Percy Fawcett and the Lost City of Z: The Explorer the Amazon Never Returned
On 20 April 1925, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett rode out of Cuiabá, capital of Brazil's Mato Grosso, at the head of the smallest expedition of his career: his 21-year-old son Jack and Jack's closest friend, Raleigh Rimell. Fawcett, then 57, was no dreamer by profession. A decorated artillery officer and surveyor, he had spent nearly two decades mapping disputed borders in Bolivia and Brazil for the Royal Geographical Society, surviving seven punishing expeditions. The eighth would search for a city he referred to, with deliberate secrecy, only as "Z."
On 29 May 1925 he sent his last dispatch from a spot he called Dead Horse Camp, where his horse had died on an earlier journey. In a final letter to his wife Nina, he closed with the sentence that became his epitaph: "You need have no fear of any failure." Then the three men walked north-east toward the headwaters of the Xingu River — and out of recorded history.
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