Percy Fawcett and the Lost City of Z: The Explorer the Amazon Never Returned
On 20 April 1925 three men rode out of Cuiaba, in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, and headed north-east toward the headwaters of the Xingu River. Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett was fifty-seven and had already completed seven expeditions into the interior of South America. With him went his elder son Jack, twenty-one, and Jack's boyhood friend Raleigh Rimell. By the standards of the period they travelled extremely light. Fawcett had chosen a small party deliberately: large expeditions, he argued, alarmed the peoples of the forest, moved slowly and consumed supplies faster than they could be carried. Three fit men, he believed, could pass through country where a column would be stopped. They were looking for the remains of a city he referred to in his papers by a single letter, chosen precisely because it gave nothing away: Z.
Fawcett was not an amateur adventurer. He had joined the Royal Geographical Society in 1901 to train in surveying, and from 1906 the Society sent him to map the disputed borders of Bolivia and Brazil, work carried out in fever country with primitive equipment and repeated risk. He completed those surveys with enough accuracy and composure to make his name within British exploration circles. He had crossed rivers no European had charted, endured malaria and near starvation, and returned each time.
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