The Lost City of Z

by David Grann

  The total raised amounted to roughly five thousand dollars—less than the cost of one of Dr. Rice’s radios. This was not enough money for Fawcett, Jack, or Raleigh to draw a salary, and much of the financing from newspapers would be paid only upon completion of their journey. “If they don’t return there will be nothing” for the family to live on, Nina later wrote to Large.

  “Not a sum which would inspire most explorers,” Fawcett told Keltie. But he added in another letter, “In some ways I am rather glad that not one of the three of us makes a red cent unless the journey is successful, for nobody can say we were after money in undertaking this rather perilous quest. It is an honest scientific research animated by its own exceptional interest and value.”

  Fawcett and Jack paid a visit to the RGS, where all the ill feelings, all the frustrations, seemed to have evaporated. Everyone wished them luck. Reeves, the Society’s map curator, later recalled what “a fine young fellow” Jack was: “well built, tall and strong, very like his father.” Fawcett expressed his gratitude to Reeves and Keltie, who had never wavered in their support. “I shall rejoice in telling you the whole story in three years’ time,” he said.

  Back at Stoke Canon, Fawcett, Jack, and the rest of the family were thrown into a whirl of packing and planning. It was decided that Nina and Joan, who was fourteen, would move to the Portuguese island of Madeira, where it was cheaper to live. Brian, who was devastated that his father had not chosen him for the expedition, had turned his attention to railroad engineering. With Fawcett’s help, he found work with a railroad company in Peru and was the first to depart for South America. The family accompanied Brian, who was only seventeen at the time, to the train station.

  Fawcett told Brian that he would be responsible for Nina and his sister’s care during the expedition, and that any financial assistance he could give them would help them survive. The family made plans for the return of Fawcett and Jack as heroes. “In two years’ time they would be back, and, when my first home leave fell due, we would all meet again in England,” Brian later recalled. “After that we might make a family home in Brazil, where the work of the future years would undoubtedly lie.” Brian said farewell to his family and stepped onto the train. As the carriage pulled away, he stared out the window, watching as his father and brother slowly disappeared from view.

  On December 3, 1924, Fawcett and Jack said goodbye to Joan and Nina and boarded the Aquitania for New York, where they were to meet Raleigh. The path to Z finally seemed secure. When they landed in New York a week later, however, Fawcett discovered that Lynch, his business partner of “unimpeachable character,” had sequestered himself, drunk and surrounded by prostitutes, in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. “[He] succumbed to the lure of the ubiquitous bottle in this Prohibition City,” Fawcett wrote the RGS. He said that Lynch “must have suffered from alcoholic aberration. It may be more, for he was sexually disturbed.” The aberration had cost more than a thousand dollars of the expedition’s funds, and Fawcett feared that the mission was in danger of unraveling before it began. Yet the venture had already become an international sensation, prompting John D. Rockefeller Jr., the scion of the billionaire founder of Standard Oil and an ally of Dr. Bowman, to step forward with a check for forty-five hundred dollars, so that “the plan can be initiated at once.”

  With his path to Z again clear, Fawcett could no longer even work up his notorious wrath toward Lynch, who had returned to London in disgrace. “He did precipitate this exploration, which is something to his credit, and The Gods select curious agents for their purposes sometimes,” Fawcett wrote the RGS. Plus, he said, “I am a great believer in the Law of Compensation.” He was sure that he had sacrificed all he had to give to reach Z. Now he hoped to receive what he called “the honour of immortality.”

  AN UNEXPECTED

  CLUE

  Yeah, I’ve heard of Fawcett,” a Brazilian guide who offered tours of the Amazon told me. “Isn’t he the one who disappeared looking for El Dorado or something?” When I mentioned that I was seeking a guide to help me trace Fawcett’s route and look for Z, he replied that he was “muito ocupado,” which seemed to be a polite way of saying, “You’re out of your mind.”

