The last march towards Z

Percy Fawcett · 1925 CE · Earth

The last march towards Z — Percy Fawcett · 1925 CE · Earth — Recorded expedition route · schematic map

Cross the Mato Grosso from Cuiabá to the headwaters of the Xingu and find the ruined city Fawcett called Z.

Historical context

Fawcett had been looking for the ruins of an ancient civilisation in the Brazilian interior since before the war. In 1920 he had to turn back when his companion broke down, and his horse died on the way out, at the place he later called Dead Horse Camp. He believed that remnants of that civilisation might survive in a city he called Z, perhaps the deserted city that a manuscript said bandeirantes had found in 1753. After years without money he raised it from scientific societies and from the North American Newspaper Alliance, with the endorsement of the Royal Geographical Society, and took only his son Jack and Jack’s friend Raleigh Rimell, with two Brazilian helpers as far as the edge of the unknown. Everything up to Dead Horse Camp is documented by the party’s own letters; everything after it is testimony, rumour and the searches that followed.

The voyage, step by step

  1. Cuiabá, April 1925

    April 1925

    Five men, two horses, eight mules and two dogs ride north from Cuiabá on 20 April 1925.

  2. Lost three times

    1925 CE

    North over the chapada to the Rio Manso and the upper Cuiabá, through tick country, with the animals failing.

  3. The Bakairi post

    1925 CE

    On 15 May the party reaches the last government post, with unexplored country, Jack wrote, just beyond the hills.

  4. Towards the unknown country

    1925 CE

    North from the post towards the headwaters of the Xingu, the peons and the animals still with them.

  5. Dead Horse Camp, 29 May

    29 May 1925

    The last letter is written and sent back: a latitude, a longitude and a promise.

  6. Beyond the last confirmed point

    1925 CE

    Beyond Dead Horse Camp nothing is certain: the line on the map is a hypothesis.

  7. The Kalapalo account

    1925 CE

    The Kalapalo remember three Englishmen who came on foot, were fed, and went east against their warning.

Outcome

The party was last confirmed at Dead Horse Camp on 29 May 1925. Everything after that rests on later testimony, from the Kalapalo and others, which contradicts itself, and on searches that found nothing certain; the bones dug up in 1951 were not Fawcett’s. The fate of the three men is unknown.

Percy Fawcett

British artillery officer and boundary surveyor who mapped the rivers of the Bolivian frontier, then walked into the Mato Grosso in 1925 looking for a lost city he called Z and was never seen again.

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Sources

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