The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

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Categories	Americas
Author	David Grann
Publisher	Vintage (February 17, 2009)
Language	English
Paperback	414 pages
Item Weight	9.6 ounces
Dimensions	7.8 x 0.91 x 5.24 inches

I. Book introduction

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon is a non-fiction book by American author David Grann. Published in 2009, the book recounts the activities of the British explorer Percy Fawcett who, in 1925, disappeared with his son in the Amazon rainforest while looking for the ancient “Lost City of Z”. In the book, Grann recounts his own journey into the Amazon, by which he discovered new evidence about how Fawcett may have died.

The Lost City of Z was the basis of a 2016 feature film of the same name.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Killers of the Flower Moon comes a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction that unravels the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century—the story of the legendary British explorer who ventured into the Amazon jungle in search of a fabled civilization and never returned.

“Reads with all the pace and excitement of a movie thriller…At once a biography, a detective story and a wonderfully vivid piece of travel writing.” —The New York Times

After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed writer David Grann set out to determine what happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z. For centuries Europeans believed the Amazon, the world’s largest rain forest, concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Thousands had died looking for it, leaving many scientists convinced that the Amazon was truly inimical to humankind. In 1925 Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an ancient civilization, hoping to make one of the most important discoveries in history. Then he vanished. Over the years countless perished trying to find evidence of his party and the place he called “The Lost City of Z.”

In this masterpiece, journalist David Grann interweaves the spellbinding stories of Fawcett’s quest for “Z” and his own journey into the deadly jungle.

Overview

As observed by Kirkus Reviews, “Fawcett’s exploits in jungles and atop mountains inspired novels such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, and his character is the tutelary spirit of the Indiana Jones franchise. Fawcett in turn was nurtured by his associations with fabulists such as Doyle and H. Rider Haggard, whose talisman he bore into the Amazonian rainforest.”

For decades explorers and scientists have tried to find evidence of Fawcett’s party and of the Lost City of Z. Of those, Grann explains, “there are no reliable statistics on the numbers who died. One recent estimate, however, put the total as high as a hundred.” (A more historically accurate toll, according to historian John Hemming, is one.)

Grann, a New Yorker magazine staff writer, first wrote about the story in The New Yorker in 2005. The article documents how Grann, working from Fawcett’s long-lost diaries, reconstructed the explorer’s last journey, including visiting members of the Kalapalo tribe in the Xingu Indigenous Park region of the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil. The Kalapalo had apparently preserved an oral history about Fawcett’s small party of himself, his son Jack, and Jack’s friend Raleigh Rimell, who were among the first Europeans the tribe had ever seen.

The oral account said that Fawcett and his party had stayed at their village and, despite warnings about “fierce Indians” who occupied that territory, had headed eastward. The Kalapalos observed smoke from Fawcett’s expedition’s campfire each evening for five days before it disappeared. As a result, the Kalapalos said they were sure that the fierce Indians had killed them. The article formed the basis for Grann’s book.

As a result of Grann’s own trek into the Amazon and consultations with archeologists, he also learned that Fawcett may have come upon “Z” without knowing it. Grann reported on excavations by the archeologist Michael Heckenberger at a site in the Amazon Xingu region that might be the long-rumored lost city. The ruins were surrounded by several concentric circular moats, with evidence of palisades that had been described in the folklore and oral history of nearby tribes. Heckenberger also found evidence of wooden structures and roads that cut through the jungle. Black Indian earth showed evidence that humans had added supplements to the soil to increase its fertility to support agriculture.

The settlements and civilization of these people appeared to have lasted long enough for them to have had contact with Europeans. Many died due to new infectious diseases, which may have been carried by some of their usual indigenous trading partners, rather than directly by Europeans. The high rate of fatality of these epidemics disrupted the people and their society: in only a few years, they were so devastated by disease that they had virtually died out.

The earliest conquistadors left records of their glimpses of this civilization, but by the time they tried to explore the rainforest again, the indigenous people were all but gone. The jungle was quickly reclaiming the land.

