Percy Fawcett and the City of Z

Z

By the 1920s, 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 Bolivia, on the Royal Geographical Society's recommendation, and he was very good in the field.

April 20, 1925

He left Cuiabá 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, agree on the smoke: the party went east, the Kalapalo watched their campfire smoke for five days, and then it stopped. Accounts of what followed differ: some say the party was attacked, others that the men starved or fell ill. Rimell's foot became infected from a tick bite within days of leaving Cuiabá.

Search parties began in 1928 and have never entirely stopped. In 1951, remains brought back from one search were ruled not to be his.

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, some of it in the region he was walking into. He was wrong about a lost white civilization. He was right that large planned settlements had stood in that forest.

Cuiabá is the departure point and the practical anchor, a working state capital with an international airport and a compact historic center around the Praça da República. 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 Cuiabá 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 Guimarães 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.