No waterway is mightier than the Amazon, which, at the height of the rainy season, stretches 120 miles from shore to shore. But Percy Fawcett possessed a romantic streak broader even than the river with which his name is still associated. By the time he disappeared, in 1925, Fawcett was probably the best-known explorer on the planet – no mean feat for a man associated with rainforests rather than the modish polar wastes. And his name has been kept alive by authors such as David Grann, whose new book – a surprise bestseller in America – tackles not only the British artillery colonel’s final journey, but also his obsession with finding traces of civilisation deep in the Brazilian interior: a settlement Fawcett named, for obscure reasons, the Lost City of Z.
Born in genteel Torquay in 1867, Fawcett was bitten by the exploration bug at the age of 21. While he was serving with the army in Sri Lanka, a superior handed him a cryptic note describing a hidden cave stuffed with precious stones. Reading between the lines, it seems the CO hoped only to rid himself of an annoying junior by packing him off on a wild goose chase. Thirty-seven years later, though, Fawcett was still hacking his way through jungles, having discovered, in the interim, not just a passion for exploration, but a clear-eyed understanding that, for a man of slender private means, sponsored expeditions to uncharted corners were one way to scrape a living.
Seen from the perspective of a man for whom fame was never an end in itself, Fawcett’s career begins to make more sense. He was one of the first explorers to appeal for funds by dangling the prospect of exotic discoveries before the eyes of investors, and in the course of an unorthodox career – one highlight of which was Fawcett’s deployment of a ouija board to locate German positions on the Western Front – he spun several necessary yarns. Fawcett claimed to have discovered a breed of two-nosed dog high in the Andes, and spoke of shooting an anaconda 65 feet long in Amazonia. These encounters may actually have occurred, but, equally, they may have been the inventions of a man who was by 1923 so destitute that he was living in a house without electricity or running water, and could not even afford to pay £3 for membership of the Royal Geographical Society.
The story of Z, though, always was of a different order. Tales of lost cities in the rainforest had circulated for centuries; the Spaniards, in 1541, sent a fully-equipped expedition of 200 men in search of El Dorado, and readings of Fawcett’s journals suggest he genuinely believed that such a place existed. What is not nearly so clear is where he thought it was and what he expected to find when he got there; worried that he might yield the honour of discovery to his competitors, Fawcett took pains to leak plenty of misinformation, and Grann is not alone in pointing out that most of the 50 or so explorers who lost their lives searching for him probably did so entirely in vain, having set off for points hundreds of miles from the Englishman’s true destination.
Z itself is an even greater mystery. Fawcett began his quest quite scientifically, writing that “I do not expect that ‘The City’ is either large or rich.” By 1925, however, he was searching for something altogether more dramatic: proof of the existence of an advanced civilisation.
More than that, though, Z was also a mystic place. Grann skims very rapidly indeed over this aspect of Fawcett’s beliefs, which fit poorly with the picture he attempts to draw of a man of ability and common sense. However, according to the Observer journalist Misha Williams – who has scoured precisely the same private papers that Grann makes much of, and whose conclusions the author strangely makes no mention of – “Fawcett had no intention of ever returning to Britain and, perhaps lured by a native she-god or spirit guide whose beautiful image haunts the family archive, he planned instead to set up a commune in the jungle, based on a bizarre cult.” He hoped, Williams contends, “to follow what he privately described to friends and family as ‘the Grand Scheme’.” This would involve setting up a secret community which would involve both the worship of his own son, Jack, and the tenets of the then-fashionable credo of theosophy.
Whether this Grand Scheme of Fawcett’s was a sincerely-held belief or simply the ravings of a man gone mad is hard to say; what is perfectly clear, however, is that his final expedition was doomed from the start. The story has been told many times, and even Grann, talented researcher though he is, can add only a little to our knowledge of it. Setting off with only two companions – Jack and Jack’s friend Raleigh Rimell, neither of whom had any experience of the Amazon – Fawcett was last seen at a spot known as Dead Horse Camp, heading for an unexplored portion of the jungle. There need not be too great a mystery as to his fate; according to the local Indians, they warned the three Englishmen that they were headed into territory inhabited by hostile tribes, and that to press on was tantamount to suicide.
That Fawcett – too old, at 57, to take such risks – might have died in the course of an over-ambitious, under-funded final expedition is not much of a story, though, and the real problem with Grann’s undeniably entertaining book is that he cannot afford to admit this. The Lost City of Z not only glosses over Fawcett’s mysticism, but erects its own elaborate facades. There is much talk, early in the book, of Grann’s search for an ancient map that might show Z, but considerably less mention of the fact that it points to a spot about 1,000 miles from the place Fawcett was looking for. Similarly, Grann’s efforts to create a parallel narrative of his own expedition in search of Fawcett founded on the awful but revealing fact that Dead Horse Camp – reachable in 1925 only after weeks with a machete in the trackless jungle – is now less than a day’s journey from the nearest settlement, and reachable by 4WD across a deforested terrain that “looks like Nebraska – perpetual plains fading into the horizon.”
The Lost City of Z is well supported with notes and a full bibliography, but the lack of maps is sorely felt.
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