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

short muzzle, staring malignant eyes and gaping, cruelly armoured jaws, is the embodiment of evil ferocity.”

When bathing, Fawcett nervously checked his body for boils and cuts. The first time he swam across a river, he said, “there was an unpleasant sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.” In addition to piranhas, he dreaded candirus and electric eels, or puraques. The latter-about six feet long, with eyes set so far forward on their flattened heads that they nearly rested on their upper lips-were living batteries: they sent up to six hundred and fifty volts of electricity coursing through the bodies of their victims. They could electrocute a frog or a fish in a tank of water without ever touching it. The German explorer-scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who traveled along the Orinoco River in the Amazon at the beginning of the nineteenth century, drove, with the help of Indians holding harpoons, thirty horses and mules into a bog of water filled with electric eels to see what would happen. The horses and mules-manes erect, eyes inflamed-reared in terror as the eels surrounded them. Some horses tried to jump out of the water, but the Indians forced them back with the harpoons. Within seconds, two horses had drowned, while the rest eventually broke through the Indians' blockade and collapsed to the ground, exhausted and numb. “One shock is sufficient to paralyze and drown a man-but the way of the puraque is to repeat the shocks to make sure of its victim,” Fawcett wrote. He concluded that a person must do things in these parts that “carry no hope of epitaph-done in cold blood, and too often with an aftermath of tragedy.”

One day Fawcett spied something along the edge of the sluggish river. At first it looked like a fallen tree, but it began undulating toward the canoes. It was bigger than an electric eel, and when Fawcett's companions saw it they screamed. Fawcett lifted his rifle and fired at the object until smoke filled the air. When the creature ceased to move, the men pulled a canoe alongside it. It was an anaconda. In his reports to the Royal Geographical Society, Fawcett insisted that it was longer than sixty feet (“Great Snakes!” blared one headline in the British press), though much of the anaconda was submerged and it was surely smaller: the longest officially recorded one is twenty-seven feet nine inches. (At that length, a single anaconda can still weigh over half a ton and, because of its elastic jaw muscles, swallow a deer whole.) Staring at the motionless snake in front of him, Fawcett removed his knife. He tried to slice off a piece of its skin, to put it in a specimen jar, but as he cut into the anaconda it jolted toward Fawcett and his party-sending them fleeing in fear.

As the expedition pushed onward, its members gazed at the jungle. “It was one of the gloomiest journeys I had made, for the river was threatening in its quiet, and the easy current and deep water seemed to promise evils ahead,” Fawcett wrote months after leaving Riberalta. “The demons of the Amazonian rivers were abroad, manifesting their presence in lowering skies, downpours of torrential rain and somber forest walls.”

Fawcett enforced a strict regimen. According to Henry Costin, a former British corporal who went on several later expeditions with Fawcett, the party woke at first light with one person calling reveille. Then the men rushed down to the river, washed, brushed their teeth, and packed, while the person on breakfast duty started a fire. “We lived simply,” Costin recalled. “Breakfast would usually be porridge, tinned milk, lots of sugar.” Within minutes, the men were on their way. Collecting the extensive data for Fawcett's RGS reports-including surveys, sketches of the landscape, barometric and temperature readings, and catalogs of the flora and fauna- required painstaking work, and Fawcett toiled furiously. “Inactivity was what I couldn't stand,” he once said. The jungle seemed to exaggerate his fundamental nature: his bravery and toughness, along with his irascibility and intolerance of others' weakness. He allowed his men only a brief pause for lunch-a snack of a few biscuits-and trekked up to twelve hours a day.

Just before sundown, he would finally signal to his men to set up camp. Willis, the cook, was in charge of preparing supper and supplemented their powdered soup with whatever animals the group had hunted. Hunger turned anything into a delicacy: armadillos, stingrays, turtles, anacondas, rats. “Monkeys are looked on as good eating,” Fawcett observed. “Their meat tastes rather pleasant; but at first the idea revolted me because when stretched over a fire to burn off the hair they looked so horribly human.”

