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

For several days, the explorers remained there, eating and resting. Galvão was curious about what had lured the Englishmen into such wilderness. As Fawcett described his vision of Z, he removed from his belongings a strange object covered in cloth. He carefully unwrapped it, revealing the stone idol Haggard had given to him. He carried it with him like a talisman.

The three Englishmen were soon on their way again, heading east, toward Bakairí Post, where in 1920 the Brazilian government had set up a garrison-“the last point of civilization,” as the settlers referred to it. Occasionally, the forest opened up, and they could see the blinding sun and blue-tinged mountains in the distance. The trail became more difficult, and the men descended steep, mud-slicked gorges and traversed rock-strewn rapids. One river was too dangerous for the animals to swim across with the cargo. Fawcett noticed a canoe, abandoned, on the opposite bank and said that the expedition could use it to transport the gear, but that someone would need to swim over and get it-a feat involving, as Fawcett put it, “considerable danger, being made worse by a sudden violent thunderstorm.”

Jack volunteered and began to strip. Though he later admitted that he was “scared stiff,” he checked his body for cuts that might attract piranhas and dived in, thrashing his arms and legs as the currents tossed him about. When he emerged on the opposite bank, he climbed in the canoe and paddled back across-his father greeting him proudly.

A month after the explorers left Cuiabá, and after what Fawcett described as “a test of patience and endurance for the greater trials” ahead, the men arrived at Bakairí Post. The settlement consisted of about twenty ramshackle huts, cordoned off by barbed wire, to protect against aggressive tribes. (Three years later, another explorer described the outpost as “a pinprick on the map: isolated, desolate, primitive and God forsaken.”) The Bakairí tribe was one of the first in the region that the government had tried to “acculturate,” and Fawcett was appalled by what he called “the Brazilian methods of civilizing the Indian tribes.” In a letter to one of his sponsors in the United States, he noted, “The Bakairís have been dying out ever since they became civilized. There are only about 150 of them.” He went on, “They have in part been brought here to plant rice, manioc… which is sent to Cuiabá, where it fetches, at present, high prices. The Bakairís are not paid, are raggedly clothed, mainly in khaki govt. uniforms, and there is a general squalor and lack of hygiene which is making the whole of them sick.”

Fawcett was informed that a Bakairí girl had recently fallen ill. He often tried to treat the natives with his medical kit, but, unlike Dr. Rice, his knowledge was limited, and there was nothing he could do to save her. “They say the Bacairys are dying off on account of fetish [witchcraft], for there is a fetish man in the village who hates them,” Jack wrote. “Only yesterday a little girl died-of fetish, they say!”

The Brazilian in charge of the post, Valdemira, put the explorers up in the newly constructed schoolhouse. The men soaked themselves in the river, washing away the grime and sweat. “We have all clipped our beards, and feel better without them,” Jack said.

Members of other remote tribes occasionally visited Bakairí Post to obtain goods, and Jack and Raleigh soon saw something that astonished them: “about eight wild Indians, absolutely stark naked,” as Jack wrote to his mother. The Indians carried seven-foot-long bows with six-foot arrows. “To Jack's great delight we have seen the first of the wild Indians here-naked savages from the Xingu,” Fawcett wrote Nina.

Jack and Raleigh hurried out to meet them. “We gave them some guava cheese,” Jack wrote, and “they liked it immensely.”

Jack tried to conduct a rudimentary autopsis. “They are small people, about five feet two inches in height, and very well built,” he wrote of the Indians. “They eat only fish and vegetables-never meat. One woman had a very fine necklace of tiny discs cut from snail shells, which must have required tremendous patience to make.”

Raleigh, whom Fawcett had designated as the expedition's photographer, set up a camera and took pictures of the Indians. In one shot, Jack stood beside them, to demonstrate “the comparative sizes;” the Indians came up to his shoulders.

In the evening, the three explorers went to the mud hut where the Indians were staying. The only light inside was from a fire, and the air was filled with smoke. Fawcett unpacked a ukulele and Jack took out a piccolo that they had brought from England. (Fawcett told Nina that “music was a great comfort ‘in the wilds,' and might even save a solitary man from insanity.”) As the Indians gathered around them, Jack and Fawcett played a concert late into the night, the sounds wafting through the village.

On May 19, a fresh, cool day, Jack woke up exhilarated-it was his twenty-second birthday. “I have never felt so well,” he wrote to his mother. For the occasion, Fawcett dropped his prohibition against liquor, and the three explorers celebrated with a bottle of Brazilian-made alcohol. The next morning, they prepared the equipment and the pack animals. To the north of the post, the men could see several imposing mountains and the jungle. It was, Jack wrote, “absolutely unexplored country.”

The expedition headed straight for terra incognita. Before them were no clear paths, and little light filtered through the canopy. They struggled to see not just in front of them but above them, where most predators lurked. The men's feet sank in mud holes. Their hands burned from wielding machetes. Their skin bled from mosquitoes. Even Fawcett confessed to Nina, “Years tell, in spite of the spirit of enthusiasm.”

Although Raleigh's foot had healed, his other one became infected, and when he removed his sock a large patch of skin peeled off. He seemed to be unraveling; he had already suffered from jaundice, his arm was swollen, and he felt, as he put it, “bilious.”

Like his father, Jack was prone to contempt for others' frailty, and complained to his mother that his friend was unable to share his burden of work-he rode on a horse, with his shoe off-and that he was always scared and sullen.

The jungle widened the fissures that had been evident since Raleigh's romance on the boat. Raleigh, overwhelmed by the insects, the heat, and the pain in his foot, lost interest in “the Quest.” He no longer thought about returning as a hero: all he wanted, he muttered, was to open a small business and to settle down with a family. (“The Fawcetts can have all my share of the notoriety and be welcome to it!” he wrote his brother.) When Jack talked of the archaeological importance of Z, Raleigh shrugged and said, “That's too deep for me.”

“I wish [Raleigh] had more brains, as I cannot discuss any of this with him as he knows nothing of anything,” Jack wrote. “We can only converse about Los Angeles or Seaton. What he will do during a year at ‘Z' I don't know.”

“I wish to hell you were here,” Raleigh told his brother, adding, “You know there is a saying which I believe is true: ‘Two's company- three's none.' It shows itself quite often with me now!” Jack and Fawcett, he said, maintained a “sense of inferiority for others. Consequently at times I feel very ‘out of everything.' Of course I do not outwardly show it… but still, as I have said before, I feel ‘awful lonesome' for real friendship.”

After nine days, the explorers hacked their way to Dead Horse Camp, where the men could still see the “white bones” from Fawcett's old pack animal. The men were approaching the territory of the warlike Suyás and Kayapós. An Indian once described to a reporter a Kayapó ambush of his tribe. He and a few other villagers, the reporter wrote, fled across a river and “witnessed throughout the night the macabre dance of their en emies around their slaughtered brothers.” For three days, the invaders remained, playing wooden flutes and dancing among the corpses. After the Kayapós finally departed, the few villagers who had escaped across the river rushed back to their settlement: not a single person was alive. “The women, who they thought would have been spared, lay face up, their lifeless bodies in an advanced state of putrefaction, their legs spread apart by wooden struts forced between the knees.” In a dispatch, Fawcett described the Kayapós as an aggressive “lot of stick-throwers who cut off and kill wandering indi viduals… Their only weapon is a short club like a policeman's billy”-which, he added, they deploy very skillfully.