Book Review - 'The Lost City of Z' by David Grann

The Lost City of Z: A Legendary British Explorer's Deadly Quest to Uncover the Secrets of the Amazon by David Grann

 

Born in 1867, Colonel Percy Fawcett is described as “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.” Like most Victorian explorers he was also mildly bonkers. His family motto, Nec Despera Terrent – “Difficulties be Damned” – gives an idea of the man.

 

He was commissioned in the Royal Artillery in 1886, and served in Ceylon where he was given a map purporting to show the location of lost treasure in a cave system. He found no treasure but the map sparked his life-long obsession with lost cities. After leaving the army he enrolled at the Royal Geographical Society’s (RGS) “explorers’ school”, proving a dab hand with the sextant and theodolite. His first expedition was ostensibly to map parts of Morocco, but he had in fact been sent as a spy.

 

Between 1906 and 1924 Colonel Fawcett made several expeditions to the Amazon region, at the behest of the RGS, mapping the area around Brazil and Bolivia. Such was his energy and drive that he often completed his surveys well ahead of the allotted time, despite the harshness of the terrain and the dangers therein. He was unusual for the time in that he dealt with the native Indian tribes through courtesy and diplomacy, rather than shooting them. Colonel Fawcett soon became famous, described in the press as the “Livingstone of the Amazon”.

 

He broke off exploring to serve in World War One, winning the DSO. He also became friends with Sir Henry Rider Haggard and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the latter basing his novel The Lost World on Colonel Fawcett’s exploits.

 

After the war he returned to the Amazon and became obsessed with the tales he’d heard from local tribes of the ruins of lost cities hidden in the jungle. Such tales were not new. In the sixteenth century Sir Walter Raleigh and Gonzalo Pizarro had launched disastrous expeditions in search of the fabled city of El Dorado. Colonel Fawcett became convinced of the existence of such a city, code-named “Z”, to be found on the Upper Xingu river.

 

In 1925 he launched his expedition. He turned down Lawrence of Arabia’s offer to join him (fearing a clash of egos) and was accompanied by his son Jack, and Jack’s best friend, Raleigh Rimmell. Both were chosen for their pure, manly qualities: “… the three chief agents of bodily degeneration – alcohol, tobacco and loose living – were revolting to him [Fawcett].” As with previous expeditions, this was not going to be an easy journey. “Anyone who broke a limb or fell sick deep in the jungle would have little chance of survival… the logic of the jungle dictated that the person be abandoned – or, as Fawcett grimly put it, ‘He has his choice of opium pills, starvation, or torture if he is found by savages.’”

Among their provisions were a ukulele and a piccolo, music proving a good way of pacifying hostile savages.

 

Colonel Fawcett’s party was last seen in May 1925. There were numerous expeditions afterwards to find Fawcett, and although a few objects (his compass and signet ring) turned up, no remains were ever found, and no satisfactory explanation made for his disappearance. There were rumours he had become the chief of a tribe of cannibals, or was worshipped as a god in the jungle.

 

David Grann not only gives an excellent summary of Colonel Fawcett’s life, but also of the subsequent quests to discover what became of his expedition. After hunting through the archives for clues, Grann decided to travel to the Amazon himself in 2005. He visited the Kalapalo tribe, who described how they had warned Colonel Fawcett not to proceed eastwards as “fierce Indians” would kill them. They saw the expedition’s campfires for five days, and then they disappeared. Grann, quite reasonably, assumes that they were killed by a hostile tribe.

 

Grann tells a rattling good yarn about one man’s fatal obsession.

 

(A version of this book review first appeared in The Chap magazine.)