Editorial Reviews

• “Suspenseful. . . . Rollicking. . . . Reads with all the pace and excitement of a movie thriller. . . . The Lost City of Z is at once a biography, a detective story and a wonderfully vivid piece of travel writing that combines Bruce Chatwinesque powers of observation with a Waugh-like sense of the absurd. Mr. Grann treats us to a harrowing reconstruction of Fawcett’s forays into the Amazonian jungle, as well as an evocative rendering of the vanished age of exploration.”
  —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
• “Breathtaking. . . . Grann brings Fawcett’s remarkable story to a beautifully written, perfectly paced fruition. . . . Any writer who can breathe life into letters written by scientists in the early 1900s deserves more than a hat tip.”
  —The Los Angeles Times
• “Brilliant. . . . Impressively researched and skillfully crafted. . . . Grann makes abundantly clear in this fascinating, epic story of exploration and obsession, [that] the lethal attraction of the Amazon mystery remains strong.”
  —The Boston Globe
• “A smart biographical page-turner.”
  —USA Today
• “Grann escapes death and tracks down Z, giving the reader the kind of Indiana Jones kicks best experienced vicariously.”
  —Details
• “A riveting, exciting and thoroughly compelling tale of adventure.”
  —John Grisham, internationally acclaimed #1 bestselling author
• “Thoroughly researched, vividly told. . . . Grann recounts Fawcett’s expeditions with all the pace of a white-knuckle adventure story. . . . A thrill ride from start to finish.”
  —The Washington Post
• “The story of Z goes to the heart of the central questions of our age. In the battle between man and a hostile environment, who wins? A fascinating and brilliant book.”
  —Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of Talking to Strangers
• “A spellbinding tale that produces fresh surprises around each turn. . . . An amazing story.”
  —Dallas Morning News
• “A fascinating yarn that touches on science, history, and some truly obsessive personalities.”
  —Entertainment Weekly
• “There is something about Fawcett’s spirit and self-assurance that captivates. . . . To read The Lost City of Z is to feel grateful that Grann himself bothered to set out for the Amazon in search of the bones of an explorer whose body was long ago reclaimed by the jungle.”
  —Christian Science Monitor
• “In a hyperconnected and exhaustively charted world, here is a revelation about wildness and the mad desire to plunge into it. . . . Unfathomably riveting. . . . Grann wildly delivers the goods.”
  —GQ
• “A blockbuster tale of adventure.”
  —New York Observer
• “Marvelous. . . . [Grann] combines a colorful narrative of Fawcett’s early life, military career, jungle treks, theories and even conversations with a biography of an extraordinary man and an overview of the last great and highly competitive age of exploration.”
  —Bloomberg News
• “A blood-stirring reading experience.”
  —The Denver Post
• “A deeply satisfying revelation. . . . What could be better—obsession, mystery, deadly insects, shrunken heads, suppurating wounds, hostile tribesmen—all for us to savor in our homes, safely before the fire.”
  —Erik Larson, bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile and The Devil in the White City
• “What makes Mr. Grann’s telling of the story so captivating is that he decides not simply to go off in search of yet more relics of our absent hero—but to go off himself in search of the city that Fawcett was looking for so heroically when he suddenly went AWOL.”
  —Simon Winchester, The Wall Street Journal
• “Fast-paced adventure. . . . Grann delights us with the lure of obsession under a canopy of trees.”
  —Cleveland Plain Dealer
• “Absorbing and fair-minded. . . . In restoring a life that history has swallowed from general view, and vindicating a crackpot theory, Mr. Grann has also exposed the toll that explorers often took on those who loved or depended on them.”
  —Richard B. Woodward, The New York Times
• “An engrossing book, whose protagonist could outmarch Lara Croft and out-think Indiana Jones. . . . It’s almost enough to make you reach for a backpack.”
  —The Daily Telegraph (London)
• “A riveting adventure-mystery in the tradition of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, said to be inspired by Fawcett.”
  —The Toronto Star
• “Perfect for armchair travelers and readers with fond childhood memories of books recounting tales of adventure in the dark wild. . . . What [Grann] found should help change how we think about the Amazon. . . . Read it, shiver with delight and thank your lucky stars you’re never going to get as close to a candirú as Fawcett and Grann did. (Look it up on Wikipedia, if you dare.)”
  —Richmond Times-Dispatch
• “Thrilling. . . . What a story. . . . The beauty is that as incredible as it is, it’s true.”
  —Daily News
• “Outstanding. . . . A powerful narrative, stiff lipped and Victorian at the center, trippy at the edges, as if one of those stern men of Conrad had found himself trapped in a novel by García Márquez.”
  —Rich Cohen, The New York Times Book Review
• “Did Grann find the lost city? . . . It’s worth reading every page of this marvelous book to find out.”
  —Houston Chronicle
• “Grann is no hard-as-nails explorer, and his self-deprecating personal narrative . . . serves as a comic counterpoint to the superhuman exploits of Fawcett. Grann may not be able to hack the wilderness very well, but as a storyteller he’s first-rate.” —Outside
• “Grann has an extraordinary sense of pacing, and his scenes of forest adventure are dispatched in passages of swift, arresting simplicity. . . . A splendid, suspenseful book.”
  —Bookforum
• “With this riveting work, David Grann emerges on our national landscape as a major new talent. His superb writing style, his skills as a reporter, his masterful use of historical and scientific documents, and his stunning storytelling ability are on full display here, producing an endlessly absorbing tale about a magical subject that captivates from start to finish. This is a terrific book.”
  —Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize-wiining author
• “A thrilling yarn. . . . What [Grann] finds is what makes The Lost City of Z so gratifying, and in the end he, and we along with him, find ourselves stunned by what Percy Fawcett discovered.”
  —The Oregonian
• “Grann paints a vivid picture of the final days of trail-blazing, Earth-bound grand exploration, before airplanes and radios began stripping the mystery from the unknown parts of the world.”
  —The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA)
• “Meticulously researched and spellbinding. . . . Reads like a cross between an Indiana Jones adventure and a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. . . . Gripping.”
  —The Ottawa Citizen
• “Irresistible. . . . At once a biography of Fawcett, a history of the era of exploration, a science book on the nature and ethnography of the Amazon and a thrilling armchair adventure. . . . [It] has everything to fire the imagination: Romance, nostalgia, bravery, monomania, hardship, adventure, science, tragedy, mystery.”
  —South Florida Sun Sentinel
• “The Lost City of Z is meticulously researched, riveting and horrifying, guided by a core mystery that seems unimaginable and an author driven into the depths of the jungle by his daring to imagine it.”
  —Philadelphia City Paper
• “Absorbing. . . . A wonderful story of a lost age of heroic exploration.”
  —The Sunday Times (London)
• “Tantalizing. . . . Grann gives us a glimpse of the vanished age of exploration [as well as] a suspenseful, often very funny account of his own trek as a complete amateur into the ‘green hell’ of the Amazon. . . . Immensely entertaining.”
  —The Gazette (Montreal)
• “Thankfully, for those of us who secretly live and breath for the swashbuckling adventure tale, every now and then a book comes along that renews our faith in the epic quest narrative, its ability to inform and enlighten even as it feeds our most primal need for dramatic amusement. [The Lost City of Z] succeeds tremendously in these pursuits.”
  —The Globe and Mail (Canada)

About David Grann

David Elliot Grann (born March 10, 1967) is an American journalist, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a best-selling author.

His first book, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, was published by Doubleday in February 2009. After its first week of publication, it debuted on The New York Times bestseller list at #4 and later reached #1. Grann’s articles have been collected in several anthologies, including What We Saw: The Events of September 11, 2001, The Best American Crime Writing of 2004 and 2005, and The Best American Sports Writing of 2003 and 2006. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Weekly Standard.

According to a profile in Slate, Grann has a reputation as a “workhorse reporter”, which has made him a popular journalist who “inspires a devotion in readers that can border on the obsessive.”

