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

AS FAWCETT WAS developing his theory of an ancient Amazonian civilization, he was conscious of growing competition from other explorers, who were racing into the interior of South America to survey one of the last uncharted realms. They were an eclectic, fractious, monomaniacal bunch, each with his own pet theory and obsession. There was, for instance, Henry Savage Landor, who had attracted worldwide renown for his travelogues in which he told of nearly being executed in Tibet, of climbing the Himalayas without ropes and clamps, and of crossing the deserts of Persia and Baluchistan by camel, and who was now wandering through parts of the Amazon dressed as if he were heading off to a luncheon in Piccadilly Circus (“I did not masquerade about in fancy costumes such as are imagined to be worn by explorers”) while his men mutinied and nearly shot him. There was the Brazilian colonel and part-Indian orphan Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, who had helped to lay telegraph lines across the jungle, lost a toe to piranhas, and started the Indian Protection Service. (Its motto, like his, was “Die if you must, but never kill.”) There was Theodore Roosevelt, who, after being defeated in the 1912 presidential election, sought refuge in the Amazon and surveyed with Rondon the River of Doubt. (By the end of the journey, the former president, who had advocated “the strenuous life,” was reduced to near death from hunger and fever, and kept repeating the opening lines to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem “Kubla Khan”: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree.”)

But perhaps the rival Fawcett most feared was Alexander Hamilton Rice, a tall, debonair American doctor who, like Fawcett, had trained under Edward Ayearst Reeves at the Royal Geographical Society. In his late thirties, with a barrel chest and bushy mustache, Rice had graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1904. An interest in tropical diseases led him to the Amazon, where he investigated lethal parasites by dissecting monkeys and jaguars and where he soon became obsessed with the region's geography and ethnology. In 1907, while Fawcett was conducting his first surveying expedition, Dr. Rice was trekking over the Andes with a then-unknown amateur archaeologist named Hiram Bingham. Later, Dr. Rice descended into the northern basin of the Amazon, searching for the sources of several rivers and studying the native inhabitants. In a letter to a friend, Dr. Rice wrote, “I am going very slowly, studying everything carefully, and coming only to conclusions after long meditation. If I am in doubt about anything, I return to work over it again.”

After that expedition, Dr. Rice, realizing that he lacked sufficient technical training, enrolled at the School of Astronomy and Surveying at the Royal Geographical Society. Upon graduating in 1910 (“We look upon him, in a very special degree, as a child of our Society,” an RGS president later noted), he returned to South America to explore the Amazon basin. Whereas Fawcett was impetuous and daring, Dr. Rice approached his mission with the calm precision of a surgeon. He did not so much want to transcend the brutal conditions as transform them. He assembled teams of as many as a hundred men, and was fixated on gad-getry-new boats, new boots, new generators-and on bringing the latest methods of modern science into the wild. During one expedition, he paused to perform emergency surgery on a native suffering from anthrax and on an Indian with an abscess near her liver. The RGS noted that the latter procedure was “probably the first surgical operation under chloroform carried out in this primeval wilderness.” Although Dr. Rice did not push his men the way Fawcett did, on at least one occasion they mutinied, deserting him in the jungle. During that same expedition, Dr. Rice's leg became so infected that he took his surgical blade and plunged it into his flesh to remove part of the tissue, operating on himself while he was still conscious. As Keltie told Fawcett, “He is a medical man and very clever in all his work.”

Fawcett may have been confident that no one could surpass his abilities as an explorer, but he knew that his chief rival had an advantage that he could never match: money. Dr. Rice, who was the wealthy grandson of a former mayor of Boston and governor of Massachusetts, had married Eleanor Widener, the widow of a Philadelphia tycoon who had been one of the richest men in America. (Her first husband and her son were on the Titanic when it sank.) With a fortune worth millions of dollars, Dr. Rice and his wife-who donated the Widener Library at Harvard University in memory of her late son-helped to finance a new lecture hall at the Royal Geographical Society. In the United States, Dr. Rice often showed up at appointments in his chauffeured blue Rolls-Royce, dressed in a full-length fur coat. He was, one newspaper wrote, “as much at home in the elegant swirl of Newport society as in the steaming jungles of Brazil.” With unlimited money to bankroll his expeditions, he could afford the most advanced equipment and the best-trained men. Fawcett, meanwhile, was constantly begging foundations and capitalists for financial support. “Explorers are not often those happy and irresponsible rovers which fancy paints,” he once complained in a letter to the RGS, “but are born without the proverbial silver spoon.”

Despite the vastness of the Amazon, it seemed unable to accommodate all of these explorers' egos and ambitions. The men tended to eye one another hawkishly, jealously guarding their routes for fear of being beaten to a discovery. They even conducted reconnaissance on each other's activities. “Keep your ears open as to any information about the movements of Landor,” the RGS advised Fawcett in a communiqué in 1911. Fawcett needed no prodding: he maintained the paranoia of a spy.

At the same time, the explorers were quick to cast doubt upon, and even denigrate, a rival's accomplishments. After Roosevelt and Rondon announced that they had explored for the first time a nearly thousand-mile-long river-renamed Rio Roosevelt in the president's honor-Landor told reporters it was impossible that such a tributary existed. Branding Roosevelt a “charlatan,” he accused the former president of plagiarizing events from the narrative of Landor's own journey: “I see he even has had the same sickness as I experienced and, what is more extraordinary, in the very same leg I had trouble with. These things happen very often to big explorers who carefully read the books of some of the humble travelers who preceded them.” Roosevelt snapped back that Landor was “a pure fake, to whom no attention should be paid.” (It was not the first time Landor had been called a fake: after he ascended a peak in the Himalayas, Douglas Freshfield, one of the most distinguished climbers of his day and a future president of the RGS, said that “no mountaineer can accept the marvelous feats of speed and endurance Mr. Landor believes himself to have accomplished” and that his “very sensational tale” affects “the credit, both at home and on the Continent, of English travellers, critics and scientific societies.”) Dr. Rice, for his part, initially found Roosevelt's account “unintelligible;” but after Roosevelt furnished him with more details he apologized. Though Fawcett never doubted Roosevelt's discovery, he dismissed it tartly as a good journey “for an elderly man.”

“I do not wish to deprecate other exploration work in South America,” Fawcett told the RGS, “only to point out the vast difference between river journeys with their freedom from the great food problem, and forest journeys on foot-when one has perforce to put up with circumstances and deliberately penetrate Indian sanctuaries.” Nor was Fawcett impressed by Landor, whom he considered “a humbug from the first.” Fawcett told Keltie that he had no desire to be “counted in with the Savage Landors and Roosevelts of the so-called exploring fraternity.”