The Lost City of Z [electronic resource] : A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

Title:

Author:

Grann, David.

Description:

-- Look for David Grann’s latest bestselling book, The Wager!

Publisher:

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group,

Date:

2009

Digital Format:

CLOUDLIBRARY EPUB

Language:

English

Summary

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From the author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager comes a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction "with all the pace and excitement of a movie thriller"( The New York Times ) 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.

"[Grann is] one of the preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today."-- New York Magazine

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.

Look for David Grann's latest bestselling book, The Wager !

Reviews (5)

Publisher's Weekly Review

In 1925, renowned British explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett embarked on a much publicized search to find the city of Z, site of an ancient Amazonian civilization that may or may not have existed. Fawcett, along with his grown son Jack, never returned, but that didn't stop countless others, including actors, college professors and well-funded explorers from venturing into the jungle to find Fawcett or the city. Among the wannabe explorers is Grann, a staff writer for the New Yorker, who has bad eyes and a worse sense of direction. He became interested in Fawcett while researching another story, eventually venturing into the Amazon to satisfy his all-consuming curiosity about the explorer and his fatal mission. Largely about Fawcett, the book examines the stranglehold of passion as Grann's vigorous research mirrors Fawcett's obsession with uncovering the mysteries of the jungle. By interweaving the great story of Fawcett with his own investigative escapades in South America and Britain, Grann provides an in-depth, captivating character study that has the relentless energy of a classic adventure tale. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Percy Fawcett, a celebrated member of the Royal Geographical Society, explored the Amazon the hard way: on foot, hacking his way through the jungle. Single-minded and exceptionally tough, he captured the imagination of a public hungry for tales of far-off adventure. His exploits were widely reported, especially when he told of his belief in a lost city enigmatically, he called it Z that would offer proof an advanced civilization had once thrived despite the region's hostile environment. In 1925, having vowed to find Z, he disappeared into the jungle and was never seen again. Grann, of the New Yorker, was no outdoorsman. But captivated by the story, he joined the ranks of the Fawcett Freaks, determined to discover the explorer's fate. (It is estimated that more than 100 people have lost their lives trying to find out how Fawcett lost his.) He interweaves Fawcett's story with rich period detail and an account of his own trip to the receding jungle. The historical passages, peerlessly researched, are the best; the first-person parts could have been a useful way of illustrating the tale's irresistible lure but compared to Fawcett's relentless monomania and astonishing travels, Grann's own journey pales. The device pays off in the final scene, however, when, through Grann's own eyes, we experience the thrill of discovery and learn that Percy Fawcett just may have been right all along.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2008 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