David Grann was born on March 10, 1967, to Phyllis and Victor Grann. His mother is the former CEO of Putnam Penguin and the first woman CEO of a major publishing firm. His father is an oncologist and Director of the Bennett Cancer Center in Stamford, Connecticut. Grann has two siblings, Edward and Alison

II. Reviewer The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

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1. MG reviews for The Lost City of Z

Good reading for explorers

I found this book interesting in many ways. It was easy to read since it touched many subjects that are familiar to me. The book covers historic facts of the Victorian age and its influence in the world but specially South America and the countries of Bolivia and Brazil whose Amazonian region was and is difficult to explore or study. It is well balanced since the book covers many areas that help understand different points of view of previous times compared to present times. I found answers to questions that come up as you read this book. For instance, to refer to the tribes that populate the Amazonian forests as savages, made me question who is anyone to judge, specially after the atrocities of WWI, described in the book as well as all the inhuman spectacle of WW2. Also, it explains what was happening in the areas related to the fields he got to be involved in like archeology and the discovery of Machu Pichu which may have influenced him.

Fawcett’s motivations could have been banal if they were glory or becoming famous but he showed an ethical position not usual in his time which was to approach the indigenous people in a non violent way, trying not to use arms and ordering to drop arms even if danger was felt. He would raise his hands and confront the Indians which gave him good results since he got to be treated as a sort of friend. This respectful behavior, considering the times, was something positive to take in account when trying to define Fawcett’s personality which could show his humanity, something to learn from him. Now, consider that Indiana Jones is partly based in the real life of Percy Fawcett and P.F. is one of the characters of one of his movies; however, Indiana Jones had no problem in shooting for entertainment.

Having lived in Bolivia and having done some exploration myself I may have a different take to this adventure. To start, one of Fawcett’s motivation was as normal as to answer why people climb mountains, the answer is,” because it’s there”. I have done hiking going from La Paz at 12000 ft. above sea level to about 15000 ft. and then down to the tropics of Yungas which is the start of the Amazonian jungle all along an Inca road which was partly well preserved considering hundreds of years of use. After getting familiar with this subtropical region, it happened that I read The mines of King Salomon and this book, cited in Grann’s book as well, inspired me to go farther. My plan was to go to an uncharted area in the forest called Madidi, which is a national park now. My motivation was just to see what no one else has seen. I was able to enlist two university friends who seemed interested but who back down at the last minute. Next year I tried again but I had a sudden back ache problem. Going back to the book, Fawcett’s intentions may have been to attain fame by finding not El Dorado but something like Machu Pichu which was “found” in 1911. He visited Cusco and Tiahuanacu and was able to marvel at the achievements of these civilizations. But destiny put him in the Bolivian jungle with the aid of the British government, it wasn’t something that he was looking for but that opened his eyes and his innate explorer spirit.

Before I even finished reading this book I was compelled to read about the original source, Percy Fawcett’s own words, compiled in a book “Lost trail, lost cities” by Brian Fawcett, his son. By reading it, I found out that in his first trip he was hired by the Bolivian government, P. Fawcett does not mention Brazil in the first expedition which was actually work. Now, there are historical details that are not clear. The border problem between Bolivia and Brazil was already established in 1903 after a short war between these two countries and the result was the annexation of the Acre, an area of 190,000 square Kilometers (75,000 sq mls), more than ¾ the size of UK. By the way, something that this book could have in next edition is a better map, the map of Bolivia is not clear.

There are details in the Fawcett’s book that could have been part of Grann’s book or even the movie, like the moment when, after departing La Paz, one of many mules P.F. had, runs away and that was the mule that had the $£1000 in gold he received as part of the payment from the Bolivian government, an interesting historical detail, a “jingling treasure” in the saddle bags. However, Fawcett explains that the mule was brought back by local people who he rewarded. P .F. describes foreigners by name but there is no mention of Bolivian dignitaries with the exception of the president of Bolivia who was taking matters with his own hands and who knew these lands very well. The region next to the Brazilian border bears his name, Pando.

“All who have lived in these lands and learned to know them fell captive to their irresistible charm”, Fawcett writes as part of his reflexions. Is this one of the motives he kept coming back?

2. DEM reviews for The Lost City of Z

A terrific adventure story, full of suspense and intrigue and lots of historical detail to keep the reader interested. I am not really a reader of adventure strories but every now and again one comes along that catches my interest and when a trusted Goodread’s friend recommend this I just had to give it a try and see exactly what the Lost City of Z was all about.

In 1925, British explorer Percy Fawcett and his son journey into the Amazon jungle, in search of what for centuries Europeans believed the jungle was holding secret…… ” The ancient city of Z” an advanced civilization that many believed to have once inhabited the jungle. Unfortunately the party never returned and over the years countless perished trying to find evidence of the party and the place they called “The Lost City of Z.” In this book David Grann traces their steps.

I really enjoyed this non fiction read about Percy Fawcett and his obsession and adventures in the Amazon. I particulary enjoyed how the author weaved suspense, history and geography together in this book and I was entertained as well as educated which really added to my enjoyment of the read.

Its an extremely well written and entertaining book and I couldn’t help but admire these exporers (and their families) who risked everything for adventure. I think readers who like non fiction and adventure and history will really enjoy this book.

I listened to this one on audio and the nattation was excellent but as always with audio I cant help wondering if the hard copy had photos and maps which I would have missed out on in the audio.

3. DIANE reviews for The Lost City of Z

Reading this book helped clarify one of my life goals, which is TO NEVER GET STRANDED IN THE AMAZON JUNGLE.

Seriously, that place would kill me. There’s the threat of piranhas, electric eels, venomous snakes, vampire fish, vampire bats, disease-carrying mosquitoes, dangerous spiders, poisonous plants… and about a hundred other scary things. I fear the jungle because I respect it.*

I also respect those who have set out to explore the jungle — many of whom have died or disappeared. Some of those folks are the subject of David Grann’s fascinating book, The Lost City of Z. Grann himself became a bit obsessed with the Amazon, hoping to discover what happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett, who went missing in the Amazon in 1925. Fawcett had been searching for an ancient civilization, nicknamed Z, and after he disappeared, dozens of people also went into the Amazon trying to find him and the lost city. Some never returned.

This book is part travelogue, part history, part outdoor adventure. I really enjoyed reading it (even though descriptions of the jungle are terrifying) and I’m looking forward to watching the movie that is based on this book. This is the third Grann book I’ve read this year — I also recommend Killers of the Flower Moon and The Devil and Sherlock Holmes — and I’ve become such a fan of Grann’s work that I’ll happily read his future books.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go buy some antivenom and mosquito nets. JUST TO BE SAFE.

