Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 507 - Finding The Lost City of Z: Percy Fawcett's Suicide Mission

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

What began as a search for a mythical city hidden deep within the Amazon became an obsession that consumed famed British explorer Percy Fawcett. In 1925, convinced that an advanced lost civilization known only as “Z” truly existed, Fawcett led a small expedition that included his oldest son into one of the deadliest environments on Earth… and vanished forever. What happened to them? And does Z exist? Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com  Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :) For all merch-related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste) Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast. Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You need have no fear of any failure. These were some of the last words. The British explorer Percy Fawcett wrote to his wife before he disappeared forever in the Amazon rainforest. Turns out she had plenty to worry about. In 1925, Fawcett, his son Jack and Jack's best friend, Raleigh Rimmel, set out into the Amazon in search of a possible lost ancient city that Fawcett called Zee.

Z had haunted the renowned explorer for years, finding it had truly become his obsession, and nothing would start. stop him from searching for it. When two years passed with no word from the explorers, the Royal Geographical Society, the institution that had backed Fawcett off and on for more than two decades officially declared him missing. It was hard to believe that Fawcett, who had gained worldwide fame for a number of other expeditions and wartime heroics, a man practically believed to be immune to death, had gone without a trace. After he disappeared, finding Fawcett and

the Lost City of Zee became an obsession for a number of other explorers who ventured out into their own demise, just as Fawcett had. A century later, Percy Fawcett's fate still remains a mystery. Some said he started his own civilization in the jungle, others that he found a portal to another world, or that he was held hostage by indigenous people for many years, or died of natural causes, or was quickly murdered. Accounts from indigenous residents of the region, which were largely discounted until recent years, have possibly shed some light on he and his group's grim fate. Today we will discuss the remarkable life and the mysterious disappearance of Percy Harrison Fawcett, a real-life Indiana Jones, the legendary explorer whose obsession with a fabled and fantastical

hidden Amazonian city became his downfall on this historical, adventurous, maybe don't fuck with the jungle because the jungle will definitely fuck with you. Edition of TimeSuck. This is Michael McDonald, and you're listening to TimeSuck. You're listening to TimeSuck. Well, happy Monday and welcome or welcome back to the cult of the curious. I'm Dan Cummins. Suck Nasty.

Shameless, tsunami phobic. Black Ang, Steakhouse and Nightclub marketing director, and you are listening to TimeSuck. Hail Nimrod. Hail Lucifina. Praise B to Good Boy, Bojangles, and Glory B to Triple M. Back in the Suck dungeon this week, had an amazing time at Jazz Fest. Thank you, Nola. Another big show today.

So much good source material. I wanted to cut more out because around the, you know, the three-hour word equivalent, I just lose too much of my ability to bring enthusiasm and focus to these topics, but, God, there's just so much fascinating shit. I couldn't cut as much as I wanted to. So, I say that to let you know that there will not be as many jokes and commentary as there often is. I don't think that will make this less entertaining, though.

I found this fucking riveting. Made me feel like a kid again in the best possible way, right? Dreaming of fantastical adventures and hidden treasures. Hope you feel the same. Let's fucking go. I'm going to start things off with an overview of the Amazon rainforest Before jumping into a complete timeline of the life and adventures of Percy Fawcett This guy was

This guy was brave, yes, but also fucking nuts I'm going to talk about his disappearance The numerous search parties who have attempted to find him over the past century Yeah, so let's go The Amazon rainforest, oh my god The Amazon River Different R word The largest drainage system in the entire world

world. The river is at least 4,000 miles long, slightly shorter than the Nile, maybe, or maybe slightly longer. It's a matter of debate. Some Brazilian estimates have placed it as a bit longer than the Nile. Either way, it spans a distance approximately, if the river were to be straightened out, from New York City across the Atlantic to Rome, Italy. That's wild. Its westernmost source is high up in the Andes Mountains within 100 miles of the Pacific Ocean, and the mouth of the river is located in the Atlantic Ocean on the northeastern coast of Brazil. In addition to the length of the Amazon, the location of its source has been the subject of debate since the mid-20th century. The Amazon basin is the largest lowland in Latin America with an area of about 2.7 million square miles.

The basin includes the greater part of Brazil and most of Peru, significant parts of Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and a small part of Venezuela. More than two-thirds of the basin is covered by the Amazon rainforest, which represents about half of the Earth's remaining rainforest area. Amazon rainforest stretches from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the tree line of the Andes in the west. The forest widens from a 200-mile front along the Atlantic to a belt roughly 1,200 miles wide, at the Andean foothills. Approximately 60% of the rainforest is within the country of Brazil. Amazon is the world's richest, most varied biological reservoir containing millions of species.

of insects, plants, birds, and other forms of life. Many species are theorized to have yet to be discovered there. The rainforest covers an area of 2,300,000 square miles, comprising about 40% of Brazil's total area. In the 20th century, Brazil's rapidly growing population settled major areas of the Amazon, which drastically reduced the size of the rainforest as a result of settlers' clearance of land to obtain lumber and, you know, create grazing pastures and farmland. Between 1970 and 2016, the Brazilian Amazon forest cover declined from 1,583,000 square miles to about 1,283,000 square miles.

Fortunately in the 90s, the Brazilian government and various international bodies began efforts to protect parts of the forest from human encroachment, exploitation, and deforestation. Conservation efforts have slowed forest loss considerably to roughly 0.1 to 0.2% percent, year between 2008 and 2016. Hopefully since 2016 it is, uh, don't have the data still, yet, but hopefully it's, uh, you know, remained around the same, uh, very, very impressive. Maybe someday we can actually go the other way. Uh, shifting focus back to the Amazon River. Technological advances made it possible for researchers to explore deeper into the remote headstreams to more accurately measure its length. Starting in the 1950s, explor of the region cited various mountains in Peru, as

possible sources, but these studies, you know, done without precise measurements, were done without precise measurements or applying hydrological research. An expedition in 1971, sponsored by the National Geographic Society, pinpointed Carwasanta River, more of a small creek, really, which runs off the north slope of Mount Mismi in southern Peru as the source of the Amazon River. This location became widely accepted by the scientific community until the mid-90. A Polish expedition in 1983, can we trust it, contended that the source was actually another stream nearby called Appaceta Creek. The Apaceta is six miles longer than the Carwasa.

Carvasa, carries water year-round, signaling to many that the Apaceta is the true source of the Amazon River. And the most recent measurement of the Amazon from Apoceta Creek to the mouth of Marozo Bay was 4,340. 45 miles. Very, very far. Amazon has a warm, rainy and human climate. Major mammal wildlife includes the jaguar, manatee, taper, red deer, Kapibara, bats, many other types of rodents and monkeys. More than 8,000 species of insects have been collected and classified,

including, of course, disease-carrying mosquitoes, nasty, biting leaf cutter ants, a bunch of big-ass creepy fucking flies. Pretty cool, pretty chill fireflies. various very angry, not fucking cool stinging bees, super uncool nightmare hornets, demonic devil wasps, horror movie beetles, fuck my life cockroaches, annoying cicadas, just fucking kill me if that thing ever touches me centipedes, are you fucking kidding me scorpions, creepy disgusting ticks, and giant horrifying spiders to name just a few?

The worst insects of all seem to be the Ombrayasino ants. I don't know if you remember hearing about those when we were in South America a long time, ago talking about serial killer Pedro Lopez. These mutants grow up to three inches in length, three inches have mandibles that allow them to gnaw their way through actual bone. They usually have no interest in eating humans. They do prefer sugary plants. I mean, who doesn't love sugar, but they will eat flesh if it's easily accessible. The bodies of wild boars, spider monkeys, many other animals, occasional humans have been found stripped to the bone in the jungle. The Andreusino ants are venomous, and with enough bites, they can paralyze.

you. So how'd you like to go out that way? Hundreds of giant aggressive ants walking around in your fucking face, paralyzed face, walking into your mouth when you frozen and scream, eating their way into your head through the soft tissue of your ear canal. And we really picture that vividly. About

2,500 species of fish have also been discovered in the Amazon. Some of them also horrifying, like the piranha, which generally feed on other fish, but also attack animals and humans and will make you wish you were never born. The waters are also home to alligators, turtles, a lot of other things with sharp teeth, but also cute stuff too, like Amazon River

Dolphins, which are pink and preposterously adorable. The Amazon also had giant anacondas, over 25 feet long, which are not adorable, not at all. They have 400 pounds, and they're utterly terrifying. At the time of the European conquest of the Amazon, the bottomlands and upland services the Amazon River and its major tributaries. We're home to a dense stationary population of indigenous people. who had chosen to live around all these creepy bugs and animals because they're clearly tougher than me or you, or were just born there and never told that there are fucking many places in the world.

They're a lot better to live. They've traditionally practiced small-scale farming, supplemented by fishing and hunting. The more elevated areas away from the rivers were home to smaller, widely dispersed, semi-nomadic tribes. These groups traditionally relied on hunting large and small animals and gathering wild fruit berries, nuts while practicing small-scale agriculture and while also constantly trying not to get killed by the many fucking insane creatures that live in the forest or jungle. In the early 90s, the indigenous population of the Amazon Basin was still estimated to be about 600,000 people, about one-third of those individuals lived in Brazil. By the early 21st century, though, the indigenous population had decreased to less than 200,000, partly as a result of deforestation and commercial exploitation, sadly. also partly due to people being introduced to a comparatively easier and much less dangerous way of life

and coming to the realization that they don't have to live surrounded by disturbing bugs and snakes and shit for the rest of their days. I mean, let's be honest. Would you want to give up AC and central heating and a shower and a bedroom with a locking door where you never have to worry about a 25-foot anaconda or Ombrayasino ants? Fuck no, you wouldn't. So why should they have to keep living like that? Also, in case you forgot, I did make up the Ambri Asino. ants for the Pedro Lopez suck, and they are still just as fake now as they were back then. But the Amazon actually does have some really creepy ants. Not kidding.

Like the bullet ant, renowned for having the most painful sting, allegedly, of any insect in the world. Its sting produces extremely intense, agonizing pain comparable to actually being shot that lasts up to 24 hours. While not usually lethal to humans, the pain is debilitating. these little fuckers grow to a little over an inch long and resemble stout reddish black wingless wasps and they, I assume, come from hell. So that's fun. The indigenous people of the Amazon,

who have remained in the jungle, and are extremely skilled at surviving in the inhospitable rainforest, though, they have figured out how to make a poisonous cassava edible, for example. They've perfected the use of quinine, isolated from the bark of the Sanchona tree to treat malaria.

They've extracted fucking cocaine from the leaves of the cocoa plant to feel fucking invincible and immortal. Not all bad. They've skilled navigators, or they are skilled navigators, in rafts and canoes, have blowguns, hammocks, other cool shit. Early explorers reported that the river was fringed with villages, some of them pretty big, large settlements, home to thousands of people. The early European explorers, not always super kind to the people of the Amazon.

A lot of people still aren't, unfortunately. they sometimes stole food, canoes from the indigenous people, large number were enslaved from the 16th to the 18th century. Many others died from diseases new to them, such as influenza, measles, and smallpox. Survivors fled even more remote sections of the Amazon basin, forming much smaller tribes. As recently as 1906, there were still reports of the capture and enslavement of indigenous people as part of the local rubber industry. Unsurprisingly, many tribes became quite hostile, hostile towards outsiders. Right? Can't blame them. In the early days of exploration before planes and modern technology, the Amazon River was the only way to access the rainforest. Spanish explorer Francisco de Oriana descended the main course of the Amazon from the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Andes to the Atlantic from 1541 to 1542 becoming the first European to do so.

A variety of French, German, and English explorers took expeditions into the Amazon in the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1913, even a American U.S. President, Theodore Roosevelt, explored a major tributary of the Amazon. Despite having little jungle experience, 55-year-old Roosevelt described the expedition as his last chance to be a boy. Roosevelt enjoyed travel that involved hardship and risked two key components of the so-called strenuous life he so vigorously endorsed. He was warned about the risks, but said,

if it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite ready to do so. He wasn't kidding. It's been a long time since we sucked him, but that guy I was a tough motherfucker. He nearly did just that. Trip almost killed him as it did so many other men. Roosevelt traveled with Rondon.

Colonel Rondon, a small army of porters, explorers, and scientists, his 23-year-old son, Kermit, who had been living in Brazil. Several men came down with tropical illnesses while crossing the Brazilian highlands. Over half their pack animals died of exhaustion. By the time they reached the so-called River of Doubt in February of 1914, they were forced to downsize due to a lack of supplies. The final team of just 22 men

included three Americans, Roosevelt, Kermit and naturalist George Cherry. They faced dangers at every turn as they went down river, alligators, piranhas, hostile, indigenous people, also tormented by mosquitoes and stinging flies. Roosevelt was almost bitten by a venomous coral snake, but it only managed to sink its teeth into his boot

and not through it. Roosevelt wrote, It was interesting work for no civilized man, no white man had ever gone down or up this river or seen the country through which we were passing. The lofty and matted forest rose like a green wall on either hand. In early March, they encountered the first of some rapids, which were impassable. We were forced to carry their boats through the forest and their progress slowed to seven miles a day. Even had to stop to build some new canoes at one point.

On March 15th, Kermit's canoe sucked into a whirlpool. He fell over a waterfall. He and a companion managed to swim to shore, but a Brazilian man named Simplico drowned. in the rapids. Over the next several weeks, the group realized that a band of indigenous people were stalking them. One of the party's dogs was shot with some arrows. Soon Roosevelt himself fell sick with fever, cut his leg on a rock. In early April, a porter named Julio shot and killed another Brazilian who caught him stealing food. The expedition failed to capture Julio and just abandoned him in the jungle. So he probably didn't fare well. They continued downriver, their clothes,

reduced to rags, facing starvation, would have died, were it not for some fish. and hearts of palm they were able to eat. Roosevelt became delirious from fever and infection, repeatedly demanded to be left to die, but his son, Kermit would not leave his father. Roosevelt lost a quarter of his body weight on the trip and survived

an emergency leg surgery conducted on a riverbank. With the help of local Brazilian pioneers who lived in the jungle, harvesting rubber, they were finally able to get new canoes and traverse the last of the rapids. And on April 26, the team cited a relief party, ordered in by Colonel Ron Don, who

we will meet again in the timeline. Roosevelt returned in New York in May of 1914, strong enough to walk on his own and greet his admirers. Some skeptics doubted that he had actually mapped a 1,500-kilometer river, but a 1926 expedition would confirm his expedition's geographical findings. By then, the River had been renamed the Roosevelt River. Still its name today. That was Roosevelt's last big adventure for the rest of his life.

He would be plagued by various ailments he called his old Brazilian trouble. In the century since European contact, countless explorers have been drawn to the region, searching for lost ancient civilizations and treasure. The legend of El Dorado specifically has drawn many to their deaths. According to author David Graham, author of this episode's main source, Lost City of Z, A Tale of Deadly Obsession, quote,

Ever since Francisco de Oriana and his army of Spanish conquistadores descended into the Amazon River in 1542, perhaps no place on the planet had ignited the imagination or lured men to their deaths Kaspar de Carvajal Dominican friar who accompanied Oriana described women warriors in the jungle

who resembled the mythical Greek amazons Half a century later, Sir Walter Raleigh spoke of Indians with their eyes and their shoulders and their mouths in the middle of their breasts. What in the fucking ayahuasca were they drinking to see that? Sounds like they went on some intense spirit quest. ate the wrong roots, ate the wrong tree bark,

or maybe the right stuff. And the most entrancing vision of all grandrope was of Eldorado. El Dorado means the gilded man and was originally the name of the ruler of this mythical wealthy civilization, where gold was reportedly so plentiful it was used as a cosmetic.

Over time, the kingdom became synonymous with its leader. One chronicler reported that the king slathered himself in gold and floated in a lake, and his subjects offered him gold in emerald jewelry. According to Chronicle,

Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo. The great lord goes about continually covered in gold dust as fine as ground salt. He feels that it would be less beautiful to wear any other ornament. It would be crude and common to put on armor plates, hammered, or stamped gold, for other rich lords wear those when they wish. But to powder oneself with gold is something exotic, unusual, novel, and more costly. For he washes away at night what he puts on each morning, so that it is discarded and lost, and he does as every day.

of the year. Well, true, that's insane. That sounds like some kind of shit, some kind of skin care regiment one of the Kardashians would promote. Also believe that the kingdom El Dorado was full of cinnamon trees, a highly valuable spice at that time. In February of 1541, the first expedition in search of El Dorado was launched by Gonzalo Pizarro, the younger half-brother of Francisco Pizarro, who conquered the great Inca capital of Cusco in 1533. Gonzalo Pizarro was also the governor of Quito, the capital city of modern-day Ecuador. Pizarro wrote to the king of Spain because of many reports, which I received in Quito and outside that city, from prominent and very aged chiefs as well as from Spaniards, whose account agreed with one another that the province

of La Canela, something like with cinnamon, and Lake El Dorado, were a very populous and very rich land. I decided to go and conquer and explore it. Well, Pizarro put almost his entire fortune into assembling a large expeditionary force. He assembled a procession of more than 200 mounted soldiers, 4,000 enslaved indigenous people, people who were kept shackled into the day of departure. They were followed by llamas, pulling wooden carts, roughly 2,000 pigs,

and almost 2,000 dogs. Feels excessive on the dog front. I love dogs, but almost 2,000? Not sure any expedition should have that many dogs. The expedition headed east over the Andes, where a hundred roughly enslaved people died, along the way from the cold. Clearly they went too heavy in the dogs

and too light on jackets and wool socks. As these soldiers hacked their way through the Amazon basin, they did find several cinnamon trees. They hoped that the legends were true, but these trees were scattered about over vast territories not consolidated into some big orchard,

making it pointless to try and, you know, cultivate them. Pizarro then encountered several indigenous people deep in the jungle, demanded to know where Eldorado was. When they had no idea what the fuck he was talking about, He tortured them.

Historian Pedro de Cieza de Leon wrote, The butcher Gonzalo Bizarro, not content with burning Indians who had committed no fault, further ordered that other Indians should be thrown to the dogs, who tore them to pieces with their teeth and devoured them. Fuck. So that was why the dogs were brought for terror. Less than a year after departure, all the llamas had died,

and the expedition had eaten almost all of the livestock, also a bunch of the dogs. oh, and almost 4,000 enslaved people had died of disease or hunger. Things were not going well. Pizarro decided to split the survivors into two. The majority of party continued to search along the river with him. His second command, Francisco de Oriana, took 57 Spaniards and two enslaved people downriver on a boat in hopes of finding food. Dominican friar, Gaspar de Carval, travel with Oriana, wrote that some of their party were so weak that they were reduced to crawling along the jungle floor in search of food.

Carval Hall wrote in his diary, We reached a state of probation so great that we were eating nothing but leather, belts and soles of shoes, cooked with certain herbs, with the result that so great was our weakness that we could not remain standing. Dear God, I would feel sorry for them, but they sound like there were some real sadistic pieces of shit for their torturing of the locals who deserved whatever fate became of them. Rather than return to fine Pizarro and his crew,

Oriana and his men decided to continue downriver until they would either die or see what the see what there was along it according to Carvajal. Carvajal wrote of passing villages and being attacked by thousands of indigenous people, including female warriors. Carvajal was struck in the fucking eyeball by an arrow during one attack. Somehow survived that. I'm sure that pain lingered. On August 26, 1542, the boat was expelled into the Atlantic Ocean and they became the first Europeans who have traveled the length of the Amazon. but never found that fabled city of gold. Oriana would return to Spain, down an eye, but still wanted to find El Dorado.

And in 1545, he invested all his money into another expedition. Spanish authorities denied him permission to sail because they deemed his fleet unseaworthy, but Oriana launched the mission anyway. And it was doomed from the start. A plague killed almost 100 people. And one ship in 77 souls were lost at sea. So that's not good. upon reach in the mouth of the Amazon,

57 more crew members died of disease and hunger. Then 17 more died in attacks. Oriana collapsed from fever, ordered a retreat before his heart stopped beating, and then he died. His wife would have him buried in the banks of the, or along the banks of the Amazon River. Despite the obvious dangers,

the promise of Eldorado continued to call to more brave explorers. And now let's dive into a big-ass adventurous timeline of Percy Fawcett's search for a hidden city, his adventures, and his mysterious disappearance. Hi-ha-ha! Shrap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a time-sunk timeline.

