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

While the book’s first theme highlights the “pull” of legends, such as El Dorado and Z, the second major theme acknowledges that the doldrums and banalities associated with everyday life in “civilized” society can push some of its most restless and disaffected souls toward escape.

In private thoughts composed under the heading “Renegades from Civilization,” Fawcett concludes that “[c]ivilization 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 ‘o the wild’ is in the blood of many of us and finds its safety valve in adventure” (133). As a young man, Fawcett hears this call. Though he is “trained to be an apostle of Western civilization,” he escapes into the Ceylon jungle at every opportunity (41). He “relishe[s] his flight from everything” familiar and detestable in his own world (43). Back home in Devon following his first Amazon expedition, he tries to convince himself that he is content: “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 housemaid” (115). Soon, however, he finds himself “unable to sit still” (116). He returns to the Amazon five times in the next seven years. Henry Costin, who accompanies Fawcett on several expeditions, summarizes the allure: “It’s hell all right, but one kind of likes it” (140).

The Fawcett story involves attempted escapes not only from civilization but from the physical world altogether. As a young man, Fawcett is drawn to Buddhism, which is scandalous for a Victorian-era English gentleman. He also dabbles in the unconventional spiritualism of the purported psychic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. As Fawcett gets older, the allure of the occult strengthens. World War I accelerates his alienation from the known world: “Civilization! Ye gods! To see what one has seen the word is an absurdity. It has been an insane explosion of the lowest human emotions” (189). As an artillery officer, Fawcett reportedly uses a Ouija board to locate enemy positions, and is Fawcett isn’t the only member of his family and circle of friends who gravitates toward spiritualism since, in her search for her husband, Nina consults “psychics and soothsayers” (294). Edward Reeves and Ralph Paget do likewise. When he visits Rolette de Montet-Guerin, Fawcett’s granddaughter, Grann learns that she had shown her grandfather’s ring to a psychic in the hopes of obtaining more information about her grandfather’s last days.

Re-imagining the Amazon is primarily a historical, archaeological, and anthropological process, though it also has visual components of a surprising and deceptive nature.

As a journalist pursuing the Fawcett story, Grann ventures into unfamiliar scholarly territory. Betty Meggers of the Smithsonian Institution, who is “perhaps the most influential modern archaeologist of the region,” once described the Amazon as a “counterfeit paradise,” an environment “inimical to human life” (33). This environmental-determinist view, in fact, predates Meggers. In Fawcett’s day, many scientists regarded the Amazon as “proof of the Malthusian limits that the environment placed on civilizations (195). In recent years, however, revisionists have challenged environmental determinism and argued, as Fawcett once did, that an ancient civilization could have developed and thrived in the Amazon. This scholarly debate turns on “a fundamental understanding of human nature and the ancient world” (34-35).

Reconstructing that world requires both evidence and imagination, and Fawcett spends years gathering the former. He discovers shards of ancient pottery, and he observes geometric shapes in the landscape, some of which look like roads from a high altitude. He reads the conquistadors’ accounts of “vast and dense indigenous populations,” of settlements connected by roads similar to what he had seen, “only on a grander scale” (175). From there, however, the story remains elusive, and the question haunts him: What happened to these people? He guesses that disease must have decimated these tribes, but the human cataclysm appears so immense that he wonders “whether something more dramatic had occurred, even a natural disaster” (177).

In short, most scientists have treated the small native population that survives in the present-day “counterfeit paradise” as proof that the conquistadors exaggerated their accounts. Modern revisionists, on the other hand, take those older accounts seriously in light of new evidence, much as Fawcett did.

Finally, the imagination plays another role in Grann’s story, for “the Amazon can deceive” (19). In the 1950s, Brian Fawcett explores the Amazon by airplane. At one point, using binoculars, he spots “a crumbling city with streets and towers and pyramids,” but a closer look reveals merely “an outcropping of freakishly eroded sandstone” that he describes as “remarkable–almost unbelievable” (298-99). He begins to wonder if Z is merely a figment of his late father’s imagination. On his own journey into the Amazon in 2005, Grann sees a “cracked stone column” and a “large archway” in front of a “dazzlingly large tower,” but Pinage reveals the truth: “It is–how do you say?--an illusion,” for it is ”made by nature, by erosion” (248).