The Lost City of Z

by David Grann

  He chose his party with equal care. He recruited two mechanics, who could repair all the equipment, and two veteran off-road drivers. He also enlisted Dr. Daniel Muñoz, an acclaimed forensic anthropologist who, in 1985, had helped to identify the remains of Josef Mengele, the Nazi fugitive, and who could help confirm the origins of any object they might find from Fawcett’s party: a belt buckle, a bone fragment, a bullet.

  Although Fawcett had warned that large expeditions have “only one and all come to grief,” the party soon grew to include sixteen men. Still, there was one more person who wanted to go: Lynch’s sixteen-year-old son, James, Jr. Athletic and more muscular than his father, with bushy brown hair and large brown eyes, he had gone on a previous expedition and acquitted himself well. And so Lynch agreed, like Fawcett, to take his son with him.

  The team assembled in Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso, along the southern edge of the Amazon basin. Lynch handed out T-shirts that he had made up with a picture of footprints leading into the jungle. In England, the Daily Mail published a story about the expedition under the headline “Are We About to Solve the Enduring Mystery of Colonel Percy Fawcett?” For days, the group drove through the Amazon basin, traversing unpaved roads scarred with ruts and brambles. The forest grew thicker, and James, Jr., pressed his face against the window. Wiping steam from the glass, he could see the leafy crowns of trees unfurling overhead, before breaking apart, as shafts of sunlight poured into the forest, the yellow wings of butterflies and macaws suddenly visible. Once, he spotted a six-foot snake, half-burrowed in mud, with a deep depression between its eyes. “Jararaca” his father said. It was a pit viper, one of the most venomous snakes in the Americas. (A jararaca bite will cause a person to bleed from the eyes and become, as a biologist put it, “a corpse piece by piece.”) Lynch swerved around the snake, while the roar of the engine sent other animals, including howler monkeys, scattering into the treetops; only the mosquitoes seemed to remain, hovering over the vehicles like sentries.

  After stopping several times to camp, the expedition followed the trail to a clearing along the Xingu River, where Lynch tried to get a reading on his GPS.

  “What is it?” one of his colleagues asked.

  Lynch stared at the coordinates on the screen. “We’re not far from where Fawcett was last seen,” he said.

  A net of vines and lianas covered the trails extending from the clearing, and Lynch decided that the expedition would have to proceed by boat. He instructed several members to turn back with some of the heaviest gear; once he found a place where a bush plane could land, he would radio in the coordinates, so that the equipment could be delivered by air.

  The remaining team members, including James, Jr., slipped the two boats into the water and began their journey down the Xingu. The currents carried them quickly, past spiny ferns and buriti palms, creepers and myrtles—an endless mesh that rose on either side of them. Shortly before sunset, Lynch was going around another bend, when he thought he spotted something on the distant bank. He lifted the brim of his hat. In a break amid the branches, he could see several pairs of eyes staring at him. He told his men to cut the engines; no one made a sound. As the boats drifted onto the shore, scraping against the sand, Lynch and his men leaped out. At the same time, Indians—naked, their ears pierced with dazzling macaw feathers— emerged from the forest. Eventually, a powerfully built man, his eyes encircled in black paint, stepped forward. According to some of the Indians who spoke broken Portuguese and served as translators, he was the chief of the Kuikuro tribe. Lynch told his men to get out their gifts, which included beads, candy, and matches. The chief seemed welcoming, and he granted the expedition permission to camp by the Kuikuro village and to land a propeller plane in a nearby clearing.

  That night, as James, Jr., tried to sleep, he wondered if Jack Fawcett had lain in a similar spot and seen such wondrous things. The sun woke him the next morning at dawn, and he poked his head in his father’s tent. “Happy birthday, Dad,” he said. Lynch had forgotten that it was his birthday. He was forty-two years old.

  Several Kuikuros invited Lynch and his son to a nearby lagoon later that day, where they bathed alongside hundred-pound turtles. Lynch heard the sound of a plane landing with the rest of his men and equipment. The expedition was finally coming together.