Percy Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones Fawcett, or Percy Harrison Fawcett, was born. August 18th, 1867 in the seaside town of Torquay, Devon, located in southwest England. His parents were Edward Boyd Fawcett and Myra Elizabeth. Elizabeth. The Fossets were a family of old Yorkshire Gentry, who were shipping magnets in the East Indies in the late 17th to the 19th centuries. Owned a lot of land even before all that. So old money by the time Percy came along. Percy Fossett's most well-known sibling, his older brother Edward, was a mountain climber, a cultist, and author of philosophical books and adventure novels. He was actually a very close associate of Madam Helena Blavatsky. I am not trying to find more connections, that old fucking theosophical. wackadoodle, by the way. She just keeps showing up lately. Edward helped her write her big book, the biggest theosophical book, The Secret Doctrine. So, he was all about the lost civilization of Atlantis, Lemurians, root races, all that shit. He believed that imagination was the fundamental reality of the universe, but was also an incredible chess player. Clearly the Fossett's were

an intelligent, interesting, unorthodox bunch. A bunch of Fawcett's father, Captain Edward Boyd Fawcett was an aristocrat. who was a member of the Prince of Wales inner circle. So unorthodox, connected, wealthy bunch. Percy, his father struggled with alcoholism, though, from a very young age. He was nicknamed Bulb in his later years because his nose became bulbous and nasty from drinking so much. That's a fucking rough nickname. A dude drank himself to death by the age of 45, so he went fucking hard.

He also squandered most of his family's wealth by that point. Percy's childhood was not great. his mother Myra was said to be bitter and cruel, a woman who openly resented her children. Fawcett later confided to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes, that his mother was hateful. While in public, he tried to protect his parents' reputation, though, he once wrote, perhaps it was all for the best that my childhood was so devoid of parental affection, that it turned me in upon myself. Well, I mean, he did end up being a tough dude. Fossi's parents, they would be able to send him to an elite public school.

he attended Newton Abbey A proprietary college in the 1880s. Growing up, he was a recipient of frequent canings for misbehavior there, forced to conform to the standards of a Victorian gentleman. He knew how to talk about art, how to waltz, how to behave properly in front of women.

He was also taught, quote, mastery over bodily instincts, such as sexual desire. Sounds creepy. In his personal journals, Fawcett wrote of craving for sensual excitement and vices and desires. that were too often concealed.

Yeah, yeah, you can have people tell you the stuff's all naughty and fucking bad for you, and your body's still going to want it. That's kind of how we're wired. Victorian gentlemen were expected to be fearless leaders in battle, and sports were considered for future military experience. Foster became a skilled cricket player, a fierce competitor in both rugby and boxing. At age of 17, he was sent to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich,

nicknamed the shop. He had no desire to be a soldier, but his mom wanted him to go anyway because she liked stylish. uniforms the kind they wore there. That's some odd reasoning. That's like pressuring your kid to go to medical school because you think having a stethoscope hanging around your neck looks cool. New cadets were put through hours of drills there each day if they violated the code of conduct, they'd be flogged. A lot of flogging, a lot of caning back then. Older cadets engage in hazing rituals such as forcing new cadets to stick their arms and legs out an open window in the cold for hours at a time

or forced them to stand on a couple of stacked stools, you know, and then kicking that shit. out from underneath him. Fawcett wrote that by the time he graduated two years later, he learned, quote, to regard the risk of death as the most piquant sauce to life. So he's a hard dude now. By 1888, 21-year-old Fawcett made into a tough man from all those childhood beatings, perhaps, had become a lieutenant in the Royal Army station at Fort Frederick in the British colony of Salon, which is now Sri Lanka. Once there, Fawcett decided to use his one-month leave for a little exploratory adventure, the first of many. A colonial administrator was given a note by a village headman for whom he had done a favor, and the note claimed that in the city of Budula, there was a rocky

plain, and beneath that rocky plain was a cave, and in that cave, where many jewels and gold, quote, to an extent greater than that possessed of many kings. The administrator himself did not take the note seriously, but passed it along to Fawcett thinking he might find it interesting, and boy, did he. Fawcett, who was not as wealthy as most of his fellow aristocratic officers, wrote the idea of treasure was too attractive to abandon. He traveled 80 miles down the coast, then another 100 miles inland to try and find this place. Did not find the treasure, because it probably doesn't exist.

But later, during his first adventure. But then he came back another time with the map, a team of hired men. He did find a spot that resembled the cave from the note. Still no treasure. They spent hours digging. They did find some old pottery charts. and alive and very dangerous cobra. Still these failed attempts, they excited him

and would not dissuade him from future adventures. That spring, after returning to Fort Frederick, Fawcett learned that Archduke Franz Ferdinand of later World War I infamy was coming to visit the country, and a gala was planned in his honor. He attended the gala, saw a beautiful young woman, probably a girl, really, age-wise,

named Nina Agnes Patterson, daughter of a colonial magistrate. Custom prevented Fawcett from approaching Nina to ask for a dance, so he had somebody else present him. I mean, it was a highly educated young woman. She spoke German and French, had studied geography, religion, Shakespeare, and more.

She advocated for women's rights, was curious about many other cultures and religions. The day after meeting Nina, Fawcett wrote a letter to his mother telling her that he had met the only one I want to marry. He was smitten. Fawcett proceeded to make regular trips to the other side of the island to court, Nina. He nicknamed her Cheeky because she always had to have the last word,

he said. She called him Puggy, because of his tenacity. Nina later told a reporter, I was very happy and I had nothing but admiration for Percy's character, an austere, serious, and generous man. On October 29th, 1890, Fawcett proposed to Nina, telling her my life would have no meaning without you. And that is pretty epic.

She accepted, but then their happiness would be short-lived. Some of Fawcett's family opposed the engagement, told him that Nina was not a virgin. Back when that was a way bigger deal than it is now for most rational people, It is unclear why his family objected so strongly to Nina. Possible Fossa's mother was involved in the scheme. Apparently she was a fucking nasty woman. Fawcett was furious.

Writing to Nina, you're not the pure young girl I thought you to be. Oh, for fuck's sake. Lucifina is annoyed. He ended the engagement, and they had no contact for years. Nina returned to Britain, took her some time to recover from the heartbreak. But eventually she met Army Captain Herbert Christy Pritchard. They married in the summer of 1897, but then she was. Just five months later, he died of a cerebral embolism.

Moments before he died, he told her to marry Fawcett, interestingly. By this time, Fawcett had learned about his family's scheme, and now he begged Nina to take him back. Nina later admitted, I thought I had no love left for him. I thought that he'd killed the passion I had for him with his brutish behavior. But when they reunited, quote, we looked at each other and invincibly this time. Happiness jumped all over us.

We had found each other again. Now, she definitely wasn't a virgin, But I guess Percy got over that silly shit. And the two will marry in a few years' time. And now before we move forward, this feels like a good spot for today's first to two mid-show sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads ever again, tough fucking shit! No. I know you can sign up to be a space lizard on Patreon.

You can help us make monthly charitable contributions, which I got to get better about advertising this year. We do them every month still. You can get a catalog ad-free episode three days early and more. Thank you to our sponsors And now let's head back to Sri Lanka Although Sri Lanka was his home Fossa still wanted to get away from the Strictures of Victorians

Or the structures of Victorian society He was determined to quote Seek paths of my own Rather than take the well-trodden ways He became interested in Helena Petrovna Blavatsky A.k.a. Madame Blavatsky

A.k.a. The queen of New Age bullshit Blavatsky who claimed to be a psychic amongst other things was of course the primary founder of a fringe religious movement called the Theosophical Society. A few more quick words about her before we move on. She was born in Russia in 1831, maybe. You can't believe anything she said. She openly professed to be a virgin for much of her life despite being married twice and also having a son with another man. She promoted asceticism while also smoking up to 200 cigarettes a day. Two hundred a day. God damn. And swearing often. She traveled to America in Europe in the 1870s and 1880s

gathering followers who admired her supposed power to levitate objects and speak with the dead. She claimed that she was a conduit for a brotherhood of reincarnated Tibetan Mahatmas. Her religion, theosophy, meaning wisdom of the gods, drew on occult teachings and Eastern religions. Some theosophists also became Buddhist and aligned themselves with religious leaders

in India and Sri Lanka who opposed British colonization efforts. One of those followers was Fossett's older brother Edward, one of our most diehard followers. Fawcett had always looked out to his older brother after Edward traveled to Sri Lanka in 1890 to take the Pansil, the five precepts of Buddhism. Fawcett did the same, a scandalous act for a British military officer who was supposed to be promoting Christianity and colonial rule. In addition to fringe religious movements, Fawcett was also obsessed with tales of explorers such as Richard Francis Burton. Dix do famously love to go exploring. And David Livingston. Burton once famously disguised.

himself to enter Mecca in 1853. Livingston searched for the source of the Nile River and disappeared in the heart of the African continent. Explore Henry Morton Stanley set out to find him. Remarkably he did. He greeted him with the now infamous phrase, Dr. Livingston, I presume. Back to Fawcett. For several more years, he continued his military career, continued his occult obsession reading about interesting fantastical things. He was promoted to captain on June 15, 1897, later served briefly in Hong Kong and also in Malta. By the time he was in his 30s,

he knew military life was no longer for him, though. Wanted to go to the Royal Geographical Society in London to uncover his destiny. In the 19th century, several English scientists, admirals and merchants believed an institution was needed to create a map of the world based on observation. That led to the founding of the Royal Geographical Society, the RGS in 1830.

Fawcett showed up at the RGS headquarters in London on February 4, 1900. He was there to meet Edward Reeves, the map curator of the RGS and chief instructor of surveying. Fawcett was taken up to the third floor where classes were held. Reeves told Fawcett and the other students that if they heeded his instructions, they could become the next generation of famous explorers. Reeves is going to teach them to fix their position anywhere on any map, and that if they were brave enough, they could chart the rest of the world's undiscovered lands.

At the RGS, Fawcett was taught to survey, to record, to classify his surroundings. the RGS also offered instruction on botany, geology, meteorology, and anthropology. At that time, the field of anthropology was mostly made up of amateur enthusiasts rather than studied professionals. Students, they were also taught how to organize and execute an expedition, survival skills, basic medicine, like removing a decaying tooth, inducing vomiting after ingesting poison. They were instructed that they could drink animal blood or eat certain insects to avoid starvation, taught how to deal with hostile indigenous people, how to take somebody prisoner. They were instructed that if a member of their party died, they should record a detailed account of what had happened,

with corroborating testimony, and the expedition member should be buried with dignity. A year later, Fawcett passed his final exam in all these courses with great credit. And then he eagerly awaited his first mission. Before that mission came, January 31st, 1901, he and Nina wed. After the wedding day, they moved to the garrison in Sri Lanka,

where they fucked a bunch. Just guessing, but I feel pretty confident that they did. Their first son, Jack, would be born in March of 1903. A particularly beautiful boy in Fawcett's words. Fossett often bragged about his son, saying stuff like he ran about it seven months old and talked freely at a year old. He was and is physically and intellectually, far ahead. Proud Papa. That same year, Fawc received his first assignment from the British government, and he was sent to Morocco to act as a spy.

He was instructed to go in disguised as a catarget. and to observe people, places, and conversations. He knew his handler as James. He was asked to assess nature of trails, villages, water, army and organization, arms and guns, and anything political. In the 19th century, the British government often recruited explorers and mapmakers as spies. There's a good way to sneak people into foreign land utilizing recruits who knew how to collect geographical and political data. Fawcett was able to get access to the royal court and spy on the Sultan of Morocco. Fossett wrote at the time the Sultan is young and weak in character.

Personal pleasure is the first consideration, and time has passed bicycle trick riding at which he is a considerable adept in playing with motorcars, mechanical toys, photography, billiards, pig sticking on bicycles, feeding his menagerie. Fawcett delivered his observations to his handler and returned with his wife and son to England. That would be the only time he would ever act officially as a spy. His skills caught the attention of Sir George Tobman, Goldie, a colonial administrator who became president of the RGS in 1905,

Goldie played a major role in the founding of colonial Nigeria, also scandalized society by running off with the governess to Paris. He was a very eccentric man, known for carrying a tube of lethal poison with him, wherever he went, and case he ever became physically disabled or was diagnosed with an incurable illness. Okay? Early 1906, Goldie summoned Fawcett for a meeting. Fawcett had been sent to different garrisons since Morocco, most recently in Ireland.

Now Goldie asked Fawcett if he knew anything about Bolivia. Fawcett did not. Goldie told Fawcett that beyond the mountains was a massive tropical forest and plains, that the area was largely unexplored, so much so that Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru still did not agree on where their borders actually lay. In fact, back in 1864, boundary disputes between Paraguay and neighboring countries had caused one of the worst conflicts in Latin American history, leading to the death of about half of Paraguay's population.

Many sources suggest a loss of between 300 and 400,000 people, with as many as 90% of the male population perishing, leaving only about 28,000 adult males alive in Paraguay in 1870. And now because of a big rubber boom, defining the boundaries was critical to prevent more blood loss. The three countries had established a boundary commission and wanted an impartial observer from the RGS to map the borders, beginning in the area between Bolivia and Brazil

that comprised hundreds of miles of rugged terrain. It could take up to two years to accomplish this mission. And there was no guarantee of safety. Fawcett briefly thought about his wife, about his young son's Jack, what would happen to them in his absence, but also did not hesitate to say yes. He wrote, Destiny intended me to go so there could be no other answer. I doubt his wife shared that exact sentiment,

but also guessing she knew who she was getting married to. And away he went. Fawcett traveled to the Amazon on the SS Panama, which was filled with, quote, Tufts, would-be Tufts, and leather-faced. old scoundrels. It's not like the exact opposite of any crews I've ever been on, which has tended to be filled with people who don't want to fight,

people who really don't want to fight, and happy grandparents. Fawcett's second command was 30-year-old Arthur John Chivers, an engineer and surveyor recommended by the RGS. Their ship docked in Panama, where construction of the canal was currently underway. Fawcett saw dozens of coffins stacked on the pier when he arrived, his first real confirmation of how deadly the region could be. Since construction it began in 1881, over 20,000 workers had already died, mostly from malaria and yellow fever.

Fucking skeeters. Is there a bug more annoying than those? Fossett soon boarded another trip to, or ship, excuse me, to Peru, then took a train up the Andes. When the train reached 12,000 feet in elevation, he got on another boat across Lake Titicaca, the largest lake in South America, both in terms of volume of water and surface area. And yes, it is pronounced Titicaca. before boarding another train that took him to La Paz, the capital of Bolivia.

He then waited over a month for the government to provide a few thousand dollars more for provisions and travel expenses. And before moving forward, a bit more on Lake Booby Turd, I mean, Tidikaka. It's a 12,500 feet, claims to be the highest navigable lake in the world since it is full of big commercial watercraft. It's up to 118 miles long, up to 50 miles wide, and almost 1,000 feet deep in places. massive lake that I did not know existed until this episode. Back to Fawcett now. On July 4th, 1906, his first Amazon expedition was ready to depart. Fawcett and Chivers traveled over the Andes and descended into the jungle.

At one point, early on they got trapped in a blizzard. Could not see more than a few feet in front of them. Then once they made it down to about 3,000 feet elevation, they looked into a valley and saw the Amazon below. And packing for a trip like that must have been a bitch. Fawcett and Shivers abandoned their pack animals For a raft now that took them to the Amazon frontier A collection of little towns that were part of the rubber boom

The first frontier town they came to was called This is a tough one Rue Réna Bake In North West Bolivia Something like that in northwest Bolivia It was around 20,000 people now this place But nothing more than just a few huts back then Fawcett wrote about the site in his journal

Saying my heart sank and I began to realize how truly primitive this river country was. Back in 1872, Bolivia and Brazil had attempted to build a railroad through the jungle, but so many workers died from disease or violence at the hands of the indigenous tribes that it quickly became known as the railroad of the dead. Holy shit, that sounds ominous. That railway was still under construction when Fawcett arrived, but only five miles of track had been late. The Amazon was so rugged and wild that there was really no way to enforce the law, he found out.

Very Wild West. when they reached the outpost of River Alta, now a city of about 100,000 people, but much smaller back then, much, much smaller. Fawcett witnessed a boat carrying 30 indigenous men and women and chains to shore where they were inspected for purchase.

He was shocked to learn that soulless rubber barons sent armed possees into the jungle to kidnap and enslave tribes to replace dead laborers, people who would literally work to death, only to be replaced by more people who would be worked to death. In one instance in Peru, the British government launched an investigation and his

discovered that the Peruvian Amazon company specifically committed genocide by attempting to enslave the indigenous population. People were castrated, beheaded, set on fire, crucified upside down, mutilated, starve, drown, etc. Women and girls routinely raped and murdered. 30,000 indigenous people died at the hands of just that one company

in just a period of six years. They went full fucking evil. I could do an entire episode on just the Peruvian Amazon company. good reminder of what a corporation that cares only about profit can and will do if left entirely to their own devices with no laws no law enforcement to enforce any kind of morality because of the cruelties of the rubber boom indigenous people were even more wary of strangers than they were before that which of course made faucet's mission much more dangerous in the r g s journal faucet wrote the wretched policy which created a slave trade and openly encouraged a reckless slaughter of the indigenous indians many of them races of great intelligence caused them to develop a deadly vengeance against the stranger. On September 25th, 1906, Fawcett and Chivers, nevertheless, left Riberalta with 20 amateur explorers and indigenous guides out into the jungle. Their cook was a Jamaican prospector named Willis, a former Bolivian military officer who spoke some English, acted as their interpreter.

Fawcett warned the men that anyone who broke a limb or became sick would very likely die in the forest. They would not be carried out, could not be. And, they would have to be abandoned. Man, how fucking desperate or crazed would you have to be to sign up for this madness? In their canoes, the crew headed westward on the 600-mile planned route, traveling the frontier between Brazil and Bolivia. Now, there was danger at every turn. From fallen trees blocking the river to hungry piranhas just below the water surface.

In one report to the RGS, Fawcett claimed he saw a 60-foot anaconda. 60 feet? Probably not, but still, it must have been a big snake. much of the anaconda was submerged in the water so it was probably quite a bit smaller. But still, big scary motherfucker. Several months into the mission, Fawcett wrote, it was one of the gloomiest journeys I've made,

for the river was threatening and it's quiet, and the easy current and deep water seemed to promise evil ahead. The demons of the Amazonian rivers were abroad, manifesting their presence in lowering skies, downpours of torrential rain, and somber forest walls. Nope! Heart nope! To all of this. No, thank you. Fossey kept his team on a strict schedule.

They woke at first light, washed in the river, ate some porridge and some tin milk and sugar for breakfast. Within a few minutes, they were on their way again. They spent the day collecting data such as land surveys, sketches, barometric temperature readings, listings of forest and flora, excuse me, and fauna. Only stopped for a few minutes to eat some biscuits for lunch. They would walk up to 12 hours a day. Shortly before sundown, they would stop and set up camp. For dinner, they'd have powdered soup supplemented with random animal meat from whatever they had managed to hunt in the jungle. They ate armadillos, stingrays, turtles, anacondas, rats, monkeys.

Fawcett wrote, monkeys are looked on as good eating. Their meat tastes rather pleasant, but at first the idea revolted me because when stretched over a fire to burn off the hair, they look so horribly human. At night, they were sworn by mosquitoes and small black blood-sucking flies called peams, which are not deterred by netting. Fawcett wrote, at least not by their netting. Fawcett wrote, The P.M. settled on us in clouds.

We were forced to close both ends of the boat's palm leaf shelter with mosquito nets and use head veils as well, yet in spite of that, our hands and faces were soon a mass of tiny itching blood blisters. Fun! Oh, man! What a fun trip! If this was a vacation, I would want to fucking literally murder my travel agent. The men eventually were able to recognize different insects, just by the sounds of their wings rubbing together.

Six months into the expedition. Most of the dudes were sick. they experienced fever, thirst, headaches, body aches, most likely to do to malaria or yellow fever. And then one morning, Fawcett discovered a trail of footprints and realized that a group of indigenous people have been tracking them. Fawcett and his men were, of course, nervous.

But he made them agree that they would not shoot at any indigenous people under any circumstances. When the RGS learned about Fawcett's instructions, one member warned that his method would be court assassination. Fawcett conceded that his approach was risky, but it was the only way a small, easily outnumbered group could show friendly intentions. That night, it was difficult for everybody get some sleep, knowing they were being watched, but they weren't attacked.

On another day, they came upon a series of River Rapids. One of their crew members went inland to look for a way around them. Hours passed with no word. Fawcett and several others eventually went looking for the missing man. They found him, but he wasn't doing great. He had 42 arrows, literally 42 different arrows sticking out of his body. They fucking bow and arrowed the fuck out of him. As they drifted down river another day, they spotted a group of indigenous people in the riverbank.

