The last march towards Z

Percy Fawcett · 1925 CE · Earth

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

Historical context

By 1925 the Royal Geographical Society had run out of blanks that could be filled by a gentleman with a compass, and Fawcett offered it one last blank: a ruined city in the Mato Grosso, argued from an eighteenth-century manuscript and from his own conviction that the forest had once held cities. A syndicate of newspapers paid for a party of three, chosen small on the theory that three men would be taken for travellers rather than invaders. Everything up to Dead Horse Camp is documented by his own letters; everything after it is testimony, rumour and the ninety years of searching that followed.

The voyage, step by step

1. Cuiabá, April 1925

   April 1925

   Three men and eight mules leave the last railhead town for the Mato Grosso.

2. The ox-cart road

   1925 CE

   North through cattle country, scrub and rivers still on the Brazilian map.

3. The Bakairi post

   1925 CE

   The last administered place on the road, on a headwater of the Xingu.

4. Into the Upper Xingu

   1925 CE

   Twelve days north-east through scrub forest towards the headwaters, with three mules left.

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

   East into forest nobody surveyed, on a course that exists only in his own notes.

7. The Kalapalo account

   1925 CE

   Three white men pass a village heading east, against advice, and their smoke is watched for five days.

Outcome

The party was last confirmed at Dead Horse Camp on 29 May 1925; everything after that rests on Kalapalo testimony and on thirteen search expeditions that found nothing certain.

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.

Read on Wikipedia

Sources

• Percy Fawcett — Wikipedia
• The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the AmazonDavid Grann · Doubleday, New York · 2009
• Exploration FawcettPercy Harrison Fawcett, edited by Brian Fawcett · Hutchinson, London · 1953

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