The Lost City of Z

by David Grann

  BURIED TREASURE

  Percy Harrison Fawcett had rarely, if ever, felt so alive.

  It was 1888, and he was a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant in the Royal Artillery. He had just received a month’s leave from his garrison in the British colony of Ceylon and was decked out in a crisp white uniform with gold buttons and a spiked helmet strapped under his chin. Even with a rifle and a sword, though, he looked like a boy—“the callowest” of young officers, as he called himself.

  He went into his bungalow at Fort Frederick, which overlooked the shimmering blue harbor in Trincomalee. Fawcett, who was an inveterate dog lover, shared his room with seven fox terriers, which, in those days, often followed an officer into battle. He searched among the local artifacts cluttering his quarters for a letter he had stashed. There it was, with strange curling characters scrawled across the front in sepia ink. Fawcett had received the note from a colonial administrator, who had been given it by a village headman for whom he had done a favor. As Fawcett later wrote in his journal, a message, in English, was attached to the mysterious script and said that in the city of Badulla, in the interior of the island, was a plain covered at one end with rocks. In Sinhalese, the spot was sometimes called Galla-pita-Galla—“Rock upon Rock.” The message went on:

  Beneath these rocks is a cave, once easy to enter, but now difficult of approach as the entrance is obscured by stones, jungle and long grass. Leopards are sometimes found there. In that cave is a treasure . . . [of] uncut jewels and gold to an extent greater than that possessed of many kings.

  Although Ceylon (today Sri Lanka) was renowned as “the jewel box of the Indian Ocean,” the colonial administrator had placed little credence in such an extravagant tale and passed the documents to Fawcett, who he thought might find them interesting. Fawcett had no idea what to make of them—they might well be poppycock. But, unlike most of the aristocratic officer corps, he had little money. “As an impecunious Artillery lieutenant,” he wrote, “the idea of treasure was too attractive to abandon.” It was also a chance to escape from the base and its white ruling caste, which mirrored upper-class English society—a society that, beneath its veneer of social respectability, had always contained for Fawcett a somewhat Dickensian horror.

  His father, Captain Edward Boyd Fawcett, was a Victorian aristocrat who had been a member of the Prince of Wales’s inner circle and one of the empire’s great batsmen in cricket. But as a young man he had degenerated into alcoholism—his nickname was Bulb, because his nose had become so bulbous from liquor—and, in addition to philandering, he squandered the family’s wealth. Years later, a relative, straining to describe him in the best light, wrote that Captain Fawcett “possessed great abilities which found no true application—a good man gone wrong . . . A Balliol scholar and fine athlete . . . yachtsman, charmer and wit, equerry to the Prince of Wales (later to succeed Queen Victoria as Edward VII), he dissipated two substantial fortunes at court, neglected his wife and children . . . and, in consequence of his dissolute ways and addiction to drink at the end of his short life, died of consumption aged forty-five.”

  Percy’s mother, Myra Elizabeth, provided little refuge from this “disturbed” environment. “Her unhappy married life caused her much frustration and embitterment, inclining her to caprice and injustice, particularly towards her children,” the family member wrote. Percy later confided to Conan Doyle, with whom he corresponded, that his mother was all but “hateful.” Still, Percy tried to protect her reputation, along with his father’s, by alluding to them only obliquely in Exploration Fawcett: “Perhaps it was all for the best that my childhood . . . was so devoid of parental affection that it turned me in upon myself.”

  With what money they had left, Fawcett’s parents sent him to Britain’s elite public schools—including Westminster—which were notorious for their harsh methods. Though Fawcett insisted that his frequent canings “did nothing to alter my outlook,” he was forced to conform to the Victorian notion of a gentleman. Dress was considered an unmistakable index of character, and he often wore a black frock coat and a waistcoat and, on formal occasions, tails and a top hat; immaculate gloves, prepared with stretcher and powder machines, were so essential that some men went through six pairs in a day. Years later, Fawcett complained that “the memorable horror of [such garments] still lingered from drab days at Westminster School.”

