Lost: one British explorer – and an entire city
As a new film pieces together the last expedition of an intrepid adventurer, Joe Shute meets the man who set off to find out his fate
‘His gold signet ring (motto: Difficulties Be Damned) was found in 1979’
On June 21 1927, The Daily Telegraph published an appeal from the president of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) for help finding a British adventurer who had vanished on an expedition in the Amazon rainforest. The piece was headlined: “Colonel Fawcett’s Silence. No news for two years.”
The man in question was Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, the 58-yearold veteran of countless journeys into the heart of the jungle. A decorated war hero who was gassed in the Battle of the Somme, a skilled cartographer and the son of an aristocrat who had squandered two family fortunes, Fawcett was obsessed with the notion of a lost civilisation in the middle of the Amazon basin. He was convinced its discovery would change the course of history.
For his final journey, he was accompanied by his 21-year-old son, Jack, and best friend Raleigh Rimmell. So worried was Fawcett that a rival adventurer would get to his lost city first that he had kept their exact route a closely guarded secret. When the alarm was raised, all that was known was that they were somewhere deep in the Mato Grosso (translation: “thick forest”) region.
For a time, the mysterious vanishing act of Percy Fawcett and his team gripped the world’s media. He was the Lord Lucan of his day and, for two decades after his disappearance, the subject of endless newspaper speculation.
But as the years passed, he was slowly forgotten by history, his feats overshadowed by the likes of Ernest Shackleton, David Livingston and Robert Falcon Scott – all of whom have been immortalised in bronze statues erected around the exterior walls of the RGS. Most people, nowadays, have never heard of Colonel Percy Fawcett.
It has taken an American to exhume him in the popular imagination. David Grann, an author and staff writer on the New Yorker magazine, discovered Fawcett when researching the works of Arthur Conan Doyle (the pair were friends and Fawcett partly inspired his tale The Lost World).
Grann grew so obsessed with his story that he decided to trek into the Amazon himself, leaving his wife, Kyra, and baby son behind for three months to discover the truth about what happened to Colonel Fawcett and whether or not the mythical kingdom he called “Z” could ever have existed. “I’d never done anything like that,” he says. “I hate camping. I’m out of shape now and was out of shape then. When I told my wife, the one thing she made me do was go to an outdoors shop. I also took another insurance policy out on my life.” Grann’s book, The Lost City of Z, has inspired a Hollywood film, which is released this week. When we meet in the Lowther Room of the RGS, the urbane 50-year-old New Yorker, who talks with the inflection of Woody Allen, still shudders at the privations of the jungle. “There was a dengue fever outbreak… the bugs, the snakes. I’ve tried to block it all out.” At one point, he became separated from his guide and all of his equipment, spending the best part of the day staggering alone through the rainforest. “I was desperate and it was getting dark – then I heard some cackling in the trees and it turned out to be local children, who led me to safety. I must have looked reddened from the sun and fat and scared, and they thought I was the funniest thing in the world.”
Prior to embarking on his journey in the summer of 2005, Grann spent months trawling through Fawcett’s papers in the archives of the RGS to try to piece together his route. He also traced Fawcett’s granddaughter, Rolette de Montet-Guerin, to her home in Cardiff, where she showed him a trunkful of old diaries and logbooks. She also had his gold signet ring engraved with the family motto, “Nec Aspera Terrent” (meaning “Difficulties Be Damned”). The ring had been discovered in a shop in the Amazonian town of Cuiabá in 1979.
Grann recruited a guide and set off up the Xingu river in Fawcett’s footsteps. So arduous were the original Amazon expeditions that it was not unusual for Fawcett to be away for years at a time, and to lose most of the men who accompanied him.
In the early stages, Grann discovered that much of the jungle from the explorer’s time had disappeared – cleared for soya bean cultivation. Times change, he says, but the threat to the Amazon and struggle for independence of indigenous societies remains. “It looked like farmland in Nebraska. Shocking.” Still, when he made it into the Xingu national park, Brazil’s first designated Indian reservation and an area the size of Belgium, the forest closed about him.
In Fawcett’s era, white explorers would regularly come into brutal conflict with the native Indians. They would be shot at with poisoned darts as their boats headed upstream and would return in kind with a barrage of bullets. Fawcett, though, refused to allow his men to engage fire and, as a result, they were cautiously welcomed in by many tribes.
As Grann progressed through the jungle, he discovered that oral histories passed between tribes, some of which made mention of Fawcett’s final expedition. One such story from the Kalapalos tribe described Fawcett’s equipment in detail and that he was playing a recorder – a fact Grann had read in one of his letters to his wife (who is played by Sienna Miller in the film), but which had never been made public.
Grann remains “pretty convinced” by another Kalapalos story about the truth of Fawcett’s final fate. He was told a story of Fawcett and two younger men coming through the Kalapalos lands and insisting upon travelling east, despite warnings of a murderous tribe ahead. “They described seeing the smoke of Fawcett’s campfire rising above the canopy of the forest,” he says. And then as they watched on the fifth night, there was nothing.
And what of Fawcett’s theory of the city of Z, for which he was so ridiculed in his own era? Recent archaeological finds in the Amazon of earthworks, drainage channels and pottery (which Fawcett discovered fragments of himself) seem to corroborate his theory of a complex civilisation existing in the rainforest long before Europeans arrived.
“I think Z was a fairly grounded pursuit,” Grann says. “But it’s important to look at Fawcett after the Battle of the Somme, when he had seen all these men perish and the society suddenly implode around him. At that point, Z became something else in his mind, a way to find some transcendence and meaning and search for the sublime.”
Grann encapsulates this as Fawcett’s drive for discovery and revelation. “Fawcett was complicated, larger than life, deeply brave and with amazing derring-do. He was also merciless to the people he went with. The effects upon his family were enormous and tragic. It haunted them.”
Grann had a personal insight into the strain it placed upon those left behind. During his time in the jungle, he only had occasional contact with his wife via satellite phone. At the end of his journey, he returned home in secret as a birthday surprise. “I showed up the door, dirty and covered in a beard. She just burst into tears, because she thought something had happened to me.”
Since the publication of his book, Grann has moved on to other stories. But the desire to uncover the secrets of the jungle still refuses to fade.
“Even if we’re not explorers like Fawcett, we all still embark on these objectives in our own weird way,” he says. “And you don’t really know when you’re going to come back from them.”
The Lost City of Z is on general release in cinemas from Friday