The Lost City of Z

by David Grann

  Before an arrest party was dispatched, further inquiries revealed that the man was none other than Winston Churchill, who had volunteered to command a battalion on the western front after being forced to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty in the wake of the disastrous invasion of Gallipoli. While visiting the trenches south of Fawcett’s position, Churchill wrote, “Filth & rubbish everywhere, graves built into the defences & scattered about promiscuously, feet & clothing breaking through the soil, water & muck on all sides; & about this scene in the dazzling moonlight troops of enormous bats creep & glide, to the unceasing accompaniment of rifles & machine guns & the venomous whining & whirring of the bullets which pass overhead.”

  Fawcett, who was accustomed to inhuman conditions, was superb at holding his position, and in January 1916 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and put in command of a brigade of more than seven hundred men. Nina kept Keltie and the Royal Geographical Society apprised of his activities. In a letter dated March 2, 1916, she wrote, “He is very well in spite of 3 months constantly under shell fire.” Several weeks later, she said that he was overseeing nine batteries, far more than constituted a typical brigade. “So you can imagine how hard worked he is,” she said, adding, “Of course I am glad he has an opportunity to use his powers of organization and leadership for it all helps in the struggle for victory.” Nina was not the only one who touted his abilities. He was repeatedly cited in dispatches for his “gallant” and “distinguished” services under fire.

  Even in the trenches, Fawcett tried to keep informed of events in the Amazon. He learned of expeditions being led by anthropologists and explorers from America, which was not yet engaged in the war, and these reports only intensified his fear that someone would discover Z before he did. In a letter to his old teaching mentor Reeves, he confided, “If you only knew what these expeditions cost in physical strain, you would, I feel sure, appreciate what a lot it means to me that I shall have the completion of the work.”

  He had reason to fret, in particular, about Dr. Rice. To Fawcett’s shock, the RGS had, in 1914, presented Dr. Rice with a gold medal for his “meritorious work on the head waters of the Orinoco and the Northern tributaries of the Amazon.” Fawcett was incensed that his own efforts had not received equal recognition. Then, in early 1916, he discovered that the doctor was preparing to launch another expedition. A bulletin in the Geographical Journal announced that “our medallist” Dr. Rice would ascend the Amazon and the Rio Negro, with “a view to still further extending our knowledge of the region previously explored by him.” Why was the doctor returning to the same area? The bulletin said little more than that Dr. Rice was building a forty-foot motor-powered vessel that could navigate through swamps and carry seven hundred gallons of petrol. It must have cost a fortune, though what did that matter to a millionaire?

  That spring, amid intense fighting, Fawcett received a letter from the Royal Geographical Society. It said that, in tribute to his historic mapping of South America, he, too, had been awarded a gold medal. (The Society gave out two gold medals, both equal in prestige: Fawcett’s was the Founder’s Medal and Dr. Rice’s the Patron’s.) The award was the same honor that had been bestowed upon the likes of Livingstone and Burton—“the dream of his life,” as Nina put it. Not even the prospect of Dr. Rice’s expedition or the continuation of the war could diminish Fawcett’s delight. Nina, who told Keltie that such an occasion comes “only once in a life time,” quickly set about planning for the award presentation on May 22. Fawcett obtained leave to attend. “I possess the medal and am content,” he remarked.

  After the ceremony, he hurried back to the front: he had received orders that the British command was launching an unprecedented assault, with the aim of ending the war. In early July 1916, Fawcett and his men took up their positions along a placid river in northern France, providing cover as tens of thousands of British soldiers clambered up ladders propped against the muddy trench walls and marched onto the battlefield, bayonets gleaming and arms swinging, like in a parade. From his perch, Fawcett would have seen the German gunners, who were supposed to have been destroyed by weeks of bombardment. They were emerging from cavernous holes, unleashing machine-gun fire. The British soldiers fell, one by one. Fawcett tried to offer cover, but there was no way to protect men walking into a hail of bullets and eighteen-pound shells and liquidy bursts from flamethrowers. No force of nature in the jungle had prepared him for this man-made onslaught. Bits of letters and photographs that men had carried into battle fluttered over their corpses like snow. The wounded crawled into shell holes, shrieking. Fawcett called it “Armageddon.”

