The Lost City of Z

by David Grann

  “How many mules and horses did the coronel have?” Paolo asked, trying to picture Fawcett’s crossing.

  “A dozen or so,” I said. “According to his letters, Galvão replaced some of the weakest animals and gave him a dog . . . which supposedly returned to the farm, several months after Fawcett vanished.”

  “It wandered back on its own?” Paolo asked.

  “That’s what Galvão said. He also said something about some swallows he saw rise from the forest in the east, which he thought had to be some kind of sign from Fawcett.”

  For the first time, we entered a swath of dense forest. Though there was no farm in sight, we came across a mud hut with a thatched roof. Inside was an old Indian sitting on a tree stump with a wooden cane in his hand. He was barefoot and wore dusty slacks without a shirt. Behind him, hanging on the wall, was the skin of a jaguar and a picture of the Virgin Mary. Taukane asked him, in the Bakairí language, if there was a cattle-breeding ranch known as Rio Novo. The man spit when he heard the name and waved his cane toward the door. “That way,” he said.

  Another Indian, who was younger, appeared and said that he would show us the way. We got back in the car and drove down an overgrown path, the branches clapping against the windshield. When we couldn’t drive any farther, our guide hopped out, and we followed him through the forest as he slashed at the creepers and vines with a machete. Several times he paused, studied the tops of the trees, and took a few paces east or west. Finally, he stopped.

  We looked around—there was nothing but a cocoon of trees. “Where’s Rio Novo?” Paolo asked.

  Our guide lifted his machete over his head and slammed it into the ground. It hit something hard. “Right here,” he said.

  We looked down and, to our disbelief, saw a row of cracked bricks.

  “This is where the entrance to the manor used to be,” the guide said, adding, “It was very big.”

  We began to fan out in the forest, as rain started to fall again, looking for signs of the great Galvão farm.

  “Over here!” Paolo cried. He was a hundred feet away, standing by a crumbling brick wall nestled in vines. The farm had been consumed by jungle in just a few decades, and I wondered how actual ancient ruins could possibly survive in such a hostile environment. For the first time, I had some sense of how it might be possible for the remnants of a civilization simply to disappear.

  WHEN WE RETURNED to the road, the sun had begun to set. In our excitement, we had lost track of the time. We hadn’t eaten since five-thirty in the morning and had nothing in the truck except a warm bottle of water and some crackers. (Earlier in the trip we had devoured my packets of freeze-dried food, Paolo saying, “Astronauts really eat this stuff?”) As we drove through the night, lightning flashed in the distance, illuminating the emptiness around us. Taukane eventually nodded off, and Paolo and I became engaged in what had become our favorite diversion—trying to imagine what had happened to Fawcett and his party after they left Dead Horse Camp.

  “I can see them starving to death,” Paolo, who seemed focused on his own hunger, said. “Very slowly and very painfully.”

  Paolo and I were not alone in trying to conjure a denouement to the Fawcett saga. Dozens of writers and artists had imagined an ending where none existed, like the earlier cartographers who had conceived of much of the world without ever seeing it. There were radio and stage plays about the mystery. There was the screenplay “Find Colonel Fawcett,” which was later the extremely loose basis for the 1941 movie Road to Zanzibar, with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. There were comic books, including one in the Adventures of Tintin series; in the story, a missing explorer based on Fawcett rescues Tintin from a poisonous snake in the jungle. (“Everybody thinks you’re dead,” Tintin tells the explorer, who says, “I’ve decided never to return to civilization. I’m happy here.”)

  Fawcett also continued to inspire quest novelists. In 1956, the popular Belgian adventure author Charles-Henri Dewisme, who used the pseudonym Henry Verne, wrote Bob Moran and the Fawcett Mystery. In the novel, the hero Moran investigates the Amazon explorer’s disappearance, and although he fails to reveal what happened to him, he uncovers the lost City of Z, making “Fawcett’s dream come true.”

