The Lost City of Z

and think that perhaps their father wasn’t such an old bore after all. Finally, I want to thank my wife, Kyra, who has given to this book more than words can describe, and is, and will always be, everything to me. Together, she, Zachary, and Ella have provided the most rewarding and unexpected journey of all.

A NOTE ON THE SOURCES

DESPITE FAWCETT’S once-enormous fame, many details of his life, like those of his death, have been shrouded in mystery. Until recently, Fawcett’s family kept the bulk of his papers private. Moreover, the contents of many of the diaries and correspondence of his colleagues and companions, such as Raleigh Rimell, have never been published.

In trying to excavate Fawcett’s life, I have drawn extensively on these materials. They include Fawcett’s diaries and logbooks; the correspondence of his wife and children, as well as those of his closest exploring companions and his most bitter rivals; the journals of members of his military unit during World War I; and Rimell’s final letters from the 1925 expedition, which had been passed down to a cousin once removed. Fawcett himself was a compulsive writer who left behind an enormous amount of firsthand information in scientific and esoteric journals, and his son Brian, who edited Exploration Fawcett, turned out to be a prolific writer as well.

I also benefited from the tremendous research of other authors, particularly in reconstructing historical periods. I would have been lost, for instance, without John Hemming’s three-volume history on the Brazilian Indians or his book The Search for El Dorado. Charles Mann’s 1491, which was published not long after I returned from my trip, served as a wonderful guide to the scientific developments that are sweeping away so many previous conceptions about what the Americas looked like before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. I have listed these and other important sources in the bibliography. If I was especially indebted to a source, I tried to cite it in the notes as well.

Anything that appears in the text between quotation marks, including conversation in the jungle from vanished explorers, comes directly from a diary, a letter, or some other written document and is cited in the notes. In a few places, I found minor discrepancies in the quotations between published versions of letters, which had been edited, and their original; in these cases, I reverted to the original. In an effort to keep the notes as concise as possible, I do not include citations for well-established or uncontroversial facts, or when it is clear that a person is speaking directly to me.

ARCHIVAL AND UNPUBLISHED SOURCES

Alabama Department of Archives and History, ADAH

American Geographical Society, AGS

Costin Family Papers, private collection of Michael Costin and Mary Gibson

Fawcett Family Papers, private collection of Rolette de Montet-Guerin

Fundacao Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, FBN

Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, HRC

Imperial War Museum, IWM

National Library of Scotland, NLS

National Museum of the American Indian Archives, Smithsonian Institution, NMAI

Percy Harrison Fawcett Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections

Library, Duke University, PHFP

Rimell Family Papers, private collection of Ann Macdonald

Royal Anthropological Institute, RAI

Royal Artillery Historical Trust, RAHT

Royal Geographical Society, RGS

The National Archives, Kew, Surrey, TNA

NOTES

PREFACE

4 “no Arts; no Letters”: Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 186.

4 “write a new”: Los Angeles Times, Jan. 28, 1925.

CHAPTER 1: WE SHALL RETURN

8 He was the last: Though many of Fawcett’s expeditions took place after the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, he is often categorized as a Victorian explorer. Not only did he come of age during the Victorian period, but he embodied, in almost every way, the Victorian ethos and spirit of exploration.

8 “a man of indomitable”: Dyott, “Search for Colonel Fawcett,” p. 514.

8 “outwalk and outhike”: Loren McIntyre, in transcript of interview on National Public Radio, March 15, 1999.

8 “Fawcett marked”: K.G.G., “Review: Exploration Fawcett,” Geographical Journal, Sept. 1953, p. 352.

8 Among them was: Doyle, notes to Lost World, p. 195; Percy Harrison Fawcett, Exploration Fawcett, p. 122. There is little known about the origins of the relationship between Percy Fawcett and Conan Doyle. Exploration Fawcett notes that Conan Doyle had attended one of Fawcett’s lectures delivered before the Royal Geographical Society. Once, in a letter to Conan Doyle, Fawcett remembered how the author had tried to contact him during the writing of The Lost World, but because Fawcett was off in the jungle Nina had been forced to respond. In The Annotated Lost World, published in 1996, Roy Pilot and Alvin Rodin point out that Fawcett was “well known to Conan Doyle” and catalog the many similarities between Fawcett and the novel’s fictional explorer John Roxton. Interestingly, Percy Fawcett may not have been the only member of his family to influence Conan Doyle’s famous literary work. In 1894, nearly two decades before Conan Doyle came out with The Lost World, Fawcett’s brother, Edward, published Swallowed by an Earthquake -a novel that similarly tells of men discovering a hidden world of prehistoric dinosaurs. In an article in the British Heritage in 1985, Edward Fawcett’s literary executor and the author Robert K. G. Temple accused Conan Doyle of borrowing “shamelessly” from Edward’s now largely forgotten novel.

8 “disappear into the unknown”: Doyle, Lost World, p. 63.

9 “Something there was”: Ibid., p. 57.

9 The ship: My descriptions of the Vauban and life on board ocean liners come from, among other places, the Lamport & Holt brochure “South America: The Land of Opportunity, a Continent of Scenic Wonders, a Paradise for the Tourist;” Heaton’s Lamport & Holt; and Maxtone-Graham’s Only Way to Cross.

9 “the great discovery”: Fawcett to John Scott Keltie, Feb. 4, 1925, RGS.

10 “What is there”: Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1925.

10 “their eyes in”: Ralegh, Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, pp. 177-78.

10 “thorow hollow”: Ibid., p. 114.

10 “We reached”: Carvajal, Discovery of the Amazon, p. 172.

11 “Does God think”: Quoted in Hemming, Search for El