  It was the Battle of the Somme—or what the Germans, who suffered massive casualties as well, referred to in letters home as “the bath of blood.” On the first day of the offensive, nearly twenty thousand British soldiers died and almost forty thousand were wounded. It was the greatest loss of life in the history of the British military, and many in the West began to portray the “savage” as European rather than as some native in the jungle. Fawcett, quoting a companion, wrote that cannibalism “at least provides a reasonable motive for killing a man, which is more than you can say for civilized warfare.”

  When Ernest Shackleton, who had been trekking through Antarctica for nearly a year and a half, emerged in 1916 on the island of South Georgia, he immediately asked someone, “Tell me, when was the war over?” The person replied, “The war is not over . . . Europe is mad. The whole world is mad.”

  As the conflict dragged on, Fawcett often remained at the front lines, living among corpses. The air smelled of blood and fumes. Trenches became bogs of urine and excrement and bones and lice and maggots and rats. The walls caved in from rain, and occasionally men drowned in the slime. One soldier sank slowly for days in a mud hole, without anyone being able to reach him. Fawcett, who had always found refuge in the natural world, no longer recognized the wilderness of bombed-out villages, denuded trees, craters, and sunbaked skeletons. As Lyne wrote in his diary, “Dante would never have condemned lost souls to wander in so terrible a purgatory.”

  Periodically, Fawcett would hear a gong-like sound, which meant the gases were coming. Shells unleashed phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. A nurse described patients “burnt up and blistered all over with great mustard-coloured suppurating blisters, with blind eyes. . . all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke.” In March 1917, Nina sent a letter to the RGS saying her husband had been “gassed” after Christmas. For once, Fawcett had been injured. “He was troubled for some time by the effects of the poison,” Nina told Keltie. Certain days were worse than others: “He feels better but not quite right.”

  All around Fawcett, people he knew or had been associated with were dying. The war had claimed the lives of more than a hundred and thirty RGS members. Conan Doyle’s oldest son, Kingsley, died of wounds and influenza. A surveyor with whom Fawcett had worked on the South American boundary commission was killed. (“He was a good fellow—we all thought so,” Fawcett informed Keltie. “I am sorry.”) A friend in his brigade was blown up when he rushed to help someone—an act, Fawcett wrote in his official report, “of purely unselfish self-sacrifice.”

  Toward the end of the war, Fawcett described some of the carnage that he had witnessed in a missive published in an English newspaper under the headline “British Colonel in Letter Here Tells of Enormous Slaughter.” “If you can imagine 60 miles of front, to a depth of 1 to 30 miles, literally carpeted with dead, often in little hills,” Fawcett wrote. “It is a measure of the price paid. Masses of men moved to the slaughter in endless waves, bridged the wires and filled the trenches with dead and dying. It was the irresistible force of an army of ants, where the pressure of the succeeding waves forced the legions in front, willingly or unwillingly, into the shambles. No thin line could withstand the human tidal wave, or go on killing forever. It is, I think, the most terrible testimony
to the relentless effect of an unbridled militarism.” He concluded, “ ‘Civilization!’ Ye gods! To see what one has seen the word is an absurdity. It has been an insane explosion of the lowest human emotions.”

  Amid this onslaught, Fawcett continued to be heralded in dispatches for his bravery, and, as the London Gazette announced on January 4, 1917, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order medal. But if his body remained intact, his mind appeared, at times, to be wavering. When he visited home on leave, he often sat for hours without speaking, holding his head in his hands. He sought solace in spiritualism and occult rituals that offered a way to communicate with missing loved ones—a refuge that many Europeans turned to in their grief. Conan Doyle described attending a séance where he heard a voice:

  I said, “Is that you, boy?”

  He said in a very intense whisper and a tone all his own, “Father!” and then after a pause, “Forgive me!”

  I said, “There was never anything to forgive. You were the best son a man ever had.” A strong hand descended on my head which was slowly pressed forward, and I felt a kiss just above my brow.

