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

by David Grann

“It is a loss, both to himself and others, when a traveller does not observe.”

Occasionally, Fawcett and Chivers came upon a footbridge—strung together with palmetto slats and cables—that stretched more than a hundred yards over a gorge and swung wildly in the wind, like a shredded flag.

Nope

The sauba ants that could reduce the men’s clothes and rucksacks to threads in a single night. The ticks that attached like leeches (another scourge) and the red hairy chiggers that consumed human tissue. The cyanide-squirting millipedes. The parasitic worms that caused blindness. The berne flies that drove their ovipositors through clothing and deposited larval eggs that hatched and burrowed under the skin. The almost invisible biting flies called piums that left the explorers’ bodies covered in lesions. Then there were the “kissing bugs,” which bite their victim on the lips, transferring a protozoan called Trypanosoma cruzi; twenty years later, the person, thinking he had escaped the jungle unharmed, would begin to die of heart or brain swelling. Nothing, though, was more hazardous than the mosquitoes. They transmitted everything from malaria to “bone-crusher” fever to elephantiasis to yellow fever. “[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.

Well, that's horiffic!

It dawned on Fawcett that in regions far from the major rivers, where most European travelers and slave raiders went, tribes were healthier and more populous.

wow, ya think?