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

“It is a little awkward as you can understand, for us at the present moment, to make any definite promise as to what could be done after the war,” Keltie responded to one of his appeals. “If you can only afford to wait.”

“I am getting older and am, I daresay, impatient of lost years and months,” Fawcett complained to Keltie in early 1918. Later that year, he told Travel magazine, “Knowing what these journeys in the real fastnesses of the forest mean to men a good deal younger than I am, I do not want to delay action.”

On June 28, 1919, nearly five years after Fawcett returned from the Amazon and shortly before his fifty-second birthday, Germany finally signed a peace treaty in surrender. Some twenty million people had been killed and at least twenty million wounded. Fawcett described “the whole business” as “suicide” for Western civilization, and thought, “Many thousands must have come through those four years of mud and blood with a similar disillusionment.”

Returning to his home in England, he saw his wife and children on a regular basis for the first time in years. He was astonished by how much Jack had grown, how much bigger he was through his shoulders and around his arms. Jack had recently celebrated his sixteenth birthday and was “now quite an inch, if not more, taller than his father!” Nina wrote in a letter to Harold Large, a family friend who lived in New Zealand. Jack had developed into a powerful athlete and was already honing his body for the day when he was old enough to venture with his father into the wilderness. “We all went to the sports on Saturday and saw him win the 2nd Prize for the High Jump and Putting the Weight,” Nina said.

Fawcett and Jack played their usual sports together, only now the son often surpassed the father in ability. Jack wrote to Large, boasting, “I had a ripping cricket season, as I was vice-captain of the [school] team, and won the average ball, and was second in the batting averages. Also I never dropped a catch throughout the whole season.” He wrote with a mixture of youthful cockiness and innocence. He noted that he had taken up photography and made “some ripping photos.” Occasionally in his letters he'd include a pen-and-ink caricature of his brother or sister.

Despite his brashness and athletic grace, Jack remained, in many ways, an awkward teenager who, unsure how to interact with girls and desperate to uphold his father's monkish edicts, seemed mostly at ease in the company of his childhood friend Raleigh Rimell. Brian Fawcett said that Raleigh was Jack's “able and willing lieutenant.” During the war, the two friends would shoot starlings off the roofs of surrounding houses, causing a furor among the neighbors and the local police. Once, Raleigh shattered a letter box and was summoned by the police and ordered to pay ten shillings to replace it. Whenever Raleigh passed the new letter box, he would polish it with a handkerchief and proclaim, “This is mine, you know!”

On the rare occasions when Raleigh wasn't present, it was Brian Fawcett who followed Jack around. Brian was different from his older brother-indeed, different from most Fawcett men. He lacked athletic prowess and was often, as he admitted, bullied by other kids “into a stupor.” Suffering in the shadow of his brother, Brian recalled, “At school it was always Jack who distinguished himself in games, in fights, and by standing up to the severe canings of the headmaster.”

Although Nina thought her children had no “hidden feeling of fear or distrust” toward their parents, Brian seemed roiled by his father's actions. Fawcett always seemed to want to play with Jack and touted him as a future explorer; he even gave Jack his Ceylon treasure map. Brian once noted in a letter to his mother that at least when his father was away there were “no favourites” in the house.

One day Brian followed Jack into the room where their father kept his collection of artifacts. It included a sword, stone axes, a spear tipped with bone, bows and arrows, and shell necklaces. The boys had previously devoured a bag of nuts that the chief of the Maxubis had given Fawcett as a present; now Jack removed a beautifully handcrafted musket called a jezail, which Fawcett had obtained in Morocco. Wondering if it would fire, Jack carried the jezail outside and loaded it with powder. Given its rust and age, the gun was likely to backfire, lethally, and Jack said that he and Brian should flip a coin to see who would pull the trigger. Brian lost. “My elder brother stood well clear, and goaded me on to fulfil my honourable obligation to risk suicide,” Brian recalled. “I pulled the trigger, the pan flashed and sizzled-and nothing further seemed to happen. But things were happening. An appreciable time after pulling the trigger there was a loud, asthmatic sort of cough, and a huge cloud of red dust vomited out of the muzzle!” The gun didn't fire, but Brian had demonstrated, at least for an instant, that he was as daring as his older brother.

FAWCETT, MEANWHILE, was frantically trying to organize what he called his “path to Z.” His two most trusted companions were no longer available: Manley had died of heart disease shortly after the war, and Costin had married and decided to settle down. The loss of these men was a blow that perhaps only Costin fully appreciated. He told his family that Fawcett's only Achilles' heel as an explorer was that he hated to slow down, and he needed someone whom he trusted enough to defer to when the person said, “Enough!” Without him or Manley, Costin feared, there would be no one to stop Fawcett.

Fawcett then suffered a more severe setback: the RGS and a number of other institutions turned down his requests for funding. The war had made money for scientific exploration harder to come by, but that wasn't the only reason. University-trained anthropologists and archaeologists were displacing “Hints to Travellers” amateurs; sub-specialization had rendered obsolete the man or woman who dared to try to provide an autopsis of the entire earth. Another South American explorer and contemporary of Fawcett's complained bitterly that “the general practitioner in this everyday world of ours is being squeezed out.” And, although Fawcett remained a legend, most of the new specialists disputed his theory of Z. “I cannot induce scientific men to accept even the supposition that there are traces of an old civilization” in the Amazon, Fawcett wrote in his journals.

Colleagues had once doubted his theory of Z largely for biological reasons: the Indians were physically incapable of constructing a complex civilization. Now many of the new breed of scientists doubted him for environmental reasons: the physical landscape of the Amazon was too inhospitable for primitive tribes to construct any sort of sophisticated society. Biological determinism had increasingly given way to environmental determinism. And the Amazon-the great “counterfeit paradise”-was the most vivid proof of the Malthusian limits that the environment placed on civilizations.

The chronicles of the early El Dorado hunters that Fawcett cited only confirmed to many in the scientific establishment that he was an “amateur.” An article in Geographical Review concluded that the Amazon basin was so bereft of humankind that it was like “one of the world's great deserts… comparable with the Sahara.” The distinguished Swedish anthropologist Erland Nordenskiöld, who had met Fawcett in Bolivia, acknowledged that the English explorer was “an extremely original man, absolutely fearless,” but that he suffered from “boundless imagination.” An official at the RGS said of Fawcett, “He is a visionary kind of man who sometimes talks rather nonsense,” and added, “I do not expect that his going in for spiritualism has improved his judgment.”