The Lost City of Z

of the river and lie down. The men held their breath as the Indians paddled past them.

At last, Dyott gave the order to row, and the explorers began to paddle furiously. One of the technicians got the wireless radio to work long enough to relay a brief message: “Am sorry to report Fawcett expedition perished at the hands of hostile Indians. Our position is critical… Can’t even afford time to send full details by wireless. Must descend the Xingu without delay or we ourselves will be caught.” The expedition then dumped the radio, along with other heavy gear, to hasten its exit. Newspapers debated the team’s odds. “Dyott’s Chance to Escape Even,” one headline ran. When Dyott and his men finally emerged from the jungle, months later-sick, emaciated, bearded, mosquito pocked-they were greeted as heroes. “We want to luxuriate in the pleasant and heady atmosphere of notoriety,” said Whitehead, who was subsequently hired as a pitchman for a laxative called Nujol. (“You can be sure that no matter what important equipment I have to discard, my next adventure will see me taking plenty of Nujol along.”) Dyott published a book, Man Hunting in the Jungle, and starred in a 1933 Hollywood film about his adventures called Savage Gold.

But by then Dyott’s story had begun to collapse. As Brian Fawcett pointed out, it is hard to believe that his father, who was so wary of anyone knowing his path, would have left Y marks on trees. The gear that Dyott found in Aloique’s house may well have been a gift from Fawcett, as Aloique insisted, or it may have come from Fawcett’s 1920 expedition, when he and Holt had been forced to dump much of their cargo. Indeed, Dyott’s case rested on his assessment of Aloique’s “treacherous” disposition-a judgment based largely on interactions conducted in sign language and on Dyott’s purported expertise in “Indian psychology.”

Years later, when missionaries and other explorers entered the region, they described Aloique and the Nahukwa as generally peaceful and friendly. Dyott had ignored the likelihood that Aloique’s evasiveness, including his decision to flee, stemmed from his own fears of a white stranger who was leading an armed brigade. Finally, there was Bernardino. “Dyott… must have swallowed hook, line and sinker what he was told,” Brian Fawcett wrote. “I say this because there was no Bernardino with my father’s party in 1925.” According to Fawcett’s last letters, he had brought with him from Bakairi Post only two Brazilian helpers: Gardenia and Simao. Not long after the expedition, Nina Fawcett released a statement declaring, “There is consequently still no proof that the three explorers are dead.”

Elsie Rimell insisted that she would “never give up” believing that her son would return. Privately, though, she was despairing. A friend wrote her a letter saying that it was natural that she was so “down,” but pleaded with her, “Do not lose hope.” The friend assured her that the true fate of the explorers would soon be made known.

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ON MARCH 12, 1932, a man with brooding eyes and a dark mustache appeared outside the British Embassy in Sao Paulo, demanding to see the consul general. He wore a sports jacket, striped tie, and baggy pants tucked into knee-high riding boots. He said it was an urgent matter concerning Colonel Fawcett.

The man was led in to see the consul general, Arthur Abbott, who had been a friend of Fawcett’s. For years, Abbott had held out faith that the explorers might materialize, but only a few weeks earlier he had destroyed his last letters from Fawcett, believing that “all hope of ever seeing him again had gone.”

In a later sworn statement, the visitor said, “My name is Stefan Rat-tin. I am a Swiss subject. I came to South America twenty-one years ago.” He explained that, nearly five months earlier, he and two companions had been hunting near the Tapajos River, in the northwest corner of Mato Grosso, when he encountered a tribe holding an elderly white man with long yellowish hair. Later, after many of the tribesmen had got drunk, Rattin said, the white man, who was clad in animal skins, quietly approached him.

“Are you a friend?” he asked.

“Yes,” Rattin replied.

“I am an English colonel,” he said, and he implored Rattin to go to the British consulate and tell “Major Paget” that he was being held captive.

Abbott knew that the former British ambassador to Brazil, Sir Ralph Paget, had been a confidant of Fawcett’s. Indeed, it was Paget who had lobbied the Brazilian government to fund Fawcett’s 1920 expedition. These facts, Abbott noted in a letter to the Royal Geographical Society, were “only known to me and a few personal friends.”

