Percy Fawcett and the Lost City of Z: The Explorer the Amazon Never Returned

2026-05-27 · Vanished Without a Trace · 8 min read

The rainy season was breaking over Mato Grosso when the three men rode out of Cuiaba on 20 April 1925, and by the standards of the Amazon they were travelling absurdly light. Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett was fifty-seven, a lean and famously indestructible figure who had survived seven expeditions into the interior of South America. With him went his son Jack, twenty-one, and Jack's boyhood friend Raleigh Rimell. Fawcett had chosen a small party on purpose. Large expeditions, he believed, provoked the peoples of the forest and moved too slowly; three fit men, hardened and unthreatening, could slip through where an army would be cut down. He was going to find a city he had spent more than a decade convincing himself was real, a place he guarded in his notes under a single deliberately meaningless letter: Z. They walked north-east toward the headwaters of the Xingu, and then the forest closed behind them and did not open again.

To understand why a decorated officer would stake his life and his son's on a rumour, you have to understand what Fawcett was not. He was not a fantasist by temperament. He had joined the Royal Geographical Society in 1901 to learn surveying, and from 1906 the Society sent him to map the disputed, fever-ridden borders of Bolivia and Brazil, work he did with such precision and nerve that he became a minor legend in his own lifetime. He had faced anacondas, hostile encounters and rivers no European had charted, and come back every time. When such a man began to speak of a lost civilisation, people who knew the jungle listened, even as they doubted.

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