  “Are you happy?” I cried.

  There was a pause and then very gently, “I am so happy.”

  Fawcett wrote to Conan Doyle about his own experiences with mediums. He recounted how his dreaded mother had spoken to him during a séance. The medium, who channeled her spirit, said, “She loved you so as a little boy and she has remorse for treating you badly.” And, “She would like to send her love but fears it might not be accepted.”

  In the past, Fawcett’s interest in the occult had been largely an expression of his youthful rebellion and scientific curiosity, and had contributed to his willingness to defy the prevailing orthodoxies of his own society and to respect tribal legends and religions. Now, though, his approach was untethered from his rigorous RGS training and acute powers of observation. He imbibed Madame Blavatsky’s most outlandish teachings about Hyperboreans and astral bodies and Lords of the Dark Face and keys to unlocking the universe—the Other World seemingly more tantalizing than the present one. (In The Land of Mist, Conan Doyle’s 1926 sequel to The Lost World, John Roxton, the character said to be partly based on Fawcett, embraces spiritualism and investigates the existence of ghosts.) There was a rumor among some officers that Fawcett used a Ouija board, a popular tool of mediums, to help make tactical decisions on the battlefield. “He and his intelligence officer . . . would retire to a darkened room and put their four hands, but not their elbows, on the board,” Henry Harold Hemming, who was then a captain in Fawcett’s corps, wrote in an unpublished memoir. “Fawcett would then ask the Ouija Board in a loud voice if this was a confirmed location [of the enemy’s position], and if the miserable board skidded over in the right direction; not merely would he include it in his list of confirmed locations, but often order 20 rounds of 9.2 howitzer to be fired at the place.”

  More than anything, though, Fawcett was consumed with visions of Z, which, amid the war’s horror, gathered only more luster—a glittering place seemingly immune to the rottenness of Western civilization. Or, as he told Conan Doyle, something of “The Lost World” really did exist. By all accounts, Fawcett thought about Z when he was firing howitzers, when he was being shot at in the trenches, when he was burying the dead. In an article published in the Washington Post in 1934, a soldier in Fawcett’s unit recalled how “many times in France when the commander was ‘marking time’ between raids and attacks, he would tell of his explorations and adventures in South American jungles—of the heavy rains and the thick tangle of grass and bushes meeting overhanging vines and branches— and the deep unbroken quiet of the interior.” An officer from his brigade wrote in a letter that Fawcett was already “full of the hidden cities and treasures. . . he intended to search for.”

  Fawcett deluged Costin and Manley, who were also fighting on the western front, with letters, trying to secure their services in the future. And he petitioned the RGS for funding.

  “It is a little awkward as you can understand, for us at the present moment, to make any definite promise as to what could be done after the war,” Keltie responded to one of his appeals. “If you can only afford to wait.”

  “I am getting older and am, I daresay, impatient of lost years and months,” Fawcett complained to Keltie in early 1918. Later that year, he told Travel magazine, “Knowing what these journeys in the real fastnesses of the forest mean to men a good deal younger than I am, I do not want to delay action.”

  On June 28, 1919, nearly five years after Fawcett returned from the Amazon and shortly before his fifty-second birthday, Germany finally signed a peace treaty in surrender. Some twenty million people had been killed and at least twenty million wounded. Fawcett described “the whole business” as “suicide” for Western civilization, and thought, “Many thousands must have come through those four years of mud and blood with a similar disillusionment.”

  Returning to his home in England, he saw his wife and children on a regular basis for the first time in years. He was astonished by how much Jack had grown, how much bigger he was through his shoulders and around his arms. Jack had recently celebrated his sixteenth birthday and was “now quite an inch, if not more, taller than his father!” Nina wrote in a letter to Harold Large, a family friend who lived in New Zealand. Jack had developed into a powerful athlete and was already honing his body for the day when he was old enough to venture with his father into the wilderness. “We all went to the sports on Saturday and saw him win the 2nd Prize for the High Jump and Putting the Weight,” Nina said.

