The Lost City of Z

Anyone who's ever come into contact with the Tintin comics, or has seen an Indiana Jones movie, or perhaps even read Rider Haggard or Rudyard Kipling's books, wants nothing more than to go on an adventure, deep into some dark, dripping rainforest, looking for signs of lost civilizations or discovering tribes that have not yet made contact with the rest of the world. And to a certain degree, history seems to prove that such discoveries, such adventures, are possible. One need only to look at Hiram Bingham and his discovery of Machu Picchu in the Urubamba Valley of Peru; or the discovery of Mayan temples and pyramids in the jungles of Belize and Guatemala; or even the beautiful, mysterious cities still being cut out of the jungles of Cambodia (Angkor Thom, specifically, is still being uncovered, and no one knows just how large it is), to know that, yes, the adventures one reads about in books might be entirely possible after all.

But what the books don't mention anything about are the dangers - and there are so many of them as to make the idea of a jungle adventure more terrifying than going to the Poles or trekking through the desert. Bear Grylls and others like him might make it look easy, but surviving the jungle is no mean feat. Too, Bear Grylls has the advantage of having been born in the twenty-first century, when technology and knowledge have become advanced enough that getting lost in the jungle is no longer as life-threatening as it used to be by a slightly smaller margin. In the early twentieth-century, this was not the case.

This was especially true for Lt. Colonel Percy Fawcett, one of the most notable - and notorious - Amazon explorers. Previous to the final and fatal exploration that claimed his life (though the circumstances of his death remain unknown), Fawcett had already led expeditions into unexplored parts of the Amazon, described as a “green hell” by many other explorers - or at least, those who made it out alive, as the Amazon was equally famous for consuming those who entered it and leaving no trace of them. But Fawcett had survived those expeditions, and many believed that he could survive one more - a most monumental one guaranteed to secure his place in history. On his last expedition, Fawcett - accompanied by his eldest son, Jack, and Jack's best friend - was determined to find the city he called Z, believed by many to be the legendary El Dorado. There was much fanfare and attention surrounding the expedition, and many believed that if anyone was going to find traces of a complex civilization in the depths of Amazonia, then Fawcett was most assuredly the one to find it.

But when Fawcett and his expedition team disappeared, they in their turn became the objects at the heart of several rescue, and then later on merely search, expeditions that claimed the lives of around a hundred would-be adventurers. Some of them simply wanted answers to what happened to the lost Fawcett expedition, but quite a few of them were determined to find Fawcett's City of Z, and they believed that if they could just figure out where Fawcett had last disappeared, then they too would be able to find Z.

Author David Grann became fascinated with the Fawcett expedition, and his book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession with the Amazon juxtaposes his search for the fate of the Fawcett expedition with the tale of Fawcett's life, from the moment he decided that he wanted to be an explorer all the way to that final, fated expedition to find Z, including the ill-fated search-and-rescue expeditions that sought to find out what happened to him and his team. Along the way Grann describes the dangers of the Amazon as Fawcett and other explorers encountered them: the never-ending assault from gnats, mosquitoes, bot flies, and other dangerous creatures and parasites, as well as the fatal illnesses that result in contact with them; the extremes of heat, humidity, and rain; the delirium and madness that befall those weakened by their physical ailments; and of course, the anger of tribes who have had nothing but suffering and heartache from their encounters with white people. In Grann's own accounts of his adventures in the jungle to search for the Fawcett expedition, he makes it clear that these dangers still exist in the twenty-first century, though encroaching modernity have made his privations significantly less difficult when compared to those that Fawcett and other explorers describe in their accounts.

While the story Grann tells about his own adventures in the Amazon are well-told, and his narrative of Fawcett's story equally compelling - all the more so for its juxtaposition with Grann's own story - it's their combined account of what conquest and modernity have done and are still doing to the Amazon and its resident tribes that raise the most interest - and the most concern. Almost everyone is aware of what is happening to the Amazon, how much of it has disappeared and what that disappearance is doing to ecology and climate, but not a lot of people are aware of what this destruction is doing to the tribal inhabitants who call the jungle home, and whose cultures are so deeply entwined with it. Fawcett describes how disease and the exploitation of the jungle's rich resources - people included - have destroyed entire tribes and, moreover, made the remaining ones exceedingly hostile to white explorers, making Fawcett's goals even more difficult to achieve. The prevailing racism of the early twentieth-century certainly did not help matters much.

Grann's own account of what he sees in the Amazon in the twenty-first century is both a product and a continuation of what was done in the twentieth. The drive for modernity in the mold presented by first-world countries has resulted in hundreds of species of plants and animals, many of them unknown to science, going extinct as rivers are dammed and trees are cut down. Not only that, the tribes whose lives and cultures are built around the jungle as they knew it are seeing their holy sites destroyed and defiled, and their cultures evaporating all around them as they encounter - or are forced to encounter - the realities of of the world outside the jungle.

Grann's book could easily have devolved into an overt, didactic warning about the dangers of modernity and the negative results of globalization on the environment and on small tribal communities, but it does not. While Grann does make his concerns regarding those issues known, it is only a part of what makes The Lost City of Z and excellent book. In many ways, it is also a loving testament to the concept of “adventure” as it was understood in the twentieth century - something which has been lost, and which many people seek again and again. When people read Haggard or Kipling or Tintin, or watch Indiana Jones, they think of adventure in the same way that Fawcett, Livingstone, and all the rest of the early twentieth-century's explorers lived it - and, in many cases, died while living it. The book itself also reads very well and very quickly, like a proper adventure story, with the reader's hopes rising and falling in accordance with the triumphs and failures of both Fawcett and the author.

And, like any good adventure story, Grann does indeed find Z - or tantalizing hints of it, at any rate, that are nevertheless solidly grounded in scientific and archaeological fact. In a scene rather reminiscent of Stanley meeting Livingstone, Grann meets Michael Heckenberger, who has been adopted and taken up residence with an Amazonian tribe, and who has proven almost conclusively that Fawcett was right: Z does exist, though not in the form Fawcett and others searching for El Dorado in the Amazon thought. But Heckenberger has vindicated Fawcett's speculations regarding the existence of a large, complex civilization existing deep within the Amazon which he has named "Kuhikugu," and which he is currently exploring - in many ways continuing Fawcett's legacy.

Much praise has already been said for this book, and in many ways, the praise is quite true. For those of us who seek adventure in our lives, but for various reasons cannot - or maybe will not - go and find it, The Lost City of Z is a wonderful and well-told insight into the possibilities that were there, and perhaps still are, waiting for others to take them, and for the rest of us to read about.