  Fawcett even appears in the 1991 novel Indiana Jones and the Seven Veils, one of a series of books written to capitalize on the success of the 1981 blockbuster movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the novel’s convoluted plot, Indiana Jones—though insisting, “I’m an archeologist, not a private detective”—sets out to find Fawcett. He uncovers fragments of Fawcett’s journal from his last expedition, which says, “My son, lame from a bad ankle and feverish from malaria, turned back some weeks ago, and I sent our last guide with him. God save them. I followed a river upstream . . . I ran out of water, and for the next two or three days my only source of liquid was the dew I licked from leaves. How I questioned myself over and over about my decision to go on alone! I called myself a fool, an idiot, a madman.” Jones locates Fawcett and discovers that the Amazon explorer has found his magical city. After the two amateur archaeologists are taken prisoner by a hostile tribe, Jones, whip in hand, and Fawcett escape by plunging into the River of Death.

  Paolo and I went through several more fantastical scenarios—Fawcett and his party had their bodies taken over by worms like Murray, contracted elephantiasis, were poisoned by lethal frogs—before we both fell asleep in the car. The next morning, we drove up a small mountainside to reach Bakairí Post. It had taken Fawcett a month to get here from Cuiabá. It took us two days.

  Bakairí Post had grown, and more than eight hundred Indians now lived in the area. We went to the largest village, where several dozen one-story houses were organized in rows around a dusty plaza. Most of the houses were made of clay and bamboo and had thatched roofs, though some of the newer ones had concrete walls and tin roofs that clinked in the rain. The village, while still unmistakably poor, now had a well, a tractor, satellite dishes, and electricity.

  When we arrived, nearly all the men, young and old, were away hunting, in preparation for a ritual to celebrate the corn harvest. But Taukane said that there was someone we had to meet. He took us to a house abutting the plaza, near a row of fragrant mango trees. We entered a small room with a single electric lightbulb hanging overhead and several wooden benches along the walls.

  Before long, a tiny, stooped woman appeared through a back door. She held a child’s hand for support and moved slowly toward us, as if leaning into a strong wind. She wore a floral cotton dress and had long gray hair, which framed a face so wizened that her eyes were almost invisible. She had a wide smile, revealing a majestic set of white teeth. Taukane explained that the woman was the oldest member of the village and had seen Fawcett and his expedition come through. “She is probably the last living person to have encountered them,” he said.

  She sat down on a chair, her bare feet hardly reaching the floor. Using Taukane and Paolo to translate from English into Portuguese and then into Bakairí, I asked her how old she was. “I don’t know my exact age,” she said. “But I was born around 1910.” She continued, “I was just a little girl when the three outsiders came to stay in our village. I remember them because I had never seen people so white and with such long beards. My mother said, ‘Look, the Christians are here!’ ”

  She said that the three explorers had set up camp inside the village’s new school, which no longer exists. “It was the nicest building,” she said. “We didn’t know who they were, but we knew they must be important because they slept in the school.” In a letter, I recalled, Jack Fawcett had mentioned sleeping in a school. She added, “I remember that they were tall, so tall. And one of them carried a funny pack. He looked like a tapir.”

  I asked her what the village was like then. She said that by the time Fawcett and his men had arrived everything was changing. Brazilian military officials, she recalled, “told us we had to wear clothes, and they gave us each a new name.” She added, “My real name was Comaeda Bakairí, b
ut they told me I was now Laurinda. So I became Laurinda.” She recalled the widespread sickness that Fawcett had described in his letters. “Bakairí people would wake up with coughs and go to the river to clean themselves, but it didn’t help,” she said.

  After a while, Laurinda got up and stepped outside. Accompanying her, we could see, in the distance, the mountains that Jack had stared at with such wonder. “The three went in that direction,” she said. “Over those peaks. People said there were no white people over those mountains, but that is where they said they were going. We waited for them to come back, but they never did.”

  I asked her if she had heard of any cities on the other side of the mountains that the Indians may have built centuries ago. She said she didn’t know of any, but she pointed to the walls of her house and said that her ancestors had spoken of Bakairí houses that had been much bigger and more spectacular. “They were made of palm leaves from the buriti trees and were twice as high and so beautiful,” she said.

