason to celebrate their accomplishments in the face of German and other competition. The war interrupted his planning and sent him to the front as an artillery officer. After the war, Fawcett spiraled both materially and intellectually, and came to write (though usually not publish) ideas that his lost city, which he had codenamed "Z," had been founded by people of Atlantis, or had other occult connections. Fawcett was at loose ends in the postwar world, and after one failed expedition he could not raise capital for another, and lived in near-poverty with his family. Many in the academic and exploration communities increasingly viewed him and "Z" as a crackpot.

Finally, after partnering with a man named George Lynch, he was able to get the ball rolling by receiving financing from a newspaper network, which would heavily publicize the expedition. The RGS and others contributed as well, after earlier hesitation. He had his long-standing partisans in the venerable old pith-helmeted organization, including geographer and eventual president John Scott Keltie. Fawcett’s entire exploration career orbited the RGS.

Though Fawcett had a specific location in mind for his search, he kept it secret out of fear that rival explorers - such as the aforementioned Rice, gentleman-adventurer Henry Savage Landor, or Brazilian official Cândido Rondon, who had started that country's Indian Protection Service and was wary of outsiders exploring where Brazilian nationals should have taken the lead - would get there first. Paranoid, he (in Grann's analysis) attempted to throw people off his trail by providing false coordinates from one of his embarkation points, the "Dead Horse Camp" where his previous expedition had ended in failure.

Fawcett's old exploring partners had retired or died after the war; some would later analyze that these had been his anchors who prevented him from overdoing it or taking major risks in his expeditions. When he finally had the money together, he went only with his son, Jack Fawcett, in his early 20s, and his son's boyhood friend, Raliegh Rimell. The three of them set off with much fanfare, and continued to send press dispatches and letters (eventually by native runners) as they traveled the long journey to the Brazilian frontier, then along the frontier. Eventually they reached their Dead Horse Camp, and disappeared into the jungle.

The expedition was expected to take a while, but by 1927 people started to worry when they had not returned or been heard from. Starting in that year, other adventurers started to search for him - the well-publicized expedition led to a lot of interest. Grann estimates that at least 100 people have died or disappeared launching their own searches for Fawcett of varying competence, crackpottedness, and legitimacy. American George Miller Dyott was one of the first, and believed that he had found evidence, in the form of Fawcett equipment in the possession of an indigenous chieftain, that Fawcett had been killed by Amazon tribesmen. This was later disputed by others, due to Dyott's poor communications with the natives and the possibility of the equipment originating from one of Fawcett's earlier expeditions. Other claims of either death or captivity would trickle out, to be compiled and analyzed by Fawcett's wife, Nina, with surprising competence and hard-headedness. Eventually, even Fawcett's surviving son conducted a search by air in the 1950s. No trace has ever been found.

Grann details his own search. He retrieved documents from the Royal Geographical Society and from Fawcett's descendants, despite their wariness of another "Fawcett nut." He, as mentioned, believed that Fawcett's coordinates from Dead Horse Camp were false, and that the actual location was in a different part of the Amazon. I am slightly confused by this information as a reader; others had apparently been able to trace the same path that Grann later traced, so someone must have been looking in the right place (there was apparently an anthropologist named Vincenzo Petrullo who, in 1931, had heard a similar story to that which follows). Grann ended up in the village of Kalapalos, where oral tradition told of how Fawcett and his partners had passed further into a more hostile territory, until sightings of their campfire smoke ceased after five days. This location was also where Brazilian politician and activist Orlando Villas-Bôas had apparently acquired a skeleton that he had passed off as Fawcett's in the '50s, hoping to end the amateur expeditions. Gran also had earlier, at Bakairi Post, the last frontier outpost from which Fawcett had sent messages, met an elderly woman who had seen the party travel through as a child.

As I said, I knew a fair amount about Fawcett going in, as a mild connoisseur of interwar disappearances (Amundsen: still tragically under-noted). The story of the campfires was familiar to me. Regardless, as something I mostly just read for fun, this was a good account of one man's search, especially as he left the comfortable modern city and trekked into the dangerous and no-doubt-uncomfortable jungle. Fawcett is an interesting character, and it is good to show him warts and all, with notes on the debate over his ideas and a clear look at his partial descent from respectability, at least in professional circles. I am not optimistic on any resolution to this story, as it recedes further into the past, but one can see why it is so captivating. Grann’s book also exists in article form, and can be found here.