The Endless Allure of El Dorado

Following in the Footsteps of a British Explorer Who Vanished in the Brazilian Jungle

Percy Harrison Fawcett, the affection-starved son of an independently wealthy Devon cricketer, joined the British army, got "slightly gassed" during World War I, surveyed Bolivia, went quietly mad, devoted his middle years to searching for the Lost Cities of the Brazilian rainforest and, while doing so in 1925, vanished.

Men who go missing -- think Livingstone, Scott, Shackleton -- are much beloved in the British Isles. Col. Fawcett's story gripped the nation for years: Expeditions were sent to look for him; contrite Brazilian Indians offered up bones, strips of cloth and wristwatches that may have been his; and others told stories of how he had been clubbed to death or tossed into the Xingu River by their recent ancestors. His widow, Cheeky, still alive when I was a schoolboy, to her very last kept up pressure to find her long-lost husband. But his fate remains unknown, and his Lost City -- of which Arthur Conan Doyle made much, with the Professor Challenger of his novels based largely on Fawcett -- remains unfound.
[Percy Fawcett mapping the frontier between Brazil and Bolivia in 1908.] Royal Geographical Society

Numberless books and articles have over the past 80 years retold a story that is known to British audiences to the point of tedium but less familiar here in America. Now in the hands of David Grann, an amusingly self-deprecating Brooklyn nerd on the staff of the New Yorker, it is brought vividly alive once more in "The Lost City of Z."

So good is his recounting of the yarn that no less a luminary than Brad Pitt is said to be interested in a film version. Since poisoned arrows, cannibalism, impenetrable canopies of rainforest, incomprehensible maps, utility-pole-size pythons, stiff upper lips, gray-bearded geographers, steam packets, naked jungle folk and incessant drumming -- as well as possibly the aforementioned Mr. Pitt -- all figure boldly in the epic, it is not hard to imagine Hollywood backer-types feeling the near-certainty of commercial reward.

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.

Fawcett had first read about the supposed city in 1920, while researching the El Dorado legend in the manuscript department of the National Library of Brazil, in Rio. He came across a slim and rather beautiful book, its fabric pages half-eaten by ants and worms. It had apparently been written by an 18th-century Portuguese mercenary and gold-seeking adventurer offering an account of his discovery in the heart of the jungle of "a large, hidden, and very ancient city."

Fawcett was certain that the document was genuine (so was the explorer Richard Burton, who also saw it and translated it). Though others have not been so sure (could a mere gold prospector have mastered such impeccable calligraphy?), the account swiftly became the fons et origo of Fawcett's fatal obsession. He persuaded the Brazilian government and the Royal Geographical Society in London to help fund a series of expeditions to go and look for the city, which he somewhat unimaginatively called "Z." Six months after first reading the bandeirante's account, he was axing his way merrily through the remote jungles of an Amazon tributary, at the start of what would be five years of incessant questing.

Mr. Grann -- with his kindly sounding wife clearly fretting that the degenerative eye condition from which he suffers might make it tricky for him to avoid pythons and poisoned darts and so advising him not to be "stupid" while up-country -- went off to Rio to examine the same book. He found himself as convinced by it as Fawcett and Burton had been 80 years before and promptly thrust his exercise-averse body off into the jungle to look for Z himself. Before venturing to Brazil he also went to London to ferret through the well-thumbed RGS archives and then cleverly found, living in a Welsh bungalow, one of Fawcett's descendants, who let him look at her grandfather's diaries. (They turned out to be amusing but perhaps a little less valuable to the quest than the book's publicist would have us believe.)
[The Lost City of Z]

The Lost City of Z

Mr. Grann's accounts of his travels in central Brazil -- where he had a GPS device and satellite phone, ate freeze-dried chicken teriyaki, traveled in planes and SUVs, and suffered rather fewer hardships (other than getting muddy and pricked by thorns) than his illustrious predecessor -- are somewhat less successful than his well-wrought and occasionally funny historical account of the Fawcett saga. The characters he encounters are rather smaller than life: His guide was a samba dancer who dresses up as an explorer; his jungle Indians, who watch Woody Woodpecker on TV, seem more interested in coming to Manhattan than in hearing the story of Fawcett; and his expedition adviser turns out to be a smooth São Paolo banker wannabe who took a trip into the jungle in 1996 only to get his party detained and then released on payment of a derisory ransom.

Then again, and crucially, the author also encounters anthropological theories (with which South America is all too replete) that lead him to end the book all too fancifully. I found it tricky, for instance, to judge Michael Heckenberger, the Florida anthropology professor he meets in mid-jungle. In an online description of his work of 13 years in Brazil, Mr. Heckenberger says that it "requires a commitment to holistic and deeply contextual research and interpretation" and "is not framed in opposition to 'positivist' viewpoints, whether evolutionist or functionalist." But Mr. Grann has few doubts and seizes on his theories -- all too readily -- as a neat way to conclude his own search.

For when the bouffant-haired professor shows him what he insists is an ancient moat cut through the jungle and goes on to display other relics that, Mr. Grann says, "were, clearly, the remains of a massive man-made landscape," the author drinks the Kool-Aid lustily. "I began to picture the flutists and dancers . . . crossing moats and passing through tall palisade fences . . . along wide boulevards and bridges. . . . I could see this vanished world as if it were right in front of me. Z."

Oh, please. It is all just too pat, too wanting in healthy skepticism. Sure, after all the mud and scratched knees and far too many astronaut dinners, Mr. Grann surely wanted to go home to Brooklyn. But I wish he had lingered and considered the legacy of the poor, mad and utterly memorable Percy Harrison Fawcett. Though Brad Pitt might never notice, it would have made for an even better book.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123569217402288043.html?mod=googlenews_wsj