The Lost City of Z ...
May 1925 ... Amazon Jungle ... Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, a British archaeologist and explorer, along with his son, Jack, disappear under unknown circumstances during an expedition to find what he believed to be an ancient lost city in the uncharted jungles of Brazil. Their quest was to find the Lost City of Z or El Dorado (Spanish for "the golden one"), a legend that began with the story of a South American tribal chief who covered himself with gold dust and would dive into a lake of pure mountain water. Imagined as a place, El Dorado became a kingdom, an empire, the city of this legendary golden king. (This story has many metaphors.)
Fawcett always preferred to travel light, with companions who could be relied upon to negotiate the dangers that confronted them. Small groups of people were also less likely to attract the attention of hostile Indian tribes.
On May 29th, 1925, Fawcett telegraphed his wife saying that they were ready to enter unexplored territory in the region of the Upper Xingu, a tributary of the Amazon River. He said that they had sent the rest of the party back on account of the dangers posed by the local Indians, and that just the three of them would be going on. His message ended with the words; "You need have no fear of failure."
This was the last that anyone heard of the expedition. The three men vanished into the jungle and were never heard from again. No sooner had the group disappeared than rumors of their fate began to circulate. Some thought they had met their death at the hands of the Indians, while others were convinced they had died of disease or fallen prey to wild animals.
Percy Fawcett's son Brian made two trips to the area to try to solve the mystery of their disappearance, but returned without success. But stories of a lost city of antiquity hidden deep in the jungles of the Mato Grosso continue to persist, and in the decades that have followed, more than a hundred people have lost their lives in their quest to find this lost city of Paititi.
Yet the haunting thought remains. Could Percy Fawcett actually have succeeded in finding his city of "Z" after all, but was prevented from leaving by the local Indians who guarded the site? Up to the time of her death, Fawcett's wife remained convinced that her husband had achieved his goal, and had lived for many years in the city of his dreams.
Perhaps we shall never know, for the existence of this lost city has until now remained hidden in the mists that shroud the jungles of the Mato Grosso. These jungles guard their secrets well, for as the Oracle of Tolemac has written:
The world might have forgotten about the hoary legends of Paititi if it had not been for the tales of a Swiss hotelier who visited South America in 1972, and met with a reclusive man with a sensational story to tell. The name of the Swiss writer was Erich von Daniken, and the man that he met was Juan Moricz.
At the time of their meeting Erich von Daniken was a successful author with a provocative theme. He had already published two books which had captured the popular imagination of the world and become instant best-sellers. These books were "Chariots of the Gods" and "Return to the Stars".
While most scholars and scientists scorned his theories of ancient astronauts, von Daniken was nevertheless successful in drawing the attention of the world to ancient relics and ruins that defied the traditional explanation of the history of humanity. In his book entitled "The Gold of the Gods", von Daniken described why he had arranged to meet with Moricz.
The History Channel presents a special about Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett
and his quest to find The Lost City of Z
Q&A with David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z March 26, 2009
Grann spoke to The Afterword about lost worlds, getting lost in the jungle, and the era of exploration.
The Afterword: For those who need to do a little brushing up on their explorers, who was Percy Fawcett?
He was the last of the great territorial explorers who ventured into blank spots on the map with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, he explored the Amazon, a wilderness area virtually the size of the continental United States. He became convinced that this impenetrable jungle concealed the remnants of an ancient civilization, which he named, simply, the City of Z. In 1925, he set out to find it with his twenty-one-year-old son and his son's best friend. They never returned, giving rise to what has been described as "the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century."
What drew you to him?
