The Lost City of Z

garrisons, most recently in Ireland. Goldie was not someone to trifle with. Famous for his keen intelligence and volatile temper, he had almost single-handedly imposed the British Empire’s control over Niger, in the 1880s and 1890s. He had shocked Victorian society by running off to Paris with a governess, and was an unrepentant atheist who championed Darwin’s theory of evolution. “[He] was lashed into frenzies of impatience by stupidity, or incompetence,” one of his biographers wrote. “Never did man suffer fools less gladly.”

Fawcett was led into the RGS to see Goldie, whose blue eyes seemed to “bore holes into one,” as a subordinate once put it. Goldie, who was nearly sixty, always carried in his pocket a tube of poison, which he planned to take if he ever became physically handicapped or incurably ill. As Fawcett recalled, Goldie asked him, “Do you know anything about Bolivia?”

When Fawcett said no, Goldie continued, “One usually thinks of Bolivia as a country on the roof of the world. A great deal of it is in the mountains; but beyond the mountains, to the east, lies an enormous area of tropical forest and plains.” Goldie reached into his desk and pulled out a large map of Bolivia, which he spread before Fawcett like a tablecloth. “Here you are, Major-here’s about as good a map of the country as I have! Look at this area! It’s full of blank spaces.” As Goldie traced his finger over the map, he explained that the area was so unexplored that Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru could not even agree on their borders: they were simply speculative lines sketched through mountains and jungles. 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. “A major conflagration could arise out of this question of what territory belongs to whom,” Goldie said.

“All this is most interesting,” Fawcett interrupted. “But what has it got to do with me?”

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-beginning with an area between Bolivia and Brazil that comprised several hundred miles in nearly impassable terrain. The expedition would take up to two years, and there was no guarantee that its members would survive. Disease was rampant in the region, and the Indians, who had been attacked mercilessly by rubber trappers, murdered interlopers. “Would you be interested in taking it on?” Goldie asked.

Fawcett later said that he felt his heart pounding. He thought about his wife, Nina, who was pregnant again, and his son, Jack, who was almost three years old. Still, he didn’t hesitate: “Destiny intended me to go, so there could be no other answer!”

* * *

THE CRAMPED, DIRTY hold of the SS Panama was filled with “toughs, would be toughs, and leather faced old scoundrels,” as Fawcett put it. Prim in his starched white collar, Fawcett sat beside his second-in-command for the expedition, a thirty-year-old engineer and surveyor named Arthur John Chivers, whom the Royal Geographical Society had recommended. Fawcett passed the time by studying Spanish, while other passengers sipped whiskey, spit tobacco, played dice, and slept with whores. “They were all good fellows in their way,” Fawcett wrote, adding, “To [Chivers] and myself it served as a useful introduction to an aspect of life we had not hitherto known, and much of our English reserve was knocked off in the process.”

The ship docked in Panama, where the construction of the canal- the most audacious attempt yet by man to tame nature-was under way, and the project gave Fawcett the first inkling of what he was about to encounter: stacked on the pier were dozens of coffins. Since the canal’s excavation began, in 1881, more than twenty thousand laborers had died from malaria and yellow fever.

In Panama City, Fawcett boarded a ship for Peru, then proceeded by train up the glimmering, snowcapped Andes. When the train reached around twelve thousand feet, he switched to a boat and crossed Lake Titicaca (“How strange it is to see steamers in operation up here on the roof of the world!”), before squeezing into another jaw-rattling train, which took him across the plains to La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. There he waited more than a month for the government to provide a few thousand dollars, a sum far less than he had counted on, for provisions and travel expenses, his impatience provoking a row with local officials that had to be smoothed over by the British consul. Finally, on July 4, 1906, he and Chivers were ready to go. They loaded their mules with tea, preserved milk, Edwards’ Desiccated Soup, sardines in tomato sauce, lemonade effervescing powder, and kola-nut biscuits, which, according to Hints to Travellers, produced “a marvelous effect in sustaining strength during exertion.” They also brought surveying instruments, rifles, rappelling ropes, machetes, hammocks, mosquito nets, collecting jars, fishing lines, a stereoscopic camera, a pan for sifting gold, and gifts such as beads for tribal encounters. A medical kit was stocked with gauze bandages; iodine for mosquito bites; permanganate of potash for cleaning vegetables or arrow wounds; a pencil knife for cutting out flesh poisoned from snakebites or gangrene; and opium. In his rucksack, Fawcett stuffed a copy of Hints to Travellers and his diary with his favorite poems to recite in the wilderness. One poem he often took was Rudyard Kipling’s “The Explorer”:

“Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look
behind the Ranges—
“Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting
for you. Go!”

Fawcett and Chivers went over the Andes and began their descent into the jungle. Fawcett, wearing gabardine breeches, leather boots, a Stetson, and a silk scarf wrapped around his neck-his standard explorer’s uniform- made his way along the edges of cliffs, which fell away hun dreds of feet. Traveling in a blizzard, the men could see no more than a few yards ahead, though they heard rocks slipping from under the hooves of their pack animals and cascading into the gorges. It was hard to believe, as wind whipped around twenty-thousand-foot peaks, that they were on their way to the jungle. The altitude made them dizzy and nauseated. The animals staggered forward, out of breath, their noses bleeding from a lack of oxygen. Years later, moving through the same mountains, Fawcett would lose half a convoy of twenty-four mules. “A mule’s load would often foul on jutting rocks, and knock [the animal] screaming over the precipices,” he wrote.

Occasionally, Fawcett and Chivers came upon a footbridge-strung together with palmetto slats and cables- that stretched more than a hundred yards over a gorge and swung wildly in the wind, like a shredded flag. The mules, too scared to pass, had to be blindfolded. After cajoling them across, the explorers picked their way downward around boulders and cliffs, spotting the first signs of vegetation-magnolias and stunted trees. By three thousand feet, where the heat was palpable, they encountered roots and vines creeping up the mountainside. Then Fawcett, drenched in sweat, peered into a valley and saw trees shaped like spiders and parachutes and clouds of smoke; waterways threading back and forth for thousands of miles; a jungle canopy so dark it appeared almost black-Amazonia.

Fawcett and Chivers eventually abandoned their pack animals for a raft made from sticks and twine and drifted into the Amazon frontier, a collection of Dodge-like towns with mocking names, such as Hope and Beautiful Village, that had recently been carved into the jungle by settlers who had fallen under the spell of oro negro-“black gold.” Christopher Columbus had first reported seeing Indians bouncing a ball made from the strange, sticky substance that bled from tropical trees, but 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. In 1912, Brazil alone exported more than thirty million dollars’ worth of rubber, the equivalent today of nearly half a billion dollars. Rubber barons had transformed Ma-naus, along the Amazon River, into one of the gaudiest cities in the world. “No extravagance, however absurd, deterred them,” the historian Robin Furneaux wrote in The Amazon. “If one rubber baron bought a vast yacht, another would install a tame lion in his villa, and a third would water his horse on champagne.” And nothing was more extravagant than the opera house, with its Italian marble, Bohemian glass, gilded balconies, crystal chandeliers, Victorian murals, and a dome bathed in the colors of the national flag. Prefabricated in Europe and costing an estimated ten million dollars in taxpayers’ money, the opera house was shipped in pieces more than a thousand miles up the Amazon River, where laborers were deployed around the clock to assemble it, working at night under Brazil’s first electric lightbulbs. It didn’t matter that almost no one from Manaus had heard of Puccini or that more than half the members of a visiting opera troupe eventually died of yellow fever. This was the apotheosis