Percy Fawcett and the City of Z

Z

By 1914 Fawcett had persuaded himself, out of documents in Rio de Janeiro including an eighteenth-century Portuguese account of a ruined stone city, that a complex civilization had existed in the Mato Grosso and that something of it survived. He called the target Z. Between 1906 and 1924 he made seven expeditions across the Amazon basin, mapping boundaries for the Royal Geographical Society, and he was very good in the field.

April 20, 1925

He left Cuiaba with his elder son Jack, 21, and Jack's friend Raleigh Rimell. The party was deliberately tiny. Fawcett held that large expeditions provoked attack and small ones passed unnoticed.

The last message went out with runners from a place he called Dead Horse Camp, dated May 29, 1925. He wrote that they were about to enter unexplored country and that his wife should have no fear of failure. Then nothing.

What probably happened, and what came after

The Kalapalo, through whose territory the men passed, gave a consistent account for decades: the party went east, the Kalapalo watched their campfire smoke for five days, and then it stopped. The likeliest readings are that they were killed by people whose land they entered, or that they starved or sickened. Rimell had an infected leg when they set out.

Search parties began in 1928 and have never entirely stopped. Searchers have died, some have vanished, and several have come back with bones that turned out to belong to somebody else.

The premise is the part that has aged strangely. Fawcett was dismissed for believing that large settled societies had existed in the Amazon. Since the 1990s, earthworks, causeways and settlement complexes have been mapped across the southern Amazon, much of it in the region he was walking into. He was wrong about a lost white civilization. He was right that the forest had held cities.

Cuiaba is the departure point and the practical anchor, a working state capital with an international airport and a compact historic center around the Praca da Republica. There is no Fawcett site and no marker. The route he took runs into the Xingu, which is Indigenous land entered only with authorization from FUNAI and from the communities themselves.

What Cuiaba offers instead is context and a base. The Museu Rondon at the federal university holds Indigenous collections from the region, and the Pantanal and the Chapada dos Guimaraes are both an easy trip out and are what most visitors to Mato Grosso come for.

The heat is what people underestimate. The dry season from May to September is the sensible window, and it is the season Fawcett chose as well.