This 2005 book entitled: “The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon” by David Grann is a well written and entertaining story of explorations of South America primarily by “Colonel” Percy Harrison Fawcett and those who followed in his path to explore South America mainly in the vicinity of the Amazon river. This reviewer selected it after first reading another more recent excellent book by David Grann: “The Wager”. The lost city of Z provides great insight into indigenous tribes, how they lived and how they interacted with European explorers. Both books are worth purchasing and reading.
Illustrative of how Grann tells this story about exploring the Amazon, he writes: “I had come simply to record how generations of scientists and adventurers became fatally obsessed with solving what has often been described as “the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century”—the whereabouts of the lost City of Z… 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 the real-life hunt for Z. At times, I had to remind myself that everything in this story is true”
Grann writes: “Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, and his name was known throughout the world… He was renowned as the “David Livingstone of the Amazon,”
In 1916, the Royal Geographical Society had awarded him… a gold medal “for his contributions to the mapping of South America.”… Fawcett was setting out into the Amazon, a wilderness nearly the size of the continental United States, to make what he called “the great discovery of the century”—a lost civilization… Some four thousand men died during that expedition alone, of starvation and disease and at the hands of Indians defending their territory with arrows dipped in poison… Fawcett had determined that an ancient, highly cultured people still existed in the Brazilian Amazon and that their civilization was so old and sophisticated it would forever alter the Western view of the Americas. He had christened this lost world the City of Z.”
Grann writes: “… in June of 1996, when an expedition of Brazilian scientists and adventurers headed into the jungle. They were searching for signs of Colonel Percy Fawcett, who had vanished, along with his son Jack and Raleigh Rimell, more than seventy years earlier… Even today [2005], 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… and asked if the planes overhead were on an invisible road.”
Grann writes: “Betty Meggers of the Smithsonian Institution is perhaps the most influential modern archaeologist of the Amazon. In 1971, she famously summed up the region as a “counterfeit paradise,” a place that, for all its fauna and flora, is inimical to human life… Some tribes committed infanticide, abandoned their sick in the woods, or engaged in blood revenge and warfare. In the 1970s, Claudio Villas Boas, who was one of the great defenders of Amazonian Indians, told a reporter, “This is the jungle and to kill a deformed child—to abandon the man without family—can be essential for the survival of the tribe… After studying members of the Sirionó tribe in Bolivia in the early 1940s, Holmberg described them as among “the most culturally backward peoples of the world,” a society so consumed by the quest for food that it had developed no art, religion, clothes, domesticated animals, solid shelter, commerce, roads, or even the ability to count beyond three… When I called Meggers… she dismissed the possibility of anyone discovering a lost civilization in the Amazon.”
Grann writes: “Fawcett… was trained to be an apostle of Western civilization: to go forth and convert the world to capitalism and Christianity, to transform pastures into plantations and huts into hotels, to introduce to those living in the Stone Age the marvels of the steam engine and locomotive, and to ensure that the sun never set on the British Empire… [But] in Fawcett’s… mind, what he had been taught his whole life about the superiority of Western civilization clashed with what he experienced beyond its shores…”
Grann writes: “Even as late as 1740, it was estimated that fewer than a hundred and twenty places on the planet had been accurately mapped. Because precise portable clocks did not exist, navigators had no means of determining longitude, which is most easily measured as a function of time. Ships plowed into rocks and shoals, their captains convinced that they were hundreds of miles out to sea; thousands of men and millions of dollars’ worth of cargo were squandered. In 1714, Parliament announced that “the Discovery of the Longitude is of such Consequence to Great Britain for the safety of the Navy and Merchant-Ships as well as for the improvement of Trade” that it was offering a twenty-thousand-pound prize—the equivalent today of twelve million dollars—for a “Practical and Useful” solution.”