Fawcett wrote, their bodies were painted all over. Their ears had pendulous lobes. Quills were thrust from side to side to their nostrils. He wanted to make contact with him, but his men were paddling away from them. It was the right call. The group fired a bunch of arrows at the boats. One even went through the side of Percy's boat, strong-ass arrow. But they did escape with the help of some rapids. Soon after that, Fawcett's right-hand man Chivers had a full on nervous breakdown. Can you blame him? They're in hell. After his breakdown, Fawcett sent shivers and several others back to the Amazon frontier, like back to the part where they came from, where there was actually some talents. Soon after that, two of Fawcett's men died from fever. By that point, Fawcett was missing his family badly. He had missed the birth of his second son,

Brian. He was tempted to give up, but he was still in good health compared to the rest of his men and still determined to complete the mission. Fawcett, Willis the Cook, his interpreter, they continued on, and soon incredibly, they did finish surveying the border between Bolivia and Brazil. In May of 1907, Fawcett presented his findings to the South American Boundary Commission and the RGS. According to author David Gran, quote, he had redefined the borders of South America, and he had done it nearly a year ahead of schedule. Damn. And then despite the horrors of what he had just been through, it didn't take him long to return to the jungle. The next time, Fawcett tried to persuade his new second command, Frank Fisher,

to explore the Rio Verde on the Brazilian and Bolivian border. A 41-year-old Fisher was an engineer, a member of the RGS. He was hesitant to explore the Rio Verde because the South American Boundary Commission had not contacted them to do so. They were instead tasked with surveying a region in southwest Brazil near Karumba, excuse me, now a city of about 100,000 people, then just a few thousand. Fawcett insisted on mapping the river in addition to the region near the city, a river that was so unexplored, no one even knew its source. when Fisher and seven others, or with Fisher and seven others, they set out from Karumba

heading 400 miles northwest before traveling down the river on some rafts. Two rafts. They passed the Ricardo Franco Hills, 3,000 feet high sandstone plateaus. Fossett wrote, Time and the foot of man had not touched those summits. They stood like a lost world, forested to their tops, and the imagination could picture the last vestiges of an age long vanished. Eventually, the River Rapids became impassable. forcing the crew to follow the river on foot.

They could only bring a few days of rations with them and would have to live off the land for most of their sustenance. The jungle was so thick that he would advance no more than half a mile a day. Dear God! They were out of food by the ninth day on this on-foot leg of the expedition. Food turned out to be extremely difficult to find. Fawcett wrote, Starvation sounds almost unbelievable in forest country,

and yet it is only too likely to happen. All they could find were handfuls of nuts and palm ones. leaves. Fishing was unsuccessful. The men wanted to turn back, but Fawcett was determined to find the source of the Rio Verde. Pushing ahead, things quickly went from bad to worse. The men got so thirsty they held their mouths open when it rained, trying to catch a few drops of water. Then Fisher was infected by some kind of poisonous ant bite. Then a tree fell on one member of the expedition, nearly killed him, forced others to carry his supplies. Almost a month later, the men reached what appeared to be the source of the river. Even though he was so weak, he could barely move his

limbs, Fawcett took measurements anyway. The party's success photo shows a group of very thin, very haggard-looking dudes. Fossett struggled to find a way back. At one point accidentally ended up on the edge of a cliff. He wrote, how long could we carry on was a vital question, unless food was obtained soon. We would soon be feeble, too feeble to make our way out by any route. They'd gone for over a month with almost no food and were starving to death. Food consumed their thoughts.

They were irritable, weak, paranoid, confused. some of them developed fevers. Fawcett fearing a mutiny, ordered Fisher to collect everyone's guns. One man tried to give up and begged Fawcett to just leave him to die. Fawcett ended up holding him at knife point, forcing him to keep walking. Many of the men were so weak that they stopped swatting at the bugs that constantly pestered them, stopped keeping watch for hostile tribes. Fawcett explained that, quote, in ambush.

In spite of its moment of terror and agony, it is quickly over. And if we regard these matters in the United, in a reasonable way, it would be considered merciful. Holy shit. Several days later, they came upon a deer in the forest. Fawcett had just one shot at it and fucking nailed it. That meat restored their strength. Well, it restored strength for some of them.

Some of them were two weeks to eat, and five of them died. By the time Fawc returned to La Paz, Bolivia, he resembled a living skeleton. But he sent a triumphant telegram to the RGS saying, hell Verde conquered. Fosser returned to England at the end of 190. seven relieved to be home. He wrote, I wanted to forget atrocities, to put slavery, murder, and horrible disease behind me, and to look again at respectable old ladies whose ideas of vice ended with the indiscretions of so-and-so's housemate. I wanted to listen to the everyday chit-chat of the village parson, discuss the uncertainties of the weather with the yokels. Pick up the daily

paper on my breakfast plate. I wanted, in short, to be just ordinary, as though South America had never been. And yet, Fawcett soon could not ignore the growing urge to explore there again. He wrote, Deep down inside me, a tiny voice was calling. At first, scarcely audible, it persisted until I could no longer ignore it. It was the voice of the wild places,

and I knew that it was now part of me forever. Inexplicably, amazingly, I knew I loved that hell. Its fiendish grasp had captured me, and I wanted to see it again. Man, dude loved a challenge. Or maybe it was a little bit of a masochist, loved to face almost insurmountable advice,

to see if he could, you know, surmount what few others could. I mean, I get it. You know, sometimes even after a real ass whoop, like, even after being like the first kill, I'll play Fortnite again, like right away. And that's kind of the same thing, right? Pretty much, almost. A few months later, Fawcett was back on the move. And over the next decade and a half, he would explore thousands of square miles of the

Amazon and help map South America further. He was away from home most of that time. His wife, Nina, lived, quote, a very uncertain and lonely, life without private means miserably poor, especially with children. Damn. Whole family sacrificing for his obsession. The longer Fawcett spent at home, the more restless he became. His son Brian later admitted in his diary, I felt relieved when he was out of the way. It's not like he was a better explorer than he was a dad or a husband most of the time. Nina supported the family with Fawcett's 600-pound annual salary from the Boundary Commission.

Wasn't exactly a fortune. She was forced to move often to find cheaper rent. Foss's daughter Joan was born in 1910 in the midst of his expeditions. There were times when Nina expressed interest in accompanying her husband on an expedition, but Fawcett never agreed to take her. Still, she learned how to read the stars and kept herself in good health in case he ever asked. She also encouraged Joan to keep herself in shape as well. Nina once wrote to Sir John Scott Kelty, former secretary of the RGS and a close supporter of Fawcett, someday perhaps she is in Joan may win the laurels of the Royal Geographical Society

as a lady geographer, and so fulfilled the ambition that her mother has striven for in vain so far. Joan later recalled about her memories of her father's visits home. Daddy gave us a tremendous amount of fun because he didn't realize the danger. He was always encouraging us to climb across roofs and up trees. Once I fell on the cervical vertebrae of my neck that cost me a fortnight in bed with high delirium and unconscious. Since I had that accident, my neck has always been slightly stopped. Foss's oldest son Jack idolized his father, wanted to be just like him. Fosser was proud and boasted that Jack was fascinated by his tales of adventure. When he was home, the two would go hiking, sailing, and

played cricket together. In 1910, when Jack was sent to boarding school, Fawcett wrote his son a poem titled, Jack Going to School. Never forget us, brave little man, mother and father trust in you. Be brave as a lion, yet kind, returning, ready to fight in averse to wrong. Never forget you're a gentleman, and never a fear you'll do. Life is short and the world is wide. We're just a ripple on life's great pool. Enjoy your life to the best you can. All will help to enrich the span, but never forget you're a gentleman. And the time will come when we all with pride will think of your days at school. He probably knew how to recite it better than I just did. Probably made it flow better. So, you know, he could be a pretty solid debt. Just not traditional. In a letter to Nina,

Fawcett wrote about Jack's future describing his son as, quote, a leader of men, I think possibly an orator, always an independent, lovable, erratic personality, which may go far, a bundle of nerves, inexhaustible, nervous energy, a boy of boys, capable of extreme, sensitive and proud, the child we long for, and I think born for some purpose as yet obscure. As the years passed, Fawcett's renown grew, although he did not have one single massive achievement, like reaching the summit of Mount Everest or the Poles, he had mapped as much of Amazonia as any other explorer. One reporter called Fawcett, probably the world's foremost expert on South America. His accomplishments occurred at a time when England was worried about the state of the

empire and the manliness of their next generation. The press raved about Fawcett's accomplishments, portraying him as an ultra-masculine hero. One newspaper reported, The Lure of the Wild has not lost its power upon men of the fearless and resourceful type represented by Major Fawcett. In early 1911, Fawcett, dozens of scientists and explorers attended Fossett's lecture before the RGS. Leonard Darwin, the Society's president at that time, described how Fawcett mapped unexplored regions and demonstrated that there was a place on earth where the explorer can go forth

and exhibit perseverance, energy, courage, forethought, and all those qualities which go to make up the qualities of an explorer of the times now passing away. Fawcett presented slides showing photos of the Amazon and sketches of his maps. He told the eager crowd, what I hope is that the publicity of these explorations may attract other adventurous spirits into this neglected part of the world. But it should be remembered that the difficulties are great in the tales of disasters along one. For the few remaining unknown corners of the world exact a price for their secrets. Without any desire or whatever for self-glorification, I can vouch for it that it requires a great enthusiasm to successfully bridge year after year the wide gulf which lies between the

comforts of civilization and the very real risks and penalties which dog every footstep in the unexplored forests of this still little-known continent. One Bolivian emissary in attendance a set of Fossus map of South America, I must tell you that it is owing to, to Major Fossett's bravery that this has been accomplished. If we had a few more men like him, I'm sure there would be not a single corner of the unexplored regions. Fawcett had taken on a legendary status. What some explorers took years to do, Fawcett had accomplished in months. He rarely got sick. There was actually some speculation that he had superior physiology and immunity from tropical disease. Fawcett himself said he had a, quote,

perfect constitution. Not only was he extremely disease-resistant, but he also had honed senses that allowed him to avoid predators. Fawcett once wrote about an encounter with a pit viper in his journal, writing what amazed me more than anything was the warning of my subconscious mind and the instant muscular response. I had not seen it till it flashed between my legs, but the inner man, if I can call it that, not only sought in time, but judged at striking height and distance exactly, and issued commands to the body accordingly. Fossett's RGS colleague, William Barclay, noted that over the years Fawcett developed the conviction that no danger could touch him. and the belief that his actions and happenings were for ordained.

Although Fawcett possessed extreme determination, strength, and resistance to exhaustion and disease, he was also difficult to work with. He would not let anything or anyone stand in the way of his goal. He was very loyal to those who could keep up with them, but if they could not, he despise them. Their illness, their death, just confirmed their cowardice to him. Fawcett's personality was actually partially to blame for a disastrous 1911 expedition. For that one, he was paired with James Murray. a polar scientist.

They were tasked with exploring hundreds of miles of jungle surrounding the Heath River along Bolivia's northwestern border with Peru, with the goal of mapping the region and studying the wildlife and inhabitants there. Murray had been born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1865, son of a grocer, but as a young man, became fascinated by the recent discovery of microscopic organisms.

With a microscope and a specimen jar, he turned himself into a mostly self-taught expert in that field. Murray was enlisted in Ernest Shackleton's famous Arctic Expedition, where he conducted recordings of marine biology. He and Fawcett had met each other for the first time in September of 1911 when Murray arrived in San Carlos, a little outpost on the Bolivian-Peruvian border. Although Fawcett declared in a letter to the RGS that Murray is an admirable man for the job, each man, a man had underlying biases about each other.

Fossett believed exploring the, exploring the Amazon was much more difficult of more scientific importance than any polar exploration. he also resented that polar explorers were more popular with the public and with investors. Murray felt certain that his expedition with Shackleton made him essentially superior to Fawcett. These two men were joined by British corporal Henry Coston, who responded to Fawcett's newspaper ad, and Henry Manley, a 26-year-old Englishman who listed his profession as explorer, despite a lack of experience. They were also accompanied by a handful of indigenous porters, heroic anonymous men whose name sadly were never recorded in history books, adventures in their own right, though.

And now, before diving into this disastrous expedition, time for today's second of two mid-show sponsor breaks. Thanks for listening to the sponsors. Hope you heard some deals you liked. And now let's return to the fall of 1911. The expedition prepared to depart the outpost on October 4th, 1911 to begin the journey north along the banks of the Heath River. A Bolivian officer warned Fawcett that he should not go this way because the local

Guarayo people in the region were known to attack outsiders. but Fawcett would not be deterred. The expedition would be a battle against nature from the very beginning. One night, Murray woke up to a swarm of vampire bats attacking their pack animals. He wrote about this, saying, several mules with ugly wounds and streaming with blood. As they were patched up to animals, the men were also attacked by the vampire bats. Their wounds bled heavily, and according to Foset, we woke to find our hammocks saturated with blood. For any part of our persons touching the mosquito nets or protruding beyond them,

were attacked by these loathsome animals. The pack animals struggled in the difficult terrain, and they were low on fucking blood. They were forced to quickly abandon them, taking only a pair of dogs. Each man carried a pack of supplies, so weighed about 60 pounds, and Fawcett asked Murray to carry one extra item for him,

his gold sifting pan. Murray struggled with the weight of his pack, would need to stop for rest often. Fawcett would be forced to have a porter help him along. Then Murray fell behind while ascending to summit and lost track. the group for a little while. He continued along the river as far as he could. When he sat down to rest his aching feet, he removed his boots and socks and peeled

off some of the skin from his ankles. Fuck that. I loved watching movies like Indiana Jones as a kid, but in real life, get the fuck out of here. All Murray had to eat was a pound of homemade carmels. Nina Fawcett had prepared for the entire group. Murray ate half of the box after taking off his fucking ankle skin, washed down all that candy with river water. Oh my God. All those parasites and bacteria. I'm sure he felt great. Then he smoked a few cigarettes and passed the fuck out. The group found him in the morning. Fawcett reprimanded him for his slowness, but Murray continued to fall behind after this. He became so beaten and demoralized. He gave up on conducting any scientific work.

Tensions rose higher and higher. Murray became a bit afraid of Fawcett, whose disposition had become harder every year he had spent in the jungle. Fawcett once wrote in his private papers. Civilization has a relatively precarious hold upon us, and there is an undoubted attraction in a life of absolute freedom once it has been tasted. The call of the wild is in the blood of many of us and finds its safety valve and adventure. Yeah, he loved this shit. Fawcett believed that they would make no progress with Murray, and he also came to believe Murray was stealing from them. Some of the communal provisions were decreasing at a suspicious rate. So Fawcett confronted Murray about the theft and Murray was indignant. He wrote, told them what I had eaten.

It seems my honorable course would have been to starve. But then not long after that confrontation, Henry Coston caught Murray with the communal maze they'd been saving up for later in the trip. Murray claimed it was a surplus from his personal supplies. Fawcett now ordered that because Murray had stolen it, he would not be allowed to eat any bread they were going to make from that maze. Then Murray got malaria and Coston got something worse called espandia. some nasty affliction caused by a parasite transmitted by sandflies. It destroys the flesh around the mouth, nose, and limbs. So that's fun.

Then one of Murray's fingers grew inflamed after brushing against a poisonous plant and his finger knell fell off. And then his hand developed a, quote, very sick, deep, suppurating wound. He was then afflicted with a horrific bout of diarrhea. And it gets worse. much worse. Before he'd recovered from his diarrhea and all his other shit, diarrhea he probably got from drinking that river water,

Murray woke up one day to find literal maggots crawling in his knee and arm. Fuck. Oh my God. And not crawling like on his skin, like into his skin. He tried to poison the maggots with substances like nicotine, mercury chloride,

some kind of a permigant of potash. Some of the worms died. others started to rot Some of them Some of them grew up to an inch long And occasionally he would poke out of his body This is unreal

He's like a walking corpse Fossa was as expected unaffected He did almost He did find a couple maggots under his skin But he didn't poison them like Murray I guess he was just like fuck you maggots Go ahead and eat on me And his wounds remained uninfected

Crazy bastard Probably thought of these maggots as like his new pets You know his new travel companions Oh, look at these, though, guys. That's cute. Despite their miserable state and the loss of both dogs to being eaten by a fucking puma, they continued the mission. Murray came to believe that Fawcett had zero empathy for anybody else.

A little bit of a sociopath. Fawcett didn't give a fuck what he thought and refused to slow down despite all the illnesses. Eventually, at one point, Murray refused to carry Fawcett's gold washing pen anymore and just fucking dumped it, along with most of his possessions, including his hammock and clothing. Murray's not doing well. This miserable bastard. After dumping all his shit, he had to sleep on the ground now. And bugs were just crawling all over him every night,

just fucking more maggots probably. And then his entire body swole up, and he has pus and worms all over him and gangrene. Did I mention he has some gangrene? He smelled horrific. Flies were constantly swarming around him, as if he were already dead. According to author David Gran,

with a route not even half done, the moment had arrived that Fawcett had warned every expedition member of. Were he too sick to carry on, he would be abandoned. Fawcett discussed Murray's abandonment with both Koston and Manly. Murray later reflected, there was a curious discussion in Camp Tonight. I just picture this guy. I sit there with a fucking swarm of flies around him, maggots crawling in and out of his, you know, swollen skin.

Literally looks like a fucking zombie. Listening to people talk about abandoning him. He said there was a curious discussion in Camp tonight on the question of my abandonment. When traveling in the uninhabited forest, without other recourses that you carry with you, every man realized that if he falls sick or can't keep up with others, he must take the consequences. The others can't wait and die with him.

This calm admission of the willingness to abandon me was a queer thing to hear from an Englishman, although it did not surprise me, as I had gauged his character long before. Well, ultimately, Fawcett decided to divert the mission to get Murray to the nearest settlement. Koston escorted a delirious Murray, I can't even believe he's able to travel still,

until they came across a frontiersman who promised to carry him back, to civilization. Koston told Murray he hoped that any harsh words would be forgotten. Also warned Murray that his infected knee was worse than he thought. Murray gathered that Koston and the others fully expected him to die. I can't believe he didn't die. Fawcett, Manley, and Kosset continued to the jungle.

Month later, when they finally emerged in the jungle in a little village in the region of Kohata, Peru. They had received no word of Murray. Once he was back in La Paz, after completing yet another expedition, Fawcett sent a letter to the RGS informing them that Murray was probably dead. Uh, no. No, he was actually alive and furious. After more than a week, uh, the frontiersman who took him and his mule had, uh, taken Murray to an outpost along the border of Bolivia and Peru. This outpost was nothing more than a single house. But there, a man named Sardin and his family somehow nursed that fucker back to health. They removed the mackets from his body, drained his sores of infection. Then when he was strong enough, they didn't even lose a limb. They put him on a mule, sent him to La Paz. He arrived there at the beginning of his 1912. And then Murray accused Fawcett of trying to murder him. Fawcett maintained as he wrote, everything that could humanely speaking be done for him was done. Strictly speaking, he owed his condition to unsanitary habits, insatiability for food, and excessive partiality for strong liquor, all of which

are suicidal in such places. I have little sympathy for him. He knew to a detail what he would have to put up with, and that on such journeys of a pioneering character illness, such an unscernet And sorry, the way these fuckers write, oh my God, he knew to a detail what he would have to put up with and that on such journeys of a pioneering character,

they don't use fucking comments like they're supposed to. Illness and accidents cannot be allowed to jeopardize the safety of the party. Everyone who goes with me understands that much clearly beforehand. That was a really thoughtful way

of being like, now he's a fucking bitch. That guy's, he's fucking weak. Fuck his Arctic Explan. He can't handle this shit. Well, the RGS declared that Fawcett did what he could for Murray under the circumstances and asked him to quietly put the matter to rest before it became a scandal. It is not clear whether Fawcett ever apologized to Murray or vice versa.

I doubt it. The full details of the feud were never made public. Henry Koston eventually recovered his health, despite being a, quote, dreadful sight when he returned. And he would even decide to go back into the Amazon with Fawcett. Murray was, of course, fucking done. He wanted to go back to the Arctic. and in June of 1913 at the age of 49 he joined a Canadian expedition

six weeks later his ship got stuck in a bunch of ice this guy was fucking doomed Murray had helped lead a mutiny against a captain and then he and his faction escaped with some sleds where they disappeared and likely froze to death they were never seen again

the only subsequent hint of their fate was a sailor scarf belonging to one of them seaman Stanley Morris later found buried in an ice flow strongly, strongly assumed that they died, and horribly so. Man, Murray, last few years of his life were brutal. By this point in the timeline, you might be wondering,

where the fuck is the Lost City of Z? When does that come in? How did Fawcett come to believe in the ancient city hidden in the Amazon? Well, according to David Grant, there was no epiphany, no bolt of lightning. Rather, the theory developed over time, with a clue here and a clue there, and fits and starts and with unexpected turns,

the trail of evidence reaching as far back as his days in Salon at Fort Frederick, Fossett had first learned that it was possible for a great kingdom to seclude itself in the jungle, and, after time, had taken its inexorable toll for its palaces and thoroughfares to vanish under creeping vines and roots. But the notion of Zee, a lost civilization concealed in the Amazon, began truly to take hold when Fossett encountered the hostile Indians. He had been warned to avoid at all costs. Back in 1910, Fossett, Henry Koston, and several others have been exploring the Heath River when they were attacked with poisonous arrows. Fawcett pulled the boats to the opposite bank, ordered his men to drop the rifles.

The assault continued. Fossett then instructed one of his men to start playing the accordion. Okay? To further show their peaceful intentions. Well, that's random. The accordion? Why the fuck did they bring an accordion on that expedition? For this very purpose?