  It was difficult to find someone not only willing to make the journey into the jungle but also with ties to the indigenous communities in Brazil, which function almost as autonomous countries, with their own laws and governing councils. The history of the interaction between brancos and indios—whites and Indians—in the Amazon often reads like an extended epitaph: tribes were wiped out by disease and massacres; languages and songs were obliterated. One tribe buried its children alive to spare them the shame of subjugation. But some tribes, including the dozens that remain uncontacted, have managed to insulate themselves in the jungle. In recent decades, as many indigenous people have organized themselves politically, the Brazilian government has stopped trying to “modernize” them and has worked more effectively to protect them. As a result, some Amazon tribes, particularly those in the Mato Grosso region, where Fawcett disappeared, have flourished. Their populations, after being decimated, are growing again; their languages and customs have endured.

  The person I eventually persuaded to accompany me was Paolo Pinage, a fifty-two-year-old former professional samba dancer and theater director. Though Paolo was not of Indian descent, he had previously worked for FUNAI, the agency that succeeded Rondon’s Indian Protection Service. Paolo shared its “Die if you must, but never kill” edict. During our initial phone conversation, I had asked him if we could penetrate the same region that Fawcett had, including part of what is now Xingu National Park, Brazil’s first Indian reservation, which was created in 1961. (The park, along with an adjoining reservation, is the size of Belgium and is one of the largest swaths of jungle under Indian control in the world.) Paolo said, “I can take you there, but it’s not easy.”

  Entering Indian territories, he explained, required elaborate negotiations with tribal leaders. He asked me to send him medical records attesting that I carried no contagious diseases. Then he began approaching various chiefs on my behalf. Many of the tribes in the jungle now had shortwave radios, a more modern version of what Dr. Rice had used, and for weeks our messages were relayed back and forth as Paolo assured them that I was a reporter and not a garimpero, or “prospector.” In 2004, twenty-nine diamond miners trespassed onto a reservation in western Brazil, and members of the Cinta Larga tribe shot them or beat them to death with wooden clubs.

  Paolo told me to meet him at the airport in Cuiabá. Although none of the tribes had agreed to my visit, he seemed optimistic when he greeted me. He was carrying several large plastic containers, instead of a suitcase or a backpack, and had a cigarette dangling from his lip. He wore a camouflage vest with myriad pockets, stuffed with supplies: a Swiss Army knife, a Japanese anti-itch medicine, a flashlight, a bag of peanuts, and more cigarettes. He resembled someone returning from an expedition, not embarking on one. His vest was ragged, his face was bone thin and covered with a gray-tinged beard, and his bald head had been seared by the sun. His English pronunciation was shaky, yet he spoke as fast as he smoked. “Come, come, we go now,” he said. “Paolo take care of everything.”

  We took a taxi to the center of Cuiabá, which was no longer the “ghost town” Fawcett had described but had an air of modernity, with paved roads and a few modest skyscrapers. Brazilian settlers had once been lured into the interior by rubber and gold. Now the primary temptation was the high price of commodities from ranching and farming, and the city served as a staging ground for these latest pioneers.

  We checked into a hotel named El Dorado (“A funny coincidence, isn’t it?” Paolo said) and began making preparations. Our first challenge was to ensure that we correctly divined Fawcett’s route. I filled Paolo in about my trip to England and about everything Fawcett had done— including planting false leads and using ciphers—to conceal his course.

  “This colonel goes to many lengths to hide something tha
t no one has ever found,” Paolo said.

  I spread the relevant documents that I had obtained in British archives on a wooden table. Among them were copies of several of Fawcett’s original maps. They were meticulous, recalling pointillist paintings. Paolo picked one up and examined it for several minutes under the light. Fawcett had printed “UNEXPLORED” in bold letters atop one image, which depicted the forests between the Xingu River and two other major tributaries of the Amazon. On another map, he added several notations: “small tribes. . . believed to be friendly;” “very bad Indian tribes—names unknown;” “Indians probably dangerous.”