Grann writes: “It was February 4, 1900… And that strange beast which was invading the streets, scaring the horses and pedestrians, breaking down on every curb: the automobile. The law had originally required drivers to proceed at no more than two miles per hour with a footman walking ahead waving a red flag, but in 1896 the speed limit had been raised to fourteen miles per hour… Since he [Fawcett] had left England for Ceylon fourteen years earlier, London seemed to have become more crowded, more dirty, more modern, more rich, more poor, more everything. With over four and a half million people, London was the biggest city in the world... Then there was the horse manure—“ the London mud,” as it was politely called—which, though swept up by street urchins and sold door-to-door as garden fertilizer, was virtually everywhere Fawcett stepped… Despite the Victorians’ dizzying contact with alien cultures, the field was still composed almost entirely of amateurs and enthusiasts. (In 1896, Great Britain had only one university professor… of anthropology.)… Fawcett [studied and] received the imprimatur of the Royal Geographical Society—or, as he put it, “The R.G.S. bred me as an explorer.” All he needed now was a mission.”
Grann writes: “In the nineteenth century, the British government had increasingly recruited agents from the ranks of explorers and mapmakers. It was a way not only to sneak people into foreign territories with plausible deniability but also to tap recruits skilled in collecting the sensitive geographical and political data that the government most coveted… and, when entering lands forbidden to Westerners, to wear elaborate disguises. In Tibet, many surveyors dressed as Buddhist monks and employed prayer beads to measure distances (each sliding bead represented a hundred paces… The Royal Geographical Society was often aware of, if not complicit in, such activities… In 1864, boundary disputes between Paraguay and its neighbors had erupted into one of the worst conflicts in Latin American history. (About half the Paraguayan population was killed.) Because of the extraordinary economic demand for rubber—“ black gold”—which was abundant in the region, the stakes over the Amazon delimitation were equally fraught… Goldie said that the countries had established a boundary commission and were seeking an impartial observer from the Royal Geographical Society to map the borders in question… Disease was rampant in the region, and the Indians, who had been attacked mercilessly by rubber trappers, murdered interlopers… a collection of… towns… had recently… been carved into the jungle by settlers who had fallen under the spell of oro negro—“ black gold.”… it wasn’t until 1896, when B. F. Goodrich manufactured the first automobile tires in the United States, that rubber madness consumed the… Amazon, which held a virtual monopoly on the highest-quality latex.
The prospect of fortune had enticed thousands of illiterate workers into the wilderness, where they quickly became indebted to rubber barons who had provided them with transportation, food, and equipment on credit… It often took weeks to produce a single rubber ball large enough to sell. And it was rarely enough to discharge his debt… Countless trappers died of starvation, dysentery, and other diseases… the British consul general who led the investigation, estimated that some thirty thousand Indians had died at the hands of this one rubber company alone.”
Grann writes: “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… Fawcett continued with Willis and the interpreter to survey the border between Bolivia and Brazil… and presented his findings”
Grann writes: “Candice Millard explained in The River of Doubt, “The rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite… the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day.”
Grann writes: “Over the next decade and a half, he conducted one expedition after another in which he explored thousands of square miles of the Amazon and helped to redraw the map of South America… WORD OF FAWCETT’S feats as an explorer, meanwhile, was beginning to spread… Fawcett’s growing legend was predicated on the fact that not only had he made journeys that no one else had dared but he had done so at a pace that seemed inhuman…”
Grann writes: “One night [an explorer with the group] Murray was astonished to see vampire bats swarming from the sky and attacking the animals… vampire bats also fed on humans… “We awoke to find our hammocks saturated with blood,” Fawcett said … Murray, meanwhile, seemed to be literally coming apart. One of his fingers grew inflamed after brushing against a poisonous plant… Then he was stricken with diarrhea. Then he woke up to find what looked like worms in his knee and arm… They were maggots growing inside him. He counted fifty around his elbow alone… Murray wrote. “When traveling in the uninhabited forest, without other recourses than you carry with you, every man realized that if he… can’t keep up with the others he must take the consequences. The others can’t wait and die with him.”