Is that really going to soothe anybody? Do you feel sooth right now? Fawcett ordered the rest of the party while the accordion was being played. You know, people who are fearing certain death to start singing the soldiers of the queen. Another interesting choice. Its sons once did royally declaim

about the way we ruled the way. What did you guys singing this while somebody else's like, Bimbridoo bary-t-torn-d-d-d-d-d-d-l-dain. When singing of her soldiers break. I mean, I'm sure they played it from melody, but still. Fawcett then took off the handkerchief around his neck, waded out into the river, waving it over his head as a peace flag. Over the years, he had picked up a few pieces of indigenous dialects. He called out the word friend over and over. He said, friend, friend, as he crossed the river, not even totally sure if he was speaking the right language. But it worked. The arrows ceased. A man appeared from behind a tree. He popped out, paddled over to Fawcett in a raft. Fawcett used signs to indicate he wanted to be taken across. He was escorted. He was escorted. to the other side of the river, led out to the forest. His party feared he was killed,

but he emerged back out of the forest, but an hour later, without his stets and gun. He had befriended a group of Guarayu people, known to attack trespassers. He wrote in a dispatch, they helped us to make camp, remaining in it all night, and giving us yucca, bananas,

fish, necklaces, parrots, and in fact all they had. Fossil was surprised that the group had such substantial food stores. He observed that the indigenous people knew how to use the deadly, forest plants is medicine. They knew which plant could lure fish to the surface and poison them while posing no risk to humans or to the water supply. They used the same poison as a cure for

toothaches. Fawcett concluded that the Guayruz were a most intelligent race of people. After his 1910 expedition, Fawcett came to believe that the indigenous people of the Amazon held secrets that have been overlooked by Western historians. So we started to seek out other tribes for more info. In 1911, Fawcett resigned from the South American Boundary Commission. to pursue anthropological inquiries in the region. He developed a signature approach for interacting with tribes. He would walk slowly towards them with his hands outstretched, his palms open. He traveled in small parties, you know, with no armed soldiers to seem less hostile.

And for the most part, that worked. One day, while staying with the group of Iza-Iha people in the Bolivian region of the Amazon, Fawcett observed that they, too, had a stockpile of food. They developed medicinal herbs and treatments to protect themselves in the jungle, had a special way of removing those nasty maggots. According to Fawcett, they would make a curious whistling noise with their tongues,

and at once the grub's head would issue from the blowhole. Then the Indian would give the sore a quick squeeze, and the invader would be ejected. Fawcett also said, God, fucking maggots crawling your skin is so horrific. Fawcett also said,

with illness and disease so prevalent, it is no wonder that herbal remedies are used. It seems as though every disorder has its appropriate nature cure. Of course, the medical profession does not encourage people to make use of them, yet the cures they affect are often remarkable, and I speak as one who has tried several with complete success.

That's awesome. Like many explorers of his time, Fawcett wondered, did indigenous people ever build large settlements in the Amazon? Well, Fawcett found another piece of evidence, bolstering his belief in Z in 1914. He was traveling with Henry Coston and Henry Manley in the Brazilian Amazon, far from major rivers, and they came upon a large clearing in the jungle.

And in that clearing, they found a whole bunch of dinosaur bones. Dinosaur bones, yeah, we want to see them. Dinosaur bones, yeah, where can we see them? No, sadly no. But they didn't find a bunch of dome-shaped houses made of thatch. That's cool. She estimated that some were 70 feet high, 100 feet wide.

Nearby were gardens and maize, yucca, bananas, sweet potato. There didn't seem to be anyone else around, but Kasten found an elderly woman cooking over a fire inside one of the houses. He was drawn inside for the smell of the food, followed by Fawcett and Manly. The men motioned to their stomachs. The woman, she just handed them bowls of food.

Then as they were eating, they found themselves surrounded by men. Fawcett wrote, they slipped in by various entrances not previously noticed, and through the doorway beside us, we could see the shadows of more men outside. Fawcett removed his handkerchief,

instructed Koston to give the tribe something. Costan made the mistake of presenting and striking a match. After a brief moment of panic, Fossett presented a necklace. A member of the tribe handed them a gourd full of nuts for the necklace, and that was the beginning of their friendly relations. Fawcett had befriended a previously unknown tribe that Fawcett classified as the Makushi. He had also discovered that the village was surrounded by more settlements home to thousands of people.

Fosses' discovery prompted the president of the American Geographical Society to proclaim, we do not know of anything so amazing in the history of recent expiration. Fawcett noticed that in the regions far from the major rivers, away from travelers and rubber trade and slavers, tribes were both healthier and larger. He thought that the Makushi people had a sophisticated culture. They made pottery, had names for the planets, played beautiful music. Fawcett wrote, in the utter silence of the forest, when the first light of day had stilled the nightlong uproar of insect life, these hymns impressed us greatly with their beauty.

Many of the tribes Fawcett encountered like the Macuci had legends of larger and more beautiful settlements. Fawcett noticed other clues hinting at a lost civilization, such as paintings and carvings of human and animal figures on rocks throughout the jungle. He had also found shards of ancient pottery in the soil in places where there was no human life for hundreds of miles. He noticed that wherever there was a high ground above the plains

he found artifacts between the summits were geometrically aligned paths that look like roads or causeways. As Faso was developing his theory of a lost ancient civilization in the Amazon, he was also aware of competition from other explorers who were surveying the last of this uncharted land. Fosses

his biggest rival was Alexander Hamilton Rice, an American doctor who trained at the RGS. Rice had graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1904, was interested in tropical diseases, which had led him to the Amazon. During Fossus 1907 expedition, Rice was traveling over the Andes with amateur archaeologist Hiram Bingham,

Dr. Rice descended into the basin to search for the source of several rivers and study indigenous inhabitants. Realizing he lacked technical training, Rice enrolled in the RGS's school, of astronomy and surveying, graduated in 1910, returned to explore the Amazon basin. Unlike Fawcett, Dr. Rice was said to be calm and precise. He assembled large teams, not small ones,

secured the best gear and technology available. He once performed emergency surgery on an indigenous woman who had a liver abscess and saved her life. The RGS noted that the procedure was probably the first surgical operation under chloroform carried out in this primeval wilderness. Fawcett was aware

that Rice had far more money than he did. Rice was the wealthy grandson of a former mayor of Boston and governor of Massachusetts. Also married Eleanor Widener, the wealthy widow of a Philadelphia business tycoon. With millions of dollars at his disposal, Rice and his wife helped finance a new lecture hall at the RGS. Fawcett and Rice kept an eye on each other, guarded the routes closely for fear of being beaten to a discovery. Another explorer, who was a rival of Fossett's, was Brazilian colonel, Candido, Mariano, the Silva Rondon, partially indigenous. We first heard of Rondon when he accompanied

Theodore Roosevelt during his expedition. Rondon had helped lay telegraph lines across parts of the jungle, had started the Indian Protection Service. Fawcett expressed his admiration

of Rondon, but was also distrustful of him and felt he sacrificed too many lives by traveling in two big of parties. Rondon did not understand why Fawcett resisted taking Brazilian soldiers

on expeditions. Fossett had told the RGS he preferred Englishmen owing to greater powers of endurance and enthusiasm for adventure. Fawcett worried that Dr. Rice might be on the same trail as him for the Lost City of Z. In 1911, the world was shocked when Hiram Bingham, with the aid of a Peruvian guide discovered the ruins of Machu Picchu in the Andes. Man, what a fucking cool thing to discover, or guess,

you know, rediscover. I'm lucky enough to have traveled to Machu Picchu, and it is incredible. Fossa began searching for scrolls that recounted the early conquistadores journeys into the Amazon by the early 20th century. Most historians and anthropologists had dismissed the legend. of El Dorado. And a lot of what the conquistadores or conquistadors claim to have seen on their journeys. Some scholars believe the tales were caused by imaginations gone wild or embellished to please monarchs and excuse their disastrous expeditions. Fawcett also believed that the legend of Eldorado specifically was an exaggerated romance, but he did not completely dismiss the possibility of a lost ancient civilization. He noted that the Dominican friar, Gaspar de Carvajal, who accompanied

Francisco de Oriana down the Amazon, was a respected priest. and his account was confirmed by others in the expedition. Fawcett had encountered female chiefs in the Amazon, which went along with early accounts of female warriors written by Oriana. According to David Grand, during Fossett's era, the banks of the Amazon River and its major tributaries contained little more than small scattered tribes.

The conquistadores, however, uniformly reported vast and dense indigenous populations. Carvajal had noted that some places were so thickly populated that it was dangerous to sleep on land. When Oriana and his men went ashore, they saw many roads and fine highways leading into the interior, some of which were like royal highways and wider. The account seemed to describe what faucet had seen, only on a much grander scale. When the Spaniards invaded one village, Carvajal said they discovered a great quantity of maize,

and there was also found great quantity of oats, from which the Indians make bread and very good wine resembling beer, and this is to be had in great a plenty. There was found in this village a dispensing place for this wine, and there was found a very good quality of cotton goods. Villages overflowed with cassavas, yams, beans, and fish, and there were thousands of turtles cultivated in pens for food. The Amazon seemed to sustain large civilizations and highly complex ones. The conquistadors observed cities that glistened in white,

with temples, public squares, palisade walls, with exquisite artifacts. The failure of Victorian explorers and ethnographers to find any similar settlements reinforced the belief that the conquistador's accounts were full of lies, as one historian had earlier described Carole Hall's report. Yet, why had so many of the chroniclers provided such a similar testimony? Fawcett wondered. He speculated that smallpox and other diseases had wiped out millions of people in South America, just like it had in North America, and, you know, perhaps a natural disaster caused, you know,

the collapse of some civilizations as well. He believed that the Amazon contained the greatest secrets of the past yet preserved in our world of today. There was also a manuscript that Fawc considered the first. final evidence, the big smoking gun he needed for the reality of the Lost City of Z. Manuscript 512, which is stored in Brazil's National Library. The document is titled Historical Account of a Large Hidden and Very Ancient City discovered in the year 1753.

Authorship is unknown. Some believe it was written by Portuguese explorer. Zao de Silva, Guimareis. In 1839, naturalist Manuel Ferreira Lagos found the document in the library's collection. author David Grand traveled to the National Library with no guarantee he'd be given access to the fragile document but the head of the manuscript division allowed him to see it. A librarian who spoke English helped him to translate the document.

The writer described how he and his men incited by the insatiable greed of gold set out into Brazil in search of treasure. After a long and troublesome journey and almost lost for many years we discovered a chain of mountains so high that they seemed to reach the ethereal regions and they served as throne for the wind or for the stars themselves. Eventually, they found a path to the mountains that appeared intentional, not created by nature. At the top of the path, they witnessed the ruins of an ancient city. They found stone archways, a statue, roads, and a temple.

The ruins well showed the size and grandeur, which must have been there, and how populous and opulent it had been in the age when it flourished. Upon his return to civilization, the explorer sent the document to his viceroy, urged him to dispatch an expedition to find the city. It has not known what happened with the report or if the explorer tried to reach the city. again. And obviously he might have fucking, you know, made all that shit up. Well, Fassett came across his manuscript while doing some research in the National Library of Brazil. Grant noted that there are hieroglyphics written at the bottom of the manuscript. The explorer had observed these images carved into ruins, and they were identical to some drawings in Fossett's diaries, meaning he copied them after viewing this document. After consulting archival records and interviewing tribes, Fossa believed that a large city, and possibly some descendants of its former residence, was in the

the jungle surrounding the Jinggu River in the Brazilian state of Montagrosu. This was Percy's Lost City of Zee. In September of 1914 now, after completing a reconnaissance trip with his royal followers, Manly and Koston, Fawcett felt ready to launch a big expedition specifically to find Zee. However, when he emerged from the jungle, he learned that Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated marking the start of World War I. A patriotic dude, Fawcett set sail for England, though he was now 40, years old, he felt compelled to volunteer

to fight. His wife must have been like, are you fucking kidding me? You can't just stay home for a little while? After briefly visiting his family, he made his way to the Western Front where he would serve as a major in the Royal Field Artillery. He was placed in charge of a battery of more than 100 men. Fawcett, who was used to the struggles of the jungle, was excellent at holding his position in the trenches. Dude was a fucking beast.

Some of Fossett's men were drawn to him as leadership style. Others despised him, found him unforgiving. A 22-year-old second lieutenant Cecil Eric Lewis Lynn recalled that Fawcett was, quote, one of the most colorful personalities I've ever encountered, and a man of magnificent physique and great technical ability. Another officer wrote that Fawcett, quote, was probably the nastiest man I've ever met in my life. And his dislike of me was only exceeded by my dislike of him. So polarizing dude. January of 1916, Fawcett was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, put in command of a brigade of more than 700 men.

He tried to keep informed of Amazonian expeditions while engaging in battle. He received notice of expeditions led by the Americans who were not yet involved in the war. This intensified his fear that somebody was going to discover Z before him. He was also offended when in 1914 the RGS had presented his rival, Dr. Rice, with a gold medal for his, quote, meritorious work on the headwaters of the Orinoco and the northern tributaries of the Amazon. And by early 1916, Rice was preparing another expedition. An RGS bulletin announced that Rice would ascend the Amazon and the Rio Negro with a, quote, view to still further extend our knowledge of the region previously explored by him. That spring, Fawc received a letter from the RGS informing him that he had also been awarded a gold medal in honor of his mapping of South America. He received the Founders Medal.

Rice had received the Patrons Medal. They both were equal in prestige. And so now he's, you know, he's feeling better about it all. Nina Fossett wrote that receiving this medal was the dream of her husband's life. man dude had so much passion for exploration Fawcett obtained leave to attend the award presentation on May 22nd after the ceremony he returned to the front lines he received orders that the British command was launching an assault

with the goal of ending the war what would become known as the Battle of the Psalm In early July of 1916 Fawcett and his men took a position along a river in northern France providing covers thousands of soldiers climbed up the trench walls and marched onto the battlefield Fawcett witnessed German gunners emerged from holes

and unleashed machine gun fire on the British soldiers. He could do nothing to protect the men walking to their deaths. According to David Grant, no force of nature in the jungle had prepared him for this man-made onslaught. Bits of letters and photographs

that men had carried into battle fluttered over their corpses like snow. The wounded crawled into shellholds, shrieking. Fawcett called it Armageddon. On the first day of the offensive, almost 20,000 British soldiers died and nearly another 40,000 were wounded.

60,000 in one day, the greatest loss of life in British military history. Fawcett, quoting a friend, wrote that cannibalism, quote, at least provides a reasonable motive for killing a man, which is more than you can say for civilized warfare. On January 4th, 1917, the London Gazette reported that Fawcett had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order Medal for his battlefield leadership and heroics. In total, over 130 RGS members died in that war. Percy was lucky enough not to be one of them. In March of 1917, Nina Fawcett informed the RGS that her husband had been gassed after Christmas of 1916. The man who was thought to be invincible had been injured.

Fawcett suffered lasting effects from the poison but would eventually recover. He also suffered long-term psychological damage. According to David Grant, when he visited home on leave, he often sat for hours without speaking, holding his head in his hands. He sought solace in spiritualism and occult rituals that offered a way to communicate with missed loved ones. Fawcett soon wrote to Arthur Conan Doyle about his experiences with mediums During one seance he said His mother spoke through the medium

Who told him she loved you so was a little boy And she has remorse for treating you badly She would like to send her love But fears it might not be accepted Some officers allegee said Fawcett Used a Ouija board to help make tactical decisions During the war Captain Henry Harold Hemming

Wrote in an unpublished memoir He and his intelligence officer Would retire to a darkened room and put their four hands, but not their elbows, on the board. Fawcett would then ask the Ouija board in a loud voice if this was a confirmed location for the enemy's position. And if the miserable board skidded over in the right direction, not merely would he include it in his list of confirmed locations, but often ordered 20 rounds of 9.2 howitzer

to be fired at the place. Well, that's intense. Using a Ouija board for battlefield decisions. First time I've ever heard of that one. And imagine doing that. imagine imagine doing that and it fucking works like time and time again thank you Satan for your help

love working with you buddy meanwhile Fawcett's obsession with finding Z had become stronger than ever Fawcett was in contact with Koston and Manly throughout the war trying to secure their services in the future also petition the RGS for funding Secretary Sir John Kilty

asked Fawcett to be patient or Keltie as it was difficult for them to make any promises at that time Fawsey complained to Keltie 1918, I am getting older and am I, dare say, impatient of lost years and months. On June 28th, 1919, Germany signed a peace treaty in surrender marking the end of the war. Fawcett returned home to England, saw his wife and children regularly for the first time in years. He was shocked by how much his son Jack, now 16, had grown.

Jack had been keeping up with his fitness regime in hopes of joining his father one day in the jungle, which is adorable. Jack participated in high jump contests and enjoyed playing cricket. young Jack, despite his athletic prowess, was still awkward around girls, seemed most at ease with his childhood buddy, Raleigh Rimmel. Foss's son Brian wrote that Raleigh was born a clown and was the perfect counterpart to the serious Jack.

The boys grew up together in Seton, Devonshire, and Raleigh's father, a Royal Navy surgeon, died of cancer in 1917 when Raleigh was only 15. If Jack wasn't with Raleigh, which was rare, he was with Brian, who wasn't like his father and brother. Brian was not as athletic and often bullied by other kids He was also always in Jack's shadow

As Brian later recalled At school it was always Jack Who distinguished himself in games and fights And by standing up to the severe canings Of the headmaster Fawcett showed obvious preference for Jack Always wanted to spend time with Jack And praised him as a future explorer

Brian once wrote in a letter to his mom Nina That at least when Fawcett was away There were no favorites So that sucks While stuck at home Fawcett never gave up On his pursuit of funding His travel companion, Manly, died of a heart attack after the war. Coston married, wanted to settle down.

Costing confided in his family that Fossett's Achilles' heel was that he hated slowing down, and that he needed someone he trusted to tell him when to stop. He feared that without him or Manly, no one would be able to hold him back. The RGS and several other institutions turned down Fossett's request for funding. In the post-war economy, scientific exploration, just not an immediate priority. Additionally, university anthropologists and archaeologists, with more sense, specialized specific interests were displacing generalized explorers like Fawcett, right? It was the end of an era. Times they were a change in as they always are to some extent.

Most of these specialists disputed Fawcett's theory of Z. Fawcett wrote in his journals, I cannot induce scientific men to accept even the supposition that there are traces of an old civilization in the Amazon. Most experts at the time believed in environmental determinism and decided that the Amazon was too inhospitable for tribes to construct a sophisticated society. The scientific community also discredited Fawcett because of his citation of the early chronicles of El Dorado. One Swedish anthropologist acknowledged that Fawcett was, quote, an extremely original man, absolutely fearless, but that he had boundless imagination. And one RGS official remarked,

He is a visionary kind of man who sometimes talks rather nonsense. I do not expect that his going in for spiritualism has improved his judgment. Still, Fawcett had a loyal faction of supporters within the same. the RGS, including instructor Edward Reeves and Sir John Kelty. In 1920, Fawcett moved his entire family to Jamaica, maybe to be closer to the Amazon, and so his children would have an opportunity to grow up in the virile ambiance of the new world. Jack was not phased by the move because his buddy Raleigh also moved there with his family after his father died. Jack got a job as a cowhand on a ranch. Raleigh worked on a united

fruit plantation. At night, the boys planned future treasure hunting adventures. Then in February of 1920, Fawcett departed once again for South America. America in hopes of securing funding from the Brazilian government now. His rival, Dr. Rice, was already back in the jungle, this time on a boat specifically designed to navigate the treacherous Amazon River. Rice had also brought with him a wireless telegraphy set, an early version of a radio that allowed him to receive news from the outside world. The machine cost about $6,000 at the time, around $100,000 in today's dollars.

Dr. Rice's expedition discovered a rock formation with paintings similar to the ones Fawcett had observed, also had an encounter with the Yanamama people try these are a lot of tough words Dr. Rice differed from Fawcett in his approach to indigenous people rather than be left to celebrate their own traditions he believed they should be quote

civilized and converted to Christianity When encountering the group of Yanamama people Rice presented gifts of knives and mirrors but his men kept their guns aimed when the Yanamama aimed their bows at Rice's men He ordered a warning shot to be fired over their heads.

The Yanomama then began to shoot arrows at them, one landing by Rice's foot. Dr. Rice gave the command to open fire. It is not known how many were killed in the preceding attack. In his report to the RGS, Rice characterized the Yanomama as the aggressors. Fawcett was appalled, told the RGS that Rice's actions were reprehensible. At the same time, the reports that Rice had found ancient paintings spurred Fawcett into a frenzy of fundraising. In Rio, he stayed with British ambassador, Sir Ralph Paget, who loved. lobbied the Brazilian government on his behalf.