Several years ago I read that Fawcett had been one of the real-life inspirations for Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World. Curious, I plugged Fawcett's name into a newspaper database and was amazed by the headlines that came up, including "THREE MEN FACE CANNIBALS IN RELIC QUEST" and tribesmen "Seize Movie Actor Seeking to Rescue Fawcett." As I read each story, I became more and more curious about how Fawcett's disappearance had once captivated the world, how hundreds of scientists and adventurers tried to find Fawcett's party and the City of Z, and how countless seekers died or disappeared in the process. What intrigued me most, though, was the notion of Z. For years, most scientists had dismissed Fawcett's theory, insisting that conditions in the jungle were too brutal to support a complex society. But recently some archeologists had begun to challenge this long-held belief and thought that a place like Z might really have existed -- a discovery that would transform our understanding of what the Americas looked liked before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Suddenly, the mystery seemed irresistible.
You admit you were a novice when it comes to camping. What were you thinking, and, how many people attempted to talk you out of this journey?
When I first started researching the story, I never thought I would venture into the jungle. I'm out of shape; I hate to camp; I suffer from a degenerative eye condition that makes it hard to see at night. My intention was simply to write Fawcett's biography, and I spent most of my time safely combing through libraries and archives. But one day I tracked down Fawcett's granddaughter, who, at her home in Wales, showed me a large wooden trunk. Inside was a hidden trove of Fawcett diaries and logbooks. They held new clues to Fawcett's fate and the whereabouts of Z. And it was at that point that I decided, despite warnings from others, to head into the jungle.
What is it about these lost societies -- El Dorado, Atlantis -- that intrigue us?
The fascination with lost cities seems eternal. I suspect that part of it, like the earlier searches for mythical kingdoms, such as Prester John, reflects a longing to find some place that is better or richer or more fabulous than the one we inhabit. In 1928, after tens of thousands of people volunteered to search for Fawcett and his missing party, an American newspaper marveled, "Perhaps if there were a sufficient number of jungles available and enough expeditions to go round, we would see the spectacle of our whole population marching off in search of lost explorers, ancient civilizations, and something which it vaguely felt was missing in its life." I also think there is a deep curiosity about how real civilizations, such as the Incas or Mayans, once flourished and eventually died out. Some of this interest is practical: What did these people accomplish that might help us navigate our way? And some of the fascination is simply wonder at how others lived in different places and ages.
At one point, you were literally lost in the jungle. Was there a point that you wanted to quit and go home to your family?
Being lost in the jungle was definitely the most terrifying moment of my journey. At that point I was desperate to turn back, but it was too late: I couldn't find my way out.
What was harder: trekking through the jungle, or actually sitting down to write the book? How long did it take you to finish?
Physically, the Amazon was much tougher, but psychically I'd probably say the book, which took me nearly four years to research and write.
I was going to ask a question along the lines of "Isn't it depressing that there is nothing left to discover -- that there are no more "blank spots on the map" -- but I guess your book makes clear that isn't the case. What do you think is still out there to uncover?
Though Fawcett marked the end of the age of real territorial exploration, there are still relatively unknown places, especially in the Amazon. Even today, the Brazilian government estimates that there are more than sixty Amazonian tribes that have never been contacted by outsiders. Sydney Possuelo, who was in charge of the Brazilian department set up to protect Indian tribes, has said of these groups, "No one knows for sure who they are, where they are, how many they are, and what languages they speak." Archeologists, using satellite imagery and ground penetrating radars to pinpoint buried artifacts, are beginning to make extraordinary discoveries in the Amazon that are overturning virtually everything that was once believed about the region and its early inhabitants.
It seems there was a time when the explorer or the adventurer was THE celebrity. In recent years, Steve Fossett is the first person who comes to mind who may have been on this level. What will it take for the adventurer to become engrained in the public consciousness again? Astronauts going to Mars?
I am not sure if explorers will ever hold the same place in the popular imagination. Fawcett's legend once contributed to radio plays, novels (Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust is believed to have been influenced by Fawcett's saga), poems, documentaries, movies, stamps, children's stories, comic books, ballads, stage plays, graphic novels, and museum exhibits. As I discuss in my book, there were not only geographical circumstances that made these figures legends; there was an array of cultural forces as well.
Do you know of any new expeditions to search for Z?
I don't know of any at the moment. My hope is that the book will have sufficiently cleared up the endless mystery surrounding Fawcett's fate and the City of Z, though undoubtedly someone else will get bitten by the bug and go marching off.