Grann writes: “Darwin’s theory, laid out in On the Origin of Species in 1859, suggested that people and apes shared a common ancestor, and, coupled with recent discoveries of fossils revealing that humans had been on earth far longer than the Bible stated, helped irrevocably to sever anthropology from theology. Victorians now attempted to make sense of human diversity not in theological terms but in biological ones… The Victorians wanted to know, in effect, why some apes had evolved into English gentlemen and why some hadn’t. Whereas Sepúlveda had argued that Indians were inferior on religious grounds, many Victorians now claimed that they were inferior on biological ones—that they were possibly even a “missing link” in the evolutionary chain between apes and men.”
Grann writes: “Fawcett… vigorously opposed the destruction of indigenous cultures through colonization… He hated to classify unacculturated Indians as “savages”—then the common terminology… IN 1914, FAWCETT was traveling… in a remote corner of the Brazilian Amazon, far from any major rivers, when… the jungle suddenly opened into a huge clearing. In the burst of light, Fawcett could see a series of beautiful dome-shaped houses made of thatch; some were seventy feet high and a hundred feet in diameter. Nearby were plantings of maize, yucca, bananas, and sweet potato… A member of the tribe, in turn, handed to its visitors gourds full of nuts. “Our friendship was now accepted,”… And, while staying there, Fawcett discovered something he had never seen before: a large population numbering in the several thousands. Moreover, the village was surrounded by indigenous settlements with thousands more people.”
Grann writes: “In 1907, while Fawcett was conducting his first surveying expedition, Dr. Rice was trekking over the Andes with a then-unknown amateur archaeologist named Hiram Bingham… In 1911, the cohort of South American explorers, along with the rest of the world, was astounded by the announcement that Hiram Bingham, Dr. Rice’s old traveling companion, had, with the aid of a Peruvian guide, uncovered the Incan ruins of Machu Picchu, nearly eight thousand feet above sea level, in the Andes. Although Bingham had not discovered an unknown civilization—the Incan empire and its monumental architectural works were well documented—he had helped to illuminate this ancient world in remarkable fashion. National Geographic, which devoted an entire issue to Bingham’s find, noted that Machu Picchu’s stone temples and palaces and fountains—most likely a fifteenth-century retreat for Incan nobility—may “prove to be the most important group of ruins discovered in South America.”… Bingham was catapulted into the stratosphere of fame; he was even elected to the U.S. Senate… The discovery fired Fawcett’s imagination.”
Grann writes: “In September of 1914… World War I had begun… Though Fawcett was forty-seven years old… he felt compelled to volunteer… As a major in the Royal Field Artillery, Fawcett was placed in charge… of more than a hundred men… Fawcett, who was accustomed to inhuman conditions, was superb at holding his position, and in January 1916 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and put in command of a brigade of more than seven hundred men… No force of nature in the jungle had prepared him for this man-made onslaught… It was the Battle of the Somme—or what the Germans, who suffered massive casualties as well, referred to in letters home… as “the bath of blood.” On the first day of the offensive, nearly twenty thousand British soldiers died and almost forty thousand were wounded… On June 28, 1919, nearly five years after Fawcett returned from the Amazon and shortly before his fifty-second birthday, Germany finally signed a peace treaty in surrender. Some twenty million people had been killed and at least twenty million wounded.”
Grann writes: “During the six years Fawcett had been away from the Amazon, the rubber boom had collapsed, and a central role in its demise was played by a former president of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Clements Markham. In the 1870s, Markham had engineered… the smuggling of Amazonian rubber-tree seeds to Europe, which were then distributed to plantations throughout British colonies in Asia. Compared with the brutal, inefficient, and costly extraction of wild rubber in the jungle, growing rubber on Asian plantations was easy and cheap, and the produce abundant.”