*Note: Another great-and-terrifying book about the Amazon jungle is Candice Millard’s The River of Doubt. Highly recommended.

Meaningful Passage
“For nearly a century, explorers have sacrificed everything, even their lives, to find the City of Z. The search for the civilization, and for the countless men who vanished while looking for it, has eclipsed the Victorian quest novels of Arthur Conan Doyle and H. Rider Haggard — both of whom, as it happens, were drawn into the real-life hunt for Z. At times, I had to remind myself that everything in this story is true: a movie star really was abducted by Indians; there were cannibals, ruins, secret maps, and spies; explorers died from starvation, disease, attacks by wild animals, and poisonous arrows; and at stake amid the adventure and death was the very understanding of the Americas before Christopher Columbus came ashore in the New World.”

4. CARMEN reviews for The Lost City of Z

Gann is my new fave!

After having my world rocked by Gann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, I decided to read this one. It was just as phenomenal as the first.

What I’m finding I like the best about Gann’s writing is that he does not go into it with the expectation of finding answers, though through no lack of trying. Gann’s job, as he seems to see it, is to tell us the story. And while we are a civilization that demands instant answers, Gann manages to bring back the days in which it was the story that was most important… Not the ending.

I’m off to try another book by this author. With two five star reviews from me I can’t, imagine, I’ll be disappointed. For history and mystery lovers alike! How lovely to find a genre that is true to both.!

5. JASON KOIVU reviews for The Lost City of Z

This will make you feel like a kid again! It will ignite a Jonny Quest kind of desire for adventure, to dive into the jungle in search of lost worlds.

This will also quench most desires to ever take one step closer to a jungle.

“Z” is supposedly a long lost South American city of a once powerful people. Think El Dorado. Did it ever really exist? Finding out was the self-imposed task of an almost legend of a man who lives up to the myth:

Famous British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett…

A military man with an athlete’s physique and a cast iron constitution, Fawcett made the perfect explorer. As fortune would have it, he lived in a time and place where conquering the last of our Earth’s unknowns was in high fashion: Victorian England.

I’ve read a few of these sorts of books and I’ve come to expect the unavoidable asides. After all, to take this book as an example, there is always going to be more to the story than just one man trying to find one lost city. The Lost City of Z is fattened by many an aside discussing the myriad of Victorian era explorers who threw themselves into harm’s way for glory and adventure. It was almost like a game to them, a great race to see who could get there first, be it the depths of the jungle or the arctic pole.

Author David Grann juggles these stories well, never dropping the main story, at least no more than necessary to incorporate the interesting details from these off-shoot tales that help the reader to better understand the mindset of the times or to underscore the perils of such treks into the unknown.

In the process of putting this book together, tracking Fawcett became Grann’s adventure. However, it turned out to be one shared by many.

Fawcett went on numerous South American explorations with varying degrees of success and always emerging – though slightly worse for wear – in relatively good health compared to the many who perished along the way. However, after disappearing into the jungle one last time, with his son and a friend in-tow on this occasion, Fawcett disappeared forever. In the years that followed, finding Fawcett became a new kind of sport that swept the world. Many expeditions set out to find and bring the man back, dead or alive.

As you read The Lost City of Z you begin to form the opinion that “dead” is the only possible outcome for anyone foolish enough to set foot in the jungle. Grann’s descriptions of the jungle’s deprivations felt to me like watching a David Attenborough nature program in Feel-o-vision…every sting, bite and virulent disease feels like its invading your body. I itched unconsciously at every mention of the ubiquitous insects. I swore my skin creeped and I could feel a fever coming on. So, if you’ve got Indiana Jones aspirations, this is the cure!

6. NANCY OAKES reviews for The Lost City of Z

I picked up this book and was immediately lost between the covers and could not stop reading until I had finished the entire thing. That’s how good this book is.

The author sets forth the story of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, a British explorer who in 1925 set out on an expedition to the Amazon to find what he had named the “lost city of Z.” He was convinced that an ancient and “highly cultured” people lived in the Amazon of Brazil, untouched by modern civilization, and that they lived in a great city in a valley somewhere. He spent years doing research and gathering evidence for the existence of this place in order to get funding for expeditions into Brazil’s interior. On the 1925 expedition, he took his son, Jack, and Jack’s best friend, both eager to be part of a mission that would make history. But shortly after they had arrived into the Amazon area, all communications ceased, and while their movements were traced to a point, nothing concrete was ever heard regarding the three explorers. Their disappearance, and the publicity following the mission from which they never returned, prompted years worth of explorers trying to locate any trace of Fawcett, his son, and his son’s friend, even as late as 1996. Too bad for those left behind, Fawcett, who was facing a lot of competition from others exploring the Amazon at the time, and worried that these other explorers might find the lost city of Z before he would, kept his route a very closely guarded secret, so it was pretty much impossible for anyone to go in to either locate bodies, effect a rescue or even trace with any accuracy the steps taken by Fawcett and his group. Although Fawcett’s wife refused to believe that her husband and son were gone, they had pretty much just vanished off the face of the earth. Grann, who writes for the New Yorker, decided to try to find Fawcett’s route and discover what had happened to him once and for all. This book not only traces Grann’s efforts, but takes the reader back into the Victorian period, at the peak of the British Empire, to look at exactly who Percy Fawcett was. It also examines old and modern views of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon as well as offers a glimpse of the fate of the rain forest in modern times.

Simply stunning and superb, I loved this book so much that I pre-ordered a copy for when it is released for the general reading public. The writing is excellent, the mystery surrounding Fawcett’s disappearance is well portrayed, and the amount of effort that Grann went to in his research is very much apparent here. If you are looking for something entirely different that will mesmerize you instantly, you cannot miss this book. I had never heard about any of this up until now, & my curiosity has been sparked enough that I made notes and took down book titles to fill in some holes in my knowledge.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough, and I would like to thank Doubleday for sending me this book and also those on Shelf Awareness for offering it as an ARC. It is an excellent piece of writing.

7. SARAH-LOU reviews for The Lost City of Z

Two treasure hunts in one

This was like reading about two treasure hunts rolled into one.

