David Grann - The Lost City of Z - A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

That night, Fawcett and his men were all on edge. Before they set off, Fawcett had made each of them agree to a seemingly suicidal edict: they were not to fire their weapons on Indians under any circumstances. When the Royal Geographical Society learned of Fawcett's instructions, one member familiar with the region warned that such a method would “court assassination.” Fawcett conceded that his nonviolent approach involved “mad risks.” Yet he argued that it was not just the moral course; it was also the only way for a small and easily outnumbered party to demonstrate its friendly intentions to tribes.

As the men now lay in their hammocks, a small fire crackling, they listened to the tumult of the forest. They tried to distinguish each sound: the plopping of a nut in the river, the rubbing of branches, the whine of mosquitoes, the roar of a jaguar. Occasionally, the jungle would seem silent, then a screech would shatter the darkness. While the men couldn't see anyone, they knew they could be seen. “It was trying to the nerves, knowing all the time that our every movement was watched, yet seeing almost nothing of those who were watching,” Fawcett wrote.

On the river one day the boats came to a series of rapids, and a pilot went inland to look for a place to circumvent them. A long time elapsed with no word from him, so Fawcett went with several men to find him. They hacked through the forest for half a mile and suddenly came upon the pilot's body, pierced with forty-two arrows.

The men were beginning to panic. At one point, drifting on the boat toward the rapids, Willis yelled, “Savages!”-and there they were standing on the banks. “Their bodies [were] painted all over,” Fawcett wrote, and “their ears had pendulous lobes, and quills were thrust from side to side through their nostrils.” He wanted to try to establish contact, but the other men on board were shouting and paddling frantically away. The Indians took aim with six-foot bows and fired their arrows. “One ripped through the side of the boat with a vicious smack-through wood an inch and a half in thickness,” Fawcett said. The boat then slipped down a chute of rapids, leaving, for the moment, the tribe behind.

Even before this confrontation, Fawcett had noticed his men, especially Chivers, unraveling. “I had observed his gradual break-up,” Fawcett wrote. He decided to relieve Chivers of his duties and sent him and several other members of the party back to the frontier. Still, two of the men died of their fevers. Fawcett himself longed for his family. What kind of a fool was he, Fawcett wondered, to exchange the comfort of his previous postings for such conditions? His second son, Brian, had been born in his absence. “I was tempted to resign and return home,” Fawcett wrote. Yet, unlike his men, Fawcett was in good health. He was hungry and wretched, but his skin wasn't yellow and his temperature was normal and he wasn't vomiting blood. Later, John Keltie, the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, wrote a letter to Fawcett's wife, saying, “Unless he had an exceptional constitution, I do not see how he could survive.” Fawcett noted that in these parts “the healthy person was regarded as a freak, an exception, extraordinary.”

Despite his yearnings for home, Fawcett continued with Willis and the interpreter to survey the border between Bolivia and Brazil, hacking for miles through the jungle. In May 1907, he completed his route and presented his findings to members of the South American boundary commission and the RGS. They were incredulous. He had redefined the borders of South America-and he had done it nearly a year ahead of schedule.

When I was in England, I tried to track down Fawcett's descendants, who, perhaps, could tell me more about the explorer and his route to Z. Fawcett's wife and children had died long ago, but in Cardiff, Wales, I located one of his grandchildren, Rolette de Montet-Guerin, whose mother was Fawcett's only daughter, Joan. She lived in a single-story house, with stucco walls and wood frame windows-an unassuming place that seemed somehow at odds with all the fanfare that had once surrounded her family. She was a petite, energetic woman in her fifties, with short black hair and glasses, who referred affectionately to her grandfather by his initials, PHF. (“That's what my mum and everyone in the family always called him.”) Fawcett's wife and children, after years of being hounded by reporters, had retreated from the public eye, but Rolette welcomed me into the kitchen. As I told her about my plans to trace Fawcett's route, she said, “You don't look much like an explorer.”

“Not really.”

“Well, you best be well fed for the jungle.”

She started to open cupboards, taking out pots and pans, and turned on the gas stove. The kitchen table was soon laden with bowls of risotto, steamed vegetables, homemade bread, and hot apple crumb cake. “It's all vegetarian,” she said. “PHF believed it gave you greater stamina. Plus, he never liked to kill animals unless he had to.”

As we sat down to eat, Rolette's twenty-three-year-old daughter, Is-abelle, appeared. She had shorter hair than her mother's and eyes that held some of her great-grandfather's intensity. She was a pilot for British Airways. “I envy my great-grandfather, really,” Isabelle said. “In his day, you could still go marching off and discover some hidden part of the world. Now where can you go?”

Rolette placed an antique silver chalice in the center of the table. “I brought that out especially for you,” she said. “It was PHF's christening cup.”

I held it up to the light. On one side were engraved flowers and buds, on the other was inscribed the number 1867, the year Fawcett was born.

After we ate and chatted for a while, I asked her something I had long pondered-whether, in determining my route, I should rely, like so many other parties, on the coordinates for Dead Horse Camp cited in Exploration Fawcett.

“Well, you must be careful with those,” Rolette said.

“What do you mean?”

“PHF wrote them to throw people off the trail. They were a blind.”

The news both astounded and unsettled me: if true, it meant that many people had headed, possibly fatally, in the wrong direction. When I asked why Brian Fawcett, who had edited Exploration Fawcett, would have perpetrated the deception, she explained that he had wanted to honor the wishes of his father and brother. The more she spoke, the more I realized that what for many was a tantalizing mystery was for her family a tragedy. As we finished supper, Rolette said, “When someone disappears, it's not like an ordinary death. There is no closure.” (Later she told me, “You know, when my mother was dying, I said to her, ‘At least you'll finally know what happened to PHF and Jack.' ”) Now Rolette paused for a long time, as if trying to make up her mind about something. Then she said, “You really want to find out what happened to my grandfather?”

“Yes. If it's possible.”

“I want to show you something.”

She led me into a back room and opened a large wooden trunk. Inside were several leather-bound books. Their covers were worn and tattered, their bindings breaking apart. Some were held together only by strings, tied in bows.

“What are they?” I asked.

“PHF's diaries and logbooks.” She handed them to me. “You can look through them, but you must guard them carefully.”

I opened one of them, marked 1909. The cover left a black stain on my fingertips-a mixture, I imagined, of Victorian dust and jungle mud. The pages almost fell out when I turned them, and I held them gingerly between my index finger and thumb. Recognizing Fawcett's microscopic handwriting, I felt a strange sensation. Here was something that Fawcett had also held, something that contained his most private thoughts and that few had ever seen. The writer Janet Malcolm once compared a biographer to a “professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.”