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

by David Grann

The region has generally been regarded as a primeval wilderness, a place in which there are, as Thomas Hobbes described the state of nature, “no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death.”

The Amazon's merciless conditions have fueled one of the most enduring theories of human development: environmental determinism.

Society, in other words, is a captive of geography. And so if Z was found in such a seemingly uninhabitable environment it would be more than a repository of golden treasure, more than an intellectual curiosity; it would, as one newspaper declared in 1925, “write a new chapter of human history.” For nearly a century, explorers have sacrificed everything, even their lives, to find the City of Z. The search for the civilization, and for the countless men who vanished while looking for it, has eclipsed the Victorian quest novels of Arthur Conan Doyle and H. Rider Haggard—both of whom, as it happens, were drawn into

He was Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, and his name was known throughout the world.

He was the last of the great Victorian explorers who ventured into uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose.

the organized and heavily financed modern expedition had not arrived. With him, it was the heroic story of a man against the forest.”

King George V,

the passenger lists of luxury ocean liners were chronicled in gossip columns and scoured by young girls searching for eligible bachelors.

aneroid

glycerin compass

privation

Aguirre

Such top-heavy expeditions get nowhere; they linger on

the fringe of civilization and bask in publicity.

Raleigh Rimell.

“ichthoid curve,”

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.

Batticaloa,

Sinhalese

s...

Tamils,

dhobis,

jaggery

bullock

Jumna Das,

Galla-pita-Galla

Ceylon.

These paths led him to one of the most unconventional figures to emerge in the Victorian era: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, or, as she was usually called, Madame Blavatsky.

Theosophy,

Pansil,

eccentricities or audacious mission more than Sir Francis Galton.

candiru

images of Indians as “jolly children” and

Esther Windust,

rheas

He had been educated by missionaries, and though he now lived mostly in Cuiabá,

bandeirante

Mato Grosso,

Ministry has said that loggers along BR-163 employ “the highest concentration of slave labor in the world.”

Manaus.

Taukane asked him, in the Bakairí

Taukane

tapir.”

George Miller Dyott,

The North American Newspaper Alliance

a woman nearly half his age, Persis Stevens Wright,

Dyott wrote of the Nahukwá,

That night, as Dyott and his men slept among the Indians, many in the party were uneasy. “We cannot predict the actions of [the Indians] for we know nothing about them except—and this is important—from these regions the Fawcett party disappeared,” Whitehead wrote. He slept with a .38 Winchester and a machete under his blanket. As the expedition pushed on through the forest the following day, Dyott continued to question Aloique, and before long the chief seemed

caiman