The RGS, while they had not agreed to give Fawcett funding, they did write on his behalf to the Brazilian government, noting that it is quite true that he has a reputation of being difficult to get on with. But all the same, he has an extraordinary power of getting through difficulties that would deter anybody else. On February 26, Fawcett met with President Epitacio Pazzoa and Colonel Candido Rondon, head of the Indian Protection Service. Fosser presented himself as a colonel, even though he ended his service as lieutenant colonel.

The war office had refused his request to approve his change in rank, but he inflated his rank anyway. As recounted by Colonel Rondon, Fawcett made a real case for Z and emphasized that the archaeological research would be important for Brazil. The president asked Rondon what he thought. Rondon suspected that Fawcett may have ulterior motives, like exploiting natural resources for England. He was also aware of the rumors that Fawcett was a spy. Rondon argued it was not necessary for foreigners to conduct expeditions. The president promised the British ambassador. He would help, though, but did not indicate how exactly.

Rondon insisted that it was imperative that the search involved a joint Brazilian British expedition. Fawcett, his temper rising, announced that he planned to go it alone then. The president initially sided with Rondon, said the expedition should include Brazilians, but then economic problems caused the government to withdraw from the expedition. So another roadblock. Eventually, Fawcett was given enough funds, though, for a, quote, bare-bones operation. Fawcett had enlisted a British Army officer who was an RGS member, but then that officer backed out at the last minute. Fawcett posted an ad in the papers received a response from Lewis Brown, an Australian boxer, and 31-year-old American ornithologist Ernest Holt. They met in Kuya-bah, the capital of Matagrosu.

There in just six years' time, the rubber boom town had collapsed. Since Fawcett had been there before, he described Kuyaba as impoverished and backwards. It had become little better than a ghost town. While staying there, Fawcett feared that Ron, he said. On Don's men were spying on him as he gathered provisions for his expedition, causing him to write his letters in code now. Once their supplies were gathered, the three men, two horses, two oxen, and two dogs, marched north to the Shingu River.

According to David Grand, soon after everything began to unravel, rains flooded their path and destroyed their equipment. Brown, despite his ferocious appearance, suffered a mental breakdown. This fucking jungle just breaks people. Fawcett, fearing another Murray-like disaster, dispatched him back to Kuwaba. Holt, too, grew feeble. He said that it was impossible to do field work because of the horrific conditions,

and he maniacically cataloged the bugs that were attacking him until his diary contained details of almost nothing else. What a shit show. While going over all of this initially, I fucking cackled so many times. Just how brutal this jungle is. How it just, yeah, just demolished people. Reads like a camping trip into hell. Fawcett now 53 years old, also struggling during this expedition.

His leg became swollen, infected and painful, making it difficult for him to sleep. or fucking hike. One 90, he took an opium pill, hoping for a little bit of relief, but instead it just made him violently ill. He wrote, it was rather unusual for me to be laid low in this way, and I was heartily ashamed of myself. A month into their journey, their animals started to collapse. A maggot-infested ox, so many maggots.

This ox laid down, just never got back up. Holt shot a starving dog. One horse drowned. Another horse just dropped dead from exhaustion. That site where the horse died became known as dead horse camp. At one point, Holt knelt down, asked Fawcett to let him die. Fawcett grew incredibly frustrated fearing this would be his last opportunity to find Z, but he also knew that if he left Holt, he would truly die.

He decided they would have to take him back and the trip would be nothing more than a sickening, heart-rending failure. Fawcett was reluctant to admit that his own leg troubles had also made it nearly impossible to proceed. In their struggle back to the outpost, they went 36 hours without water. They finally returned to Kuyaba in January of 1921. Candido Randon was more than pleased to hear about this failure. He published a press release declaring that Colonel Fossett's expedition was abandoned. In spite of all his pride as an explore, he came back thin, naturally disappointed for having been forced to retreat before entering the hardest part of Gingu. Well, Fawcett made plans to return with Holt, who was still under contract, and who was determined to go through the expedition, despite nearly dying.

Holt traveled to Rio to get more supplies. Meanwhile, Fawcett analyzed his performance on the expedition, began to suspect he was sending information. back to Dr. Rice or another rival, though. Fawcett sent a message to Holt informing him, quote, unfortunately we live and think in different worlds and can no more mix than oil and water. And as the objects of this journey with me come first and personal considerations last, I prefer to finish it alone than to risk results unnecessarily. Holt was shocked, wrote in his diary, after close association with Colonel Fawcett for a period covering one year,

I find that the lesson most clearly impressed upon my mind is, never again under any circumstances form any connections with any Englishman whatsoever Okay For the first time Fawcett seriously considered his son Jack now As an ideal travel companion Jack was strong, young and loyal He believed in Z's existence like his dad did

However, he was only 18 Not quite ready for such a dangerous expedition Fossett refused to put his mission on pause though To wait for Jack Instead he sold half of his military pension To buy provisions and made a new plan his wife must have wanted to fucking kill him. He decided he would travel to Zee from east to west,

starting in the Brazilian coastal state of Bahia, passing where he thought the earlier explorer found the city in 1853. He would walk hundreds of miles inland towards the jungles of Matagrasso. In August of 1921, Fawcett set out into the jungle alone. This dude was as fucking insane as he was tough. He wrote, loneliness is not intolerable, when enthusiasm for a quest-fills, the mind. Sure, buddy. He was hungry. He became very hungry and thirsty. Early on in the journey,

his mind began to play tricks on him. At one point, he thought he saw the shape of the city in the distance, but it was just an optical illusion. A fucking mirage brought on by his delirium. This desperate adventure was very short-lived. He ran out of supplies after three months. That's still a long time, though. Forcing him to either retreat or die. After returning from another failed expedition, Fawcett headed to Los Angeles, California now, where Nina had moved the family in his absence. the Rimmels had also moved there Jack and Raleigh were living up in Hollywood now That's awesome hanging around movie sets

Trying to land some roles Fossed had a proposition for his favorite son The very thing Jack had longed for An Expedition together Spy and Explorer and recent suck subject T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia Had actually volunteered to go with Fawcett But Fossa was reluctant to take him

because of his ego and lack of experience specifically in the Amazon That's a big fuck up I think I bet Lawrence would have crushed it maybe Fawcett would have lived had he brought Lawrence. That guy was a tough motherfucker too. Fawcett instead offered the spot to Jack, warning him it would be difficult and dangerous,

a test of faith, courage, and determination. Jack did not hesitate to say yes. And Nina had no objections to sending her son into the Amazon. She believed Fawcett's seemingly superhuman survival abilities would also protect Jack and that he possessed similar abilities as his father. According to David Grand, yet her motivation seems to have gone deeper than that.

To doubt her husband, and after so many years of sacrifice was to doubt her own life's work. Indeed, she needed Zee, just as much as he did. Jack wanted Raleigh to come with him. He needed his best friend on the most important mission of his life. Raleigh's mother, Elise, was reluctant to allow her youngest son to go, but Raleigh was insistent.

He told his older brother, Roger, he felt unsatisfied and unsettled. He thought the expedition would help him earn a pile of dough and find some purpose and meaning. Fawson sent word to the RGS that he had two travel companions, both strong as horses and keen as mustard. But once again, when he tried to secure funding, it didn't happen. His most recent failed expedition had given his critics more ammo. Fawcett had no financial backers, very little savings.

He was officially bankrupt now. In September of 1921, finances forced the family to move to Stoke, Ken, in England, where they rented a small house with no running water, no electricity. Fawcett couldn't even afford to send Jack to university. Brian and Jones stopped attending school to do chores and odd jobs. Fawcett even started to sell family possessions and heirlooms. He was all in. By 1923, Fawcett was so poor he could not pay his annual three-pound membership dues to the RGS. Fawcett wrote to his confidants or John Kelty,

I wish you would give me the benefit of your advice as to whether I could resign without something in the nature of a scandal for a founder's medalist. The fact is that the forced inertia and family going to California have left me on the rocks. I had hoped to weather them, but such hope seemed to wilt away, and I do not think I can hang on. It is rather a fall from dreams. Nina began to grow worried about her husband, telling a friend, PHF, was in the lowest depths of despair. Brian Fawcett later recalled, my father's impatience to start off on his last trip was tearing at him with ever-increasing force. From reticent, he became almost surly. Fawcett felt that the RGS had turned its back on him.

He denounced his enemies at the society and complained. about money wasted on Antarctic expeditions. He declared that all the skepticism in Christendom will not budge me an inch from my belief in Z. He was going to see it through somehow or other, even if I have to wait another decade, he said. Fawcett surrounded himself with spiritualists who confirmed his belief in Zee.

One seer told him about a city full of jewels. Fawcett published essays in journals like Occult Review, writing about his quest for the treasures of the invisible world. Okay, so shit's getting pretty fucking weird. Fawcett came up with various business schemes and his attempts to raise money for this expedition, including a mine in Brazil, oil prospecting in California. None of that worked out for him. Jack told a family friend, it seemed as if some evil genius was trying to put every possible obstacle in our way.

In the spring of 1924 now, Fawcett learned that Dr. Rice was preparing for yet another expedition. He compiled a team of experts, a wireless radio system, a hydroplane, and aerial cameras. Reyes declared that with the airplane, the whole method of exploration, and geographical mapping will be revolutionized. The expedition produced a documentary film titled On the Trail of El Dorado. On April 13th, 1924, Fawcett presented his case for an expedition in the Amazon basin again to the RGS. Because he needed funding so desperately, he gave into the society's demands for more information about his route and the suspected location of Zee. He concluded that in the southern basin of the Amazon, between the Tapajas and Jinggu tributaries,

were, quote, the most remarkable relics of ancient civilization. He sketched a map and submitted it with his proposal, writing, This area represents the greatest area of unexplored country in the world. Portuguese exploration and all subsequent geographical research by Brazilians or foreigners has been invariably confined to waterways. He planned to take an overland path between the Tapajas and Jingu. In September of 1924, Fawc met with British War correspondent and former RGS member George Lynch now.

Lynch had connections in the U.S. and in Europe. He was also enthralled by the ID of Z. In exchange for a percentage of profits from the expedition, Lynch offered to help fundraise. Lynch left for the U.S. in October. He knew Fawcett's story would sell, so he reached out to the media. Within days, he secured thousands of dollars by selling the story rights for the expedition to the North America newspaper alliance, a consortium of publications in almost every major U.S. and Canadian city. Most explorers recounted their expeditions after the fact, but Fawcett would send indigenous

runners out with dispatches during the journey, providing the world with updates as he progressed. Lynch also sold the rights for the expedition to newspapers throughout the world. So tens of millions of people would read about Fawc's journey. Fawcett was wary of trivializing the expedition in the media, but grateful for the needed funding. Lynch also informed him that his proposal was generating equal enthusiasm amongst prestigious American scientific institutions. The American Geographical Society offered the expedition $1,000 grant, the Museum of the American Indian provided another $1,000 grant.

In November, Fawcett wrote to Kelty, I judge from Lynch's cable and letters that the whole affair is catching the fancy of Americans. It is, I suppose, the romantic streak that has made and no doubt will make empires. He warned that word would get out that a modern

Columbus was turned down in England, and he offered the RGS one last chance to support him. He wrote, The RGS bred me as an explorer, and I don't want them to be out of an expedition that is sure to make history. sure to make history. After years of pushing the society, voted to support Fawcett's expedition now and furnished him with equipment. The total raised amounted to about five grand. This was enough

money for Fawcett, Jack, and Raleigh to have the expedition, but not enough for them to have a salary. Much of the financing would be paid only upon completion of the journey. Fawcett said in a letter to Kelty that it was, quote, not a sum which would inspire most explorers. He added in another letter, in some ways I'm rather glad that not one of the three of us makes a red scent unless the journey is successful. For nobody can say we were after money in undertaking this rather perilous quest. It is an honest scientific research animated by its own exceptional interest and value. Jack was equally excited as his dad. At 21, his dream was finally coming true.

By this time, Jack was, quote, the reflection of his father, according to Brian. At 57 years old, Fawcett was still in incredible shape. Tall, lean, muscular, could walk for days at a time with little to no food. Brian wrote that Jack's six feet three inches were sheer bone and muscle, and the three chief agents of bodily denigration, alcohol, tobacco, and loose living were revolting to him. Jack had spent years lifting weights, keeping a strict diet, studying Portuguese, learning how to navigate by stars. It was all coming to fruition for him. Fawcett truly believed Jack and Raleigh were ideal for the mission because they were so close that even after months of isolation and physical suffering,

they were unlikely to harass and persecute one another or to mutiny against him. Fawcett agreed that Raleigh, who was almost six feet tall and muscular, had a fine physique for exploration. Jack wrote to a confidant of his father, Now we have Raleigh Rimmel on board, who is every bit as keen as I am. He is the only intimate friend I've ever had. I knew him before I was seven years old, and we have been more or less together ever since. He is absolutely honest and decent in every sense of the word, and we know each other inside and out. Although Jack and Raleigh were going to learn through a trial by fire, Fawcett wrote in his journals,

Jack has the makings of the right sort. He is young enough to adapt himself to anything, and a few months on the trail will toughen him sufficiently. If he takes after me, he will not contract the various ills and diseases. And in an emergency, I think his courage will stand. Raleigh will follow him anywhere. We decided that Nina and 14-year-old Joan would move to Madeira, a Portuguese island, that had a cheaper cost of living, so they could afford to do. this. A 17-year-old Brian was devastated that he was not chosen for the expedition and turned his focus to railroad engineering now, soon working with the company in Peru. He was actually the first in his family to leave for South America at this time. Fawson told Brian he was responsible for his mother and sister while he was away and that any financial assistance he could give would greatly help them. The entire family looked forward to Fawcett and Jack returning as heroes and all the fame and fortune that would come from that. Brian later recalled in two years' time they would be back. And when my first home leave fell due, we would all meet again on England. After that, we might make a family home in Brazil, where the work of the future years would undoubtedly lie. However, when Brian's family dropped him off

at the train station, that would be the last time he would ever see his father and brother. On December 3, 1924, Fawcett and Jack boarded his ship for New York, saying their final goodbyes to Nina and Joan. They would meet Raleigh in the city. Upon their arrival, Fawcett discovered his business partner, James Lynch, this is so fucked up, had sequestered himself in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel with an abundance of alcohol and sex workers. Dude spent over $1,000, which is like, you know, equivalent to fucking tens of thousands of dollars today on the expeditions, or $1,000 of the expedition's limited funds, partying his fucking ass off. Fawcett feared the expedition was ruined now, over before it began. But headlines of this scandal caught detention of John D. Rockefeller, who now wrote them a $4,500 check.

now they had the money more money than they'd expected originally and there would be no stopping Fawcett from his mission. In January of 1925 Fawcett, Raleigh and Jack were at the docks and Hoboken, New Jersey aboard the SS-Vubon and Ocean Line are bound for Rio de Janeiro. Our Fosset told a crowd of reporters that only a small expedition could survive this journey that they could live off the forest and would not pose a threat to indigenous people. He said that their expedition, quote, will be no pampered exploration party with an army of bears, guides, and cargo animals. Such top-heavy expeditions get nowhere.

They linger on the fringe of civilization and bask in publicity. Where the real wild start, bears are not to be had anyway. Animals cannot be taken because of lack of pasture and the attack of insects and bats. There are no guides, for no one knows the country. It is a matter of cutting equipment to the absolute minimum, carrying it all oneself and trusting that one will be able to exist by making friends with the various tribes one meets. Fawcett-Eff. Fawcett added, we will have to suffer every form of exposure. We will have to achieve a nervous and mental resistance, as well as a physical, as men under these conditions are often broken by their minds,

succumbing before their bodies. Oh, my God, I can't believe after all the shit he's been through. He's going to go through again. On February 11, 1925, the three men departed from Rio towards the interior of Brazil. Resilian authorities had demanded Fawcett sign a statement, absolving the government of any responsibility in case of their demise, which Fawcett agreed to. Despite the waiver, the government,

was welcoming to the explorers and provided free transport to the frontier in a luxurious railroad cars. Raleigh, previously eager for adventure, was now in poor spirits, though. During the voyage to Brazil, he'd fallen in love with the daughter of a British Duke. He wrote to Brian Fawcett, I became acquainted with a certain girl on board, and as time went on, our friendship increased till I admit it was threatening to get serious. Raleigh wanted to tell Jack the depth of his feelings, but Jack had complained he was making a, quote, fool of himself. Raleigh considered getting married in Rio, but Fawcett and Jack talked him out of it. Too bad for Raleigh. Raleigh recalled the colonel and Jack were getting quite anxious,

afraid I would elope or something. I came to my senses and realized I was supposed to be the member of an expedition and not allowed to take a wife along. I had to drop her gently and attend to business. Jack asked Raleigh if he would get married when they returned from the jungle. Rale replied that he wouldn't make any promises, but he did not intend to be single his entire life. The three spent a few days in Sao Paulo to visit one of the largest snake farms in the world now, where Fawcett received five years worth of anti-snake bite syrums. After that, the three men got untrained to the border of Brazil and Bolivia, where Fawcett had gone in 1920.

Jack wrote, I saw some quite interesting things. In the cattle country were numerous parrots, and we saw two flocks of young Rias, ostrich-like birds, about four to five feet high. There was a glimpse of a spider's web in a tree with a spider about the size of a sparrow. sitting in the middle. Oh, fuck that. A week later, they arrived in a Karumba,

a frontier town near the Bolivian border we've been to before. That marks the end of the railroad line and their luxury accommodations. Jack wrote to Nina about a rundown hotel in town saying, the laboratory arrangements here are very primitive. The combined bathroom and shower room is so filthy that one must be careful where one treads. But daddy says we must expect much worse in Kuwait.

February 23rd, they loaded their equipment onto a riverboat bound for Kyuba. The ship was meant for 20 people but held twice that many passengers. There were no private quarters and the men fought for space. Jack enjoyed the opportunity to practice Portuguese with the other passengers. Raleigh, unwilling to learn more than please and thank you, apparently. Jack wrote, Raleigh's a funny chap. He calls Portuguese, quote, this damn jabbering language and makes no attempt to learn it.

Instead, he gets mad at everyone because they don't speak English. On March 3rd, the ship, the ship. ship arrived in Kyuba, which according to Raleigh, was a god-forsaken hole best seen with eyes closed. So, not great. This was her stepping off point into the jungle, but first it would have to wait several weeks for the rainy season to pass. Fawcett hated to delay what he had learned his lesson from 1920. They spent their time collecting more provisions and reviewing maps. Jack and Raleigh enjoyed fantasizing about what life would be like after the expedition.

They were certain they were going to become rich and famous. Jack said, we intend to buy motorcycles and really enjoy. a good holiday in Devon, looking up all our friends and visiting the old haunts. Man, so fun to be young and dreaming of fame and fortune. While the boys day dreamed, Foss had obtained four horses and eight donkeys. One mule was called Gertrude. Another mule with an unusually shaped head.

It was called Dum Dum. Love that. A third was called Soorhead as an S-O-R-E. Soorhead. Sounds like some flies had already fucking gotten a hold of him. There are two hunting dogs were named Pastor and Chulam. or Pastor and Chulam. Foss had also learned what had happened

with his rival Dr. Rice's expedition. There had been no word from his party for several weeks as they were exploring a tributary of the Rio Bronco, 1,200 miles north of Cayuba. Many words that they were lost until an amateur radio operator way over in England picked up more signals coming from the Amazon. That's fucking crazy from that far away.