While moving through the forest, Fawcett and his men were more susceptible to predators. Once, a pack of white-lipped wild pigs stampeded toward Chivers and the interpreter, who fired their guns in every direction as Willis scampered up a tree to avoid being shot by his companions. Even frogs could be deadly to the touch: a Phyllobates terribilis, which is found in the Colombian Amazon, has enough toxins in it to kill a hundred people. One day Fawcett stumbled upon a coral snake, whose venom shuts down the central nervous system of its victim, causing the person to suffocate. In the Amazon, Fawcett marveled, the animal kingdom “is against man as it is nowhere else in the world.”

But it wasn't the big predators that he and his companions fretted about most. It was the ceaseless pests. The sauba ants that could reduce the men's clothes and rucksacks to threads in a single night. The ticks that attached like leeches (another scourge) and the red hairy chiggers that consumed human tissue. The cyanide-squirting millipedes. The parasitic worms that caused blindness. The berne flies that drove their ovipositors through clothing and deposited larval eggs that hatched and burrowed under the skin. The almost invisible biting flies called piums that left the explorers' bodies covered in lesions. Then there were the “kissing bugs,” which bite their victim on the lips, transferring a protozoan called Try-panosoma cruzi; twenty years later, the person, thinking he had escaped the jungle unharmed, would begin to die of heart or brain swelling. Nothing, though, was more hazardous than the mosquitoes. They transmitted everything from malaria to “bone-crusher” fever to elephantiasis to yellow fever. “[Mosquitoes] constitute the chief single reason why Amazonia is a frontier still to be won,” Willard Price wrote in his 1952 book The Amazing Amazon.

Fawcett and his men wrapped themselves in netting, but even this was insufficient. “The piums settled on us in clouds,” Fawcett wrote. “We were forced to close both ends of the [boat's] palm-leaf shelter with mosquito- nets, and to use head-veils as well, yet in spite of that our hands and faces were soon a mass of tiny, itching blood-blisters.” Meanwhile, polvorina, which are so small they resemble powder, hid in the hair of Fawcett and his companions. Often, all that the men could think about was insects. They came to recognize the different pitch of each insect's wings rubbing together. (“The Tabana came singly, but advertised their presence by a probe like the thrust of a needle,” Fawcett said.) The bugs tormented the explorers to the point of madness, as a diary of a naturalist who went on a later expedition with Fawcett showed:

10/20: Attacked in hammocks by tiny gnat not over 1 /10; inch in length; mosquito nets no protection; gnats bite all night allowing no sleep.

10/21: Another sleepless night account of blood-sucking gnats.

10/22: My body mass of bumps from insect bites, wrists and hands swollen from bites of tiny gnats. 2 nights with almost no sleep-simply terrible… Rain during noon, all afternoon and most of night. My shoes have been soaked since starting… Worst ticks so far.

10/23: Horrible night with worst biting gnats yet; even smoke of no avail.

10/24: More than half ill from insects. Wrists and hands swollen. Paint limbs with iodine.

10/25: Arose to find termites covering everything left on the ground… Blood-sucking gnats still with us.

10/30: Sweat bees, gnats and “polverinahs” (blood-sucking gnats) terrible.

11/2: My right eye is sadly blurred by gnats.

11/3: Bees and gnats worse than ever; truly “there's no rest for the weary.”

11/5: My first experience with flesh and carrion-eating bees. Biting gnats in clouds-very worst we have encountered-rendering one's food unpalatable by filling it with their filthy bodies, their bellies red and disgustingly distended with one's own blood.

Six months into the expedition, most of the men, including Chivers, were sick with fever. They were overcome with insatiable thirst, skull-splitting headaches, and uncontrollable shivering. Their muscles throbbed so much that it was hard to walk. They had contracted, in most cases, either yellow fever or malaria. If it was yellow fever, what the men feared most was spitting up mouthfuls of blood-the so-called black vomit- which meant that death was near. When it was malaria-which, according to one estimate, more than 80 percent of the people then working in the Amazon contracted-the men sometimes experienced hallucinations, and could slip into a coma and die. At one point, Fawcett shared a boat with four passengers who fell ill and perished. Using paddles, he helped to dig their graves along the shore. Their only monument, Fawcett noted, was “a couple of crossed twigs tied with grass.”

One morning Fawcett noticed a trail of indentations on a muddy bank. He bent down to inspect them. They were human footprints. Fawcett searched the woods in the vicinity and discovered broken branches and trampled leaves. Indians were tracking them.

Fawcett had been told that the Pacaguara Indians lived along the banks of the Abuna River and had a