In 1927, Fawcett was officially declared missing, prompting a wave of expeditions in search of him but, unlike other famed lost explorers, such as Amelia Earhart, he had kept his planned route a secret, making it almost impossible for anyone to retrace his steps. His younger son, Brian, said of him, “True, he dreamed but his dreams were built upon reason, and he was not the man to shirk the effort to turn theory into fact.” Fawcett was a recipient of the Gold Medal, the highest honor bestowed on an explorer by the Royal Geographical Society a skilled mapmaker and a decorated hero of the First World War. Lynch’s research made him feel certain that Fawcett, unlike so many of his predecessors, was not a soldier of fortune or a crackpot.
One early map of South America was adorned with minotaurs and headless beings with eyes in their chests, and well into the twentieth century the Amazon remained, as Fawcett put it, “the last great blank space in the world.” In 1541, Friar Gaspar Carvajal, a member of the first European expedition to descend from the Andes into the Amazon, reported glimpses of white Indians and women warriors who resembled the mythical Greek Amazons.
For centuries after the discovery of the New World, many Europeans believed that a fantastical kingdom of untold wealth was concealed in the ethereal landscape of the Amazon. Yet it was his “quest,” as Fawcett called it, to find Z that most captivated Lynch. Fawcett survived in the jungle for years at a time, without contact with the outside world, often subsisting for days on a handful of nuts he was ambushed by hostile tribesmen, many of whom had never seen a white man before he emerged with maps of regions from which no expedition had returned. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Fawcett had been acclaimed as one of the last of the great amateur archeologists and cartographers-men who ventured into uncharted territories with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose. He had never, however, encountered a case like that of Colonel Fawcett. On one trip, he located the long-disputed source of the Amazon, and pinpointed where, in 1937, a pioneering German aviator had crashed in the Andes. For all their physical challenges, Lynch’s voyages were also intellectual endeavors, and he spent months in the library, researching and planning them.
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A man in his early forties, with blue eyes and pale skin that burned in the sun, he had competed in many gruelling adventure contests: once, he had hiked for seventy-two hours without sleep, and traversed a wide canyon by shimmying across a rope. The latest attempt was led by James Lynch, a Brazilian financier who had trekked through the most unforgiving terrains of South America. Then there were those adventurers who had gone to find Fawcett and, instead, disappeared along with him, swallowed by the same forests in the Mato Grosso region which travellers had long ago christened the “green hell.”
Some nearly died of starvation, while others retreated in the face of tribes that attacked with poisoned arrows. In the next seven decades, scores of explorers had tried and failed to retrace Fawcett’s path. When he vanished, Fawcett and his party had been trying to uncover a lost civilization hidden in the Amazon, which Fawcett had named, simply, the City of Z. The expedition expected to find little more than bones-yet even discovering those would have been a revelation. Finally, after months of waiting, a team of Brazilian adventurers and scientists headed into the jungle, determined to solve what has been described as “the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century.” The group was searching for signs of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, a British explorer who, in 1925, had disappeared in the forest, along with his son and another companion. Rivers sank by thirty feet bogs became meadows islands turned into hills. Then the sun came out and scorched the region. Bridges were swept away, and, amid vast stretches of mud, small holes appeared where cobras and armadillos had buried themselves. In the summer of 1996, rains flooded the Amazon, rendering it virtually impenetrable.