The operator wrote down the following message. Progress slow, owing to extremely difficult physical conditions. personnel expedition numbers over 50 Unable to use hydroplane at present Due to Low Water Objects expedition being obtained All well This message sent by expedition's own wireless

Rice Rice was eventually able to use that hydroplane Over several weeks His team had surveyed thousands of miles Of the Amazon from the sky discovering that the Prima and Oranoco rivers did not share the same source They also found and spent several hours

With a group of Yonamama people Rice's expedition was considered a historic achievement. It allowed for a bird's eye view of the Amazon. And Dr. Rice declared those regions where the natives are so hostile or the physical obstacles so great as to be effectually bar, entering on foot, the airplanes passes over easily and quickly. All Fawcett cared about was that Rice had not found Z. Before they departed, the explorers visited John Arons,

a German diplomat in the region. Fossett asked Aaron to relay, or to relay, excuse me, any letters he received from the jungle. Next morning the group made their final preparations. They donned their gear, loaded their rifles, hired two indigenous porters and guides who would accompany them for about 100 miles north until they reached the most dangerous and uncharted terrain. On April 20, 1925, a crowd gathered to see the party off into the jungle. John Arons rode alongside them for about an hour on his horse, then watched as they headed, quote, into a world, so far completely uncivilized and unknown by people. First, they would cross the so-called dry forest.

they traveled seven miles in their first day Jack and Raleigh learned what their daily routine would be throughout the expedition They had to set up camp before dark string up their hammocks and netting to protect themselves from insects Fawcett eventually increased the pace

from seven miles a day to 10 as the young guys got used to that and then to 15 One afternoon as they approached the Monsal River Fawcett got separated from the group Their guides didn't know which way Fossett had turned Jack found in indentations from hooves on one of the trails

gave the order to follow The trail led them to the river but Fawcett was nowhere to be found. The group fired their rifles into the air, called out for him but received no response. That's fucking scary. It was a very anxious night, but in the morning they fired their rifles again,

and as they were eating breakfast, Fawcett appeared on his horse. He explained he had been looking for rock paintings and had lost sight of the group, and that he had spent the night sleeping on the ground. Again, this dude is a fucking beast. The group spent a day in camp recovering from this ordeal,

writing some letters to be sent back to civilization. They camped in a spot that Fawcett described as the pickiest place in the world. Abide on Raleigh's foot became infected, causing him to become depressed. Fawcett wrote to his wife, it is a saying that one only knows a man well when in the wilds with him. Raleigh, in place of being gay and energetic, is sleepy and silent. Jack, however, seemed to be thriving. He wrote that he had gained several pounds of muscle in spite of far less food. And he also wrote, Raleigh has lost more than I have gained, and it is he who seemed to feel

most the effects of the journey. Because of Raleigh's condition and the weekend. animals. They stopped for several days at a remote cattle ranch owned by a farmer named a hermenigildo Galvayo, who was considered a ruthless frontiersman. Galvio had pushed farther into the frontier than most people would ever venture and reportedly had a posse of hunters who killed indigenous people who threatened his empire. Despite his nasty reputation, he welcomed Fasda's party into his home. The three men soon headed east after that towards Baca'iri, the Baca Iri post where in 1920 the Brazilian government

had set up a garrison that settlers called the last point of civilization a month after leaving Kuyuba they arrived at the Baca'Iri post and that settlement only consisted of about 20 huts surrounded by some barbed wire one explorer described the outpost as

a pinprick on a map isolated desolate primitive and god forsaken the Baca Airi tribe was one of the first in the region that the government had tried to acculturate in a letter to a U.S. sponsor, Fawcett wrote, the Baca eries have been dying out ever since they became civilized.

They were only about 150 them now. They have in part been brought here to plant rice, cassava, which is sent to Kuyuba, where it fetches at present high prices. The Baccaris are not paid, raggedly clothed, mainly in khaki government uniforms, and there is a general squalor and lack of hygiene, which is making the whole of them sick.

Yeah, great job fucking showing them. them civilization assholes. Jack turned 22 on May 19th to celebrate Fawcett dropped his liquor ban for one night. Following morning, they prepared to head into the jungle to the north. Jack wrote that they were entering absolutely unexplored country now. According to author David Grant, before them there were no clear paths, and little light filtered through the canopy. They struggled to see not just in front of them, but above them where most predators lurked. The men's feet sank into mud holes, their hands burned from wielding machetes, their skin bled from mosquitoes. Even Fawcett confessed to Nina, years tell in spite of the spirit of enthusiasm.

Sounds like they could have really used some thrive DFT, Dermofusion technology, expedition patches to keep your spirits high, your blood out of bugs' mouths, and your feet ever moving and blister free. If you're not driving, you're dying! If that's silly MLM nutritional scam would have just been around, those three fuckers could have probably found the Lossity of Z, completely dug it out, and then ran across the surface of the river to the nearest city while carrying millions of dollars worth of ancient treasures and about a week total. But they didn't.

And Raleigh's other foot... Actually, I wish I had to thrive, fucking allergy-be-gone patch right now. Everything is blooming today. So sorry if my voice feels different than normal. I just cannot stop getting my nose to run. Excuse me. Anyway, Raleigh's other foot soon became infected.

This poor bastard. He was suffering from jaundice. One of his arms was also swollen. Cool, cool, cool. Jack complained to Nina that Raleigh was unwilling to do his fair share of work, and he was always scared and stolen. Raleigh had lost interest in the quest now. He complained that he no longer wanted to be rich and famous. He just wanted to open a small business and settle down someplace.

Yep, the jungle is breaking him. When Jack talked about how the archaeological or talked about the archaeological importance of Z, Raleigh simply said, that's too deep for me. Jack wrote, I wish Raleigh had more brains. Their friendship is breaking down now. Lifelong friendship. He said, I wish Raleigh had more brains. as I cannot discuss any of this with him, and he knows nothing of anything.

He sounds pretty grouchy. We can only converse about Los Angeles or Seton. What he will do during a year at Z, I don't know. Raleigh wrote to his brother, I wish to hell you were here. You know there is a saying which I believe is true. Two's company, three's none. It shows itself quite often with me now.

Raleigh noted that Jack and Fawcett held a sense of inferiority for others, he wrote. Consequently, at times, I feel very out of everything. Of course, I don't outwardly show it, but still, as I have said before, I feel awful lonesome for real friendship. God, man, just quick the jungle is destroying these guys. Several days later, the group reached Dead Horse Camp, where Fawcett had one of his horse die, 1920. Horses die. They were approaching the territory of the Suyas and Kayapo people. After passing through their territory, they planned to go east to the Chavante territory, where I guess it was even more formidable.

The Chavante had first been contacted by the Portuguese in the late 18th century. Many moved into villages, where they then died of disease and violence at the hands of soldiers. They eventually moved back into the jungle near the so-called river of death. 19th century German traveler wrote, From that time onwards, the Chivante no longer trusted any white man. These abused people have therefore changed from compatriots into the most dangerous and determined enemies. They generally kill anyone they can easily catch. Despite the risk, Fawcett was compromised.

confident they would succeed. He wrote, it is obviously dangerous to penetrate large hordes of Indians traditionally hostile. But I believe in my mission and in its purpose. The rest does not worry me, for I have seen a great deal of Indians and know what to do and what not to do. I believe our little party of three white men will make friends with them all. Well, he's very optimistic. Their guys were reluctant to go on, and Fawcett knew it was now time for them to go back. Fossett even pulled Raleigh aside and encouraged him to go back with him, just let him and his son go alone. He wrote to Nina, I suspect constitutional weakness and fear that we shall be handicapped by him. He warned Raleigh that after this, there was no way to carry him back out of the

jungle. Raleigh, despite his misery, insisted he would see it through. Fawcett, Jack, and Rale were lasting alive May 29th, 1925 at Dead Horse Camp. Fawcett finished his last dispatches and wrote that he would try to get out more communication in the coming year, but that it would be unlikely. He wrote in one of his final messages, By the time this dispatch is printed, we shall have long since disappeared into the unknown. And Raleigh wrote to his mother and family, I shall look forward to seeing you again in old Cali when I return. The last thing Fawcett wrote to Nina was, you need have

no fear of any failure. And then they disappeared. Two years would pass with absolutely no updates. Their fate was a mystery. The RGS officially declared the men lost in January of 1927. Mina Fawcett, however, remained hopeful and asked the RGS not to lose confidence. She told a reporter that year any day now may bring a cable from my husband announcing that he is safe and is returning. Elsie Rimmel felt the same, saying, I believe firmly that my boy and those he is with will come back out of that wilderness. Ryan, who was now 20, assured Nina, there was no reason to worry. That's how much faith they had in their dad. By the spring of 1927, theories were swirling

about what had happened to the explorers. One popular theory was that they were being held hostage by indigenous people and that they would eventually escape. In September of 1927, Roger Cortville, a French engineer, claimed that while traveling near the source of the Paraguay River in Matagrosso, he found Fawcett, Jack and Raleigh, living in the wilderness. Brian met with Cortoville, thought he described Fawcett exactly, but noticed that every time Cortville told this story, he changed some details. Nina, meanwhile, defended her husband's reputation

and pointed out the discrepancies in Cortoville statements. Nina remained confident that Fawcett was alive, but she was worried that something had happened to the expedition. She believed they were most likely kidnapped by indigenous people. Fawcett's old rival Dr. Rice visited Nina to reassure her that even if they'd been taken hostage, Fawcett would find a way out. Nina had not wanted to send in a rescue team

because Fawcett did not want anyone risking their lives to find him, but she did ask Rice if he would be willing to go. However, Dr. Rice had decided to retire from exploring. The RGS declared, we hold ourselves in readiness to help any competent and well-accredited search party. The society would receive hundreds of letters from interested volunteers.

In February of 1928, 45-year-old George Miller Diet, a member of the RGS, launched the first major rescue effort. Diet was previously a pilot during World War I, but gave up flying to become an explorer, he'd experienced in the Amazon,

and it even once been held captive by a tribe there before. The North America Newspaper Alliance sponsored the rescue effort. Diet planned to file daily dispatches with a shortwave radio and to film the expedition.

He was one of the earliest explorers to bring a motion picture camera with him. Diet posted an ad seeking a volunteer who was small spare of wire rebuild as he believed that small men like himself did best in the jungle and exerted less energy. Yeah, probably true. He received about 20,000 applications. One of those applications was from Raleigh's brother, Roger Rimmel. He told Diets, I am most anxious naturally and do consider I am as,

and do consider I am as entitled to go as much as anyone. Diet, however, declined his application. In the end, he chose four unmarried men who could operate the radio and movie camera. On the eve of their departure from New York, Diabroke broke one of his own rules, married Persis Stevens Wright, who was almost half his age. They planned to honeymoon during the voyage to Rio. They departed from Hoboken on February 18, 1928. Elsie Rimmel came to say farewell, give him a package for Rale if they found him. Oh, my God, that's so sad.

Diet said goodbye to his wife. Rio. Once he got to the frontier, he recruited a small army of Brazilian helpers and indigenous guides, bringing the party to 26 members. They arrived in Baca'iwi post in June. While camping there, Diet met an indigenous man named Bernardino, who

claimed he had been Fossett's guide down the Curisavu River, one of the headwaters of the Jingu. He agreed to lead Diet as far as he took Fossett. Shortly after departure, Diet saw Y-shaped marks carved in some tree trunks, a possible sign that Fossett had been there.

After trekking north for a month, the party reached the settlement of the Nahukwa, one of the many tribes living around the Jingu River. Several of them welcomed Diet and his crew, but the chief Alouike seemed hostile. When Diet was surrounded by the chief's children, he noticed something tied around one of the boys' necks, a small brass plate engraved with W.S. Silver and Company. That was the firm that supplied Fawcett with gear. Diat struck into the chief or snuck into the chief's hut, found a military-style metal trunk, tucked. into the corner. Dai tried to interrogate Al-I-K with sign language. Al-O-Ike also using sign language indicated that the trunk was a gift.

Also indicated that he had guided three white men to a neighboring territory. Di had asked Al-Ike and some of his men to take him on the same route. Al-I.E.K. warned that the violent Shu'os people lived in that direction, but he eventually agreed to guide them in exchange for some knives. Dai continued questioning Al-O-Ike as the expedition made their way through the forest. Al-I.E.K.

added a new element to his story that Fawcett and his men had been killed by the Suyas people. This made Diet even more suspicious. He wrote, The Finger of Guilt seems to point to Ali Ike. Eventually, Diet's radio stopped working and the expedition was running out of food and water. Some of the men got sick, so sick they could barely walk. Still, Diet continued on with just two men in hopes of finding Fossett's remains. The night before they left, one of the men in his party, an indigenous man, reported that he overheard A. A.E.K. plotting to murder Diet and steal all his equipment.

and Diet now felt confident that he had found Fawcett's killer. As a deterrent, Diet told the chief he now planned to bring the entire party. The next morning, Al-Ike and his men were gone. Soon afterwards, groups of people from various tribes in the Shingu region came out of the forest demanding gifts. When Diet ran out of things to give them, they became hostile. Diet promised that in the morning he would have knives and axes for them. Late at night, Diet and his men escaped back down the river. One of his crew managed to get the radio working to relay the message,

am sorry to report Fawcett expedition perished at the hands of hostile Indians. Our position is critical. Can't even afford time to send full detail by wireless. Must descend the Zingu without delay or we ourselves will be caught. They dumped their radio to speed up their exits. When they finally returned months later, they were considered heroes. Diet published his book, man-hunting in the jungle, and then starred in a Hollywood film. But by the early 30s, 1930s, his story started to collapse.

Brian Fawcett pointed out that his father, who didn't want anyone knowing his route, would have never left markings in the trees to guide the way. And the gear that Diat found in Al-Ike's house might have been a gift from Fawcett or from Fossett's earlier 19-20 expedition. Diet's assessment of Al-Ikei as treacherous also cannot be trusted because their interactions were conducted in sign language. When missionaries and other explorers entered the region years later, they described Al-Ike and the Nahuah people as very peaceful and friendly. Brian Fawcett also wrote, Diet must have swallowed hook, line, and sinker what he was told.

I say this because there was no Bernardino with my father's party in 1945. Fossett's Brazilian helpers were called Gardena and Samal. On March 12th, 1932 now, a man appeared outside of the embassy in Sao Paulo demanding to see the consul general

about an urgent matter concerning Percy Fossett. The consul general, Arthur Abbott, have been a friend of Fossitz, and in the sworn statement, the visitor claimed, my name is Stefan Rattin. I am a Swiss subject.

I came to South America 21 years ago. Five months earlier while hunting near the Tapazazazzo River in Matagrasso, he claimed that he had encountered a tribe holding an elderly white man with long yellow hair. When the tribesman got drunk that evening and the white man approach identified himself as an English colonel, he asked Ratten to go to the British consulate

and inform major Paget that he was being held captive. The former British ambassador to Brazil, Sir Ralph Padgett, was a friend of Fossett's. I might just say his name is Paget earlier. I think it's Ralph Paget. Abbott noted in a letter to the RGS that these facts were only known to me and a few personal friends.

Mina Fawcett and Elsie Rimmel thought Ratten's account sounded credible. But Nina didn't want to get her hopes up. Still, she sent a telegram to a Brazilian news outlet stating she was convinced her husband was still alive. However, General Claudio Rondon

interviewed Ratton for three hours and noted that the place Ratton indicated he had found Fawcett was 500 miles from where the expedition was last seen. Paget was contacted and wondered why Ratten was allowed to leave the tribe while Fawcett was forced to remain prisoner. Yeah, that doesn't make a lot of sense.

Abba was convinced Ratten was telling the truth, though, especially because he promised to rescue Fawcett without a reward. Ratten now sent out with two men, one of them a reporter. They walked to the jungle for several weeks until they reached the Arrino's River. In a dispatch from May 24, 1932, they announced they were about to enter hostile territory. And then the men were never heard from ever again. stories like that one Other tales of lost explorers

did little to dissuade future explorers hunting for Fawcett and Z In 1934 the Brazilian government issued a decree banning search parties unless they received official permission Still though Explorers continued to go into the wild

without authorization There are no official statistics but the number of deaths from these expedition is thought to number around 100 Nina Fawcett followed all developments in the Fawcett mystery as she called it She studied his old logbooks

letters and photographs asked the RGS to share any reported sightings or rumors. She insisted that she had trained herself to remain impartial regarding any sightings or tales of their fate. However, she told her friend once, My heart is lacerated. By the horrible accounts I'm obliged to read, and my imagination conjures up gruesome pictures of what might have happened. It takes all my strength or will to push these horrors out of my thoughts.

The brutal wear and tear is great. By 1936, the majority consensus was that the party was dead. Even the Rimmel family accepted that, but not Nina. By this time, Nina had almost no money, except for a small portion of Fawcett's military pension that he hadn't sold, and a small stipend that Brian sent her from his job with the railway company. She wandered around the world from Brian's home in Peru to Jones home in Switzerland, where her daughter lived with her husband, Jean de Monet, an engineer.

In the 30s, Nita began to receive reports from missionaries in the Jingu area, who wanted to convert indigenous people. in 1937, American missionary Martha L. Monich claimed that at a Quikuru village, she met a boy with pale skin and blue eyes. She was told he was a son of Jack Fawcett, who had had a child with an indigenous woman. The tribe refused to give the boy up. Other missionaries told similar stories of a white child in the jungle. Then a 1943 Brazilian media multimillionaire, Aisi Chateaubriand, sent his tabloid reporter, Edmar Morel, to find the boy. months later, Morel returned with a 17-year-old boy called Dulipé.

He was considered Fawcett's grandson and the white god of the Jingu. Dulip, a shy and nervous boy, was photographed in Life magazine, paraded around Brazil. People crowded into movie theaters just to see footage of him. A morel called Brian Fawcett in Peru, asked if he and Nina wanted to adopt the boy. But when they looked at photos of Dulip, they realized he wasn't white at all. He was an albino. Sadly, when he was no longer a commercial attraction, Dulip was abandoned in Kuuba, far from his home and the people he grew up with

and he would die quickly of alcoholism there. Fuck. Another sad story. In April of 1951, Orlando Villas Boas, a Brazilian government official known for his defense of indigenous people, announced that the Kalapaloo people admitted that their tribe had killed three explorers. Boaz reported that the Kalapaloo tribe

told him that Fawcett and his companions were killed because they had failed to bring gifts and had treated the tribe rudely. Fawcett allegedly suffered a blow to the head, Jack and Raleigh were killed at the bottom of an embankment and thrown into a lagoon. Boaz also claimed he was led to the bones of Colonel Fawcett near the village. For decades, this was thought to have been the fate of Fawcett, Jack and Raleigh, and the Kalapo people were considered the villains. But there's more to this story, as we will hear soon further down the timeline.

In 1953, a full 28 years after the party's disappearance, Fawcett's son Brian published Exploration Fawcett, a collection of his father's writings. backing up a bit by late 1945. The then-75-year-old Nina was in poor health, suffering from severe arthritis and anemia. She described herself as having no home, no one to help me, or meet me, and crippled. That poor woman.

She suffered in many ways much more than Percy ever did. While he was off on his adventures, she often barely had enough money to keep the family from being homeless. And she saw her husband, you know, less than the Amazon did, it seems. Still as late as 1950, Nina stated she would not be surprised of her husband, who would now be 82 and Jack who would now be 47 or to walk through her door.

Damn, she just had to hold on to hope. Nina surrounded herself with psychics who attempted to contact the Lost Explorers. Brian, who was caring for his mother in Peru, wrote to his sister Joan, I really don't think her days on earth will be many. She herself would be the first to claim she's breaking up.

Nina once wrote to Joan that she must be prepared for the call at any moment. Have you really and truly asked yourself? Have I any fear of death and the hereafter? She expressed her hope that her death would be easy, that she would fall asleep and not wake up. Brian wrote to Joan, in a way it would be a good thing for her to go out here in Peru.

There would be a rather pleasing thought in her leaving her remains in the same continent as her husband and son. Most of Brian's life have been marked by death. He lost his father, his brother, his first wife had died of diabetes when she was pregnant with her child. He had since remarried but suffered bouts

of wild despairing sorrow. Nina gave Brian all of Fossett's log books and diaries, which Brian called the pathetic relics of a disaster, whose nature we had no means of knowing. After 20 years as a railroad engineer, Brian wrote, I feel that I'm wasting my life, just going to a lousy office every day, signing a lot of stupid papers and driving back again. During his lunch break, he read his father's papers, putting him on his, or picturing him on his expeditions. Brian had once been resentful and disinterested in his father's work because he had not been chosen for the expedition, but now he'd become obsessed. He decided to quit his job, piece together his father's writings

into expiration faucet. As he worked on the manuscript, Brian told Nina, Daddy seems very close to me, as though I were collaborating at his conscience direction. Naturally, there are times when it tugs in my heartstrings a lot.

Brian finished a draft in April of 1952 when the book was published the following year became an international sensation. Nina died soon after the publication on September 8, 1954, at the age of 84.

I hope she did in fact go quietly and peacefully in her sleep. In the early 50s, Brian launched his own expeditions in search of his father, brother, and Raleigh. He suspected that his father was dead, and that Raleigh died soon after leaving

Dead Horse camp, but he wondered if Jack maybe could have survived. Brian reached out to the British embassy in Brazil asking for permission to conduct a search. He wrote that he could not legally declare Jack dead without satisfying myself that all has been done.

British officials refused to facilitate his search. But Brian went to Brazil anyway. He knew he would not make it in the jungle, so he rented a small plane, lane searched by air, you know, dropping thousands of flyers into the wilderness that asked, are you Jack Fawcett? If your answer is yes, then make this sign holding arms above your head. Can you control the Indians if we land? Brian never received a response or found any evidence that his brother was alive. On another expedition, Brian searched for the lost city of Z. At one point,

he thought he found it, only to realize it was just an outcropping of sandstone that looked like a city. As a days went on, Brian began to fear that there never was a Z. He later wrote, the whole romantic structure of fallacious beliefs already rocking dangerously collapsed about me, leaving me dazed. He wrote in his diary, was Daddy's whole conception of Z, a spiritual objective, and the manner of reaching it, a religious allegory. Brian died on August 10th, 1994, in Cumberland,

at the age of 78. Over a decade later, in June of 1996, an expedition of Brazilian scientists, and explorers went into the jungle searching for faucets remains. The expedition was led by 42-year-old James Lynch, who'd heard about Fawcett from a reporter and dove headfirst into research. Lynch worked at Chase Bank in South Paulo.

