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

Jack didn't hesitate. “I want to go with you,” he said.

Nina, who was present during these discussions, raised no objections. Partly, she was confident that Fawcett's seemingly superhuman powers would protect their son, and, partly, she believed that Jack, as his father's natural heir, would possess similar abilities. Yet her motivation seems to have gone deeper than that: to doubt her husband after so many years of sacrifice was to doubt her own life's work. Indeed, she needed Z just as much as he did. And even though Jack had no exploring experience and the expedition entailed extraordinary danger, she never considered, as she later told a reporter, trying to “hold” her son back.

Of course, Raleigh had to come, too. Jack said that he could not do the most important thing in his life without him.

Raleigh's mother, Elsie, was reluctant to permit her youngest son- her “boy,” as she called him-to join such a dangerous venture. But Raleigh was insistent. His movie aspirations had foundered, and he was toiling in menial jobs in the lumber industry. As he told his older brother, Roger, he felt “unsatisfied and unsettled.” This was his opportunity not only to earn a “pile of dough” but also to make good with his life.

Fawcett informed the RGS and others that he now had two ideal companions (“both strong as horses and keen as mustard”) and tried once more to secure funding. “I can only say I am a Founder's Medallist… and therefore deserving of confidence,” he maintained. Yet the failure of his previous expedition-even though it was only the first in an illustrious career-had given his critics further ammunition. And with no backers, and after exhausting what little savings he had on his previous expedition, he soon found himself bankrupt, like his father. In September 1921, unable to sustain the cost of living in California, he was forced to uproot his family again and return to Stoke Canon, England, where he rented an old, ramshackle house without running water or electricity. “All water has to be pumped and huge logs have to be sawn into blocks-all additional labour,” Nina wrote to Large. The work was grueling. “I broke down utterly about 5 weeks ago and was very seriously ill,” Nina said. Part of her wanted to run away and escape all the sacrifices and burdens-but, she said, “the family needed me.”

“The situation is difficult,” Fawcett admitted to Large. “One learns little from a smooth life, but I do not like roping others into the difficulties which have dogged me so persistently… It is not that I want luxuries. I care little about such things-but I hate inactivity.”

He couldn't afford to send Jack to university, and Brian and Joan stopped attending school, in order to help with chores and do odd jobs to make money. They hawked photographs and paintings, while Fawcett sold off family possessions and heirlooms. “My man actually suggested a few days ago that he thought it would be a wise thing to sell those old Spanish chairs, if… they would fetch a good price,” Nina wrote Large. By 1923, Fawcett had become so poor that he could not pay his annual three-pound membership dues to the RGS. “I wish you would give me the benefit of your advice as to whether I could resign… without something in the nature of a scandal for a Founder's Medallist,” Fawcett wrote Keltie. “The fact is that the forced inertia and family… going to California have left me on the rocks. I had hoped to weather them, but such hopes seem to wilt away, and I do not think I can hang on.” He added, “It is rather a fall from dreams.”

Although he scraped up enough money to pay another year of dues, Nina was concerned about her husband. “P.H.F. was in the lowest depths of despair,” she confided to Large.

“My father's impatience to start off on his last trip was tearing at him with ever increasing force,” Brian later recalled. “From reticent he became almost surly.”

Fawcett began to lash out at the scientific establishment, which he felt had turned its back on him. He told a friend, “Archeological and ethnological science is founded upon the sands of speculation, and we know what may happen to houses so constructed.” He denounced his enemies at the RGS and detected “treachery” everywhere. He complained about “the money wasted on these useless Antarctic expeditions,” about the “men of science” who had “in their day pooh-poohed the existence of the Americas-and, later, the idea of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Troy,” about how “all the skepticism in Christendom won't budge me an inch” from believing in Z, about how he was “going to see it through somehow or other even if I have to wait another decade.”

He increasingly surrounded himself with spiritualists who not only confirmed but embroidered on his own vision of Z. One seer told him: “The valley and city are full of jewels, spiritual jewels, but also immense wealth of real jewels.” Fawcett published essays in journals, such as the Occult Review, in which he spoke of his spiritual quest and “the treasures of the invisible World.”

Another South American explorer and RGS fellow said that many people thought that Fawcett had become “a trifle unbalanced.” Some called him a “scientific maniac.”

In the spiritualist magazine Light, Fawcett contributed an essay titled “Obsession.” Without mentioning his own idée fixe, he described how “mental storms” could consume a person with “fearful torture.” “Undoubtedly obsession is the diagnosis of many cases of madness,” he concluded.

Brooding day and night, Fawcett hatched various half-baked schemes- to mine nitrate in Brazil, to prospect for oil in California-in order to raise money for his expedition. “The Mining Syndicate fell through” because it was “a nest of crooks,” Fawcett wrote Large in October 1923.

Jack told another family friend, “It seemed as if some evil genius was trying to put every possible obstacle in our way.”

Still, Jack continued to train in case the money suddenly came through. Without Raleigh's lighthearted influence, he adopted his father's asceticism, shunning meat and liquor. “A short time ago I had the idea that I must set myself a certain immensely difficult trial requiring a tremendous spiritual effort,” he wrote Esther Windust, a family friend who was a Theosophist. “By great effort I have been successful and have already felt the benefit.” He added, “I enjoy immensely the life and teachings of Buddha [which] came somewhat as a surprise to me in their absolute adherence to my own ideas. You notice his dislike of creeds and dogma.” A visitor to the house was struck by Jack's presence: “The capacity for love- and the slight ascetic restraint-makes one think of the knights of the Grail.”

Fawcett, meanwhile, tried to hold out faith that sooner or later “the Gods will accept me for service.” At one point, his friend Rider Haggard told Fawcett that he had something important he wanted to give the explorer. It was a stone idol, about ten inches tall with almond-shaped eyes and hieroglyphics carved on its chest. Haggard, who had kept it by his desk while writing the 1919 book When the World Shook, said that he had received the statue from someone in Brazil who believed it came from the Indians in the interior. Fawcett took the idol with him and had it examined by several museum experts. Most suspected it was fake, but Fawcett, in his desperation, even showed it to a psychic, and concluded that it might be a relic of Z.

In the spring of 1924, Fawcett learned that Dr. Rice, drawing on his bottomless bank account, was mounting one of the more extraordinary expeditions ever assembled. He had compiled a team that reflected the new demand for specialization. It included experts in botany, zoology, topography, astronomy, geography, and medicine, as well as one of the world's most distinguished anthropologists, Dr. Theodor Koch-Grünberg, and Silvino Santos, considered the first cinematographer of the Amazon. More breathtaking was the expedition's arsenal of equipment. There was the Eleanor II, along with another elegant vessel; and a new wireless radio system, this one able not only to receive signals but also to send them. These objects, however, were not what had created the greatest stir. As the New York Times reported, the doctor had with him a 160-horsepower, six-cylinder, three-person oak-propeller hydroplane with a complete outfit of aerial cameras.