  Moments later, a Kuikuro came running down the path, yelling in his native language. The Kuikuros rushed out of the water. “What is it?” Lynch asked in Portuguese.

  “Trouble,” a Kuikuro replied.

  The Indians began to run toward the village, and Lynch and his son followed, branches ricocheting in their faces. When they arrived, a member of their expedition approached them. “What’s happening?” Lynch asked.

  “They’re surrounding our camp.”

  Lynch could see more than two dozen Indian men, presumably from neighboring tribes, rushing toward them. They, too, had heard the sound of the arriving plane. Many wore black and red paint slashed across their naked bodies. They carried bows with six-foot arrows, antique rifles, and spears. Five of Lynch’s men darted toward the plane. The pilot was still in the cockpit, and the five jumped into the cabin, though it was designed for only four passengers. They shouted for the pilot to take off, but he didn’t seem to realize what was happening. Then he looked out the window and saw several Indians hurrying toward him, aiming their bows and arrows. As the pilot started the engine, the Indians grabbed onto the wings, trying to keep the plane grounded. The pilot, concerned that the plane was dangerously heavy, threw whatever he could find out the window—clothes and papers, which twirled in the propellers’ thrust. The plane rumbled down the makeshift runway, bouncing and roaring and swerving between trees. Just before the wheels lifted off, the last of the Indians let go.

  Lynch watched the plane disappear, red dust from its wake swirling around him. A young Indian, whose body was covered in paint and who seemed to be leading the assault, stepped toward Lynch, waving a borduna, a four-foot-long club that warriors used to smash their enemies’ heads. He herded Lynch and the eleven remaining members of his team into small boats. “Where are you taking us?” Lynch asked.

  “You are our prisoners for life,” the young man responded.

  James, Jr., fingered the cross around his neck. Lynch had always believed that there was no adventure until, as he put it, “shit happens.” But this was something he had never anticipated. He had no backup plan, no experience to call upon. He didn’t even have a weapon.

  He squeezed his son’s hand. “Whatever happens,” Lynch whispered, “don’t do anything unless I tell you.”

  The boats turned off the major river and down a narrow stream. As they floated farther into the jungle, Lynch surveyed the surroundings—the crystal clear water filled with rainbow-colored fish, the increasingly dense thicket of vegetation. It was, he thought, the most beautiful place he had ever seen.

  THE SEARCH

  BEGINS

  Every quest, we are led to believe, has a romantic origin. Yet, even now, I can’t provide a good one for mine.

  Let me be clear: I am not an explorer or an adventurer. I don’t climb mountains or hunt. I don’t even like to camp. I stand less than five feet nine inches tall and am nearly forty years old, with a blossoming waistline and thinning black hair. I suffer from keratoconus—a degenerative eye condition that makes it hard for me to see at night. I have a terrible sense of direction and tend to forget where I am on the subway and miss my stop in Brooklyn. I like newspapers, take-out food, sports highlights (recorded on TiVo), and the air-conditioning on high. Given a choice each day between climbing the two flights of stairs to my apartment and riding the elevator, I invariably take the elevator.

  But when I’m working on a story things are different. Ever since I was young, I’ve been drawn to mystery and adventure tales, ones that had what Rider Haggard called “the grip.” The first stories I remember being told were about my grandfather Monya. In his seventies at the time, and sick with Parkinson’s disea
se, he would sit trembling on our porch in Westport, Connecticut, looking vacantly toward the horizon. My grandmother, meanwhile, would recount memories of his adventures. She told me that he had been a Russian furrier and a freelance National Geographic photographer who, in the 1920s, was one of the few Western cameramen allowed into various parts of China and Tibet. (Some relatives suspect that he was a spy, though we have never found any evidence to support such a theory.) My grandmother recalled how, not long before their wedding, Monya went to India to purchase some prized furs. Weeks went by without word from him. Finally, a crumpled envelope arrived in the mail. There was nothing inside but a smudged photograph: it showed Monya lying contorted and pale under a mosquito net, racked with malaria. He eventually returned, but, because he was still convalescing, the wedding took place at a hospital. “I knew then I was in for it,” my grandmother said. She told me that Monya became a professional motorcycle racer, and when I gave her a skeptical look she unwrapped a handkerchief, revealing one of his gold medals. Once, while in Afghanistan collecting furs, he was driving through the Khyber Pass on a motorcycle with a friend in a sidecar when his brakes failed. “As the motorcycle was spinning out of control, your grandfather said goodbye to his friend,” my grandmother recalled. “Then Monya spotted some men doing construction on the road; beside them was a big mound of dirt, and he steered right for it. Your grandfather and his friend were catapulted into it. They broke some bones, nothing worse. Of course, that never stopped your grandfather from riding again.”