He was married with two kids, but in his 30s became restless, started going on days-long adventures into the Amazon jungle. Like other explorers, Lynch was stumped by the fact that Fawcett kept his route so secret that not even his wife knew his true destination. Lynch studied the book Exploration Fawcett, which appeared to contain a hint about Fawcett's true route. For example, Fawcett wrote,

Our route will be from Dead Horse Camp, 11 degree 43 minutes south and 54 degree 35 minutes west where my horse died in 1921 Lynch plugged the coordinates into his GPS which pinpointed a spot in the southern basin of the Amazon

in the Brazilian state of Matagrosso Lynch would have to traverse some of the deepest jungle of the Amazon and enter land controlled by indigenous people that remains secluded from outsiders. Lynch recruited Brazilian engineer Renee Delmate, whom he had met during adventure competition.

They would spend months studying satellite images of the Amazon to determine their best route. Lynch also worked with a shipbuilder to construct two vessels that were shallow enough to traverse the Amazon Swamps. He recruited two mechanics who could repair equipment to experience off-road drivers and forensic anthropologist Dr. Daniel Munoz, who in 1985 had helped identify the remains of Joseph Mengela. Lynch's 16-year-old son James expressed his interest in going. James had done well on a previous expedition, so Lynch agreed. The team prepared to depart in

Kuyaba, where Fawcett launched his ill-fated expedition. They spent days driving through the basin, following the trail to the clearing along the Jingu River into the spot Fawcett was last seen alive. At that point, Lynch decided they would have to proceed by boat. He had several crew members go back with their heaviest gear. Once he found a place for a bush plane to land, he would send the coordinates to have the equipment dropped off. The remaining team got into two boats, began to travel down the Jingu River.

Shortly before sunset, Lynch saw several pairs of eyes, watching him from the distant riverbank. He told his team to cut their engines. As the boats drifted to shore, Lynch and his men got out. At the same time, a group of indigenous men emerged from the forest. One of them stepped forward. Some of the men spoke Portuguese, identified their leader as the chief of the Quikaru tribe. Quikuru tribe. Lynch presented them with some of the gifts they brought along, such as beads, candy, and matches. They were granted permission to camp near the Quikuru village and to land a plane in a nearby clearing. The following day, Lynch and his son were invited to a lagoon.

As they bathed with giant turtles, Lynch heard the sounds of a plane landing. Moments later, one of the Quikuro people came running telling Lynch telling Lynch trouble. Just the word trouble. Over two men from the Quikuro and neighboring tribes

surrounded the camp, holding bows, rifles, and spears. Five of Lynch's men rushed the plane, which was only designed to hold the pilot in four passengers. They shouted for the pilot to take off. Several Quikuro men rushed toward the plane and grabbed onto the wings. The pilot concerned about weight through clothes and papers out before a hasty takeoff. Lynch and his 11 remaining team members were then put on small boats and told by one man,

you are our prisoners for life. That's fucking terrifying. Lynch would eventually manage to escape from captivity. He told author David Grant that after the group was transported upriver, they were forced to stay in a makeshift camp. Lynch spent his time looking for weak spots. When night fell, he collapsed from exhaustion. when he woke up in the morning, the first thing he saw

was the tip of a spear in the forest. They were soon surrounded by a circle of tribesmen, five older men who appeared to be tribal leaders sat down in front of the group to determine their fate. One by one, men addressed the leaders. Every so often a man who spoke Portuguese translated for Lynch's group, he explained that they had been accused of trespassing.

The negotiations lasted for two days. Lynch recalled, quote, there would be these endless hours of debate and we didn't know what was going on. And then this translator would sum up everything in a single sentence. It was like, bam, they're going to tie you over the river and let the piranhas.

They're going to tie you over the river and let the piranhas eat you. Or bam, they're going to cover you in honey and let the bee sting you to death. And then they would just go back to talking. What a fucking absolutely terrifying experience. The tribe soon began to target his son James. Lynch thought about trying to escape, but that was a death, you know, a wish. He said he then noticed that four of the leaders seemed to defer to a fifth one, who was leased swayed by the passionate arguments for their execution.

when several people indicated that they were going to tie James up and kill him Lynch approached the fifth chief with the help of a translator he explained that he was sorry if they had offended his people he began negotiations agreed to give up his group's boat and equipment in exchange for their release eventually the chief accepted

Lynch used his radio to send an SOS with coordinates and a bush plane was dispatched to rescue them the value of his ransom was worth $30,000 worth of equipment oh my God when Lynch finally boarded plain he thought about Percy Fawcett and wondered if he too had been taken hostage. He told David Grant, I don't think anyone will ever solve the mystery of Fossett's disappearance. It's impossible.

Yet, in 2004, another new theory emerged about Fawcett's disappearance. According to previously hidden papers, Fawcett had no intention of returning to Britain and planned to set up a commune in the jungle. Huh. Theater and TV director, Misha Williams, gained some permission to search through Fawcett's private correspondence. And according to Williams, Fawcett wanted to follow. what he called the grand scheme, setting up a secret community based on a mixture of spiritual

beliefs involving the worship of his son Jack, okay, and the tenets of theosophy. Oh, cool. Williams told the Guardian, I can now show that there were scores of associates who were planning to go out and join Fawcett to live in a new freer way. William claimed he was a confidant of Fossus' descendants and that he uncovered a drawing of a female spirit guide who he believed was at the heart of the journey, or at the heart of the mystery. The spirit was said to only appear to Fawcett family or those who tried to follow the lost expedition's path, luring them into the jungle.

Okay. Williams also said that much of the uncertainty surrounding the disappearance of Fawcett could be explained by the family's attempts to protect his reputation. He claimed Brian's book, Exploration Fawcett, was a smokescreen. Well, this theory seems to be pulled mostly out of Misha's ass, nothing but tabloid fodder and a pathetic money graze. of attempt, I think.

Now to close that our timeline, let's meet the author of our main source and learn how he got involved in his own expedition to find Fawcett and what he thinks may have happened. David Grant has always considered himself a disinterested reporter who did not get involved personally in his stories. In 2003, he had joined the New Yorker as a staff writer. Two years later, he would travel over 10,000 miles from New York to London to the Jingu River studying the disappearance of Percy Fossett. Grant wrote, in The Lost City of Zee, I told myself that I had come simply to

record how generations of scientists and adventures became fatally obsessed with solving what has often been described as the greatest expiration mystery of the 20th century. It all started in 2004, when Grant was researching a story on the mysterious death of an expert on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his character Sherlock Holmes, he saw a reference to Fawcett's role in inspiring Doyle's book, The Lost World. He was intrigued by Fawcett's story and The Lost City of Z. Grant wrote about his decision to travel into the remote Amazon, let me be clear, I am not an explorer. or an adventure. I don't climb mountains or hunt. I don't even like to camp. I stand less than five feet nine inches tall and I'm nearly 40 years old with a blossoming waistline and thinning black hair.

I suffer from keratococonus, a degenerative eye condition that makes it hard for me to see at night. I have a terrible sense of direction and tend to forget where I am on the subway and miss my stop in Brooklyn. I like newspapers, take out food, sports highlights, and the air conditioning on high. Given a choice each day between climbing the two flights of stairs to my apartment or riding the elevator, I invariably take the elevator. That's so funny to me. I love the self-deprecating humility. But when I'm working on a story, he added, things are different. Ever since I was young, I've been drawn to mystery and adventure tales, ones that had what writer Haggard called The Grip. In February of 2005, Grand traveled to London to the British Archives, where Fossett's most sensitive papers. He also visited the RGS to request

more of Fossus papers. Grand then traveled to Cardiff, Wales, and found one of Fossus' as grandchildren. Relette de Monet Gwerin, daughter of Joan Fawcett. Rolette was now in her 50s. She referred to her grandfather as PHF, which was what everyone in the family called him. Although the family had avoided the media, Rolette welcomed Grand into her home.

Grant asked her if she could rely on the known coordinates for Dead Horse Camp, or he asked if he should rely on the known coordinates for Dead Horse Camp to start his journey. And Rolette claimed that Fawcett wrote those coordinates as a way to throw people off his trail. Grant asked why Brian Fawcett?

would have continued the deception in Exploration Fawcett. She explained that he wanted to honor his father's wishes. So that's interesting. Rolitt then gave Grand permission to look through the diaries and logbook she kept in her home. There was a book for every year from 1906, 1921, full of notes and observations from Fossett's expeditions. Rulitt also showed Grand Fawcett's treasure book full of stories about secret treasures like Gala Pita Gala, the legendary likely mythical treasure site in Sri Lanka that had inspired early adventures for Percy Fawley. that whole secret cave under the rocky plain.

In the diaries, Fawcett wrote about Z often. There were drawings of hieroglyphics, references to legends about a city enormously rich in gold, so much so as to blaze like fire. Fawcett became more secretive in later entries. In the 1921 log book, he outlined the code he used to send messages to Nina. When looking to the log, Grant found a note in the margins of one page that spelled out Dead Horse Camp. There were coordinates on the same page that were significantly different than the ones in exploration Fawcett. Grant also saw a photo of Fawcett's gold signet ring. Back in 1979, a man named Brian

Rodeau, who was making a wildlife film in Brazil, heard that Fawcett's ring was in a pawn shop in Kuyaba. The shop owner had died, but the man's wife found the ring. It was the last concrete piece of evidence from the expedition, and the ring ominously had dried blood on it. Grand prepared to travel to the Amazon in the summer of 2005. It was difficult for him to find someone willing to take into the jungle who also had ties to indigenous communities. But he found one. His guy ended up being a 52-year-old man named Paulo Pinage, a former professional samba dancer and theater director.

Pablo had previously worked for Funai, the agency that succeeded the Indian Protection Service. Grant asked if he could penetrate the region Fossett had, including part of what is now Shingu National Park, the first reservation in Brazil, established in 1961. Paulo asked Grant for his medical records attesting that he had no contagious or debilitating diseases, and then he began to approach various chiefs on his behalf.

None of the tribes officially agreed to a visit, but Paolo seemed optimistic when he met Grant at the airport in Kuwait. Among the various documents, Grant had gathered was a crudely drawn map. A notation on the map indicated Raleigh Rommel had sketched it. It contained his route, was given to his mother. Raleigh had made her a promise that she would destroy it, or made her promise that, but she never did. These documents confirmed that Fawcett, Jack, and Raleigh went north to the territory of the

Baca'iri Indians. From there, they went to Dead Horse Camp and then deep into what is today Jingu National Park. In the route that Fawcett gave in confidants to the RGS, he wrote that his party would turn due east around the 11th parallel south of the equator and continue

past the River of Death and the Aragwaya River until they reached the Atlantic Ocean. A segment of Raleigh's route contradicted that, though. Raleigh indicated that at the Araguaya River, they would go north and would pass from Mato Gras. Raso into the state of Parra, before exiting near the mouth of the Amazon River.

Grand thought that this had to be a mistake. He'll he found a letter from Jack Tanina that said, in part, Next time I write will probably be from Parah. Gran and Paolo picked up Pablo's friend, Tukani, Baca'iri, a descendant of the Baca'Iri chief. Tukani acted as an ambassador for his tribe's political interest. He told them that in exchange for a gift of two tires for a communal tractor, he would take them to his village, the last place Fawcett had been seen. Grant agreed travel down BR-163, one of the most dangerous roads in all of South America.

The road had been built in 1970 by the government in an effort to further open the interior, and it extends more than a thousand miles from Kuyaba to the Amazon River. However, most of the asphalt had been washed away during the rainy season. Grant was surprised to see that the terrain looked like planes rather than rainforest. Tocane pointed out a fleet of logging trucks that had destroyed the forest. Deforestation efforts had transformed much of Madagrosso into farm. The Brazilian transport ministry also declared that loggers-long BR-163 employ, quote, the highest concentration of slave labor in the world.

This is from fucking 2005. My God, indigenous people still frequently driven off their land today, sometimes enslaved or murdered. The next morning, the group headed up a small mountain to reach the Baca'Iri post. More than 800 indigenous people now lived in the area. The largest village held several dozen houses in a plaza. for some reason when I first read this, my brain transformed plaza into pizza, like pizza place,

and I was like, no shit, fucking pizza place, way out in the Amazon. Good for them. Everybody loves pizza. No, just a plaza. However, the village did have a well, a tractor, some satellite dishes, and electricity.

Dukane told Grand that there was someone he wanted them to meet. Inside one of the houses was an elderly woman named Kometa Bacairi, the oldest member of the village, and she claimed she had once seen Fawcett in person. She told her group through a translator. I don't know my exact age, but I was born around 1910. I was just a little girl when the three outsiders came to stay in our village. I remember them because I had never seen people so white with such long beards.

My mother said, look, the Christians are here. They set up camp in the village's new school, which was the nicest building at the time. She remembered that they headed over the mountains. She said people said there were no white people over those mountains. But that is where they said they were going. We waited for them to come back, but they never did. She didn't know of any cities beyond the mountains, but she did remember her ancestors

speaking of a large and beautiful Baca Iri house or Baca Iri houses from the past there. Grant and his guide said that they then met with the chief of the Kalapalu tribe, the ones who claim responsibility

for Fasett's death. They met in a Kana a small frontier town on the southern border of Jingu National Park where they do actually have a pizza place. I checked.

Looks fucking delicious actually. The chief there was a man named Vajuvie who asked Grant if he was a member of Fassett's family when Grant said no he was not indicating he was not seeking revenge

Vajuvie seemed more accommodating and said he would tell the truth about the bones but first he wanted five grand right of course Grant told him he didn't have that kind of money and then the room soon got crowded with a bunch of other men who began intense negotiations some of them became very hostile towards Grant

and called him a liar Bu Javi told Grant to talk to his chief in the U.S and that they would talk again in a few hours two hours later Palo managed to reach and agreement with them but Juvia agreed to take them in Dijin National Park if they paid for transportation and several hundred dollars of supplies. So he backed way the fuck off the initial $5,000 demand.

He's like, I want $5,000. It's $5,000 or nothing. A couple hours later, like, how about, I don't know, a couple hundred bucks of supplies and a drive. Okay. They were heading to the Kuduena River, about 60 miles from the town. Tretcherous road with puddles that almost reached the floorboard to their flatbed truck, which at times threatened to tip over. Vujuvia led the group to a to a,

Kalapaloo village in the jungle. The village had about 150 residents. According to Graham, the village was highly stratified. Chiefs descended from bloodlines, boys and girls, secluded from each other at puberty, taught the rituals of adulthood, strict dietary taboos, which contradicted the notion that the indigenous people

lived under constant threat of starvation. Grant asked Vajuvie whether he knew if the people of the region were descended from a larger civilization or if there were any ruins in the jungle. Vujuvi didn't know, but he did recall a legend of a spirit who built giant moat. in the area. Vujibovi promised to take them to those bones, telling them there are many things about the

Englishmen that only the Kalapalu people know. The following day, Vajubi took them up river, finally revealed that the bones that were reported to have been Fossets were actually his grandfather, Mujica, who was dead when Orlando via Boas, started to ask questions about faucet. Boas wanted to protect the tribe from the white people encroaching into the area and told them that if they found a tall skeleton, he would give them each a rifle. Ujika was one of the tallest men in the village So several people dug up his bones

Buried them by the bank of the river And claimed they were Fossets Ojubi's father was away at the time Was furious when he found out what happened But the bones had already been taken Vujibi's story made sense Especially when considering the fact That Brian Fawcett noted

That many of the Kalapalu People told contradictory versions Of how Fossus part him and killed Some said they were club to death Others said they were shot by arrows Some said he was killed Because he did not bring gifts And that he had slapped

A young Kalapalalu boy, but that was highly out of character for Fawcett's interactions with indigenous people. Grant also found an internal memo in the archives of the Royal Anthropological Institute in London that described the remains. Quote, the upper jaw provides the clearest possible evidence that these human remains were not those of Colonel Fawcett, whose spare upper denture is fortunately available for comparison. Colonel Fawcett is stated to have been six feet, one and a half inches tall. The height of the man whose remains have been brought to England is estimated to be about

five feet seven inches. Yeah, just a bit off. As they ate together, Vajubi told him the real story of what happened, as told him by his parents. It is true that they were here. There were three of them, and no one knew who, no one knew who they were or why they had come. They had no animals and carried packs on their backs. One who was the chief was old, and the two others were young. They were hungry and tired from marching for so long, and the people in the village gave them fish, and Bajou, in return for their help, the Englishmen offered them fish hook.

which no one had seen before, and knives. Finally, the old man said, we must be going now. The people asked them, where are you going? And they said, that way, to the east. We said, nobody goes that way. That's where the hostile Indians are. They will kill you. But the old man insisted.

And so they went, in those days, nobody went that way. For several days, they could see campfire smoke above the trees, but it disappeared on the fifth day. A group of Kalapalu worried something bad had happened, and they went out to search for them, but there was no trace of them. Vujavi told Gran, people always say the Kalupalu killed the Englishmen, but we did not. We tried to save them. This oral history has been passed down across generations with consistency.

Back in 1931, anthropologist Vincenzo Petrulu, who was one of the first whites to enter the Shingu, reported a similar account, but few paid attention to it amidst the sensationalization of Foss's disappearance. Fifty years later, Ellen Basso, another anthropologist recorded a detailed version of the story from a Kalapalu man named Kambi, who was just a boy when Fawcett's party arrived at the village. She translated his account directly from the Kalapalu language in the rhythm of the tribe's oral histories.

One of them remained by himself, she wrote. While he sang, he played a musical instrument. His musical instrument worked like this, like this. He sang and sang. He put his arm around me this way. While he was playing, we watched the Christians. While he was playing, Father and the others. Then I'll have to be going, he said.

He also recounted seeing the fire in the distance, Quote, there's the Christian's fire, we said to one another. That was going on as the sunset. The next day as the sunset, again their fire rose up. The following day again, just a little smoke spread out in the sky. On this day, their fire had gone out. It looked as if the Englishman's fire was no longer alive, as it had been put out. What a shame.

Why did he keep insisting they go away? Before heading into the jungle, granted his guide, Paolo, stopped in a town called Baja du Garas, near the Rancador Mountains and the northeast of Matugrasu. Fucking Portuguese is not fucking easy for me. Brazilians had told them that religious cults had popped up in the area that worshipped

Fawcett as a god. They believed Fawcett had entered a network of tunnels and discovered that Z was a portal to another reality. Uh-huh, okay. I mean, that'd be cool if it's true. Grands speculated on all the possibilities of what might have happened. Were they killed by indigenous people? If so, which ones? Did

Jack ever question his father? Was Z even real? Grand thought there was one man who might know something, Michael Heckenberger, a University of Florida archaeologist who currently lived in the Quikuru village north of the Kalapalu settlement. Heckenberger had spent so much time in the Jingu region that he had been formally adopted by the tribe.

But Juvie acted as their guide along the Kuluena River. At one point, Grasin and Paolo were separated and he feared he was lost in the Amazon. But eventually he was rescued and guided to the village to meet the chief Afukaka when Green when Grand Jesus Christ

when Gran asked him about faucets Afukaka said fuck my life I fucking I don't know how to speak the shit either no he said the fierce Indians must have killed him

as they were talking Michael Heckenberger appeared he told Gran that he'd been doing research in the region on and off for 13 years and that he had a home next to the chief Heckenberger wanted to show them something this is actually really cool

he led them in the forest show them how the ground sloped downward, then tilted up again like a large ditch. Heckenberger explained that this was a moat built almost 900 years ago. The moat had originally measured between 12 and 16 feet deep, 30 feet wide, and it was a mile in diameter. Damn. The quikuroes were aware of the moats, but didn't know how their ancestors had built him.

Heckenberger had excavated part of the moat. The exposed earth was so dark, it was almost black. Using radiocarbon dating, Heckenberger dated it to 1,200 CE, indicated a ditch within the moat that was formerly a palisade wall, also pointed out shards of broken pottery throughout the site. He explained that they were standing in the middle of an ancient settlement that was in the region where Fawcett believed it would be as far as Z. But Fawcett might not have been able to visualize it. That was because there was not much stone in the jungle, and settlements were built out of wood and other organic material, which, you know, destroys easily over time. Heckenberger showed

a grand evidence of three motes arranged in concentric circles. There was a large plaza, not a pizza place, and sprawling neighborhoods as evidenced by black soil enriched by human waste. The settlement also had roads, causeways, canals, even bridges. In total, Heckenberger had found 20 pre-Columbian settlements in the Jingu occupied between 800 and 1600 CE. The settlements were two to three miles apart, connected by roads. These roads were laid out from east to west positioned at the same angles, not accidental. All the settlements carefully planned with math and engineering.

