What Happened To Percy Fawcett? The Explorer Who Went In Search “The Lost City Of Z”

Despite warnings and several setbacks, including a stint at war, his final expedition to the Amazon saw him venture into Brazil’s Mato Grosso with his son and a friend in 1925. The trio of explorers were never seen again.

There are all kinds of theories as to what happened to them, from starvation to disease and even encounters with cannibals. “Remains” discovered have since been dismissed, and it seems their fate is likely to remain a mystery. As for The City Of Z? Though many dismissed his beliefs, recent LiDAR scans in Bolivia’s Llanos de Moxos have revealed vast pre-Columbian urban landscapes, featuring vast structures and water systems and proving that the Amazon rainforest did conceal an ancient lost city.

Who was Percy Fawcett?

Born in Torquay in 1867, Percy Fawcett joined the Royal Artillery age 19, visiting outposts of the British Empire until joining the Royal Geographical Society of London for an expedition to survey unmapped areas of South America. His first expedition was in 1906, centuries after Spanish conquistadors had spread rumors of El Dorado, a mythical city of gold inspired by Indigenous oral traditions. 

Fawcett made seven expeditions across the Amazon basin in total, with his last – the one he would not return from – ending in 1925. Initially, he set out to conduct his work as a cartographer, but he became increasingly obsessed with legends of a lost civilization, and the discovery of sites like Machu Picchu in Peru further fueled his conviction that there was something huge to be found hidden in the dense rainforest.

He was up against it in trying to persuade anyone back home, however, as this was a time when in the eyes of Europeans, the Indigenous peoples of Amazonia weren’t capable of culture. Of course, we’ve found plenty of evidence to the contrary, but more on that later.

What happened to Percy Fawcett?

Fawcett’s doomed expedition unfolded in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil in 1925. Although Manuscript 512 had pointed to a location in northeastern Brazil (what we know today as Bahia), he was convinced the city lay elsewhere. He set off from a place he’d dubbed Dead Horse Camp accompanied by his son, Jack, and Jack’s best friend, Raleigh Rimmell. In the epilogue of Exploration Fawcett, his other son, Brian, shared his father’s final letter:

Here we are at Dead Horse Camp[…] the spot where my horse died in 1920. Only his white bones remain. We can bathe ourselves here, but the insects make it a matter of great haste. Nevertheless, the season is good. It is very cold at night, and fresh in the morning; but insects and heat come by mid-day, and from then till six o’clock in the evening it is sheer misery in camp. You need have no fear of any failure…

“Those last words he wrote to my mother come to me like an echo across the twenty-six years that have elapsed since then,” wrote Brian. “You need have no fear of any failure…”

It was the last anyone ever heard from Colonel Percy Fawcett and his traveling companions. In 1928, a search party retraced their steps but found no sign of them. Some suspected they were killed by Indigenous groups, though others noted Fawcett had long tried to build respectful relationships with the Indigenous People he met. In 1952, anthropologist Orlando Villas-Bôas claimed to have found Fawcett’s remains, but forensic tests later disproved the claim.

Fawcett himself had documented the many dangers of jungle travel: disease, starvation, and impassable terrain. In Exploration Fawcett, he even recorded warnings from the Maxubí people about a potentially hostile group:

In about ten days we could exchange ideas with the Maxubis in their own language, and it was then that they told us of a tribe of cannibals to the north – the Maricoxis. ‘Vincha Maricoxi chimbibi coco!” they said – to give you a sample of their speech. ‘If you visit the Maricoxis you will be food for the pot!’ A gruesome pantomime accompanied the warning.

His own expeditions were a testament to the many dangers you face deep in the rainforest. Fawcett himself almost starved to death during one expedition, and he lost several traveling companions to illness along the way. The truth is that, to this day, their fate remains a mystery.

A mysterious artifact

Though a man of science in many ways, Fawcett was also open minded when it came to seeking more spiritual sources of information. In his efforts to find The Lost City Of Z, he even employed the help of a psychometrist (“a method that may evoke scorn from many people, but is widely accepted by others who have managed to keep their minds free from prejudice,” he wrote).