The Lost City of Z recounts how Percy Fawcett, his son and his son’s friend set off into the Amazon rainforest in 1925 to find the City of Z, or El Dorado. Fawcett was an experienced and seasoned explorer with incredibly physical and mental resilience against the climate, diseases, bugs and animals the Amazon greeted him with. However, he and his two companions disappeared and despite several search parties, was never heard from again. Rumors were rife as to their fate (death by starvation, murdered by an Amazon tribe, killed by animals, living with an Amazonian community and even existing in a type of parallel universe) but none fully substantiated.

With unprecedented access to Fawcett’s private letters, journals and maps, the author, David Grann, sets out on his own treasure hunt to try and find out what happened to Fawcett and whether or not he did find Z- the city of legend. Grann did not only dig in libraries and archives, but went to the Amazon, himself, attempting to find Fawcett’s trail. Not an easy feat, as Fawcett kept his exact path secret, hoping to make sure he was not pipped to the post by rival explorer Dr Rice.

Grann’s descriptions of the Amazon and the hardships of the landscape actually take you there. You feels his frustration when he hits dead ends.

This does not feel like reading from a history book. Grann alternates Fawcett’s journey with his own and also provides background as to why Fawcett felt the need to go on this quest and several before. A great read.

8. MICHAEL FERRO reviews for The Lost City of Z

After reading KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, I was desperate for more nonfiction and, especially, more David Grann. Well, THE LOST CITY OF Z did not disappoint! The joy of Grann’s writing isn’t just in the sense of action and adventure he offers in his works, but the incredible reportage and detail he puts into each of his books. Fawcett, a man larger than life and one who might seemingly be impossible to capture in the antiquated medium of the written word, comes alive like few other historic characters I have come across. His adventures into the Amazon in the early 20th century had my inner explorer feeling jealous and envious—that is until I came across the vivid descriptions of the horrors that awaited all explorers to this remote section of the world…

During Fawcett’s time, the Amazon was truly the last uncharted area on the map of the world (and in some ways, this is still the case in our present day). Once thought of as an impenetrable and harsh world of greenery and things that will kill you, certain brave souls went searching for lost worlds and hidden treasures. And while Fawcett was certainly no gold hunter, his mounting obsession with the lost city of “Z” had me truly wondering just what could be out in that dense and surprisingly delicate land of life.

As with all of Grann’s works, it is the mystery of the unknown that lurks at the heart of the story: what is possible, what is out there, and can we reach it? Grann attempts to answer all of these questions in his book and does so in such a way that it becomes one of the most thrilling and exciting nonfiction books I’ve read recently. I highly recommend this book for fans of “Indiana Jones,” early 20th century history stories, and just those tired of sitting on their lounger at home and wondering whether or not they should drop everything and run off into the jungle. (Hint: PROBABLY NOT A GOOD IDEA TO RUN OFF INTO THE JUNGLE.)

9. LAURA NOGGLE reviews for The Lost City of Z

“Loneliness is not intolerable when enthusiasm for a quest fills the mind.”

I keep finding justifications for my (primarily) solitary life of reading and writing—as if I needed any further convincing.

“Exploration … no longer seemed aimed at some outward discovery; rather, it was directed inward …”

The Lost City of Z vacillated between a 3 and 4 star read. At times it felt like I was slogging through text right alongside the jungle trekkers. However, the ending was satisfactory enough to make me want to give the movie a chance.

There is something inherently romantic about the idea of lost cities and pilgrimages. Don’t we all feel that tug deep in our psyche? That perpetual urge to find/experience/accomplish/see/do/have the next unattainable thing, to catch the carrot that’s always dangling just out of reach?

“Civilization has a relatively precarious hold upon us and there is an undoubted attraction in a life of absolute freedom once it has been tasted. The ‘call o’ the wild’ is in the blood of many of us and finds its safety valve in adventure.”

Although I’m eternally grateful to be alive now, this era of adventure and exploration must have been an exciting time to be alive.

10. JULI reviews for The Lost City of Z

Percy Fawcett, a famous British explorer in the 20th century, disappeared into the Amazon jungle with his son and his son’s best friend in 1925. Fawcett was searching for an ancient lost city that he called Z. The 3 men were never seen again. Over the decades after their disappearance, several teams and even individuals ventured into the dense jungle to find the famed explorer. Some of them reappeared weeks or months later sick and emaciated, and some were never seen again. No real trace of Fawcett was ever found. Plenty of rumors and lies……but no bodies or real evidence as to their fate. Fawcett’s wife was never the same again. Flash forward to modern times, and New Yorker writer David Grann also goes to the Amazon jungle in search of evidence of Fawcett’s fate.

I love history and tales of the old style explorers….the men who trekked off into the unknown just because it was unknown. Not the sort of people who explored to make money, or to gain renown. But real explorers….the ones who mapped the world, discovered indigenous peoples and didn’t plot to murder them all or evangelize them, the ones who climbed, trekked and discovered new places just because they were there. Fawcett was one of these men. Unfortunately, as with many explorers, his belief in himself, his obsession with his quest and his feelings of invincibility eventually caught up with him — and he took two young men with him. He escaped fate multiple times…..but it catches up with everyone eventually. In 1925, he walked into the jungle in a valiant attempt to search for the Lost City of Z that he knew to his soul was there, and disappeared forever into the mysteries and tall tales that grow from such stories.

Just a head’s up for readers — this is not a fictionalized story. This is a non-fiction account of the history of exploration in the Amazon jungle, the story of Fawcett’s life and treks around the world, the fate of other explorers of the time, facts about his son and friend that went along on the 1925 trip, and the aftermath of the disappearance. There is also an accounting of David Grann’s trip to the Amazon to glean facts about the fate of Fawcett, the local indigenous peoples and how the area has changed since the 1920s. Readers who don’t like historical accounts of facts and information might want to pass this book by. But, for those who enjoy history….this story is awesome!! I loved this book! Anyone who enjoyed Douglas Preston’s recent book, The Lost City of the Monkey God, will also enjoy this book.

I listened to the audiobook version of this book. Read by Mark Deakins, the audio is just over 10 hours long. Deakins reads at a nice pace with an even, pleasant tone. I have hearing loss but was easily able to understand this entire book.