  For me, the most amazing part of these adventures was the figure at the center of them. I had known my grandfather only as an old man who could barely walk. The more my grandmother told me about him, the hungrier I became for details that might help me understand him; still, there was an element about him that seemed to elude even my grandmother. “That’s just Monya,” she’d say, with a wave of her hand.

  When I became a reporter, I was drawn to stories that put you in “the grip.” In the 1990s, I worked as a congressional correspondent, but I kept wandering off my beat to investigate stories about con men, mobsters, and spies. While most of my articles seem unrelated, they typically have one common thread: obsession. They are about ordinary people driven to do extraordinary things—things that most of us would never dare—who get some germ of an idea in their heads that metastasizes until it consumes them.

  I have always thought that my interest in these people is merely professional: they provide the best copy. But at times I wonder whether I’m more similar to them than I care to believe. Reporting involves an endless quest to ferret out details, in the hopes of discovering some hidden truth. To my wife’s chagrin, when I work on stories, I tend to lose sight of everything else. I forget to pay bills or to shave. I don’t change my clothes as often as I should. I even take risks that I never would otherwise: crawling hundreds of feet beneath the streets of Manhattan with tunnel diggers known as sandhogs or riding in a skiff with a giant-squid hunter during a violent storm. After I returned from the boat trip, my mother said, “You know, you remind me of your grandfather.”

  In 2004, while researching a story on the mysterious death of a Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes expert, I stumbled upon a reference to Fawcett’s role in inspiring The Lost World. As I read more about him, I became intrigued by the fantastical notion of Z: that a sophisticated civilization with monumental architecture could have existed in the Amazon. Like others, I suspect, my only impression of the Amazon was of scattered tribes living in the Stone Age—a view that derived not only from adventure tales and Hollywood movies but also from scholarly accounts.

  Environmentalists have often portrayed the Amazon as a “virgin forest,” which, until recent incursions by loggers and trespassers, was all but unspoiled by human hands. Moreover, many archaeologists and geographers argue that conditions in the Amazon, like those in the Arctic, had made it impossible to develop the large populations necessary for a complex society, with divisions of labor and political hierarchies such as chiefdoms and kingdoms. Betty Meggers of the Smithsonian Institution is perhaps the most influential modern archaeologist of the Amazon. In 1971, she famously summed up the region as a “counterfeit paradise,” a place that, for all its fauna and flora, is inimical to human life. Rains and floods, as well as the pounding sun, leach vital nutrients from the soil and make large-scale agriculture impossible. In such a brutal landscape, she and other scientists contend, only small nomadic tribes could survive. Because the land had provided so little nutrition, Meggers wrote, even when tribes had managed to overcome attrition from starvation and diseases, they still had to come up with “cultural substitutes” to control their populations—including killing their own. Some tribes committed infanticide, abandoned their sick in the woods, or engaged in blood revenge and warfare. In the 1970s, Claudio Villas Boas, who was one of the great defenders of Amazonian Indians, told a reporter, “This is the jungle and to kill a deformed child—to abandon the man without family— can be essential for the survival of the tribe. It’s only now that the jungle is vanishing, and its laws are losing their meaning, that we are shocked.”