The psychometrist held a piece of black basalt with a depiction of a figure with a plaque on its chest inscribed with a number of characters. Sir H Rider Haggard had found it in Brazil and gave it to Fawcett, who wrote “I firmly believe that it came from one of the lost cities”.

So, what did our psychometrist make of it? They held it in one hand and in the other wrote of “elaborate temples” with “projecting facades and supported by beautifully carved columns”. Here, sacrifices were made to a great eye over an altar, until a day of retribution came and the majority of inhabitants were drowned or destroyed by earthquakes. “I can get no definite date of the catastrophe, but it was long prior to the rise of Egypt, and has since been forgotten – except, perhaps, in myth.”

They described Fawcett’s black basalt figure as “a maleficent possession to those not in affinity with it, and I should say it is dangerous to laugh at.” Fawcett decided it was the key to the secret of The Lost City Of Z and vowed to take it on his next expedition.

Was the Lost City Of Z real?

At the time of Fawcett’s expeditions, the idea that complex civilizations could thrive in the Amazon was largely dismissed, but a century later, modern science is rewriting that narrative.

As reported in a 2022 paper, archaeologists using LiDAR, a laser-based scanning technology, mapped the southern Llanos de Moxos region of the Bolivian Amazon. Beneath the forest canopy they saw signs of vast interconnected settlements with monumental terraces, pyramids 22 meters (72 feet) high, canals, and reservoirs. At last, evidence of a highly organized, urbanized society. The study indicates that the settlements date from approximately 500 CE to 1400 CE, when this portion of the Bolivian Amazon was home to the Casarabe culture.

The largest site, Cotoca, was built atop artificial terraces covering 22 hectares (54.4 acres, or around 30 football fields), connected by straight causeways. The scale of labor needed to construct Cotoca rivals some of the greatest known earthworks in the Americas, being larger than Tiwanaku’s Akapana pyramid and nearly the size of Cahokia’s Monks Mound in North America.

These settlements, spread across 4,500 square kilometers, form what’s known as low-density urbanism: expansive city networks interwoven with water systems and open space that were radically different from the compact cities of Mesopotamia or the Mediterranean. They were monumentally larger than previously known Amazonian structures, reshaping outdated views of how ancient Indigenous Amazonians lived. 

Once regarded as an untouched wilderness, the Amazon has proven to be a managed landscape that’s been shaped by human activity for millennia. Unfortunately, that influence has changed radically in recent years into something that threatens the Amazon rainforest’s survival.

The real treasure

When searching for lost civilizations, Hollywood likes to lean in the direction of towering pillars of gold, but in the Amazon, there’s a different kind of treasure that reveals how humans have been shaping the rainforest. Terra preta, or “dark earth”, was a key discovery in understanding how Indigenous peoples found a way to feed themselves in a forest where the soil is typically too acidic to support sustainable agriculture. 

By combining the earth with charcoal, organic matter, and even bits of pottery, they created fertile ground, some of which sampled today has been dated back to 5,000 years ago, and we’ve found evidence of early crop domestication (something Henry Ford’s Fordlândia proved isn’t easy to do). Indigenous Amazonian peoples alive today continue to be a wealth of knowledge when it comes to practices that could see humans living harmoniously with the Amazon, but a surge in illegal mining and deforestation for cattle farming is pushing the ecosystem to the brink.

It’s crisis that threatens us all because if we lose the Amazon rainforest, the climate consequences will be felt far and wide. As Dom Phillip’s set out to demonstrate in his book, How To Save The Amazon, it’s this Indigenous knowledge that could pull it back from the brink if only we could get the right people to listen. 

As for The Lost City Of Z, the Bolivian sites prove that Fawcett’s belief in an ancient Amazonian city wasn’t fantasy, but ahead of its time. He was just searching for the wrong kind of treasure.