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

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A grand mystery reaching back centuries. A sensational disappearance that made headlines around the world. A quest for truth that leads to death, madness or disappearance for those who seek to solve it. The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the impenetrable jungle canopy of the Amazon.
After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve "the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century:" What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z?
In 1925 Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an ancient civilization, hoping to make one of the most important discoveries in history. For centuries Europeans believed the world’s largest jungle concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Thousands had died looking for it, leaving many scientists convinced that the Amazon was truly inimical to humankind. But Fawcett, whose daring expeditions helped inspire Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, had spent years building his scientific case. Captivating the imagination of millions around the globe, Fawcett embarked with his twenty-one-year-old son, determined to prove that this ancient civilization-which he dubbed “Z”-existed. Then he and his expedition vanished.
Fawcett’s fate-and the tantalizing clues he left behind about “Z”-became an obsession for hundreds who followed him into the uncharted wilderness. For decades scientists and adventurers have searched for evidence of Fawcett’s party and the lost City of Z. Countless have perished, been captured by tribes, or gone mad. As David Grann delved ever deeper into the mystery surrounding Fawcett’s quest, and the greater mystery of what lies within the Amazon, he found himself, like the generations who preceded him, being irresistibly drawn into the jungle’s “green hell.” His quest for the truth and his stunning discoveries about Fawcett’s fate and “Z” form the heart of this complex, enthralling narrative.

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Fawcett was irate. How could he get anywhere with “this cripple”? he wrote in his journals. Yet Fawcett, too, was, at the age of fifty-three, no longer immune to the forces of nature. His leg had become swollen and infected, “giving me so much pain at night that sleep was difficult,” he confessed in his diary. One night he took opium pills and became violently ill. “It was rather unusual for me to be laid low in this way, and I was heartily ashamed of myself,” he wrote.

A month into their journey, the animals started to collapse. “It is awful on one's nerves to watch one's pack animals slowly dying,” Holt wrote. An ox that had been invaded by maggots lay down and never got up. One of the dogs was starving, and Holt shot it. A horse drowned. Then the other horse dropped in its tracks, and Fawcett put it out of its misery with a bullet-this was the site that became known as Dead Horse Camp. Finally, Holt prostrated himself and said, “Never mind me, Colonel. You go on-just leave me here.”

Fawcett knew the expedition might be his last opportunity to prove the theory of Z, and he cursed the gods for conspiring against him- decried them for the weather, his companions, and the war that had held him back. Fawcett realized that if he left Holt behind he would die. “There was nothing for it,” Fawcett later wrote, “but to take him back and give up the present trip as a failure-a sickening, heartrending failure!”

What he would not admit was that his own infected leg made proceeding almost impossible. As the expedition party struggled back to the nearest frontier outpost, enduring thirty-six hours without water, Fawcett told Holt, “The exit from Hell is always difficult.”

When they emerged in Cuiabá in January 1921, Ambassador Paget sent a telegram to Nina saying only, “Your husband returned.” Nina asked Harold Large, “What does it mean, think you?-Not failure I should say! Possibly, he may not have found the ‘lost cities' but I should think he's found something important or surely he wouldn't have returned.” Yet he had returned with nothing. General Rondon released a gloating statement to the press that said, “Col. Fawcett's expedition was abandoned… in spite of all his pride as an explorer… He came back thin, naturally disappointed for having been forced to retreat before entering the hardest part of the Xingu.” Devastated, Fawcett made plans to return to the jungle with Holt, who was still under contract and whose services were all he could afford. The wife of the American vice-consul in Rio, who was a friend of the ornithologist's, sent Holt a letter beseeching him not to go:

You are a strong, able-bodied young man, so why do you… deliberately throw your life away as you will if you go back to Mato Grosso?… We all realize that you are deeply interested in and love science, but how much good is it going to do you or the world to have you go aimlessly into the depths of nowhere?… What about your Mother and sister? Don't they count for anything?… Someday one or both of them may need you and where will you be. You have no right to sacrifice your life just because a man you do not know wants you to. Many lives are lost for the betterment of mankind, it is true, but how is this wild goose chase to help or give anything to the world?