Brad Pitt has optioned the film rights to the book. Are you involved in writing the screenplay?
The book is being adapted into a screenplay by James Gray, who is also going to direct. He just made the brilliant movie Two Lovers, and I feel like I'm in hands far more capable than mine when it comes to making a movie.
What's your next project, and how do you top this?
Right now I'm working on a story for The New Yorker about the death penalty. As for the next book, I probably won't realize I'm embarking on one until I'm so wrapped up in the subject that I do something foolish, like plunging into the Amazon.
For nearly 500 years, explorers have hunted in vain for a lost city - now with Google Earth, it may have been found. Since the time of the conquistadors, the legend of an ancient, lost civilization deep in the Amazon forest has beguiled hundreds of explorers and led many to their deaths. Some called their dream El Dorado. Others, most notably Colonel Percy Fawcett, the gloriously mustached British explorer (and real-life model for Indiana Jones) named it the City of Z. But no one has ever returned from the Amazon with conclusive proof that such a place existed.
Three scientists have now come close to doing just that. The journal Antiquity has published a report showing more than 200 massive earthworks in the upper Amazon basin near Brazil's border with Bolivia. From the sky it looks as if a series of geometric figures has been carved into the earth, but the archeologists and historians who published the report believe these shapes are the remains of roads, bridges, moats, avenues and squares that formed the basis for a sophisticated civilization spanning 155 miles, which could have supported a population of 60,000. The remains date from AD200 to 1283.
It is an astonishing find - one that builds on recent archeological work in Brazil and northern Bolivia and the availability of Google Earth images of deforested sections of the Amazon. Since the 1980s anthropologists have begun to uncover evidence of advanced civilizations who lived in the Amazon basin: this latest development trumps them all. David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z, believes the importance of this discovery cannot be understated. "It shatters the prevailing notions of what the Amazon looked like before the arrival of Christopher Columbus," he says.
For centuries, scientists assumed the jungle was simply a death trap, a counterfeit paradise where only small, primitive, nomadic tribes existed. These discoveries show the Amazon was, in fact, home to a large civilization that pre-dated the Incas and built an extraordinarily sophisticated society with monumental earthworks.
The dream of finding lost civilizations in South America has persisted for centuries, largely because of a couple of earth-shattering early successes. As John Hemming, a former director of the Royal Geographical Society, recounts in his 1978 book, "The Search For El Dorado", it was the conquistadors who started the craze.
In 1519 Hernan Cortes and his soldiers discovered the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, in Mexico. In the early 1530s, Francisco Pizarro conquered the Incan empire, in what is now Peru. The idea of a 'golden city' somewhere deeper in the unexplored wilds was lodged in the European imagination and never released its hold.
Grann notes that in 1753 a Portuguese bandeirante - a soldier of fortune - emerged from the Amazon jungle and described how, after a long and troublesome peregrination, incited by the insatiable greed of gold, he had seen the ruins of an ancient city from a mountain top. The man walked into the city, discovering stone arches, a statue, wide roads and a temple with hieroglyphics. The bandeirante wrote: "The ruins well showed the size and grandeur which must have been there and how populous and opulent it had been in the age in which it flourished."
Shortly before the outbreak of the first world war, Fawcett, who had been sent on previous exploratory missions to South America by the Royal Geographical Society, read the bandeirante's report. He was gripped. But, as he was preparing maps for an expedition to find what he called the City of Z, war intervened. After the armistice in 1918, he tried to raise funds for an expedition to Z and was dismissed as a crackpot.
Fawcett - whose family motto was "Difficulties be damned" - was undeterred. In 1920 he led a shambolic mission to find the lost city which ended when he had to shoot his horse (at a site known thereafter as Dead Horse Camp). Fawcett's expeditions often had this amateurish feel. He was known to leave for the jungle carrying only a 60 lb backpack and a copy of Rudyard Kipling's poem The Explorer. When his small party was ambushed by natives, Fawcett is said to have ordered his men to play musical instruments and sing Soldiers of the Queen while arrows landed around them.