  One of the maps seemed somewhat crudely drawn, and Paolo asked if Fawcett had made it. I explained that a notation on the map—which I had found among several old documents from the North American Newspaper Alliance—indicated that it had belonged to Raleigh Rimell. He had sketched on the map the expedition’s route and given it to his mother. Although he made her promise to destroy it after he left, she had held on to it.

  Paolo and I agreed that the documents confirmed that Fawcett and his team, after leaving Cuiabá, had proceeded north, to the territory of the Bakairí Indians. From there they had gone to Dead Horse Camp, and then, presumably, deep into what is today Xingu National Park. In the route that Fawcett had supplied in confidence to the Royal Geographical Society, he wrote that his party would turn due east around the eleventh parallel south of the equator and continue past the River of Death and the Araguaia River, until they reached the Atlantic Ocean. Fawcett noted in his proposal that it was preferable to maintain an eastward trajectory, toward Brazil’s coastal regions, since it “would preserve a higher level of enthusiasm than one proceeding farther and farther into the wilds.”

  Yet one segment of the route Raleigh had drawn seemed to contradict this. At the Araguaia River, Raleigh indicated, the expedition would turn sharply northward, instead of continuing eastward, and would pass from Mato Grosso into the Brazilian state of Pará, before exiting near the mouth of the Amazon River.

  “Maybe Raleigh made a mistake,” Paolo said.

  “That’s what I thought, too,” I said. “But then I read this.”

  I showed him the last letter that Jack had sent to his mother. Paolo read the line I had highlighted: “Next time I write will probably be from Para.”

  “I think Fawcett kept this last piece of his route secret even from the RGS,” I said.

  Paolo seemed increasingly intrigued by Fawcett, and with a black pen he began to trace Fawcett’s route on a clean map, excitedly ticking off each of our intended destinations. Finally, he took his cigarette out of his mouth and said, “On to Z, no?”

  HAVE NO FEAR

  The train creaked toward the frontier. On February 11, 1925, Fawcett, Jack, and Raleigh had left Rio de Janeiro on their more than one-thousand-mile journey into the interior of Brazil. In Rio, they had stayed in the Hotel Internacional, where they tested their equipment in the garden and where virtually everything they did was chronicled in newspapers around the world. “At least forty million people [are] already aware of our objective,” Fawcett wrote his son Brian, reveling in the “tremendous” publicity.

  There were photographs of the explorers with headlines like “Three Men Face Cannibals in Relic Quest.” One article said, “No Olympic games contender was ever trained down to a finer edge than these three reserved, matter-of-fact Englishmen, whose pathway to a forgotten world is beset by arrows, pestilence and wild beasts.”

  “Aren’t the reports of the expedition in the English and American papers amusing?” Jack wrote his brother.

  Brazilian authorities, fearing the demise of such an illustrious party on their territory, demanded that Fawcett sign a statement absolving them of responsibility, which he did without hesitation. “They do not want to be pressed . . . if we do not turn up,” Fawcett told Keltie. “But we shall all turn up all right—even if it is just about as much as my fifty-eight years can put up with.” Despite such concerns, the government and its citizens warmly received the explorers: the party would be given free transport to the frontier in railroad cars reserved for dignitaries—luxurious carriages with private baths and saloons. “We have met with unbounded sympathy and goodwill,” Fawcett informed the RGS.

  Raleigh seemed somewhat dispirited, though. On the voyage from New York, he had fallen in love, apparently with the daughter of a British duke. “I became acquainted with a certain girl on board, and as time went on our friendship increased till I admit it was threatening to get serious,” he confessed in a letter to Brian Fawcett. He wanted to tell Jack about his turbulent emotions, but his best friend, who had become even more priestly while training for the expedition, complained that he was making “a fool of himself.” Whereas before Raleigh had been intently focused on his adventure with Jack, now all he could think about was this . . . woman.

  “[The colonel] and Jack were getting quite anxious, afraid I should elope or something!” Raleigh wrote. Indeed, Raleigh contemplated getting married in Rio, but Fawcett and Jack dissuaded him. “I came to my senses and realized I was supposed to be the member of an expedition, and not allowed to take a wife along,” Raleigh said. “I had to drop her gently and attend to business.”