Still, Holt was determined to see the expedition through, and went to Rio to collect supplies. Fawcett, meanwhile, was turning over in his mind every aspect of Holt's performance: each complaint, each misstep, each error. He even began to suspect, though he had no evidence, that Holt was a Judas, sending information back to Dr. Rice or another rival. Fawcett dispatched a message to Holt that said, “Unfortunately we live and think in different worlds and can no more mix than oil and water… And as the objects of this journey with me come first and personal considerations last, I prefer to finish it alone than to risk results unnecessarily.”

Holt, dumbfounded, wrote in his diary, “After close association with Col. Fawcett for a period covering one year, I… find that the lesson most clearly impressed upon my mind is: Never again under any circumstances form any connections with any Englishman whatsoever.” He lamented that, instead of earning fame, he remained a “vagabond ornithologist-or perhaps ‘tramp birdskinner' would be nearer a true title.” He concluded, “As far as my biased observation goes [Fawcett] possesses only 3 qualities that I admire: Nerve, kindness to animals, and quick forgetful-ness of a row.”

Fawcett told a friend that he had fired another expedition companion, who was “convinced I am sure that I am a lunatic.”

Now, for the first time, the thought began to take hold: If only my son could come. Jack was strong and devoted. He would not complain like a pink-eyed weakling. He would not demand a large salary, or mutiny. And, most important, he believed in Z. “I longed for the day when my son would be old enough to work with me,” Fawcett wrote.

For the moment, though, Jack, still only eighteen, was not ready, and Fawcett had no one. The logical choice was to postpone the journey, but instead he sold half his military pension to pay for provisions-gambling what little private savings he had-and came up with a new plan. This time he would try to reach Z from the opposite direction, heading from east to west. Starting in Bahia and passing where he thought the bandeirante had discovered the city in 1753, he would walk hundreds of miles inland toward the jungle in Mato Grosso. The plan seemed mad. Even Fawcett conceded to Keltie that if he went alone “the prospects of returning are diminished.” Nevertheless, in August of 1921, he set out, unaccompanied. “Loneliness is not intolerable when enthusiasm for a quest fills the mind,” he wrote. Thirsty and hungry, delirious and deranged, he marched on and on. At one point, he looked out at cliffs in the distant horizon and thought he saw the shapes of a city… or was his mind unraveling? His supplies were exhausted, his legs spent. After three months in the wilderness and facing death, he had no choice but to retreat.

“I must return,” he vowed. “I shall return!”

18

картинка 20
A SCIENTIFIC OBSESSION

It's up to you, Jack,” Fawcett said.

The two were talking after Fawcett had come back from his 1921

expedition. While Fawcett had been away, Nina had moved the family from Jamaica to Los Angeles, where the Rimells had also gone and where Jack and Raleigh had been swept up in the romance of Hollywood, greasing their hair, growing Clark Gable mustaches, and hanging around Hollywood sets, in the hopes of landing roles. (Jack had met Mary Pickford and loaned her his cricket bat to use in the production of Little Lord Fauntleroy.) Fawcett had a proposition for his son. Colonel T. E. Lawrence-the celebrated desert spy and explorer better known as Lawrence of Arabia- had volunteered to go with Fawcett on his next journey in search of Z, but Fawcett was wary of choosing a companion with a powerful ego who was unaccustomed to the Amazon. As Fawcett wrote to a friend, “[Lawrence] may be keen upon S. American exploration but in the first place he probably requires a salary I cannot pay him and in the second place excellent work in the Near East does not infer the ability or willingness to hump a 60 lbs pack, live for a year upon the forest, suffer from legions of insects and accept the conditions which I would impose.” Fawcett told Jack that, instead of Lawrence, he could take part in the expedition. It would be one of the most difficult and dangerous expeditions in the history of exploration-the ultimate test, in Fawcett's words, “of faith, courage, and determination.”

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