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

I recently finished The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. I mentioned the book in an earlier post, I think. In any case, it is about the late 19th, early 20th century Amazon explorer, Percy Fawcett. I enjoyed the book. It mixes a biography of Fawcett with the story of the author’s attempt to follow in his footsteps to some degree.

Fawcett made numerous trips into the Amazon before finally disappearing in 1925 at the age of 58 with his son and his son’s friend in an expedition where he was determined to find “The Lost City of Z” which may or may not have been the inspiration for the legend of El Dorado.

A couple of thoughts: First, the Amazon seems like an absolutely horrible place to be an explorer. I guess by the time Fawcett came along, all of the less daunting unmapped place on earth had been covered. He had to hack through a trackless mass of jungle with danger and disease always present. Pack animals did not last very long. Food was difficult for non-natives to locate. Fawcett himself seems to have had a freakish constitution. He rarely seemed to get sick while those with him were constantly being debilitated and dying because of various tropical ailments.

Second, I think maybe it was the radio that really eliminated the frontier. Sure, people were getting better and better at charting the previously uncharted places on earth. But, at the end of the day, I don’t think having maps or books or knowledge of a place was instrumental in removing the other-worldly mystery of those distant lands. Rather, it seems as if it may have been the almost instant communication that removed the romance.

Fawcett’s rival, Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice, took a different approach to exploration from Fawcett. Where Fawcett was a minimally funded, individualist explorer. Rice had an enormous fortune to draw from, organized large scale expeditions, and used the newest available technology to explore the Amazon. Of note were his use of radios and airplanes. Daily dispatches from the Amazon really changed the game. Rather than having a guy disappear for two years and then stagger out of the jungle half-dead to tell his tale, you had day-to-day reports of progress and observations. The airplane was also, obviously, a game changer — instead of hacking away under the dense canopy, you could get a bird’s eye view of the Amazon.

But, in my mind, real-time communication is really what changed far off places from something other worldly into a real part of our world. Part of this notion has to do with my feeble impression of exploration — traveling from Indiana out to the Rocky Mountain West with my buddy Tom. (Known to folks around here as “T”). We started roaming Colorado and surrounding areas about 1994. Back then, there wasn’t wide cell phone availability — in any case, we didn’t have any. Our connection to home was Tom’s occasional call back to his folks at some random payphone. To some extent, when we got back to Indiana, it felt like we had been on the moon in terms of our contact with friends and family during the trip. By 1999, this communication cut off was eroded by the Internet. During our trip to Rocky Mountain National Park, I recall finding a library at nearby Estes Park with Internet access, and being able to report on our progress to Amy back in Indiana. (We still didn’t have cell phones.) Our trips to Yosemite in 2003 and to various parts of Colorado in 2007 were much different in terms of communication. Cell phones had us in touch with our wives almost daily. Heck, that trip in 2007, I was blogging my progress and briefly had cell phone reception on top of La Plata peak at 14,300 feet. The feeling of being cut off from friends and family back home had pretty much been eliminated.

Anyway, the Lost City of Z is a pretty good read if you like history, biography, and/or tales of exploration.