WHAT drove the British, from the start of the age of empire to its closing chapters in the 20th century, to all corners of the globe? Was it money, glory, adventure, or was it the dismal reality of their isles? Were they fueled by the simple need to get as far from Nottingham and Bath as possible, away from the cold gray rain? Was a craving for color the wind at their back? (Ambition belongs to those with a taste for citrus who live in a land where no citrus is grown.) The quest grew increasingly frenzied as the age ripened and there seemed ever fewer places to explore. As economists say, scarcity creates demand. This era was a moment ago yet seems ancient; the names of its heroes ring like names in a fairy tale: Richard Burton, Ernest Shackleton, David Livingstone. Some of the most daring converged on the Amazon, where hunter-gatherers still lived on human brains and even the most gaudy human creations were swallowed by vines if left for a week. In his outstanding new book, "The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon," David Grann tells the story of one of these adventurers, Percy Fawcett, "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." Fawcett was born in Devon, England, in 1867. In photos, he looks like the hero of a Saturday morning serial, the man who falls out of a plane and lands in a haystack. He got the jones for exploring, which, back then, you could catch like a fever, while stationed with the Royal Artillery in Ceylon. An officer had given him a note turned up by a local, which, in the life of Fawcett, serves the same function as the map in "Treasure Island." "Beneath these rocks is a cave," it read, "once easy to enter, but now difficult to approach as the entrance is obscured by stones, jungle and long grass. . . . In that cave is a treasure . . . [of] uncut jewels and gold to an extent greater than that possessed of many kings." Fawcett did not find that particular treasure, but was hooked by the notion of treasure hunting in general. The rest of his life was one long quest. His mishaps and triumphs were followed by would-be adventurers around the world. An entry from his diary provided the germ of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel "The Lost World." Fawcett worked with the British Geographical Society, which was in the process of mapping the globe. On his first trip into the Amazon in 1906, he was charged with fixing the border between Brazil and Bolivia. "By then, most of the world had been explored," Grann writes, "its veil of enchantment lifted, but the Amazon remained as mysterious as the dark side of the moon." Fawcett emerged nearly a year later, gaunt but exhilarated, with a taste for the forest, its solitude and its menace. It became an addiction like heroin: transcendent at first, increasingly consuming, ultimately fatal. In the course of his travels, Fawcett heard whispers of a kingdom, a civilization overgrown and forgotten. He began spotting clues everywhere, in the customs of the Indians, in oral histories and legends. He took to calling it, no one knows why, the City of Z, which, when stripped of pseudoscience, revealed itself to be El Dorado, the fabled city of gold chased after by conquistadors since 1541, when Gonzalo Pizarro took hundreds of men into the jungle and emerged months later with a few dozen walking corpses. In his quest for Z, Fawcett became a living symbol, the British officer, at the end of the British age, in search of a ruined empire, thus a glimpse of his own nation's fate. Grann, a staff writer at The New Yorker, tells two stories: of the explorer chasing his mirage, and of the reporter chasing the explorer chasing his mirage - twin obsessions spun together like strands on a helix. Fawcett going here and there to raise money for his next escapade, Grann going after him, from Brooklyn to the Amazon, like going from Paris to the moon. "Let me be clear," Grann writes. "I am not an explorer or an adventurer. I don't climb mountains or hunt. I don't even like to camp. I stand less than 5 feet 9 inches tall and am nearly 40 years old, with a blossoming waistline and thinning black hair." The book is screwball, in other words, a hybrid in which the weak, fear-wracked reporter from the present age confronts the crazed iron men of yore, citizens of a country as grand and gone as the kingdom of the Incas. The result is 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. Along the way, Grann examines dozens of subjects that seem more and more mythical, suggesting a kind of magical non-fiction - the myth of the white Indian, for example, the fate of explorers who vanished searching for Fawcett, the habits of carnivorous fish, some which latch on to and live off the holiest, most tender of human organs. But in the end, the book is mostly about the jungle itself, the real and shrinking wilderness that can be traversed on Google maps, but also the wilderness as a metaphor that can be glimpsed but never charted - the world as it really is, where everything wants to infect you and even flowers want you dead. Which is why Fawcett, in his relentless drive into the bush, supposedly in pursuit of a goal but really going because going is the same as being alive, is a stand-in for all those who keep feeding themselves to the beast. This is what Grann means when he writes of his own magazine stories: "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." At times, and perhaps it's a natural outgrowth of the subject, the book can become tedious, in the way that an obsessed person can become tedious. It's hot in the weeds where the sun beats down. I suppose it's how the guides felt as they followed Fawcett through miles of undifferentiated jungle. Chapters follow a predictable pattern - many begin with the same trick: a line of dialogue backed by a quick establishing shot - with sections on Fawcett, then sections on Grann, then on Fawcett, until the whole thing, strung together, comes to resemble a friendship bracelet. As for the prose, it's a bit like the cinematography in a Sydney Pollack film - so deft it's invisible, at total service to the story, but with none of the tracking or crane shots or wild flights of fancy that linger in the mind. Fawcett disappeared in 1925. In the final pages, which are terrifically exciting, the book reads like an adventure story for boys, the sort that is accompanied by drawings of diamond skulls and scorpion kings. Grann follows his subject all the way to an Indian village in a remote region called the Xingu, where he meets probably the last person to see the explorer alive. (Grann thinks he found the remnants of Z, but you can be the judge of that.) The Indians tell Grann what they've been telling the others who started hunting for Fawcett almost as soon as he disappeared: the white man went over the hill and never came back. In the end, "The Lost City of Z" has the odd effect of making the present age seem small, its heroes like museum miniatures. They had explorers who blazed trails, we have journalists who follow trails already blazed in search of explorers. They had parchment and clues. We have GPS and Google maps, where the blank areas hide military installations. Which makes sense. When you can buy a pineapple in Devon in February, why leave home? In Fawcett's day, the Amazon was still 'as mysterious as the dark side of the moon.' Rich Cohen's most recent books are "Sweet and Low" and "Israel Is Real," to be published in July.

Kirkus Review

A stirring tale of lost civilizations, avarice, madness and everything else that makes exploration so much fun. As New Yorker staff writer and debut author Grann notes, the British explorer Percy 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. Working from a buried treasure in the form of long-lost diaries, Grann reconstructs the 1925 voyage Fawcett undertook with his 21-year-old son to find the supposed Lost City of Z, which, by all accounts, may have been El Dorado, the fabled place of untold amounts of Inca gold. Many a conquistador had died looking for the place, though in their wake, "after a toll of death and suffering worthy of Joseph Conrad, most archaeologists had concluded that El Dorado was no more than a delusion." Fawcett was not among them, nor was his rival, a rich American doctor named Alexander Hamilton Rice, who was hot on the trail. Fawcett determined that a small expedition would be more likely to survive than a large one. Perhaps so, but the expedition notes record a hell of humid swamps and "flesh and carrion-eating bees [and] gnats in cloudsrendering one's food unpalatable by filling it with their filthy bodies, their bellies red and disgustingly distended with one's own blood." It would get worse, we imagine, before Fawcett and his party disappeared, never to be seen again. Though, as Grann writes, they were ironically close to the object of their quest. A colorful tale of true adventure, marked by satisfyingly unexpected twists, turns and plenty of dark portents. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

Grann, a staff writer at The New Yorker, gives a gripping, detailed account of the fate of English explorer Percy Fawcett. Fawcett disappeared into the jungles of Brazil in 1925 with his son and his son's best friend. It was not the first time that Fawcett had plunged into Amazonia or confronted pestilence and natives not keen on receiving trespassers. Colonel Fawcett was a soldier, sometime spy, and expert surveyor and explorer who helped define the border between Bolivia and Brazil. But he was primarily obsessed with finding a rumored great city in the jungles of South America, which he simply called Z partly because it did not have a name and partly to throw off others who were looking for it. Grann's experience following this mystery to England and Brazil was an adventure in its own right. He alternates chapters on Fawcett's adventures, based on his diaries and contemporary accounts, with his own and others' efforts to find Fawcett or at least the truth about his demise. Like the books of Simon Winchester (e.g., The Man Who Loved China), this is a compelling and entertaining read. Recommended for all public and academic libraries.-Lee Arnold, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Excerpts

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." From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.