  Fawcett and Jack played their usual sports together, only now the son often surpassed the father in ability. Jack wrote to Large, boasting, “I had a ripping cricket season, as I was vice-captain of the [school] team, and won the average ball, and was second in the batting averages. Also I never dropped a catch throughout the whole season.” He wrote with a mixture of youthful cockiness and innocence. He noted that he had taken up photography and made “some ripping photos.” Occasionally in his letters he’d include a pen-and-ink caricature of his brother or sister.

  Despite his brashness and athletic grace, Jack remained, in many ways, an awkward teenager who, unsure how to interact with girls and desperate to uphold his father’s monkish edicts, seemed mostly at ease in the company of his childhood friend Raleigh Rimell. Brian Fawcett said that Raleigh was Jack’s “able and willing lieutenant.” During the war, the two friends would shoot starlings off the roofs of surrounding houses, causing a furor among the neighbors and the local police. Once, Raleigh shattered a letter box and was summoned by the police and ordered to pay ten shillings to replace it. Whenever Raleigh passed the new letter box, he would polish it with a handkerchief and proclaim, “This is mine, you know!”

  On the rare occasions when Raleigh wasn’t present, it was Brian Fawcett who followed Jack around. Brian was different from his older brother—indeed, different from most Fawcett men. He lacked athletic prowess and was often, as he admitted, bullied by other kids “into a stupor.” Suffering in the shadow of his brother, Brian recalled, “At school it was always Jack who distinguished himself in games, in fights, and by standing up to the severe canings of the headmaster.”

  Although Nina thought her children had no “hidden feeling of fear or distrust” toward their parents, Brian seemed roiled by his father’s actions. Fawcett always seemed to want to play with Jack and touted him as a future explorer; he even gave Jack his Ceylon treasure map. Brian once noted in a letter to his mother that at least when his father was away there were “no favourites” in the house.

  One day Brian followed Jack into the room where their father kept his collection of artifacts. It included a sword, stone axes, a spear tipped with bone, bows and arrows, and shell necklaces. The boys had previously devoured a bag of nuts that the chief of the Maxubis had given Fawcett as a present; now Jack removed a beautifully handcrafted musket called a jezail, which Fawcett had obtained in Morocco. Wondering if it would
fire, Jack carried the jezail outside and loaded it with powder. Given its rust and age, the gun was likely to backfire, lethally, and Jack said that he and Brian should flip a coin to see who would pull the trigger. Brian lost. “My elder brother stood well clear, and goaded me on to fulfil my honourable obligation to risk suicide,” Brian recalled. “I pulled the trigger, the pan flashed and sizzled—and nothing further seemed to happen. But things were happening. An appreciable time after pulling the trigger there was a loud, asthmatic sort of cough, and a huge cloud of red dust vomited out of the muzzle!” The gun didn’t fire, but Brian had demonstrated, at least for an instant, that he was as daring as his older brother.

  FAWCETT, MEANWHILE, was frantically trying to organize what he called his “path to Z.” His two most trusted companions were no longer available: Manley had died of heart disease shortly after the war, and Costin had married and decided to settle down. The loss of these men was a blow that perhaps only Costin fully appreciated. He told his family that Fawcett’s only Achilles’ heel as an explorer was that he hated to slow down, and he needed someone whom he trusted enough to defer to when the person said, “Enough!” Without him or Manley, Costin feared, there would be no one to stop Fawcett.

  Fawcett then suffered a more severe setback: the RGS and a number of other institutions turned down his requests for funding. The war had made money for scientific exploration harder to come by, but that wasn’t the only reason. University-trained anthropologists and archaeologists were displacing “Hints to Travellers” amateurs; sub-specialization had rendered obsolete the man or woman who dared to try to provide an autopsis of the entire earth. Another South American explorer and contemporary of Fawcett’s complained bitterly that “the general practitioner in this everyday world of ours is being squeezed out.” And, although Fawcett remained a legend, most of the new specialists disputed his theory of Z. “I cannot induce scientific men to accept even the supposition that there are traces of an old civilization” in the Amazon, Fawcett wrote in his journals.