The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

The object of Fawcett’s obsession, the City of Z is his name for the lost civilization he believes is hidden deep in the Amazon jungle. Fawcett becomes convinced that this large civilization existed deep in the Amazon jungle based on evidence from early explorers and from pieces of evidence—broken pottery, suggestions of road networks, etc.—he discovered himself in his early explorations of the Amazon. Many dismissed Fawcett’s theory of the Z since most scholars and explorers were convinced that advanced civilization would be impossible in the dense, dangerous jungles of the Amazon. However, evidence of a large civilization in the region Fawcett believed Z could be found were discovered by Western explorers shortly after Fawcett’s disappearance. If the name of the imagined city has any meaning, Fawcett never explains it.

Cuiabá is the capital city of Mato Grosso, Brazil, and served as a starting and ending point for Fawcett’s expeditions. Though a small village, it was a good place to gather supplies and access needed resources when necessary, as the area had an accessible airport. This is also where Grann meets up with Paolo Pinage.

A phrase coined in 1971 by the accomplished archaeologist Betty Meggers, “counterfeit paradise” refers to a once-widely-held belief among scientists that no advanced civilization could have survived in the Amazon jungle’s forbidding environment. Fawcett’s theory suggested otherwise, and later discoveries of large, advanced civilizations deep in the Amazon jungle made the idea of the Amazon being a counterfeit paradise inaccurate and obsolete.

Sixteenth-century Spanish explorers and soldiers notorious for their brutal treatment of Indigenous peoples, the conquistadors conquered Peru in 1533 and then set their sights on the Amazon region. Surviving conquistador accounts describe vast settlements and large native populations along the Amazon River and some of its major tributaries. These accounts correspond with evidence Fawcett uncovers during his various expeditions.

During one of his failed expeditions in search of Z, Fawcett shoots an injured horse as an act of mercy. He records the location, calls it Dead Horse Camp, and uses the coordinates to plan his 1925 expedition. The coordinates Grann discovers in Fawcett’s logbooks differ from the coordinates published in Exploration Fawcett (1953), and Fawcett’s granddaughter informs Grann that the coordinates in Brian’s book were intentionally inaccurate to discourage other explorers from making any discoveries in the area.

After the conquest of Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City), the opulent capital of the powerful Aztec Empire, Spanish conquistadors search the Western Hemisphere for a rumored city of gold, which they call El Dorado. Though Fawcett does not appear to have lent much credence to the idea of a city literally constructed out of gold, he does believe that the El Dorado legend grows out of populous and prosperous civilizations that once existed in the Amazon.

The RGS was formed in London in 1830 for the purpose of mapping the world. In 1900-01, Fawcett studies at the RGS and trains to be an explorer. Grann conducts research at the RGS in 2005. Though initially treated as a respectable explorer, members of the RGS came to be skeptical of Fawcett’s abilities. The failure of the expedition just prior to his final ill-fated expedition was enough to deny Fawcett more funding to find Z, and his reputation in the organization has never fully recovered.

The Rubber Boom was the result of the demand for rubber tires in the United States that started when B. F. Goodrich began manufacturing tires out of rubber in 1896. Considered “black gold,” the rush on the substance from tropical trees created “rubber barons,” who became enormously rich from harvesting and exporting the rubber. These barons were known to disregard environmental concerns and the territory of Indigenous tribes. They also paid slavers well for slaves to work on their rubber plantations, thereby perpetuating cruel systems of capturing and selling people from Indigenous tribes. This slave trade led the Indigenous people to become wary of foreigners at best and aggressive at worst. The most active areas of the rubber barons and slave traders was around the Xingu River where Fawcett led his expeditions for Z, thus making the area extremely dangerous for the explorers.

Corresponding with the 64-year reign (1837-1901) of Britain’s Queen Victoria, the Victorian Era signifies the apex of British imperial expansion abroad, coupled with the cultural ascendance of conservative social values at home. Fawcett comes of age during the Victorian Era and rebels against certain elements of it, in particular its Christian-based moral strictures and its unqualified celebration of Western civilization, though Fawcett does impose strict self-discipline in pursuit of his exploration-related goals. Though Fawcett’s attitude toward the Indigenous peoples of the Amazons was more advanced than most explorers of the time, Fawcett’s beliefs were still based in the Victorian ideas that white Western men were superior to and genetically separate from Indigenous peoples. This attitude lead some later explorers to consider him a racist and to question some of Fawcett’s processes and decisions during his expeditions.