When Nina Fawcett and Elsie Rimell first heard Rattin’s account, they thought it sounded credible. Nina said that she “dare not build my hopes too high;” still, she sent a telegram to a news outlet in Brazil saying that she was now convinced that her husband was “ALIVE.”

Others remained skeptical. General Rondon, after interviewing Rattin for three hours, noted in a report that the place the Swiss trapper indicated that he had found Fawcett was five hundred miles from where the expedition was last sighted. Paget himself, when he was reached in England, wondered why Rattin would have been allowed to leave the tribe while Fawcett was forced to remain a prisoner.

Abbott, however, was convinced of Rattin’s sincerity, especially since he vowed to rescue Fawcett without seeking a reward. “I promised Colonel Fawcett I would bring aid and that promise will be fulfilled,” Rat-tin said. The Swiss trapper soon set out with two men, one of them a reporter, who filed articles for the United Press syndicate. After walking through the jungle for weeks, the three men arrived at the Arinos River, where they built canoes out of bark. In a dispatch dated May 24, 1932, as the expedition was about to enter hostile Indian territory, the reporter wrote, “Rattin is anxious to get away. He calls, ‘All aboard!’ Here we go.” The men were never heard from again.

Not long after, a fifty-two-year-old English actor named Albert de Winton arrived in Cuiaba, vowing to find Fawcett, dead or alive. He had recently had minor roles in several Hollywood films, including King of the Wild. According to the Washington Post, Winton had “given up the imitation thrills of the movies for the real ones of the jungle.” Wearing a crisp safari uniform, a gun strapped to his waist, and smoking a pipe, he hurried into the wilderness. A woman from Orange, New Jersey, referring to herself as Winton’s “American Representative,” released updates to the RGS on stationery that was embossed “Albert De Winton EXPEDITION INTO UNEXPLORED BRAZILIAN JUNGLE IN SEARCH OF COLONEL P. H. FAWCETT.” Nine months after Winton entered the jungle, he emerged with his clothes in tatters, his face shrunken. On February 4, 1934, a photograph of him appeared in newspapers with the caption “Albert Winton, Los Angeles actor, is not made up for a role in a film drama. This is what nine months in a South American wilderness did for him.” After a brief rest in Cuiaba, where he visited a museum that had an exhibit devoted to Fawcett, Winton returned to the Xingu region. Months elapsed without any word from him. Then, in September, an Indian runner emerged from the forest with a crumpled note from Winton. It said that he had been taken prisoner by a tribe and entreated, “Please send help.” Winton’s daughter notified the RGS about “this grave turn of events,” and prayed that someone at the Society would save her father. But Winton, too, was never seen again. Only years later did Brazilian officials learn from Indians in the region that two members of the Kamayura tribe had found Winton floating, naked and half-mad, in a canoe. One of the Kamayuras smashed his head in with a club, then took his rifle.

Such stories did little to dissuade scores of additional explorers from trying to find Fawcett or the City of Z. There were German-led expeditions, and Italian ones, and Russian ones, and Argentine ones. There was a female graduate student in anthropology from the University of California. There was an American soldier who had served with Fawcett on the western front. There was Peter Fleming, the brother of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. There was a band of Brazilian bandits. By 1934, the Brazilian government, overwhelmed by the number of search parties, had issued a decree banning them unless they received special permission; nonetheless, explorers continued to go, with or without permission.

Although no reliable statistics exist, one recent estimate put the death toll from these expeditions as high as one hundred. The University of California graduate student, who, in 1930, was one of the first female anthropologists to venture into the region to conduct research, made it out only to die a few years later from an infection she had contracted in the Amazon. In 1939, another American anthropologist hanged himself from a tree in the jungle. (He left a message that said, “The Indians are going to take my notes… They are very valuable and can be disinfected and sent to the museum. I want my family to imagine I died in an Indian village of natural causes.”) One seeker lost his brother to fever. “I tried to save” him, he told Nina. “But unfortunately I could do nothing and so we buried him at the edge of the Araguaya.”

Like Rattin and Winton, other explorers seemed to drop off the face of the earth. In 1947, according to the Reverend Jonathan Wells, a missionary in Brazil, a carrier pigeon flew out of the jungle with a note written by a thirty-two-year-old schoolteacher from New Zealand, Hugh McCarthy, who had become fixated on finding Z. Wells