Three-quarters of the way through a book which attempts to solve the mystery of missing Amazonian jungle explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett, the author interviews an elderly Indian woman who was possibly one of the last to ever see him alive. After the interview, this exchange:
"Before we said goodbye, she remembered something else about Fawcett. For years, she said, other people came from far away to ask about the missing explorers. She stared at me, her narrow eyes widening. 'What is it that these white people did?' she asked. 'Why is it so important for their tribe to find them?'"
That's a good question, and David Grann's book The Lost City of Z: a Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon tells the story of Grann's own obsession with finding Fawcett, along with a history of others who tried.
Grann is hardly alone. Since Fawcett, his son, and his son's best friend left for South America in 1925 and vanished, explorers from all over the world have tried to find them, including Germans, Italians, Russians, Argentines, Brazilians, Americans, and even the brother of Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond). The obsession is easy to understand; Fawcett himself was a highly experience, extremely rugged and devoted explorer. How did he go astray?
There's also the heartbreaking angle of Fawcett's son and friend, both eager to explore--but neither of whom had ever explored before.
Finally, there's the point of the quest itself: the lost city of El Dorado (or, as Fawcett cryptically referred to it, the city of Z). He believed it to be a city not only of gold and treasures, but one that would disprove scientific beliefs of the time that held that the massive jungles could not provide a living space for Indian tribes, nor could it allow them to develop into advanced societies.
Fawcett made numerous attempts to find the city of Z, and all of them involved months of peril and hardship (not to mention many distressing encounters with all manner of dangerous creatures). He nearly bankrupted his family, focused on the goal of proving his hypothesis. Those who eventually searched for him were equally obsessed, both with finding him and finding the city of Z, yet time and time again, they failed.
Does Grann succeed? I'm not going to tell you--I don't like to give spoilers. He's written a book that's an engaging read, although veering back and forth from past to present at times is confusing, and it would have been interesting to hear more about what Grann's wife had to say of his travels, since she was essentially a modern counterpart to Nina Fawcett. Great literature? No. Fun, entertaining, informative read? Yes.