  “[Raleigh] is much better now,” Jack wrote. Still, he worriedly asked Raleigh, “I suppose after we get back you’ll be married within a year?”

  Raleigh replied that he wouldn’t make any promises, but, as he later put it, “I don’t intend to be a bachelor all my life, even if Jack does!”

  The three explorers stopped for a few days in São Paulo and went to visit the Instituto Butantan, one of the largest snake farms in the world. The staff carried out a series of demonstrations for the explorers, showing how various predators strike. At one point, an attendant reached into a cage with a long hook and removed a lethal bushmaster, while Jack and Raleigh stared at its fangs. “A whole lot of venom squirted out,” Jack later wrote his brother. Fawcett was familiar with Amazonian snakes, but he still found the demonstrations enlightening, and he shared his notes in one of his dispatches for the North American Newspaper Alliance. (“A snake-bite which bleeds is nonpoisonous. Two punctures, plus a bluish and bloodless patch, is a sign of poison.”)

  Before leaving, Fawcett was handed what he most wanted: five years’ worth of anti-snakebite serums, stored in vials marked “rattlesnakes,” “pit vipers,” and “unknown” species. He also received a hypodermic needle to inject them.

  After local officials in São Paulo gave the explorers what Jack described as “a fine send-off,” the three Englishmen again boarded a train, heading west toward the Paraguay River, along the border of Brazil and Bolivia. Fawcett had made the same trip in 1920, with Holt and Brown, and the familiar vista only intensified his chronic impatience. As sparks flew up from the rails, Jack and Raleigh looked out the window, watching the swamps and scrub forest pass, imagining what they would soon encounter. “I saw some quite interesting things,” Jack wrote. “In the cattle country were numerous parrots, and we saw two flocks. . . of young rheas [ostrichlike birds] about four to five feet high. There was a glimpse of a spider’s web in a tree, with a spider about the size of a sparrow sitting in the middle.” Spotting alligators on the banks, he and Raleigh grabbed their rifles and tried to shoot them from the moving train.

  The immensity of the landscape awed Jack, who occasionally sketched what he saw as if to help him comprehend it, a habit ingrained in him by his father. In a week, the men reached Corumbá, a frontier town near the Bolivian border, not far from where Fawcett had carried out much of his early exploration. This marked the end of the railroad line and the explorers’ lavish accommodations, and that night they stayed in a squalid hotel. “The lavatory arrangements here are very primitive,” Jack wrote his mother. “The combined [bathroom] and shower-room is so filthy that one must be careful where one treads; but Daddy says we must expect much worse in Cuyaba.”

  Jack and Raleigh heard a commotion outside the hotel and saw,
in the moonlight, figures parading up and down the city’s only good road, singing and dancing. It was the last night of Carnival. Raleigh, who liked to stay out late drinking “several excellent cocktails,” joined in the revelry. “I am now by the way quite an enthusiastic dancer,” he had earlier informed his brother. “You will probably think me reckless, eh, but still I figured I would have very few chances to dissipate in the next 20 months or so.”

  On February 23, Fawcett told Jack and Raleigh to load their equipment onto the Iguatemi, a small, dirty ship docked along the Paraguay River, which was bound for Cuiabá. Raleigh dubbed the ship “the little tub.” It was supposed to hold twenty passengers, but more than twice that many crammed inside. The air reeked of sweat and burning wood from the boiler. There were no private quarters, and to hang their hammocks the men had to jostle for space on the deck. As the boat shoved off, winding northward, Jack practiced his Portuguese with the other passengers, but Raleigh lacked the ear and the patience to pick up more than faz favor (“please”) and obrigado (“thank you”). “Raleigh is a funny chap,” Jack wrote. “He calls Portuguese ‘this damn jabbering language,’ and makes no attempt to learn it. Instead he gets mad at everyone because they don’t speak English.”