  As Charles Mann notes in his book 1491, the anthropologist Allan R. Holmberg helped to crystallize the popular and scientific view of Amazonian Indians as primitives. After studying members of the Sirionó tribe in Bolivia in the early 1940s, Holmberg described them as among “the most culturally backward peoples of the world,” a society so consumed by the quest for food that it had developed no art, religion, clothes, domesticated animals, solid shelter, commerce, roads, or even the ability to count beyond three. “No records of time are kept,” Holmberg said, “and no type of calendar exists.” The Sirionó didn’t even have a “concept of romantic” love. They were, he concluded, “man in the raw state of nature.” According to Meggers, a more sophisticated civilization from the Andes had migrated down to Marajó Island, at the mouth of the Amazon, only to slowly unravel and die out. For civilization, the Amazon was, in short, a death trap.

  While looking into Z, I discovered that a group of revisionist anthropologists and archaeologists have increasingly begun to challenge these long-standing views, believing that an advanced civilization could have in fact emerged in the Amazon. In essence, they argue that the traditionalists have underestimated the power of cultures and societies to transform and transcend their natural environments, much the way humans are now creating stations in outer space and growing crops in the Israeli desert. Some contend that the traditionalists’ ideas still carry a taint of the racist views of Native Americans, which had once infused earlier reductive theories of environmental determinism. The traditionalists, in turn, charge that the revisionists are an example of political correctness run amok, and that they perpetuate a long history of projecting onto the Amazon an imaginary landscape, a fantasy of the Western mind. At stake in the debate is a fundamental understanding of human nature and the ancient world, and the feud has pitted scholars viciously against each other. When I called Meggers at the Smithsonian Institution, she dismissed the possibility of anyone discovering a lost civilization in the Amazon. Too many archaeologists, she said, are “still chasing El Dorado.”

  One acclaimed archaeologist from the University of Florida, in particular, disputes the conventional interpretation of the Amazon as a counterfeit paradise. His name is Michael Heckenberger, and he works in the Xingu region where Fawcett is believed to have vanished. Several anthropologists told me that he was the person I should talk to, but warned that he rarely emerges from the jungle and avoids any distractions from his work. James Petersen, who in 2005 was head of the anthropology department at the University of Vermont and had trained Heckenberger, told me, “Mike is absolutely brilliant and on the cutting edge of archaeology in the Amazon, but I’m afraid you’re barking up the wrong tree. Look, the guy was the best man at my wedding and I can’t get him to respond to any of my communications.”

  With the University of Florida’s help, I eventually succeeded in reaching Heckenbe
rger on his satellite phone. Through static and what sounded like the jungle in the background, he said that he was going to be staying in the Kuikuro village in the Xingu and, to my surprise, would be willing to meet me if I made it that far. Only later, as I began to piece together more of the story of Z, did I discover that this was the very place where James Lynch and his men had been kidnapped.

  . . .

  “YOU’RE GOING TO the Amazon to try to find someone who disappeared two hundred years ago?” my wife, Kyra, asked. It was a January night in 2005, and she was standing in the kitchen of our apartment, serving cold sesame noodles from Hunan Delight.

  “It was only eighty years ago.”

  “So you’re going to look for someone who vanished eighty years ago?”

  “That’s the basic idea.”

  “How will you even know where to look?”

  “I haven’t quite figured that part out yet.” My wife, who is a producer at 60 Minutes and notably sensible, put the plates on the table, waiting for me to elaborate. “It’s not like I’ll be the first to go,” I added. “Hundreds of others have done it.”

  “And what happened to them?”

  I took a bite of the noodles, hesitating. “Many of them disappeared.”

  She looked at me for a long moment. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  I promised her that I would not rush into the Xingu, at least until I knew where to begin my route. Most recent expeditions had relied on the coordinates for Dead Horse Camp contained in Exploration Fawcett, but, given the colonel’s elaborate subterfuge, it seemed strange that the camp would be that easy to find. While Fawcett had taken meticulous notes about his expeditions, his most sensitive papers were believed to have been either lost or kept private by his family. Some of Fawcett’s correspondence and the diaries of members of his expeditions, however, had ended up in British archives. And so, before plunging into the jungle, I set out to England to see if I could uncover more about Fawcett’s zealously guarded route and the man who, in 1925, had seemingly vanished from the earth.