  Reclusive, combative, and hypersensitive, Fawcett had to learn to converse about works of art (though never to flaunt his knowledge), to waltz without reversing himself, and to be unerringly proper in the presence of the opposite sex. Victorian society, fearful that industrialization was eroding Christian values, was obsessed with mastery over bodily instincts. There were crusades against obscene literature and “masturbatory disease,” and abstinence pamphlets disseminated in the countryside instructing mothers to “keep a watchful eye on the hayfields.” Doctors recommended “spiked penile rings” to restrain uncontrolled urges. Such fervor contributed to Fawcett’s view of life as a never-ending war against the physical forces surrounding him. In later writings, he warned of “craving for sensual excitement” and “vices and desires” that are too often “concealed.”

  Gentlemanliness, though, was about more than propriety. Fawcett was expected to be, as one historian wrote of the Victorian gentleman, “a natural leader of men . . . fearless in war.” Sports were considered the ultimate training for young men who would soon prove their mettle on distant battlefields. Fawcett became, like his father, a top-notch cricket player. Local newspaper accounts repeatedly hailed his “brilliant” play. Tall and lean, with remarkable hand-eye coordination, he was a natural athlete, but spectators noticed an almost maniacal determination about his style of play. One observer said that Fawcett invariably showed the bowlers that “it takes something more than the ordinary to dislodge him when once set.” When he took up rugby and boxing, he displayed the same stubborn ferocity; in one rugby match, he plowed through his opponents, even after his front teeth had been knocked out.

  Already uncommonly tough, Fawcett was made even more so when he was dispatched, at the age of seventeen, to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, or “the Shop,” as it was known. Although Fawcett had no desire to be a soldier, his mother apparently forced him to go because she liked the splendid uniforms. The coldness of the Shop supplanted the coldness of his home. “Snookers”—new cadets like Fawcett—underwent hours of drills, and if they violated the code of a “gentleman cadet” they were flogged. Older cadets often made the younger ones “look out for squalls,” which meant sticking their naked arms and legs out an open window in the cold for hours. Or snookers were ordered to stand on two stacked stools balanced on top of a table as the bottom legs were kicked out from under them. Or their skin was pressed against a scalding poker. “The fashion of torture was often ingenious, and sometimes worthy of the most savage races,” a historian of the academy stated.

  By the time Fawcett graduated, almost two years later, he had been taught, as a contemporary put it, “to regard the risk of death as the most piquant sauce to life.” More important, he was trained to be an apostle of Western civilization: to go forth and convert the world to capitalism and Christianity, to transform pastures into plantations and huts into hotels, to introduce to those living in the Stone Age the marvels of the steam engine and locomotive, and to ensure that the sun never set on the British Empire.

  NOW, AS FAWCETT slipped away from the secluded base in Ceylon with his treasure map in hand, he suddenly found himself amid verdant forests and crystalline beaches and mountains, and people dressed in colors that he had never seen before, not funereal blacks and whites like in London, but purples and yellows and rubies, all flashing and radiating and pulsating—a vista so astonishing that even the arch cynic Mark Twain, who visited the island around the same time period, remarked, “Dear me, it is beautiful!”

  Fawcett hopped a ride on a cramped sailing vessel that, alongside the British battleships, was only a speck of wood and ca
nvas. As the boat left the inlet, he could see Fort Frederick high on the bluff, its outer wall pocked with cannon holes from the late eighteenth century, when the British had tried to seize the promontory from the Dutch, who had previously seized it from the Portuguese. After traveling some eighty miles down the country’s eastern seaboard, the boat pulled in to port at Batticaloa, where canoes circulated around incoming ships. Sinhalese traders, shouting above the splash of the oars, would offer precious stones, especially to a sahib who, wearing a top hat and with a fob watch dangling from his vest, no doubt had pockets filled with sterling. Upon disembarking, Fawcett would have been surrounded by more merchants: some Sinhalese, some Tamils, some Muslims, all crowded in the bazaar, hawking fresh produce. The air was suffused with the aroma of dried tea leaves, the sweet scent of vanilla and cacao, and something more pungent—dried fish, only not with the usual rancid odor of the sea but laden with curry. And there were people: astrologers, peddlers, dhobis, jaggery sellers, goldsmiths, tom-tom beaters, and beggars. To reach Badulla, about a hundred miles inland, Fawcett took a bullock cart, which rattled and groaned as the driver’s whip lashed against the bull’s flanks, prodding the beast up the mountain road, past rice fields and tea plantations. In Badulla, Fawcett asked a British plantation owner if he had heard of a place called Galla-pita-Galla.

