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

“Many explorers went mad.”

For centuries, the legend of El Dorado has captivated adventurers, often to the point of insanity. In 1561, for instance, the Spanish conquistador Lope de Aguirre lost his mind in the middle of the jungle, resulting in mutiny and Aguirre’s death. This quotation supports the theme Obsession.

“Even today, the Brazilian government estimates that there are more than sixty Indian tribes that have never been contacted by outsiders.”

Even after 500 years of European exploration and settlement, the Amazon jungle conceals entire native societies from the world, contributing to the region’s reputation as a vast unknown. This quotation supports the themes Re-imagining the Amazon and Collision of Ancient and Modern.

“It was also a chance to escape from the base and its white ruling caste, which mirrored upper-class English society–a society that, beneath its veneer of social respectability, had always contained for Fawcett a somewhat Dickensian horror.”

As a young officer in Ceylon, when he gets time away from his military duties, Fawcett relishes the opportunity to explore the jungle, in part because it provided an escape. Though born into the English upper-class, Fawcett does not reflect with fondness upon his upbringing. This quotation supports the theme Renegades from Civilization.

“In a corridor of the Royal Geographical Society’s building, I noticed on the wall a gigantic seventeenth-century map of the globe. On the margins were sea monsters and dragons. For ages, cartographers had no means of knowing what existed on most of the earth. And more often than not these gaps were filled in with fantastical kingdoms and beasts, as if the make-believe, no matter how terrifying, were less frightening than the truly unknown."

Grann visits the RGS in 2005 and takes note of artifacts that show how mysterious the world must have appeared to generations of explorers and map-makers. As a reminder that Fawcett’s work in South America served the RGS’s broader mission of solving mysteries and mapping the world, this quotation supports the theme Re-imagining the Amazon.

“‘Explorers are not, perhaps, the most promising people with whom to build a society. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men’”

Here Grann quotes an unnamed RGS member, whose psychoanalysis seems applicable to Fawcett. This quotation supports the theme Renegades from Civilization.

“The manual warned each student against ‘the prejudices with which his European mode of thought has been surrounded,’ even as it noted that ‘it is established that some races are inferior to others in volume and complexity of brain, Australians and Africans being in this respect below Europeans.’”

The “manual” refers to an RGS guide—a kind of textbook for would-be explorers—that Fawcett and others studied and learned prior to graduating the training program. The manual’s racist dogma is commonplace for the late-19th and early-20th centuries, when it was more acute than at any other time in Western history, though it is worth noting that the manual does not place “Indians” alongside Australians and Africans, for in an age of obsessive racial thinking there were some who still allowed for the possibility that the Indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere possessed natural faculties on par with the people of Europe. By inferring that Westerners still have much to learn about the Amazonian tribes, this quotation supports the theme Re-imagining the Amazon.

“Wherever I turned, there were customers, or ‘gear heads.’ It was as if the fewer the opportunities for genuine exploration, the greater the means were for anyone to attempt it, and the more baroque the ways–bungee cording, snowboarding–that people found to replicate the sensation. Exploration, however, no longer seemed aimed at some outward discovery; rather, it was directed inward, to what guidebooks and brochures called ‘camping and wilderness therapy’ and ‘personal growth through adventure.’”

Grann encounters these customers, baroque methods, and inward-looking exploration tips at a Manhattan store in 2005. As a reminder that the periodic urge to escape one’s own familiar surroundings often grips people in the modern world, just as it once consumed Fawcett, this quotation supports the theme Renegades from Civilization.

“The area was a haven for bandits, fugitives, and fortune hunters who carried guns on each hip, lassoed jaguars out of boredom, and killed without hesitation.”

The “area” refers to a part of the Amazon that lay between the Bolivian frontier outposts of Rurrenabaque and Riberalta, where slavery still existed. This quotation supports the darker side of the theme Renegades from Civilization.

“It is no exaggeration to say that this information as to the methods employed in the collection of rubber by the agents of the company surpass in horror anything hitherto reported to the civilized world during the last century.”

This passage appears in the writings of a British diplomat. It refers to the Peruvian Amazon Company’s use of slave labor as well as its documented atrocities against the region’s indigenous people: kidnapping, rape, and torture. As a reminder that in remote corners of the Atlantic world the horrors of the slave trade persisted into the 20th century, this quotation supports the theme Collision of Ancient and Modern.

“Still, Fawcett counted his paces and crawled up banks to better see the stars and to fix their position, as if reducing the wilderness to figures and diagrams might enable him to overcome it. His men didn’t need such signposts. They knew where they were: the green hell.”

On his second Amazon expedition, Fawcett explores the Rio Verde along the Brazil-Bolivia boundary. The river’s name, coupled with the belief that few could survive in a region where the jungle’s density belies the scarcity of food, accounts for the phrase “green hell.” In time, Fawcett concludes that the jungle has supported, and continues to support, thriving Indigenous communities, so this quotation, as a reminder of broad misconceptions, supports the theme Re-imagining the Amazon.

“Yet he continued to subject her to his dangerous compulsions. In some ways, it must have been easier for his family when he was gone, for the longer he remained at home, the more his mood soured.”

