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

As the Indians retreated under the fusillade, Dr. Rice and his men returned to their boats and fled. “We could hear their blood-curdling screams as they kept at our heels,” Dr. Rice said. When the expedition eventually emerged from the jungle, the explorers were hailed for their bravery. Fawcett, however, was appalled, and told the RGS that to shoot indiscriminately at the Indians was reprehensible. He also could not resist pointing out that Dr. Rice had “skedaddled” the moment he encountered danger and was “rather too soft for the real game.”

Yet reports that the doctor had uncovered ancient Indian paintings and intended to head back into the jungle with even more gadgetry put Fawcett in a frenzy as he tried to raise funding in Brazil. In Rio, he stayed with the British ambassador, Sir Ralph Paget, a close friend, who lobbied the Brazilian government on his behalf. Although the RGS had refused to devote its depleted resources to the expedition, it recommended its famous disciple to the Brazilian government, writing in a cable that “it is quite true that he has a reputation of being difficult to get on with… but all the same he has an extraordinary power of getting through difficulties that would deter anybody else.” On February 26, a meeting was arranged with the Brazilian president, Epitácio Pessoa, and the renowned explorer and head of the Indian Protection Service, Cândido Rondon. Fawcett presented himself as a colonel, even though he had retired after the war as a lieutenant colonel. He had recently petitioned the British War Office to approve the change in rank, since he was returning to South America to raise money and “it is a matter of some importance.” In a later plea, he was more explicit: “The higher rank has a certain importance in dealing with local officials, ‘Lt Colonel' not only being locally equivalent to ‘Comman-dante,' a grade below colonel, but as a rank having lost much of its local prestige owing to the large number of Temporary Officers who have retained it.” The War Office refused his request on both occasions, but he inflated his rank anyway-a subterfuge he maintained so steadfastly that nearly everyone, including his family and friends, eventually knew him only as “Colonel Fawcett.”

In the presidential palace, Fawcett and Rondon greeted each other cordially. Rondon, who had been promoted to general, was in uniform and wore a gold-braided cap. His graying hair gave him a distinguished look, and he stood ramrod straight. As another English traveler once noted, he commanded “instant attention-an atmosphere of conscious dignity and power that immediately singled him out.” Aside from the president, there was no one else in the room.

According to Rondon, Fawcett gradually made his case for Z, emphasizing the importance of his archaeological research for Brazil. The president seemed sympathetic, and asked Rondon what he thought of “this valuable project.” Rondon suspected that his rival, who remained secretive about his route, might have some ulterior motive-perhaps to exploit the jungle's mineral wealth for England. There were also rumors, later fanned by the Russians on Radio Moscow, that Fawcett was still a spy, though there was no evidence for this. Rondon insisted that it was not necessary for “foreigners to conduct expeditions in Brazil, as we have civilians and military men who are very capable of doing such work.”

The president noted that he had promised the British ambassador that he would help. Rondon said that it was imperative, then, that the search for Z involve a joint Brazilian-British expedition.

Fawcett was convinced that Rondon was trying to sabotage him, and his temper grew. “I intend to go alone,” he snapped.

The two explorers faced each other down. The president initially sided with his countryman and said that the expedition should include Rondon's men. But economic difficulties prompted the Brazilian government to withdraw from the expedition, though it gave Fawcett enough money to launch a bare-bones operation. Before Fawcett left their final meeting, Rondon told him, “I pray for the Colonel's good fortune.”

Fawcett had enlisted for the expedition a British army officer and RGS member whom Reeves had recommended, but at the last minute the officer backed out. Undeterred, Fawcett posted an advertisement in newspapers and recruited a six-foot-five-inch Australian boxer named Lewis Brown and a thirty-one-year-old American ornithologist, Ernest Holt. Brown was the wild sort drawn to the frontier, and before leaving on the expedition he indulged his sexual appetites. “I'm flesh and blood like the rest!” he told Fawcett. Holt, in contrast, was a sensitive young man who, growing up in Alabama, had collected lizards and snakes and had long aspired to be a naturalist-explorer in the mold of Darwin. Like Fawcett, he wrote down poems in his diary to recite in the jungle, including Kipling's words “The Dreamer whose dream came true!” Holt also printed on his diary's cover, in bold letters, a relative's address, “IN CASE OF FATAL ACCIDENT.”

The three gathered in Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso. During the six years Fawcett had been away from the Amazon, the rubber boom had collapsed, and a central role in its demise was played by a former president of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Clements Markham. In the 1870s, Markham had engineered the smuggling of Amazonian rubber-tree seeds to Europe, which were then distributed to plantations throughout British colonies in Asia. Compared with the brutal, inefficient, and costly extraction of wild rubber in the jungle, growing rubber on Asian plantations was easy and cheap, and the produce abundant. “The electric lights went out in Manaus,” the historian Robin Furneaux wrote. “The opera house was silent and the jewels which had filled it were gone… Vampire bats circled the chandeliers of the broken palaces and spiders scurried across their floors.”

Fawcett described Cuiabá as “impoverished and backward,” a place that had degenerated into “little better than a ghost town.” The streets were covered in mud and grass; only the main road was illuminated by electric lightbulbs. As Fawcett gathered provisions for his expedition, he feared that he was being spied on. In fact, General Rondon had vowed not to let the Englishman out of his sight until he discovered his true intentions. In his correspondence, Fawcett began to use a cipher to conceal his route. As Nina explained in a letter to a trusted friend, “Lat x+4 to x + 5, and Long y + 2, where ‘x' is twice the number of letters in the name of the town where he stayed with us, and ‘y' is the number of the building in London where I used to visit him.” She added, “Keep the key to this cipher entirely to yourself.”

Fawcett received a farewell note from his son Jack, who wrote that he had had a “dream” in which he entered an ancient temple in a city like Z. May “protection” be “with you at all stages of your journey,” Jack told his father, and wished him Godspeed. Fawcett asked a local intermediary that if his family or friends “get alarmed at no news please soothe them with the confident assertion we shall come to no untoward end and shall be heard of in due course.” And in a letter to Keltie he vowed, “I am going to reach this place and return from it.” Trailed by his two companions, plus two horses, two oxen, and a pair of dogs, he then marched northward toward the Xingu River, holding his machete like a knight clutching his sword.

Soon after, everything began to unravel. Rains flooded their path and destroyed their equipment. Brown, despite his ferocious appearance, suffered a mental breakdown, and Fawcett, fearing another Murray-like disaster, dispatched him back to Cuiabá. Holt, too, grew feeble; he said that it was impossible to do fieldwork because of the horrific conditions, and he maniacally cataloged the bugs that were attacking him, until his diary contained details of almost nothing else. “More than half ill from insects,” he scribbled, adding, “Days of toil, nights of torture-an explorer's life! Where is the romance now?”