Heckenberger said before the population was decimated by European arrival. the settlements were likely home to up to 5,000 people. For a thousand years, the inhabitants of the Jingu region had maintained artistic and cultural traditions from an ancient civilization. He explained, these people had a cultural aesthetic of monumentality. They liked to have beautiful roads and plazas and bridges. Their monuments were not pyramids,

which is why they were so hard to find. They were horizontal features, but they were no less extraordinary. Anthropologists made the mistake of coming into the Amazon in the 20th century and seen only small tribes and saying, well, that's all there is. The problem is that by then, many Indian populations had already been wiped out

by what was essentially a Holocaust from European contact. That's why the first Europeans in the Amazon described such massive settlements that later no one could ever find. Sounds good to me. Fawcett, in a way,

had not been misguided after all. Well, Grant went on to publish the Lost City of Z in February of 2009. After its first week of publication, it debuted on the New York Times bestseller list at number four, later reached number one. And then in 2016,

an American film with the same name was released starring Charlie Hunnam as Percy Fawcett. Haven't seen it, even though it didn't do well at the box office, critics loved it. And now, let's finally get out of this timeline. Good job, soldier. You've made it back. Barely.

Yeah, before I wrap up, sorry again about some pronunciation difficulties. It is tricky down there because you're dealing with Spanish, Portuguese, and literally fucking hundreds of indigenous languages. that do not relate to Portuguese or Spanish at all. So all the pronunciations, like there's no consistent rhythm to the words when you're combining them all into one essay, essentially. Anyway, the question remains.

Does a lost and magnificent city like Z or El Dorado even exist? Something that would rival the pyramids of the Mayans, the ruins of Machapichu, if not even grander? According to author David Gran, the ancient city with its network of roads and bridges and temples was believed to be hidden in the Amazon, the largest jungle in the world. In an age of airplanes and satellites, the area remains one of the last blank spaces on the map. For hundreds of years, it has haunted geographers, archaeologists, empire builders, treasure hunters, and philosophers.

When Europeans first arrived in South America, around the turn of the 16th century, they were convinced that the jungle contained the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Environmentalists often portray the Amazon as a virgin forest, untouched by humanity. In recent decades, scientists concluded that no complex civilization could survive in the high hostile Amazon. These experts believe in the theory of environmental determinism, which I referenced earlier. As written by David Grant, according to this theory, even if some early humans eeked out in existence and the harshest conditions on the planet, they rarely advanced beyond a few primitive tribes. Society, in other words, is a captive of geography. And so if Z was found in such a seemingly

uninhabitable environment, it would more, it would be more than a repository of golden treasure, more than an intellectual curiosity. It would, as one newspaper declared in 1935, write a new chapter of human history. Betty Meggers from the Smithsonian Institution, one of the most influential archaeologists of the Amazon, coined the term counterfeit paradise about all this in 1971. Despite being rich in flora and fauna, she has said that the Amazon is wildly hostile to human life.

With its extreme rains and floods, heat, nutrient-poor soil, agriculture would be essentially impossible, and only small tribes could survive, according to this theory. Even if tribes had managed to overcome starvation and disease, they still had to come up with methods of population control, such as infanticide, abandoning the sick or injured in the woods or warfare. However, some anthropologists have challenges view

that no advanced society could survive in the Amazon. They've argued that the traditionalist ideas carry inherently racist biases. One important anthropologist who has helped change historic views of the Amazon is Michael Heckenberger, who we just met earlier. We spent years, right, working in the Brazil's Zingu region, living amongst the indigenous people there. but even he has never heard of some city that sounds quite like the lost city of Z or El Dorado.

As for Percy, exactly what happened to Fawcett and his team will likely never be known. But his work and beliefs were not in vain. Scientists and archaeologists, excuse me, have found countless evidence hidden deep in the jungle that does support Fawcett's belief, frequently pan during his lifetime, that advanced ancient civilizations, even if they maybe didn't look quite like what he thought they were going to look like, did once three. in the Amazon. And more on that and our fifth takeaway. Time shock. Top five takeaways. Number one, although Percy Fawcett came from a family with a noble history, they were far from wealthy by the time he reached adulthood.

Despite his fame, Fawcett struggled financially for most of his life in pursuit of glory. Unlike other explorers who largely came from money and had funding to buy the latest technology, Fawcett was like a real-life Indiana Jones. He had to fight for every dollar towards the end of his career did not have access to the latest technology of his time. And Percy, by the way, is one of the explorers Indiana Jones is based off of. Number two, Fawcett once acted as a spy for the British Empire. He was sent to Morocco and instructed to observe people and places. He managed to get into the Sultan's royal court and report on the king's activities.

This was the only time he ever acted as a spy in any official capacity, but rumors that he was still a spy, persisted throughout his life. Number three, Fawcett gained worldwide fame for his exploration and mapping of uncharted territory in South America. During his numerous expeditions, Fawcett interacted with countless indigenous tribes who lived in the Amazon. Those interactions challenged commonly held beliefs

at the time that the people of the Amazon were far simpler than they in fact are. Number four, throughout his expeditions, Fawcett did find some evidence of ancient civilization in the Amazon such as remnants of pottery and ancient paintings, studying documents written by the original Spanish explorers, He came to believe that there was a lost city called Z, hidden deep in the Brazilian Amazon.

He was highly secretive about its exact location, but he believed it was in the Jingu region. Fossa became obsessed with the idea of Z, letting it consume his entire life. Ultimately, his pursuit of Zed led to his death and the untimely death of his son Jack and Jack's friend Raleigh as well. Number five, new info, modern mapping technology can detect urban structures in the Amazon, further supporting the belief that indigenous people of the past did have sophisticated cities and cultures. In 2022,

scientists used light-based remote sensing technology, LIDAR, to digitally deforest the canopy. And they found ancient ruins of a large urban settlement around Yanos de Maxos in the Bolivian Amazon that was abandoned about 600 years ago. It was a stronghold of the

Casarabe culture, with urban centers that featured platform and pyramid architecture, a raised causeway connected suburban settlements to stretch for miles. The settlement was shaped by a water control and distribution system with reservoirs and canals. Michael Heckenberger was not involved in this research but noted that elements of the settlement like moats, causeways, parklands, work in forests, and fish farms have been seen at other sites in the ancient Amazon, like the ones we read about him finding. According to Smithsonian magazine, quote, the new research unveils something quite new. previous examples of urbanism in the Amazon

include the Upper Jingu region in the Brazilian Amazon where Heckenberger works with the Quikoru Nation. Such settlements might be described as groups of villages networked together. They aren't technically urban, some experts have argued, because they lack clearly defined larger centers

with monumental architecture like platform mounds and U-shaped temples. But those urban centers can be found at Janos de Moxos. Heckenberger told the Smithsonian, this is in my mind, the clearest case of a fully urbanized Amazonian landscape. It is a

marvelous piece of work. It shows really remarkable range of things that humans did in the past to work with their landscapes and to work with larger and larger populations. Previous archaeological work revealed hundreds of isolated sites across more than 1,700 square miles of the Anos de Maxos region, including the settlements

inhabited year-round by the Casa Rabe. Logistical challenges of mapping these settlements in the tropical rainforest hampered efforts to see how they related. That's where LIDARC comes in. That type of new mapping. The research team mapped six different areas ranging in size from four square miles to 32 square miles, identifying the heartland of the Kassarabe culture between 500 and 1400 CE. A LiDAR system works by firing down a grid of hundreds of thousands of infrared beams per second

when each beam strikes something, it bounces back with the measure of distance. This produces a cloud of data points that can be fed into a computer software to create high-resolution images to digitally deforest the Amazon. The maps show the search. surface and any archaeological features. In this case, the images showed 26 unique sites, including 11 that were previously unknown. There were two large urban centers called

Landivar and Kotoka. These sites were already known, but the new mapping detailed their complexity in size, 1.2 and 0.5 square miles. Each center was surrounded by rings of moats and rampart fortifications. They featured terraces,

large platform buildings, conical pyramids over 70 feet tall, all of the civic and ceremonial buildings were oriented to the north-northwest, reflecting a cosmological worldview observed at other ancient sites in the Amazon. There were also a network of regional settlements connected by causeways that radiate out from urban centers stretching several miles. The problem is that the architecture was made from mud brick and not stone. So it didn't survive like other ancient structures have.

What happened to the Casarabe people remains a mystery. Occupation of the sites ended around the year 1400, just prior to the same. to European arrival, they might have left the area due to drought. Paleo climate studies have suggested that much of the Amazon is younger than suspected, and the large areas were open savannah environments shortly before colonization, which would have facilitated landscape engineering. Heckenberger also identified dozens of garden cities with homes, plazas, and palisade walls. These sites were connected by roads, bridges, and canals,

all situated in large engineered landscapes of fields and fish farms. This cluster of suburban communities thrived in the region, where Fawcett went missing. Percy might have unknowingly hiked directly over the biggest of these cities. He might have slept atop what was once a major temple. In 2018, scientists used satellite images, using satellite images, reported that large areas of the Amazon in the Brazilian state of Montagroso once thought to have been sparsely inhabited were dotted with villages and earthworks called geoglyphs.

Hundreds of villages could have been home to up to a million people between 1250 and 1,500 C.E. If there were even larger urban centers in these populated sites, they have not yet been identified, but might be someday. Archaeologist Stephen Rostain told the BBC in 2024, You know nothing because the history that we think we know is wrong. It's a history made by so-called chroniclers that rarely saw what they described. It's a history of lies. We know a little bit from colonial times, but it's a story of exploitation of land, torture, and slavery. It's not a beautiful history.

But this, the discovery of a vast urban cradle, lets us better understand the first actors of this history, the indigenous people. It forces us to rethink the entire human past of the Amazon. Rostain and his team recently published the results of a study that took 30 years to complete. In the 1970s, a local priest named Juan Bataso found a mount built on top of a platform in the Opano Valley. Soon afterwards, he was visited by another priest from Quito named Pedro Peras and Bataso showed in the mound. Parras organized and excavation, published his findings,

in an Ecuadorian paper. The site was forgotten about for about 15 years until Ross Stain, who had been excavating a Maya site in Guatemala in the 80s, and he found the publication and went to Ecuador to investigate. He began excavating the mounds in 1996. His colleague abandoned the project two years later, but Ross Stain continued.

He returned to Ecuador in 2011 to live there, and in 2015, Ecuador's National Institute for Cultural Heritage funded an aerial survey of the valley with LIDAR. Using LIDAR, Ross-Din and his colleagues discovered a long, lost network of cities extending across 300 square kilometers or 116 square miles in the Ecuadorian Amazon featuring plazas, sadly still not pizza places, but also ceremonial sites, drainage canals, and roads. They also identified more than 6,000 rectangular earthen platforms believed to be homes

and communal buildings in 15 urban centers surrounded by terrorist agricultural fields. The city streets were engineered to be perfectly straight, connecting at right angles, linking different cities, the largest were 10 meters or 32 feet wide. This network of cities is believed to be more than a thousand years older than any other known complex Amazonian site, and its size and level of sophistication suggests a highly structured society, larger than well-known Mayan cities in Mexico and Central America. Beginning in roughly 500 BCE, the Kilamope and Opano cultures began building homes on raised platforms organized around plazas, the size of the early city, covers an area comparable to Egypt's Giza Plateau.

These societies expanded for about 1,000 years until they were abandoned between 300 and 600 CE for unknown reasons. Archaeologist Antoine Dorson, a co-author, estimated that the city was once home to up to 30,000 people. Other estimates suggest the population was possibly in the hundreds of thousands.

Rostain told the BBC, this discovery has proven that there was an equivalent of Rome in Amazonia. The people living in these societies were not semi-nomadic people lost in the rainforest looking for food, they were not the small tribes of the Amazon we know today. They were highly specialized people,

earthmovers, engineers, farmers, fishermen, priests, chiefs, and kings. It was a stratified society, a specialized society, so there is certainly something of Rome. Lasting evidence of urbanism has been difficult to find in the Amazon, but LIDAR technology is speeding up future discoveries by allowing researchers to see things not visible from the ground. Many ancient sites have remained undisturbed for hundreds of years, another big advantage for researchers.

However, continuous deforestation threatens efforts to find and properly excavate and understand these ancient sites, one of which really could be Percy Fossett's Lost City of Z. Time suck. Top five takeaways. Finding the Lost City of Z,

Percy Fossett's suicide mission has been sucked. Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team for helping make and time suck. Thank you to Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsay Cummins, to Logan Keith, this episode, designing merch for the store at bad magic production.com. A big thank you to Olivia Lee again for some more great research. Fascinating story. Easier to read

than to speak, but fascinating story, my God. Yeah, what are they going to find down there one day? Also, thanks to the all seen eyes, moderating the cult of the curious private Facebook page still after all these years. The Mod Squad, making sure Discord keeps running smooth and everybody over on the time suck and bad magic subredits. And now, time for this week's Time Sucker updates. Get your time sucker updates. First up, it's fucking Miller time.

This long time sweet sucker, send in an email to Bojangles at timesuckpodcast.com with the subject line of fuck the rainforest, not in the way you think. Hello, Suckmaster General. I hope you are well. I'll just dive right in. Number one, off the bat, thank you for all you do about talking about mental health and better help. I recently had my first session and I'm looking forward to more of them. It really has already helped me get through some personal stuff.

That's awesome. number two holy shit camp was so much fun i know i may have gotten after pretty hard on the first night i remember but not many people can say their favorite comedian started his set with a drunk story about them all of the activities at camp the community cannot say enough good things about it and i hope i can get to go this year yeah i hope so too on the good side of things i quit amazon after i was offered a job with a huge paint company as a d o t driver over the years you have said things that really resonated with me about believing in yourself, making sure you get what you're worth. I've been having the worst time with the rainforest. Technically a third-party vendor company that delivers Amazon packages.

Some things were not in their control, like not having any sort of upward mobility or just, you know, a reason to do your best. I had to constantly follow-off about health care coverage issues with them and the company that they used, and it got to a point where I decided to find a job that had a future. I landed a job with Sherwin Williams, a great company that not only have a 401k, but a pension which most companies do not. Thanks for inspiring meat sacks all over to do their best. Also, the nightmare fuel resurrection series should be a fucking series. Make it happen.

Dan Cummins, aka Johnny Gunn. Keep making it happen. Also, if you read this, both be my girlfriend Amanda, just accepted job offers within the same week and are killing it lately. Also, shout out to my brother Jack and my brother from another mother, John. I could go on and on, but thank you, Lindsay Logan, all the bad magic crew from the bottom of my butt. Hail Nimrod, Miller Hines.

man, Miller, I love you, man. Thanks for being here since day one. Always being so positive, pushing through struggles, coming out on the other side stronger. Yeah, I know you had some rough times in the past few years, but now you're fucking killing it. You didn't give up. Didn't give in to your struggles.

Get pushing like a Percy fucking faucet. And look at you now, man. Thanks for sharing that. Congrats on all the good stuff. And if you do make it to camp, come by and grab a hug. Next up, a message from cultured sack, the bone lass. Send it with the subject line of Short Suck British Museum. update. Hello, Suckmaster's Supreme. I actually worked in a museum. Ethically, the British

History Museum should give things back without compensation. And here's why. My museum had a replica of Lucy. There's only one Lucy hominid. We can't all have her, but we can replicate her. Most of the skeletons we had were real skeletons donated to science, but we also assisted with colleges and museums getting replacement specimens to study in an effort to get indigenous skeletons back to their home groups for their proper burial rights. We offered replica skeletons of multiple ethnicities for study. Many museums often partner with each other and host visiting exhibits. We are working on establishing a traveling museum where people could visit a selection of our museum at a museum where they are for a limited time. Other museums do this pretty consistently.

Most people who have visited Body World, that Body World exhibit, have visited a traveling exhibit on loan for a museum. It's a mutually beneficial system for both parties because it extends their reach and builds community and offers something exciting as they rotate with other exhibits, bringing something new for visitors to return and visit. They can charge for the visiting exhibit separately, depending on their financial model. Another example of being able to enjoy a cultural icon with being courteous to the home country are pandas.

Pandas in the United States are on loan from China. When they die, we have to give them back to China for their proper rights. My mind was blown away when I learned of this because I assumed that the zoo that they stayed in own them. There are some that may have been grandfathered in before the Pandit Diplomacy program was established, but that's how it's handled today.

we can be respectful of other countries, other cultures, other nations, and allow them to have ownership of things that belong to them, while also still having exhibitions to educate people about their cultures. By allowing this, we also remove some propaganda risks in the process. Indigenous people can control the narrative about the items they allow out on loan. They can be honest about the brutalities that they went through. Much love from the Bone Lass. Well, thank you, Bone Lass.

Yeah, I wanted to share this because having respect for other cultures, other nations, other types of people seems to be slipping away and being replaced with an ignorant kind of nationalistic arrogance for many today in the world. And there's no need for that shit. You can be very proud of your own country,

your own culture, without being a fucking dick towards other countries and their cultures. You can play nice. It doesn't have to be a fucking game of like, who's in first place, who's quote unquote winning. No, man, we can all fucking share a lot of shit. Feels good actually to play nice and be respectful. I wish everybody would try it out.

Yeah, just because some dude stole some other culture shit a couple hundred years ago, doesn't mean they should just keep it forever. Study it, document it, replicate it. We have the technology. Give the original back if they want it. Not hard. Thanks to the inside scoop one last. And now one more from duped sucker.

Fucking idiot. Now for one from a fucking moron. Mike B. No, he's not a warrant. Sent it with a subject line of delayed release Dick Bird fuckery. And Mike writes, Dan, you dirty scrote. Never falling for your nonsense was a point of pride for me since I started listening to TimeSuck a few years back. However, that recently changed on a five-and-a-half-hour flight.

For some backstory, my amazing wife just graduated with a master's in counseling, and we decided to take a trip to Maui to celebrate. Awesome. Before the flight, I downloaded a few episodes of Time Suck to listen to, as I'm still working my way through the back catalog. I currently live in Las Vegas. I saw episode 394, the Las Vegas Strip Strangler and thought, huh, never heard of that guy.

That should be interesting. I listened for about an hour on the flight and thought, Holy shit, sorry, holy shit, Dix. How have I never heard of this sick book? I never bothered to look him up because we were Maui, and I was distracted by beautiful landscapes, great food, and my sexy lady, Hale Lusufina. But one night when we took a trip down to the hot tub,

there was a man in there, probably in his mid-50s, who looked fucking identical to the ridiculous picture by the time suck, or on the time-suck episode cover for old Dick Bird. Needless to say, we decided to skip the hot tub that night. and on the walk back to our room I told my wife all about to strip strangler. We had an amazing week in Maui, and on the flight back, I finished the episode. I felt like I drank a gallon of dumb fuck juice for takeaway number five. You finally got me, and I have to say, good job and eat a dick.

The way you balance the ridiculous with the realistic in that episode kept it just believable enough that I didn't feel I had to pause to verify anything. Yes, even the hairbrush stuff. I thought you'd be glad to know that over two years after it was released, that shit got me. A little bonus section, if you feel so inclined to include it, I recently earned a doctorate in occupational therapy. A big part of our anatomy course was spending time in the cadaver lab once or twice a week. I had to help remove a leg from an individual, pro-sect and dissect many anatomical structures,

and overall, I just really spent a lot of time working with bodies donated to my school. Of course, I was respectful of the bodies and took my studies very seriously. However, I could not help but hear all your goddamn serial killer impressions as I was doing these things. Ed Kemper was the most prominent, especially when examining the structures of the head and neck. mother, why must I fuck this neck? So thank you for your delightfully, or for delightfully enriching a pretty heavy and hard-to-sumach environment.

Well, that's all for me. I can't say thank you enough for helping me get to my studies by learning about all these different topics. It's a great break from the repetitiveness of grad school. Love all that you and the bad magic do. Crew do. Have a great team.

I'm not sorry about the length of this email and you're welcome for the girth. Suck on your fellow meat sacks slash future cadaver. Oh man, right? We all are. Mike B. Mike, holy shit.

How did you get a doctorate when you're clearly dumber than a fucking stack? No, I'm just kidding. No, I love it. Especially seeing a dude in the hot tub. You thought it looked like Dick Bird. That was a nice little touch. Also, truly, congrats to you and your lovely lady.

Two smart fuckers getting out there doing smart people shit. More of that, please. More that in the world. To quote, turnstile, it's never enough. Never enough. Glad you're having fun, man.

Truly. Glad life is going well. Glad you both got the degrees you want. I'd hail Nimrod to you both and everyone listening. And let's get on out of here. Time suckers, I needed that. We all did. Well, thanks for listening to another Bad Magic Productions podcast.

Be sure and rate and review TimeSuck if you haven't already. Don't go hiking deep into an uncharted part of the Amazon this week. Up to 60% of that devil's den of hurtful critters has yet to be scientifically explored on the ground. You can still get shot with an arrow. Still get an arm full of maggots. So maybe just stay at home, watch videos on the couch, you know, about the Amazon while you're stoned or something. And keep on sucking. Add Magic Productions.

Let's go out. Let's find the dinosaurs. We'll have to look around when we find those bones. We're going to have to take them to a museum. It's just a right thing to do. Dinosaur bombs. Yeah. Find them in the museum. Oh, there's more to that jingle.

A big thanks to the Pancake Manor Kid Songs YouTube channel for that delightful little ditty.