  Some of the hunters returned, carrying the carcasses of deer and anteaters and boars. In the plaza, a government official was setting up a large outdoor movie screen. I was told that a documentary would be shown teaching the Bakairís the meaning of the corn-harvest ritual that they were about to celebrate, which was part of their creation myth. Whereas the government had once tried to strip the Bakairís of their traditions, it was now attempting to preserve them. The old woman watched the proceedings from her doorstep. “The new generation still performs some of the old ceremonies, but they are not as rich or as beautiful,” she said. “They do not care about the crafts or the dances. I try to tell them the old stories, but they are not interested. They do not understand that this is who we are.”

  Before we said goodbye, she remembered something else about Fawcett. For years, she said, other people came from far away to ask about the missing explorers. She stared at me, her narrow eyes widening. “What is it that these white people did?” she asked. “Why is it so important for their tribe to find them?”

  DEAD OR ALIVE

  T he world waited for news. “Any day now may bring a cable from my husband announcing that he is safe and is returning with” Jack and Raleigh, Nina Fawcett told a reporter in 1927, two years after the party was last heard from. Elsie Rimell, who corresponded frequently with Nina, echoed her sentiments: “I believe firmly that my boy and those he is with will come back out of that wilderness.”

  Nina, who was living in Madeira with her sixteen-year-old daughter, Joan, beseeched the Royal Geographical Society not to lose confidence in her husband and proudly circulated one of Jack’s last letters describing his journey into the wilderness. “I think it is quite interesting, as being the first experience of the kind as seen by a boy of twenty-two,” she said. Once, when Joan was competing in a long-distance swimming race in the ocean, she told Nina, “Mother! I feel I must succeed, because if I succeed today Daddy will succeed in finding what he is searching for, and if I fail— they will fail.” To everyone’s astonishment, she won. Brian, who was then twenty and working at the railroad company in Peru, assured his mother that there was no reason to worry. “Father has got to his goal,” he said, “and is staying there as long as possible.”

  By the spring of 1927, however, anxieties had become widespread; as a North American Newspaper Alliance bulletin declared, “Fear of Fawcett Fate Grows.” Theories abounded over what might have happened to the explorers. “Have they been killed by the warlike savages, some of them cannibals?” one newspaper asked. “Did they perish in the rapids. . . or have they starved to death in this all but foodless region?” A popular theory was that the explorers were being held hostage by a tribe—a relatively common practice. (Several decades later, when Brazilian authorities approached the Txukahamei tribe for the first time, they found half a dozen white captives.)

  In September 1927, Roger Courteville, a French engineer, announced that while traveling near the source of the Paraguay River, in Mato Grosso, he had discovered Fawcett and his companions living not as hostages but as hermits. “Explorer Called Dupe of Jungle’s Sorcery: Fawcett Forgetting World in Paradise of Birds, Wild Cattle and Game,” the Washington Post reported. Though some sympathized with Fawcett’s apparent desire to “escape from a mechanical age and . . . from dank subway platforms and sunless tenements,” as one American newspaper editorial put it, others alleged that the explorer had perpetrated one of the greatest hoaxes in history.

  Brian Fawcett, who had rushed to meet with Courteville, thought he “described Daddy exactly.” Yet, with each new telling, Courteville changed both his story and the spelling of his own name, and Nina ferociously defended Fawcett’s reputation. “I was boiling over with indignation at the slur cast on my husband’s honour,” she wrote to the RGS, and informed Courteville, “As the story grew and changed, there came an element of evil and malice into it. But thank God, I, [Fawcett’s] wife, saw the discrepancies of the published statements.” By the time she had finished her campaign against the Frenchman, almost no one placed any credence in him or his story.

  Still, the question remained: Where were Fawcett and his young companions? Nina was confident that her husband, having survived for years in the jungle, was alive. But, like Elsie Rimell, she realized now that something terrible must have happened to the expedition—most likely that the men had been kidnapped by Indians. “One cannot tell what hopelessness and despair might do with those boys,” Nina said.