It is obvious that Grann did a lot of detailed research into Amazon exploration, Fawcett and many other treks around the world at the time. He gives details of Fawcett’s journals and news stories from the time, and information gleaned from Amazon natives and others. Such an interesting and intriguing story!!

Because the book includes information gleaned from writings, journals and other sources from the time, there are some racist overtones in portions of this story. Many scientists, explorers, politicians, journalists — hell, even the general white populus — viewed indigenous peoples (or people of color in general) as lesser human beings, stating that there is no possible way they ever created a large society because it would be impossible for them to do so. At times as I listened, I found myself making snarky remarks to these long-dead idiots. Some of those old views were what started horrible and asinine beliefs/movements like eugenics, or cultural destruction by evangelization. Oh, we are white and must go to these countries and whitesplain to the natives that they are inferior, and must mold to our moral ideals or perish. Blah, blah, blah. What a load of racist crap. My take on the entire matter is this: how could anyone believe themselves superior to people who can survive and thrive in the most hazardous and inhospitable parts of the world when the whites who ventured there died in droves?? But as they were venturing into the jungle and dying of disease, starvation, accidents, predation, and native attacks, they wholeheartedly believed themselves freaking superior because of the color of their skin and their fat, sheltered lives in the modern world. Really?? Seems to me the people that can survive and feed themselves in that place are the superior ones.

Amazon has released an original movie based on this book. I wanted to watch it, but had to follow my rule of always reading the book first. Now that I’ve read the book, I can enjoy the film! 🙂 I hope it keeps the integrity of Grann’s research and doesn’t fall into over-grandizing fiction, rather than the interesting true facts of the case.

David Grann is the author of several books including The Devil & Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness & Obsession. I’m definitely going to be reading more of his books!

III. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon Quotes

The best book quotes from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

“Heckenberger told me that he had just published his research, in a book called The Ecology of Power.”

“Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, and his name was known throughout the world.”

“Those whom the Gods intend to destroy they first make mad!”

“Years later, another member [of the Royal Geographical Society] conceded, “Explorers are not, perhaps, the most promising people with whom to build a society. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men.”

“Loneliness is not intolerable when enthusiasm for a quest fills the mind.”

“…much of the discovery of the world was based on failure rather than on success–on tactical errors and pipe dreams.”

“Does God think that, because it is raining, I am not going to destroy the world? – Lope de Aguirre after going mad in the Amazon”

“Fawcett, quoting a companion, wrote that cannibalism “at least provides a reasonable motive for killing a man, which is more than you can say for civilized warfare.”

“Anthropologists,” Heckenberger said, “made the mistake of coming into the Amazon in the twentieth century and seeing only small tribes and saying, ‘Well, that’s all there is.’ The problem is that, by then, many Indian populations had already been wiped out by what was essentially a holocaust from European contact. That’s why the first Europeans in the Amazon described such massive settlements that, later, no one could ever find.”

“Many accidents happen to white people because they don’t believe their dreams.”

“You know, I had a lot of romantic notions about the jungle and this kind of finished that”

“Exploration…no longer seemed aimed at some outward discovery; rather, it was directed inward…”

“Society, in other words, is a captive of geography.”

“While most of my articles seem unrelated, they typically have one common thread: obsession. They are about ordinary people driven to do extraordinary things—things that most of us would never dare—who get some germ of an idea in their heads that metastasizes until it consumes them.”

“Civilization has a relatively precarious hold upon us and there is an undoubted attraction in a life of absolute freedom once it has been tasted. The ‘call o’ the wild’ is in the blood of many of us and finds its safety valve in adventure.”

“Explorers are not, perhaps, the most promising people with whom to build a society. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men.”

“They marched like madmen from place to place, until overcome by exhaustion and lack of strength they could no longer move from one side to the other, and they remained there, wherever this sad siren voice had summoned them, self-important, and dead.”

“The rise of science in the nineteenth century had had a paradoxical effect: while it undermined faith in Christianity and the literal word of the Bible, it also created an enormous void for someone to explain the mysteries of the universe that lay beyond microbes and evolution and capitalist greed.”

“It was the greatest loss of life in the history of the British military, and many in the West began to portray the “savage” as European rather than as some native in the jungle.”

“The rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary, but rather the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day.”

“Instead, the terrain looked like Nebraska—perpetual plains that faded into the horizon. When I asked Taukane where the forest was, he said, simply, “Gone.”

“In 2006, members of a nomadic tribe called Nukak-Makú emerged from the Amazon in Colombia and announced that they were ready to join the modern world, though they were unaware that Colombia was a country and asked if the planes overhead were on an invisible road.”

“my experience is that when undergoing severe physical labor the mind is not at all active. One thinks of the particular problem in hand or perhaps the mind just wanders not performing coherent thought. As to missing various phases of civilized life, one has no time to miss anything save food or sleep or rest. In short one becomes little more than a rational animal.”

“Fawcett agreed that El Dorado, with its plethora of gold, was an “exaggerated romance,” but he was not ready to dismiss the chronicles altogether”

“But by 1925 Fawcett had filled his papers with reams of delirious writings about the end of the world and about a mystical Atlantean kingdom, which resembled the Garden of Eden. Z was transformed into “the cradle of all civilizations” and the center of one of Blavatsky’s “White Lodges,” where a group of higher spiritual beings helped to direct the fate of the universe.”

“Fawcett could never take the final leap of a modern anthropologist and accept that complex civilizations were capable of springing up independently of each other.”

“environmental determinism. According to this theory, even if some early humans eked out an existence in the harshest conditions on the planet, they rarely advanced beyond a few primitive tribes. Society, in other words, is a captive of geography.”

“abstinence pamphlets disseminated in the countryside instructing mothers to “keep a watchful eye on the hayfields.”

“Darwin’s theory, laid out in On the Origin of Species in 1859, suggested that people and apes shared a common ancestor, and, coupled with recent discoveries of fossils revealing that humans had been on earth far longer than the Bible stated, helped irrevocably to sever anthropology from theology.”

Excerpted from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

Chapter 1 – WE SHALL RETURN

On a cold January day in 1925, a tall, distinguished gentleman hurried across the docks in Hoboken, New Jersey, toward the S.S. Vauban, a five-hundred-and-eleven-foot ocean liner bound for Rio de Janeiro. He was fifty-seven years old, and stood over six feet, his long arms corded with muscles.

