The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

by David Grann

In 1561, Lope de Aguirre led his men on a murderous rampage, screaming, “Does God think that, because it is raining, I am not going to . . . destroy the world?”

Aguirre’s companions finally rose up and killed him;

Fawcett, however, was certain that the Amazon contained a fabulous kingdom, and he was not another soldier of fortune or a crackpot.

Robert Falcon Scott, had set out to become the first explorer to reach the South Pole, only to discover when he got there, and shortly before he froze to death, that his Norwegian rival, Roald Amundsen, had beaten him by thirty-three days.

We will have to achieve a nervous and mental resistance, as well as physical, as men under these conditions are often broken by their minds succumbing before their bodies.”

Fawcett had chosen only two people to go with him: his twenty-one-year-old son, Jack, and Jack’s best friend, Raleigh Rimell.

Jack’s “six feet three inches were sheer bone and muscle, and the three chief agents of bodily degeneration—alcohol, tobacco and loose living—were revolting to him.”

What began as a trickle now expels fifty-seven million gallons of water every second—a discharge sixty times that of the Nile.

And so it was in June of 1996, when an expedition of Brazilian scientists and adventurers headed into the jungle. They were searching for signs of Colonel Percy Fawcett,

He had vowed to make “the great discovery of the century”— instead, he had given birth to “the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century.”

Because so many seekers went without fanfare, there are no reliable statistics on the numbers who died. One recent estimate, however, put the total as high as a hundred.

Even today, the Brazilian government estimates that there are more than sixty Indian tribes that have never been contacted by outsiders.

In 2006, members of a nomadic tribe called Nukak-Makú emerged from the Amazon in Colombia and announced that they were ready to join the modern world, though they were unaware that Colombia was a country and asked if the planes overhead were on an invisible road.

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.

For civilization, the Amazon was, in short, a death trap.

For ages, cartographers had no means of knowing what existed on most of the earth. And more often than not these gaps were filled in with fantastical kingdoms and beasts, as if the make-believe, no matter how terrifying, were less frightening than the truly unknown.

Finally, in the nineteenth century, as the British Empire was increasingly expanding, several English scientists, admirals, and merchants believed that an institution was needed to create a map of the world based on observation rather than on imagination,

so, in 1830, the Royal Geographical Society of London was born.

Richard Burton espoused atheism and defended polygamy so fervently that, while he was off exploring, his wife inserted into one of his manuscripts the following disclaimer: “I protest vehemently against his religious and moral sentiments, which belie a good and chivalrous life.”

“Explorers are not, perhaps, the most promising people with whom to build a society. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability

One official of the Society reprimanded an African explorer for his suppositions, telling him, “What you can do, is state accurately what you saw, leaving it to stay-at-home men of science to collate the data of very many travelers, in order to form a theory.”

In 1864, boundary disputes between Paraguay and its neighbors had erupted into one of the worst conflicts in Latin American history.

Since the canal’s excavation began, in 1881, more than twenty thousand laborers had died from malaria and yellow fever.

“If one rubber baron bought a vast yacht, another would install a tame lion in his villa, and a third would water his horse on champagne.”

Because the Amazon frontier was so isolated, it was governed by its own laws and, as one observer put it, made the American West seem by comparison “as proper as a prayer meeting.”

Evidence showed that the Peruvian Amazon Company had committed virtual genocide in attempting to pacify and enslave the native population:

In the Amazon, Fawcett marveled, the animal kingdom “is against man as it is nowhere else in the world.”

“[Mosquitoes] constitute the chief single reason why Amazonia is a frontier still to be won,” Willard Price wrote in his 1952 book The Amazing Amazon.

In May 1907, he completed his route and presented his findings to members of the South American boundary commission and the RGS.

They were incredulous. He had redefined the borders of South America—and he had done it nearly a year ahead of schedule.

amazingly—I knew I loved that hell. Its fiendish grasp had captured me, and I wanted to see it again.”

The Indians, Fawcett was discovering, were masters of pharmacology, adept at manipulating their environment to suit their needs, and he concluded that the Guarayos were “a most intelligent race of people.”

Fawcett’s ability to succeed where so many others failed contributed to a growing myth of his invincibility, which he himself began to believe.

perhaps the rival Fawcett most feared was Alexander Hamilton Rice, a tall, debonair American doctor

On August 26, 1542, the men’s boat was finally expelled into the Atlantic Ocean, and they became the first Europeans to travel the length of the Amazon.

Raleigh returned to England with no evidence of his kingdom, and was beheaded by King James in 1618. His skull was embalmed by his wife and occasionally displayed to visitors—a stark reminder that El Dorado was, if nothing else, lethal.

Financial ruin, destitution, starvation, cannibalism, murder, death: these seemed to be the only real manifestations of El Dorado.

RGS said of Fawcett, “He is a visionary kind of man who sometimes talks rather nonsense,”

indigenous communities in Brazil, which function almost as autonomous countries, with their own laws and governing councils.

Jutting into the sky was a cracked stone column. I blinked in the rain—in fact, there was not just one but several columns in a row, as in a Greek ruin. There was also a large archway, both sides of it intact, and behind it was a dazzlingly large tower. They looked like what the bandeirante had described in 1753. “What is it?” I asked. “Stone city.” “Who built it?” “It is—how do you say?—an illusion.” “That?” I said, pointing to one of the columns. “It was made by nature, by erosion.

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?”

wrote, “The finger of guilt seemed to point to Aloique.”

Although no reliable statistics exist, one recent estimate put the death toll from these expeditions as high as one hundred.

“I do not assume that ‘The City’ is either large or rich.” But by 1924 Fawcett had filled his papers with reams of delirious writings about the end of the world and about a mystical Atlantean kingdom, which resembled the Garden of Eden.