Grann writes: “There was also a large archway, both sides of it intact, and behind it was a dazzlingly large tower. They looked like what the bandeirante had described in 1753. “What is it?” I asked. “Stone city.” “Who built it?” “It is—how do you say?—an illusion.” “That?” I said, pointing to one of the columns. “It was made by nature, by erosion. But many people who see it think it is a lost city, like Z.”… In Brazil alone, the Amazon has, over the last four decades, lost some two hundred and seventy thousand square miles of its original forest cover—an area bigger than France…. Despite government efforts to reduce deforestation, in just five months in 2007 as much as two thousand seven hundred square miles were destroyed, a region larger than the state of Delaware. Countless animals and plants, many of them with potential medicinal purposes, have vanished… The Brazilian Transport Ministry has said that loggers… employ “the highest concentration of slave labor in the world.” Indians are frequently driven off their land, enslaved, or murdered… Fawcett even appears in the 1991 novel Indiana Jones and the Seven Veils… In the novel’s convoluted plot, Indiana Jones… sets out to find Fawcett… Jones locates Fawcett and discovers that the Amazon explorer has found his… city.”
Grann writes: “Nina Fawcett told a reporter in 1927, two years after the party was last heard from… as long as possible.” By the spring of 1927, however, anxieties had become widespread… A popular theory was that the explorers were being held hostage by a tribe—a relatively common practice… In February 1928, George Miller Dyott, a forty-five-year-old member of the Royal Geographical Society, launched the first major rescue effort… For the media, Fawcett’s disappearance had only contributed to what one writer called a “romantic story which builds newspaper empires”—and few were as adept at keeping the story ablaze as Dyott… he was one of the earliest explorers to bring along motion-picture cameras… Dyott… chose four hardened outdoorsmen who could operate a wireless radio and a movie camera in the jungle… After the Voltaire reached Rio, Dyott bade his wife farewell and headed with his men to the frontier. There he recruited a small army of Brazilian helpers and Indian guides, and the party
soon grew to twenty-six members and required seventy-four oxen and mules to transport more than three tons of food and gear. A reporter later described the party as a “Cecil B. DeMille safari.” Brazilians began to refer to it as the “suicide club.”… When Dyott and his men finally emerged from the jungle, months later—sick, emaciated, bearded, mosquito pocked—they were greeted as heroes… Dyott published a book, Man Hunting in the Jungle, and starred in a 1933 Hollywood film about his adventures called Savage Gold.”
Grann writes: “Although no reliable statistics exist, one recent estimate put the death toll from these expeditions as high as one hundred… NINA CAREFULLY FOLLOWED all of these developments in what she called “The Fawcett Mystery.”… In 1931, Vincenzo Petrullo, an anthropologist who worked for the Pennsylvania University Museum, in Philadelphia, and who was one of the first whites to enter the Xingu, reported hearing a similar account… Some fifty years later, Ellen Basso, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona, recorded a more detailed version
When Vajuvi finished his version of the oral history, he said, “People always say the Kalapalos killed the Englishmen. But we did not. We tried to save them.”… Brian now looked at his father’s papers… He decided to quit his job and stitch together the fragmentary writings into Exploration Fawcett… When Brian completed a draft, in April 1952, he gave a copy to Nina, telling her, “It really is quite a ‘monumental’ work, and I think Daddy would have been proud of it.”… The book, published in 1953, became an international sensation… In the early 1950s, Brian decided to conduct his own expeditions in search of the missing explorers. He suspected that his father, who would be approaching ninety, was dead and that Raleigh, owing to his infirmities, had perished soon after leaving Dead Horse Camp. But Jack—he was the cause of Brian’s gnawing doubt. What if he had survived?... British officials thought Brian “just as mad as his father,”… and refused to facilitate his “suicide.”… Still, Brian forged ahead with his plans and boarded a ship to Brazil; his arrival there touched off a media storm…. Brian
rented a tiny propeller plane and, with a pilot, canvassed the jungle from the air. He dropped thousands of leaflets that fluttered over the trees like snow.”
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