Percy Harrison Fawcett was one of the most capable field surveyors of his generation and one of its most stubborn dreamers. In 1925 he walked into the forests of central Brazil with his elder son and the son’s best friend, looking for the ruins of a city he called Z. A letter he sent back at the end of May is the last word anyone had from them. Search parties, claims and counter-claims have followed for a century without producing a body.
What happened
Fawcett, born in 1867, was an artillery officer who had served in Ceylon before the Royal Geographical Society sent him to South America in 1906 to help survey the poorly mapped borders between Bolivia, Brazil and Peru. Over the next two decades he led a series of hard expeditions through the region, won the society’s gold medal, and came to believe that a large and sophisticated civilization had once flourished in the Amazon, and that a remnant of it, Z, might still be standing somewhere in Mato Grosso. Most archaeologists of the day thought the rainforest could never have supported such a thing. An attempt in 1920 ended in fever at a place he named Dead Horse Camp, after he had to shoot his pack animal.
He went back with financing from newspapers, chiefly the North American Newspaper Alliance, and some support from the society. The party left Cuiabá on April 20, 1925: Fawcett, his son Jack, about 21, Jack’s friend Raleigh Rimell, two Brazilian laborers, horses, mules and dogs. On May 29, back at Dead Horse Camp, Fawcett wrote to his wife, Nina, that he was sending the Brazilians home and going on with the two young men alone. He told her she need have no fear of failure. He had also asked that no one come looking for him if he failed to return, on the grounds that a rescue party would only die too.
The investigation
He was declared missing in 1927, and the warning was ignored. The first major search, led in 1928 by the British explorer George Dyott, who also filed dispatches for the newspaper alliance, came back convinced that the party had been killed by Indians, though the chief Dyott relied on kept changing his story and Fawcett’s younger son, Brian, rejected the findings. Later, a Swiss trapper claimed to have met an elderly captive Englishman in the forest in 1931; a missionary reported a pale child said to be Jack’s son, who turned out to be an albino boy; and spiritualists came to believe that Z was a gateway to another plane of existence. The writer David Grann, who retraced the route for The New Yorker, noted that some searchers vanished themselves.
The most serious claim came in 1951, when Orlando Villas-Bôas, the respected Brazilian advocate for Indigenous peoples, announced that the Kalapalo had admitted killing the three men and produced a skeleton said to be Fawcett’s. The Royal Anthropological Institute in London examined it and concluded it was not: the upper jaw did not match Fawcett’s surviving spare denture, and the man had stood about five feet seven, against Fawcett’s six feet one and a half. In 2005 a Kalapalo man, Vajuvi, told Grann the bones were his own grandfather’s, dug up by villagers after they were promised rifles for a tall skeleton.
The explanations
The Kalapalo account that has been passed down holds that the three strangers stayed with them, then insisted on heading east into the territory of a more warlike people despite warnings, and that the smoke of their campfires stopped after a few days. Murder by another group, starvation, and illness are all plausible; when last seen, both young men were reported to be in poor condition. Searches were hampered by Fawcett’s own secrecy. He kept his true route from the public, and when Grann compared Fawcett’s private logbook with the family’s published account, the Dead Horse Camp coordinates differed, apparently to throw off rivals.
In 1996 a Brazilian financier, James Lynch, led a well-equipped expedition into the Upper Xingu to find the remains; the party was held by local villagers until it surrendered boats and equipment.
Where it stands
No trace of Fawcett, Jack or Raleigh Rimell has been confirmed. The idea behind Z has fared better than Fawcett did. Since the 1990s the archaeologist Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida, working with the Kuikuro people, has mapped ditches, roads and plazas in the Upper Xingu belonging to clusters of towns occupied centuries before Europeans arrived, home to perhaps tens of thousands of people. They are not the stone city Fawcett imagined, but they show that the region once held far more people than his critics believed.