The explorer's eccentricity masked an increasingly fervent conviction in the existence of a lost city. He maintained, in his entreaties to the Royal Geographical Society for funds, that there were 'the most remarkable relics of an ancient civilization' in the Amazon. After his return from his abortive mission in 1920, he inveighed once more against his doubters. 'It will of course come out,' he wrote, 'that a modern Columbus was turned down in England.'
In 1925 Fawcett, near-destitute at the time, set out on his second and last expedition to find the City of Z. He wrote to his wife: "You need have no fear of any failure." But he was never seen again. In 1927 he was declared missing by the Royal Geographical Society. Two subsequent missions attempted to find him, but with no success.
Nearly a century after Fawcett's disappearance, his instincts appear to have been proved correct. Although he expected the City of Z to be built of stone, and although by the end of his life he had a more fantastical notion of what it would look like, these discoveries show that he was, in many ways, extraordinarily prescient, says Grann. During his years of investigation he had reported very similar findings: large earth mounds filled with ancient and brittle pottery and a network of interconnecting causeways and roadways. He was convinced there were ruins that predated the Incas and that the Amazon had been home to massive settlements, with sophisticated societies and monumental works.
Others are not convinced. Hemming says that while the paper in Antiquity is significant work by serious people ... none of this has anything remotely to do with El Dorado or that racist, incompetent nutter Percy Fawcett. It's as though someone tried to link a discovery at Stonehenge with, say, Edward Lear's travels in the Balkans.Both men can agree that the recent discovery is a great advance in our knowledge of the region. The breakthrough has been eight years in the making.
In 2002 Martti Parssinen, a Finnish historian and archeologist and one of the report's co-authors, was called by a fellow expert, Alceu Ranzi, who had noticed geometrical shapes dug into the earth while flying over the Amazon and hoped that Parssinen would investigate these shapes with him. He understood they weren't natural structures, remembers Parssinen.
He realized they must have been made by indigenous people. According to Parssinen, Ranzi had already tried to enlist the help of scientists in the United States, but had been rebuffed. They just wouldn't believe him, remembers Parssinen. But I realized, because of other work I had done in the area, that this could be something very important. It was extremely exciting to receive that phone call. It was even more exciting, says Parssinen, to fly over the areas that Ranzi had noticed. When I saw the shapes then, it was an amazing feeling, he says. All the old theories said that this area of the Amazon could only ever have supported hunters and collectors. No one believed that a large civilization could have existed there. We realized that this discovery could change history.
The authors published one report in 2003 and then waited for three years for permission to start excavating the area. The use of Google Earth satellite images in pinpointing the exact sites has made their job easier than previous archeological work in the region. But their find is, by any measure, impressive. The implications of the discovery are wide-ranging. This really is the beginning of a reassessment of the history. We are only beginning to understand Amazonia, says Parssinen.
Grann believes this discovery will lead not only to a reassessment of the potential of Pre-Columbian Amazon peoples, but also to an increasing archeological interest in the region. This is just the tip of the iceberg, he says. The authors of the latest study estimate that scientists have found, in this particular area, only 10% of the geometric earthworks and ruins that are actually there. It will take decades for scientists to uncover the full extent of this and other ancient Amazonian civilizations.
It has similarly taken decades for Fawcett's reputation to be revived. For years his only true adherents were his family, those who saw him as the last of the great explorers and occultists who believed that Fawcett had not so much disappeared as discovered a gateway to a new dimension. Indeed, there are still those who worship Fawcett and believe that the City of Z was actually a door to an alternative universe - one website advertises expeditions to the same portal or doorway to a kingdom that was entered by Colonel Fawcett in 1925.
The worlds of archeology and science may take longer to acknowledge the eccentric explorer. But, whatever Fawcett's foibles, he does appear to have been broadly right. Moreover, his memory will be prolonged by a film adaptation of The Lost City of Z in which he will be played by Brad Pitt.
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