Although his hair was thinning and his mustache was flecked with white, he was so fit that he could walk for days with little, if any, rest or nourishment. His nose was crooked like a boxer’s, and there was something ferocious about his appearance, especially his eyes. They were set close together and peered out from under thick tufts of hair. No one, not even his family, seemed to agree on their color-some thought they were blue, others gray. Yet virtually everyone who encountered him was struck by their intensity: some called them “the eyes of a visionary.” He had frequently been photographed in riding boots and wearing a Stetson, with a rifle slung over his shoulder, but even in a suit and a tie, and without his customary wild beard, he could be recognized by the crowds on the pier. He was Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, and his name was known throughout the world.

He was the last of the great Victorian explorers who ventured into uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose. For nearly two decades, stories of his adventures had captivated the public’s imagination: how he had survived in the South American wilderness without contact with the outside world; how he was ambushed by hostile tribesmen, many of whom had never before seen a white man; how he battled piranha, electric eels, jaguars, crocodiles, vampire bats, and anacondas, including one that almost crushed him; and how he emerged with maps of regions from which no previous expedition had returned. He was renowned as the “David Livingstone of the Amazon,” and was believed to have such unrivaled powers of endurance that a few colleagues even claimed he was immune to death. An American explorer described him as “a man of indomitable will, infinite resource, fearless”; another said that he could “outwalk and outhike and outexplore anybody else.” The London Geographical Journal, the pre-eminent publication in its field, observed in 1953 that “Fawcett marked the end of an age. One might almost call him the last of the individualist explorers. The day of the aeroplane, the radio, the organized and heavily financed modern expedition had not arrived. With him, it was the heroic story of a man against the forest.”

In 1916, the Royal Geographical Society had awarded him, with the blessing of King George V, a gold medal “for his contributions to the mapping of South America.” And every few years, when he emerged from the jungle, spidery thin and bedraggled, dozens of scientists and luminaries would pack into the Society’s hall to hear him speak. Among them was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was said to have drawn on Fawcett’s experiences for his 1912 book The Lost World, in which explorers “disappear into the unknown” of South America and find, on a remote plateau, a land where dinosaurs have escaped extinction.

As Fawcett made his way to the gangplank that day in January, he eerily resembled one of the book’s protagonists, Lord John Roxton:
Something there was of Napoleon III, something of Don Quixote, and yet again something which was the essence of the English country gentleman._._._._He has a gentle voice and a quiet manner, but behind his twinkling blue eyes there lurks a capacity for furious wrath and implacable resolution, the more dangerous because they are held in leash.

None of Fawcett’s previous expeditions compared with what he was about to do, and he could barely conceal his impatience, as he fell into line with the other passengers boarding the S.S. Vauban. The ship, advertised as “the finest in the world,” was part of the Lamport & Holt elite “V” class. The Germans had sunk several of the company’s ocean liners during the First World War, but this one had survived, with its black, salt-streaked hull and elegant white decks and striped funnel billowing smoke into the sky. Model T Fords shepherded passengers to the dock, where longshoremen helped cart luggage into the ship’s hold. Many of the male passengers wore silk ties and bowler hats; women had on fur coats and feathered caps, as if they were attending a society event, which, in some ways, they were-the passenger lists of luxury ocean liners were chronicled in gossip columns and scoured by young girls searching for eligible bachelors.

Fawcett pushed forward with his gear. His trunks were loaded with guns, canned food, powdered milk, flares, and handcrafted machetes. He also carried a kit of surveying instruments: a sextant and a chronometer for determining latitude and longitude, an aneroid for measuring atmospheric pressure, and a glycerin compass that could fit in his pocket. Fawcett had chosen each item based on years of experience; even the clothes he had packed were made of lightweight, tear-proof gabardine. He had seen men die from the most innocuous seeming oversight-a torn net, a boot that was too tight.

Fawcett was setting out into the Amazon, a wilderness nearly the size of the continental United States, to make what he called “the great discovery of the century”-a lost civilization. By then, most of the world had been explored, its veil of enchantment lifted, but the Amazon remained as mysterious as the dark side of the moon. As Sir John Scott Keltie, the former secretary of the Royal Geographical Society and one of the world’s most acclaimed geographers at the time, noted, “What is there no one knows.”

Ever since Francisco de Orellana and his army of Spanish conquistadores descended the Amazon River, in 1542, perhaps no place on the planet had so ignited the imagination-or lured men to their death. Gaspar de Carvajal, a Dominican friar who accompanied Orellana, described woman warriors in the jungle who resembled the mythical Greek Amazons. Half a century later, Sir Walter Raleigh spoke of Indians with “their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts”-a legend that Shakespeare wove into Othello:
Of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.

What was true about the region-serpents as long as trees, rodents the size of pigs-was sufficiently beyond belief that no embellishment seemed too fanciful. And the most entrancing vision of all was of El Dorado. Raleigh claimed that the kingdom, which the conquistadores had heard about from Indians, was so plentiful in gold that its inhabitants ground the metal into powder and blew it “thorow hollow canes upon their naked bodies untill they be al shining from the foote to the head.”

Yet each expedition that had tried to find El Dorado ended in disaster. Carvajal, whose party had been searching for the kingdom, wrote in his diary, “We reached a [state of] privation so great that we were eating nothing but leather, belts and soles of shoes, cooked with certain herbs, with the result that so great was our weakness that we could not remain standing.” Some four thousand men died during that expedition alone, of starvation and disease, and at the hands of Indians defending their territory with arrows dipped in poison. Other El Dorado parties resorted to cannibalism. Many explorers went mad. In 1561, Lope de Aguirre led his men on a murderous rampage, screaming, “Does God think that, because it is raining, I am not going to_._._._destroy the world?” Aguirre even stabbed his own child, whispering, “Commend thyself to God, my daughter, for I am about to kill thee.” Before the Spanish crown sent forces to stop him, Aguirre warned in a letter, “I swear to you, King, on my word as a Christian, that if a hundred thousand men came, none would escape. For the reports are false: there is nothing on that river but despair.” Aguirre’s companions finally rose up and killed him; his body was quartered, and Spanish authorities displayed the head of the “Wrath of God” in a steel cage. Still, for three centuries, expeditions continued to search, until, after a toll of death and suffering worthy of Joseph Conrad, most archeologists had concluded that El Dorado was no more than a delusion.