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything,” Fawcett recalled him saying. “There’s a ruin up there they call the ‘King’s Bath,’ which may once have been a tank [reservoir] or something, but as for rocks—why, dammit, it’s all rocks!” He recommended that Fawcett talk to a local headman named Jumna Das, a descendant of the Kandyan kings who ruled the country until 1815. “If anyone can tell you where Galla-pita-Galla is, it’s him,” the Englishman said.

  That evening, Fawcett found Jumna Das, who was tall and elderly, with an elegant white beard. Das explained that the treasure of the Kandyan kings was rumored to have been buried in this region. There was no doubt, Das went on, that archaeological remains and mineral deposits lay around the foothills to the southeast of Badulla, perhaps near Galla-pita-Galla.

  Fawcett was unable to locate the treasure, but the prospect of the jewels still glimmered in his mind. “Did the hound find its greatest pleasure in the chase or in the killing of its quarry?” he wondered. Later, he set out again with a map. This time, with the help of a team of hired laborers, he discovered a spot that seemed to resemble the cave described in the note. For hours, the men dug as mounds of earth formed around them, but all they uncovered were shards of pottery and a white cobra, which sent the workers scattering in terror.

  Fawcett, despite his failure, relished his flight from everything he knew. “Ceylon is a very old country, and ancient peoples had more wisdom than we of today know,” Das told Fawcett.

  That spring, after reluctantly returning to Fort Frederick, Fawcett learned that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a nephew of the Austro-Hungarian emperor, was planning to visit Ceylon. A gala party was announced in Ferdinand’s honor, and many of the ruling elite, including Fawcett, turned out. The men wore long black dress coats and white silk cravats, the women billowing bustle skirts, with corsets pulled so tight they could barely breathe. Fawcett, who would have worn his most ceremonial dress, was a commanding and charismatic presence.

  “He obviously did exert some fascination on women,” a relative observed. Once, at a charity event, a reporter noted that “the way the ladies obeyed him was a sight for a king.” Fawcett did not meet Ferdinand, but he spotted a more alluring figure, a girl who seemed no more than seventeen or eighteen, her skin pale, her long brown hair pinned atop her head, highlighting her exquisite features. Her name was Nina Agnes Paterson, and she was the daughter of a colonial magistrate.

  Although Fawcett never acknowledged it, he must have felt some of the desires that so terrified him. (Among his papers he had kept a fortuneteller’s warning: “Your greatest dangers come through women, who are greatly attracted to you, and to whom you are greatly attracted, yet they more often bring you sorrow and boundless troubles than anything else.”) Not permitted by custom to approach Nina and ask her to dance, he had to find someone to officially present him, which he did.

  Despite being bubbly and flighty, Nina was highly cultured. She spoke German and French, and had been tutored in geography, religious studies, and Shakespeare. She also shared some of Fawcett’s brashness (she advocated women’s rights) and independent curiosity (she liked to explore the island and read Buddhist texts).

  The next day Fawcett wrote to his mother to tell her that he had met the ideal woman, “the only one I want to marry.” Nina lived with her family on the opposite end of the island, in Galle, in a large house filled with servants, and Fawcett made pilgrimages to court her. He began to call her “Cheeky,” in part, one family member said, because “she always had to have the last word;” she, in turn, called him “Puggy,” because of his tenacity. “I was very happy and I had nothing but admiration for Percy’s character: an austere, serious and generous man,” Nina later told a reporter.

