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

“Well, you must be careful with those,” Rolette said.

“What do you mean?”

“PHF wrote them to throw people off the trail. They were a blind.”

The news both astounded and unsettled me: if true, it meant that many people had headed, possibly fatally, in the wrong direction. When I asked why Brian Fawcett, who had edited Exploration Fawcett, would have perpetrated the deception, she explained that he had wanted to honor the wishes of his father and brother. The more she spoke, the more I realized that what for many was a tantalizing mystery was for her family a tragedy. As we finished supper, Rolette said, “When someone disappears, it's not like an ordinary death. There is no closure.” (Later she told me, “You know, when my mother was dying, I said to her, ‘At least you'll finally know what happened to PHF and Jack.' ”) Now Rolette paused for a long time, as if trying to make up her mind about something. Then she said, “You really want to find out what happened to my grandfather?”

“Yes. If it's possible.”

“I want to show you something.”

She led me into a back room and opened a large wooden trunk. Inside were several leather-bound books. Their covers were worn and tattered, their bindings breaking apart. Some were held together only by strings, tied in bows.

“What are they?” I asked.

“PHF's diaries and logbooks.” She handed them to me. “You can look through them, but you must guard them carefully.”

I opened one of them, marked 1909. The cover left a black stain on my fingertips-a mixture, I imagined, of Victorian dust and jungle mud. The pages almost fell out when I turned them, and I held them gingerly between my index finger and thumb. Recognizing Fawcett's microscopic handwriting, I felt a strange sensation. Here was something that Fawcett had also held, something that contained his most private thoughts and that few had ever seen. The writer Janet Malcolm once compared a biographer to a “professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.”

I sat down on the couch in the living room. There was a book for almost every year from 1906 (his first expedition) to 1921 (his penultimate trip); he had obviously carried a diary on each of his expeditions, jotting down observations. Many of them were replete with maps and surveying calculations. On the inside covers were the poems he had copied down in order to read in the jungle when he was alone and desperate. One seemed meant for Nina:

Oh love, my love! Have all your will-

I am yours to the end.

Fawcett had also scribbled down lines from Ella Wheeler Wilcox's “Solitude”:

But no man can help you die.

There is room in the halls of pleasure

For a long and lordly train,

But one by one we must all file on

Through the narrow aisles of pain.

Many of the diaries were filled with the mundane, from someone with no expectation of history: “9 July… Sleepless night… Much rain and wet through by midday… 11 July… Heavy rain from midnight. Reached [camp] on trail, caught fish… 17 July… swimming across for balsa.” Then, suddenly, a casual remark revealed the harrowing nature of his existence: “Feel very bad… Took 1 [vial] of morphine last night to rest from foot pain. It produced a violent stomachache and had to put finger down throat to relieve.”

A loud noise sounded in the other room and I looked up. It was Is-abelle playing a video game on the computer. I picked up another of the books. It had a lock to protect the contents. “That's his ‘Treasure Book,' ” Rolette said. The lock was unfastened, and inside were stories Fawcett had collected of buried treasures, like Galla-pita-Galla, and maps of their suspected locations: “In that cave is a treasure, the existence of which is known to me and to me alone.”

In later diaries, as he developed his case for Z, Fawcett made more archaeological notations. There were drawings of strange hieroglyphics. The Botocudo Indians, now virtually extinct, had told him a legend of a city “enormously rich in gold-so much so as to blaze like fire.” Fawcett added, “It is just conceivable this may be Z.” As he seemed to be nearing his goal, he became more secretive. In the 1921 log, he outlined a “code” he had apparently devised, with his wife, to send messages:

78804 Kratzbank = Discoveries much as described

78806 Kratzfuss = Rich, important and wonderful

78808 Kratzka = Cities located-future now secure

Poring through the log, I noticed a word on the margins of one page: “DEAD.” I looked at it more closely and saw two other words alongside it. They spelled out “DEAD HORSE CAMP.” Underneath them were coordinates, and I quickly flipped through my notebook where I had scribbled down the position of the camp from Exploration Fawcett. They were significantly different.

For hours, I went through the diaries, taking notes. I thought there was nothing left to glean, when Rolette appeared and said that she wanted to show me one more item. She vanished into the back room, and I could hear her rummaging through drawers and cabinets, muttering to herself. After several minutes, she emerged with a photograph from a book. “I don't know where I put it,” she said. “But I can at least show you a picture of it.”

It was a photograph of Fawcett's gold signet ring, which was engraved with the family motto, “Nee Aspera Terrent”-essentially, “Difficulties Be Damned.” In 1979, an Englishman named Brian Ridout, who was making a wildlife film in Brazil, heard rumors that the ring had turned up at a store in Cuiaba, the capital of Mato Grosso. By the time Ridout tracked down the shop, the proprietor had died. His wife, however, searched through her possessions and found Colonel Fawcett's ring. “It's the last concrete item we have from the expedition,” Rolette said.

She said that she had been desperate to learn more and had once shown the ring to a psychic.

“Did you learn anything?” I asked.

She looked down at the picture, then up at me. “It had been bathed in blood.”

10

THE GREEN HELL

Are you game?” Fawcett asked.

He was back in the jungle not long after his previous expedition, trying to persuade his new second-in- command, Frank Fisher, to explore the Rio Verde, along the Brazilian and Bolivian border.

Fisher, who was a forty-one-year-old English engineer and a member of the RGS, hesitated. The boundary commission had not contracted with the party to explore the Verde-it had asked the men to survey a region in southwest Brazil near Corumba-but Fawcett insisted on also tracing the river, which was in such uncharted territory that nobody even knew where it began.

Finally, Fisher said, “Oh, I'll come,” though he added, “Surely the contracts don't call for it.”

It was only Fawcett's second South American expedition, but it would prove critical to his understanding of the Amazon and to his evolution as a scientist. With Fisher and seven other recruits, he set out from Corumba, trekking northwest more than four hundred miles, before shoving off on two makeshift wooden rafts. The rapids, fueled by rains and by steep descents, were intense, and the rafts were propelled over precipices before tumbling down into the foam and rocks-the grinding roar-as the men hollered to hold on and Fawcett, eyes flashing, Stetson cocked, steered with a bamboo pole held to one side, so it wouldn't spear his chest. White-water rafting was not yet a sport, but Fawcett anticipated it: “When… the enterprising traveler has to construct and manage his own