Fawcett, however, was certain that the Amazon contained a fabulous kingdom, and he was not another soldier of fortune or a crackpot. A man of science, he had spent years gathering evidence to prove his case-digging up artifacts, studying petroglyphs, and interviewing tribes. And after fierce battles with skeptics Fawcett had received funding from the most respected scientific institutions, including the Royal Geographical Society, the American Geographical Society, and the Museum of the American Indian. Newspapers were proclaiming that Fawcett would soon startle the world. The Atlanta Constitution declared, “It is perhaps the most hazardous and certainly the most spectacular adventure of the kind ever undertaken by a reputable scientist with the backing of conservative scientific bodies.”

Fawcett had concluded that an ancient, highly cultured people still existed in the Brazilian Amazon and that their civilization was so old and sophisticated it would forever alter the Western view of the Americas. He had christened this lost world the City of Z. “The central place I call ‘Z’-our main objective-is in a valley_._._._about ten miles wide, and the city is on an eminence in the middle of it, approached by a barreled roadway of stone,” Fawcett had stated earlier. “The houses are low and windowless, and there is a pyramidal temple.”

Reporters on the dock in Hoboken, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, shouted questions, hoping to learn the location of Z. In the wake of the technological horrors of the Great War, and amid the spread of urbanization and industrialization, few events so captivated the world. One newspaper exulted, “Not since the days when Ponce de Le—n crossed the unknown Florida in search of the Waters of Perpetual Youth_._._._has a more alluring adventure been planned.”

Fawcett welcomed “the fuss,” as he described it in a letter to a friend, but he was careful about how he responded. He knew that his main rival, Alexander Hamilton Rice, a multimillionaire American doctor who commanded vast resources, was already entering the jungle with an unprecedented array of equipment. The prospect of Dr. Rice finding Z terrified Fawcett. Several years earlier, Fawcett had watched as a colleague from the Royal Geographical Society, Robert Falcon Scott, had set out to become the first explorer to reach the South Pole, only to discover, shortly before he froze to death, that his Norwegian rival, Roald Amundsen, had beaten him by thirty-three days. In a recent letter to the Royal Geographical Society, Fawcett wrote, “I cannot say all I know, or even be precise as to locality, for these things leak out, and there can be nothing so bitter to the pioneer as to find the crown of his work anticipated.”

He was also afraid that if he released details of his route, and others attempted to find Z or rescue him, it would result in countless deaths. An expedition of fourteen hundred armed men had previously vanished in the same region. A news bulletin telegraphed around the globe declared, “Fawcett Expedition_._._._to Penetrate Land Whence None Returned.” And Fawcett, who was resolved to reach the most inaccessible areas, did not intend, like other explorers, to go by boat; rather, he planned to hack straight through the jungle on foot. The Royal Geographical Society had warned that Fawcett “is about the only living geographer who could successfully attempt” such an expedition and that “it would be hopeless for any people to follow in his footsteps.” Before he left England, Fawcett confided to his younger son, Brian, “If with all my experience we can’t make it, there’s not much hope for others.”

As reporters clamored around him, Fawcett explained that only a small expedition would have any chance of survival. It would be able to live off the land, and not pose a threat to hostile Indians. The expedition, he had stated, “will be no pampered exploration party, with an army of bearers, guides and cargo animals. Such top-heavy expeditions get nowhere; they linger on the fringe of civilization and bask in publicity. Where the real wilds start, bearers are not to be had anyway, for fear of the savages. Animals cannot be taken because of lack of pasture and the attack of insects and bats. There are no guides, for no one knows the country. It is a matter of cutting equipment to the absolute minimum, carrying it all oneself, and trusting that one will be able to exist by making friends with the various tribes one meets.” He now added, “We will have to suffer every form of exposure._._._._We will have to achieve a nervous and mental resistance, as well as physical, as men under these conditions are often broken by their minds succumbing before their bodies.”

Fawcett had chosen only two people to go with him: his twenty-one-year-old son, Jack, and Jack’s best friend, Raleigh Rimell. Although they had never been on an expedition, Fawcett believed that they were ideal for the mission: tough, loyal, and, because they were so close, unlikely, after months of isolation and suffering, “to harass and persecute each other”-or, as was common on such expeditions, to mutiny. Jack was, as his brother Brian put it, “the reflection of his father”: tall, frighteningly fit, and ascetic. Neither he nor his father smoked cigarettes or drank. Brian noted that Jack’s “six feet three inches were sheer bone and muscle, and the three chief agents of bodily degeneration-alcohol, tobacco and loose living-were revolting to him.” Colonel Fawcett, who followed a strict Victorian code, put it slightly differently: “He is_._._._absolutely virgin in mind and body.”

Jack, who had wanted to accompany his father on an expedition since he was a boy, had spent years preparing-lifting weights, maintaining a rigid diet, studying Portuguese, and learning how to navigate by the stars. Still, he had suffered little real deprivation, and his face, with its luminescent skin, crisp mustache, and slick brown hair, betrayed none of the hardness of his father’s. With his stylish clothes, he looked more like a movie star, which is what he hoped to become upon his triumphant return.

Raleigh, though smaller than Jack, was still nearly six feet tall and muscular. (A “fine physique,” Fawcett told the R.G.S.) His father had been a surgeon in the Royal Navy and had died of cancer in 1917, when Raleigh was fifteen. Dark-haired, with a pronounced widow’s peak and a riverboat gambler’s mustache, Raleigh had a jocular, mischievous nature. “He was a born clown,” said Brian Fawcett, the “perfect counterpart of the serious Jack.” The two boys had been virtually inseparable since they roamed the Devonshire countryside around Seaton, England, where they grew up, riding bicycles and shooting rifles in the air. In a letter to one of Fawcett’s confidants, Jack wrote, “Now we have Raleigh Rimell on board who is every bit as keen as I am._._._._He is the only intimate friend I have ever had. I knew him before I was seven years old and we have been more or less together ever since. He is absolutely honest and decent in every sense of the word and we know each other inside out.”

….

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