The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2009

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 5

Chapters 6-13

Chapters 14-17

Chapters 18-21

Chapters 22-25

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 18-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 18 Summary: “A Scientific Obsession”

While Fawcett is away, Nina moves the family to Los Angeles from Jamaica. Jack’s friend Raleigh is also there, and the two young men develop Hollywood aspirations. Back home, Fawcett asks Jack to join him on his next expedition. Jack agrees and insists that Raleigh should accompany them. Meanwhile, Fawcett’s obsession has left the family on the edge of poverty. He requested funding from the RGS, but they declined based on his last unsuccessful venture, which had bankrupted him personally to conduct. Unable to afford Los Angeles, the Fawcetts return to England and rent a home with no modern amenities, forcing the family to pump their own water and chop wood for heat and cooking. The younger children are forced to quit school to help take care of the household and to take small jobs for some money. Fawcett, frustrated with the scientific community, retreats into the spiritual realm, writes articles for occult magazines, and broods over his misfortune. In September 1924, Fawcett meets George Lynch, a well-connected war correspondent who is also fascinated by the idea of Z, so he helps secure funding from both British and American sources by selling the rights to Fawcett’s story of the expedition. On December 3, 1924, Fawcett and Jack board a ship to New York. Lynch proves to be an untrustworthy alcoholic, but most of the funding materializes, and the press attention in the United States leads to additional contributions, including one from the Rockefeller family.

Chapter 19 Summary: “An Unexpected Clue”

In 2005, Grann prepares to enter the Amazon. He recruits a guide named Paulo Pinage, a veteran of Brazil’s Indian Protection Service. Grann’s objective lay inside what is now Xingu National Park, which in 1961 became Brazil’s first Indigenous reservation. At Cuiaba, where the lost Fawcett party passed in 1925, Grann shows Pinage two pieces of evidence: 1) a map on which Raleigh had sketched the party’s intended path, and 2) a letter from Jack to his mother. Each suggests that Fawcett intended a more northerly route than what he told the RGS. Pinage looks “increasingly intrigued” (224).

Chapter 20 Summary: “Have No Fear”

Fawcett, Jack, and Raleigh travel by train from Rio de Janeiro to Corumba, deep in the Brazilian wilderness. On February 23, 1925, they leave Corumba by ship and head northward to Cuiaba. After a glorious ocean passage, during which Raleigh had met and fallen in love with a young woman, this part of the journey is sheer tedium. Arriving at Cuiaba on March 3, Fawcett and his two companions wait for the arrival of the dry season. Fawcett learns that Dr. Rice has surveyed the jungle by airplane but has not found Z. On April 20, the Fawcett party, accompanied by several native guides, sets out northward.

In the extreme heat, Fawcett pushes Jack and Raleigh to advance at an accelerating pace. At one point, the expedition loses sight of Fawcett, who strays off in a different direction and then re-emerges along the Manso River the next morning. The world awaits news. Indigenous runners carry dispatches back to Cuiaba. As obstacles mount, Raleigh’s enthusiasm begins to decline, but Jack seems to relish the challenges. The party arrives at a cattle ranch and then turns east to Bakairi Post, “the last point of civilization” (239). They encounter members of the Bakairi tribe, take pictures, play music, and celebrate Jack’s 22nd birthday on May 19. The expedition heads east from Bakairi, where the jungle thickens. Raleigh begins to falter. He dreams of home and loses interest in Z. Fawcett sends the guides back to Cuiaba and encourages Raleigh to go with them, but Raleigh decides to continue. With the guides heading back in the other direction and with the party poised to abandon all except what they can carry on their backs, Fawcett and his two younger companions write their final letters.

Chapter 21 Summary: “The Last Eyewitness”

In 2005, after picking up a Bakairi guide, Grann and Pinage drive northward from Cuiaba, following the Fawcett trail. Near the Manso River, where Fawcett advanced too quickly and got separated from the others, Grann notes that the terrain resembles “Nebraska–perpetual plains that faded into the horizon,” a consequence of deforestation (249). Approaching the site of the old cattle ranch, the jungle finally thickens into something like what Fawcett would have seen. They locate the ranch, which the jungle has now consumed. Grann, Pinage, and their guide drive east. At Bakairi Post, they meet an elderly woman named Laurinda who remembers seeing the Fawcett expedition come through the village when she was young. The three Englishmen left the village and traveled in the direction of distant mountains: “We waited for them to come back, but they never did” (256).

Chapters 18-21 Analysis

Much has changed after World War One. As he searches for the funding he needs to satisfy his obsession, Fawcett grows increasingly miserable. He begins to “lash out at the scientific establishment,” which dismisses him as a kook (212). As an RGS-trained explorer with nearly two decades of experience, Fawcett views himself as a serious scientist. Grann notes, however, that the professional landscape had changed in a single generation. “University-trained” specialists with their territorial preoccupations “were displacing” the “amateurs” of an earlier day (194). By immersing himself in the occult, Fawcett does not enhance his scientific credibility.

When at last he secures funding for what proves to be his final expedition, one of his primary backers, the North American Newspaper Alliance, attaches a condition: “Fawcett would send Indian runners out with dispatches during his journey” (216). Though Fawcett chafes at the newspapers’ sensationalizing motives, he is too desperate to refuse their support. These real-time dispatches include letters from all three members of the ill-fated expedition, and they allow Grann to reconstruct the party’s final days.

As Fawcett’s story nears its end, the book’s emphasis begins to shift. Throughout The Lost City of Z, the Amazon’s Indigenous tribes appear on the story’s periphery. Now they move to the center. In Chapter 19, for instance, Grann observes that entering tribal territory can be dangerous, for 29 trespassers were killed as recently as 2004. This observation, taken from Grann’s perspective, still views the region’s Indigenous peoples primarily as a mystery and potential threat to the explorer. In Chapter 21, however, Grann meets Laurinda, the last living witness to the Fawcett expedition. Laurinda explains that her “real name was Comaeda Bakairi, but they told me I was now Laurinda. So I became Laurinda” (255-56). Agents of the Brazilian government, determined to “civilize” the Bakairi by eradicating their tribal identity, had insisted on the name change. It is a lesson in the history of the Western Hemisphere since 1492: where explorers go, imperialism follows.