  Just as her concerns were mounting, a tall, impeccably dressed man appeared at her doorstep in Madeira. It was Fawcett’s longtime rival Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice. He had come to console her, and assured her that even if the expedition had been taken hostage Fawcett would find a way to escape. The one person you need not worry about in the jungle is the colonel, Dr. Rice said.

  Nina had so far resisted sending a rescue team, insisting that Fawcett and her son would rather die than have others lose their lives, but now, in her growing panic, she asked the doctor if he would be willing to go. “No better man could be selected to lead such an expedition,” she later said. To the shock of many of his colleagues, however, Dr. Rice decided to retire from exploring. Perhaps, at the age of fifty, he felt too old, especially after seeing what had happened to his seemingly invulnerable rival. Perhaps Dr. Rice’s wife, who had lost her first husband and son in a tragic accident, prevailed upon him not to go back. Or perhaps he simply felt that he had accomplished everything he could as an explorer.

  The Royal Geographical Society, meanwhile, declared in 1927 that “we hold ourselves in readiness to help any competent and well-accredited” search party. Though the Society warned that if Fawcett “could not penetrate and push through, much less can anyone else,” it was deluged with hundreds of letters from volunteers. One wrote, “I am thirty-six years of age. Practically Malaria-proof Stand 5. . .11. . . in my socks and am as hard as nails.” Another said, “I am prepared to sacrifice all, including my life.”

  A few volunteers sought to escape a dreary home life. (“My wife and I have . . . decided that separation for a couple of years will do us both worlds of good.”) Some hoped to attain fame and fortune, like Henry Morton Stanley, who had located Livingstone five decades earlier. Others were simply drawn to the heroic nature of the quest—to see, as one put it, “whether there is the making of a man in me, or just clay.” A young Welshman, who offered to enlist with his friends, wrote, “We consider that there is a greater measure of heroism in this quiet adventure than, for example, in Lindbergh’s spectacular triumph.”

  In February 1928, George Miller Dyott, a forty-five-year-old member of the Royal Geographical Society, launched the first major rescue effort. Born in New York—his father was British and his mother American—he had test piloted airplanes not long after the Wright brothers and was among the first ever to fly at night. After serving as a squadron commander during World War I, he had given up flying to become an explorer, and though he did not quite fit the image of a rugged adventurer—he was
five feet seven and weighed only a hundred and forty pounds—he had trekked across the Andes more than a half-dozen times and ventured through parts of the Amazon. (He had navigated the River of Doubt to confirm Teddy Roosevelt’s once-disputed claims.) He had also been held captive for several weeks by an Amazonian tribe that shrank its enemies’ heads.

  For the media, Fawcett’s disappearance had only contributed to what one writer called a “romantic story which builds newspaper empires”— and few were as adept at keeping the story ablaze as Dyott. A former managing director of a company called Travel Films, he was one of the earliest explorers to bring along motion-picture cameras, and he knew instinctively how to strike a pose and talk like a character in a B movie.

  The North American Newspaper Alliance sponsored his rescue effort, which it advertised as “an adventure that makes the blood race . . . Romance, mystery—and Peril!” Despite protests from the RGS that the publicity was threatening the expedition’s objective, Dyott planned to file daily dispatches with a shortwave radio and to film his journey. To succeed, Dyott, who had once met Fawcett, claimed that he would need “the intuition of Sherlock Holmes” and “the skill of a big-game hunter.” He pictured Fawcett and his companions “camped in some remote corner of the primeval forest, unable to come or go. Their reserve food supply must long since have been exhausted; their clothing torn to shreds or rotted to pieces.” In such a prolonged “hand-to-hand” combat with the wilderness, Dyott added, it was only Fawcett’s “supreme courage that will have held his party together and instilled in them the will to live.”

  Like Fawcett, Dyott had developed over the years his own idiosyncratic methods of exploring. He believed, for instance, that diminutive men—men, that is to say, built like himself—were best able to endure in the jungle. “A big man has to exert so much energy to carry his bulk that he has no surplus,” Dyott told reporters, and he would be “difficult to stow in a canoe.”