Fawcett’s “dangerous compulsions” take a toll on Nina, though she manages it as best she can by immersing herself in her husband’s pursuits, at least as far as possible. This quotation supports the theme Obsession. As a reminder that Fawcett’s compulsions seem to intensify when he languishes at home, this quotation also supports the theme Renegades from Civilization.

“Yet the very things that made Fawcett a great explorer–demonic fury, single-mindedness, and an almost divine sense of immortality–also made him terrifying to be with.”

Fawcett commands loyalty from a handful of like-minded companions, but at times he also comes across as heartless and maniacal. This quotation supports the theme Obsession.

“It’s hell all right, but one kind of likes it.”

This line appears in the writings of Henry Costin, who accompanies Fawcett on several Amazon expeditions. As a reminder that Fawcett is not the only one who finds something thrilling in exploration that ordinary life cannot match, this quotation supports the theme Renegades from Civilization.

“But the notion of Z–of a lost civilization concealed in the Amazon–began truly to take hold when Fawcett encountered the hostile Indians he had been warned to avoid at all costs.”

Most Indigenous tribes prove neither as hostile nor as destitute as Fawcett had been led to expect. In fact, they have plenty of food, and they appear to have a well-developed culture that must have originated in something much older. This quotation supports the theme Re-imagining the Amazon. As a reminder that contact between Europeans and the Indigenous tribes of the Western Hemisphere produced revelations even in the 20th century, this quotation also supports the theme Collision of Ancient and Modern.

“The Victorians wanted to know, in effect, why some apes had evolved into English gentlemen and why some hadn’t.”

Fawcett comes of age at a time when the theory of evolution reinforces bigotry, and he never fully transcends the era’s racial assumptions. Through repeated contact with Amazonian tribes, however, he does discard certain presuppositions and comes to believe in the existence of an advanced civilization. In an indirect way, therefore, this quotation supports the theme Re-imagining the Amazon.

“What is consistent in his writings is the growing belief that the Amazon and its people were not what everyone assumed them to be.”

Fawcett imbibes Victorian-era racism, endures the trauma of World War I, and dabbles heavily in the occult, so his writings include passages and claims that modern readers might find incoherent or extravagant. Amidst the confusion, however, Fawcett always maintains that the Amazon’s breathtaking secrets have yet to be revealed. This quotation supports the theme Re-imagining the Amazon.

“It dawned on Fawcett that in regions far from the major rivers, where most European travelers and slave traders went, tribes were healthier and more populous.”

Throughout the Western Hemisphere, from 1492 onward, contact with Europeans left Indigenous tribes decimated by disease. The New World’s biological cataclysm, now well established by historians and anthropologists, strikes Fawcett as further evidence for a once-thriving Amazonian civilization. This quotation supports the theme Re-imagining the Amazon.

“For more than a century after the manuscript was written, Fawcett said, it had been ‘pigeonholed’ in bureaucratic archives. ‘It was difficult for an administration steeped in the narrow bigotry of an all-powerful Church to give much credence to such a thing as an old civilization,’ Fawcett wrote.”

Here Grann and Fawcett refer to a 1753 Portuguese document that describes the ruins of an ancient city. As an expression of Fawcett’s frustration with the Catholic Church, which sat at the apex of Western society for more than a thousand years, this quotation supports the theme Renegades from Civilization.

“The logical choice was to postpone the journey, but instead he sold half his military pension to pay for provisions–gambling what little private savings he had–and came up with a new plan.”

After the devastating failure of his 1921 expedition, Fawcett allows his compulsion to get the better of him. Instead of exercising patience in pursuit of funding and then waiting for a more opportune time, Fawcett bankrupts himself and impoverishes his family to undertake an immediate solo mission, which also fails. This quotation supports the theme Obsession.

“He was sure that he had sacrificed all he had to give to reach Z.”

In addition to impoverishing his family, Fawcett lies and schemes to acquire funding for another expedition. This quotation supports the theme Obsession.

“Some of the Indians wore striking jewelry and had in their possession exquisite pottery, which made Dyott think that Fawcett’s stories of an ancient sophisticated civilization might be true.”

George Dyott leads the first major rescue operation after Fawcett’s disappearance. He is struck by the same kinds of evidence that drew Fawcett to Z in the first place. This quotation supports the theme Re-imagining the Amazon.

“Our search for Fawcett and the city of Z suddenly felt trivial.”

Vanite, a fellow Kalapalo, has just informed Vajuvi that the white people destroyed a nearby sacred waterfall and are building a hydroelectric dam, which threatens the Kalapalos’ very existence. Grann’s reaction to Vanite’s sad news, a scene that must have played out thousands of times in different forms over the last five centuries, supports the theme Collision of Ancient and Modern.

“Heckenberger said that we were standing in the middle of a vast ancient settlement.”

The archaeologist Michael Heckenberger, whom Grann encounters in the Kuikuro village, reveals substantial evidence of the ancient civilization Fawcett always knew to be hidden deep in the Amazon. This quotation supports the theme Re-imagining the Amazon. Heckenberger spent so much time in the jungle that the Kuikuro chief had formally adopted him, so in this respect the quotation also supports the theme Renegades from Civilization.