The Lost City of Z

During Fawcett’s official training with the Royal Geographical Society he was taught the “science of savages,” which related, in part, that “it is established that some races are inferior to others in volume and complexity of brain, Australians and Africans being in this respect below Europeans.”

Grann notes, “[Fawcett] escaped virtually every kind of pathology in the jungle, but he could not rid himself of the pernicious disease of race.”

What makes Fawcett such a fascinating biography subject are his contradictions. Remembered by his family members as a man who preferred vegetarianism because he hated to kill an animal unnecessarily, he was also a stoic who made a point of telling his expedition companions that anyone who broke a leg in the forest would be abandoned to prevent slowing down the entire party.

It is also unclear why an überrationalist like Fawcett would risk his all in search of so nebulous a goal. What was Z, exactly? A city of gold? A still-thriving civilization of extreme complexity? Something else entirely? To this day it remains hard to understand how the very vague legends that surrounded the unknown site could have provoked evangelical fervor in a man of science.

Fawcett’s time in the trenches in World War I seems to have upended his sense of what it meant to be a civilized man. “Civilization!‚ Ye Gods!,” Fawcett wrote toward the end of the war. “To see what one has seen the word is an absurdity. It has been an insane explosion of the lowest human emotions.”

Yet somehow, he emerged from the war with an even stronger need to find Z.

There is something about Fawcett’s spirit and self-assurance that captivates many who hear his story, Grann included. As readers, we are left wondering if that eternal explorer’s ethos – the desire to climb the mountain “because it’s there” – is something intrinsically human or if, ultimately, exploration is a cultural construct.

In one of the most poignant scenes of the book, Grann speaks with a native member of an Indian tribe who lives not far from where Fawcett is believed to have disappeared. The woman has encountered more than her fair share of latter-day searchers like Grann, all hoping to discover what had happened to Fawcett and his party. “What is it that these white people did?,” she asks. “Why is it so important for their tribe to find them?”

It’s a question that gives pause. Fawcett saved no lives and solved no cosmic mysteries. On the contrary, he and the Spanish conquistadores before him brought the diseases that helped turn once-flourishing native civilizations into decaying ruins.

And yet it’s hard not to care about the fate of this man who pushed himself so far beyond the normal limits of human capacity. And to read “The Lost City of Z” is to feel grateful that Grann himself bothered to set out for the Amazon in search of the bones of an explorer whose body was long ago reclaimed by the jungle.

Jeremy Kutner is a Monitor intern.

Previous

1 | 2