  On October 29, 1890, two years after they met, Fawcett proposed. “My life would have no meaning without you,” he told her. Nina agreed immediately, and her family held a party to celebrate. But, according to relatives, some members of Fawcett’s family opposed the engagement and lied to Fawcett, telling him that Nina was not the lady he thought she was—in other words, that she was not a virgin. It is unclear why the family objected to the marriage and leveled such an allegation, but Fawcett’s mother appears to have been at the center of the machinations. In a letter years later to Conan Doyle, Fawcett implied that his mother had been “a silly old thing and an ugly old thing for being so hateful” to Nina, and that she had “a good deal to make up for.” At the time, though, Fawcett’s fury was unleashed not at his mother but at Nina. He wrote her a letter, saying, “You are not the pure young girl I thought you to be.” He then terminated their engagement.

  For years, they had no more contact. Fawcett remained at the fort, where, high on the cliffs, he could see a pillar dedicated to a Dutch maiden who, in 1687, had leaped to her death after her fiancé deserted her. Nina, meanwhile, returned to Great Britain. “It took me a long time to recover from this blow,” she later told a reporter, though concealing the true reason for Fawcett’s decision. Eventually, she met a captain in the Army named Herbert Christie Prichard, who was either unaware of the charge against her or unwilling to cast her out. In the summer of 1897, the two wed. But five months later he collapsed from a cerebral embolism. As Nina put it, “Destiny cruelly struck me again for the second time.” Moments before he died, Prichard reputedly told her, “Go . . . and marry Fawcett! He is the real man for you.” By then, Fawcett had discovered his family’s deception and, according to one relative, wrote to Nina and “begged her to take him back.”

  “I thought I had no love left for him,” Nina confessed. “I thought that he had killed the passion I had for him with his brutish behavior.” But, when they met again, she could not bring herself to rebuff him: “We looked at each other and, invincibly this time, happiness jumped all over us. We had found each other again!”

  On January 31, 1901, nine days after Queen Victoria died, ending a reign that lasted almost sixty-four years, Nina Paterson and Percy Harrison Fawcett were finally married, and eventually settled at the military garrison in Ceylon. In May 1903, their first child, Jack, was born. He looked like his father, only with his mother’s fairer skin and finer features. “A particularly beautiful boy,” Fawcett wrote. Jack seemed preternaturally gifted, at least to his parents. “He ran about at seven months old and talked freely at a year old,” Fawcett boasted. “He was and is, physically and intellectually, far ahead.”

  Although Ceylon had become for his wife and son “an earthly paradise,” Fawcett began to chafe at the confines of Victorian society. He was too much of a loner, too ambitious and headstrong (“audacious to the point of rashness,” as one observer put it), too intellectually curious to
fit within the officer corps. While his wife had dispelled some of his moodiness, he remained, as he put it, a “lone wolf,” determined to “seek paths of my own rather than take the well-trodden ways.”

  These paths led him to one of the most unconventional figures to emerge in the Victorian era: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, or, as she was usually called, Madame Blavatsky. For a moment during the late nineteenth century, Blavatsky, who claimed to be psychic, seemed on the threshold of founding a lasting religious movement. Marion Meade, one of her most dispassionate biographers, wrote that during her lifetime people across the globe furiously debated whether she was “a genius, a consummate fraud, or simply a lunatic. By that time, an excellent case could have been made for any of the three.” Born in Russia in 1831, Blavatsky was short and fat, with bulging eyes and folds of skin falling from her multiple chins. Her face was so broad that some people suspected she was a man. She professed to be a virgin (in fact, she had two husbands and an illegitimate son) and an apostle of asceticism (she smoked up to two hundred cigarettes a day and swore like a soldier). Meade wrote, “She weighed more than other people, ate more, smoked more, swore more, and visualized heaven and earth in terms that dwarfed any previous conception.” The poet William Butler Yeats, who fell under her spell, described her as “the most human person alive.”

  As she traveled to America and Europe in the 1870s and 1880s, she gathered followers who were mesmerized by her odd charms and Gothic appetites and, what’s more, by her powers to seemingly levitate objects and speak with the dead. The rise of science in the nineteenth century had had a paradoxical effect: while it undermined faith in Christianity and the literal word of the Bible, it also created an enormous void for someone to explain the mysteries of the universe that lay beyond microbes and evolution and capitalist greed. George Bernard Shaw wrote that perhaps never be fore had so many people been “addicted to table-rapping, materialization séances, clairvoyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing and the like.”