Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Col. Percy Fawcett was right.
Who?
Post-Dispatch readers of the 1920s and 1930s could have told you. Back in the day, he was a sensation — a classically eccentric English explorer who captivated newspaper readers by disappearing into the Amazon rainforest in 1925 while searching for a fabulous lost city he had dubbed "Z."
His story is a quirky and intoxicating mix of archeology, exploration and mystery. David Grann, a writer for The New Yorker, published a best-selling book last year that recounts Col. Fawcett's doomed quest. A film version of "The Lost City of Z," starring Brad Pitt, reportedly will be released later this year.
This newspaper never wrote a word about Col. Fawcett before he disappeared. But we ran dozens of stories afterward. In fits and starts, they tell a tale that might have been lifted from a pulp-fiction novel.
Part of the mystery's allure was that the answers laid in the mysterious Amazon, as much Terra Incognita for newspaper readers in St. Louis as it had been to Spanish conquistadors centuries earlier.
On Aug. 19, 1928, we reported that the explorer's wife was asking the press not to print that he was dead. "She affirms that, through telepathy, she absolutely knows that her husband is still alive."
The very next day, we quoted the head of an expedition searching for the lost explorer, who said Col. Fawcett had been killed by natives.
We wrote about Stephen Rattin in 1932. He was a Swiss trapper who claimed he saw Col. Fawcett being held captive by natives.
We printed other reports: That the captive white man could be the writer Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared in Mexico in 1914. Or perhaps American flier Paul Redfern, who crashed while trying to fly from Georgia to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1927.
Some wondered if Col. Fawcett had disappeared on purpose. No speculation seemed too far-fetched, except for one: No one could imagine cities hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest.
But they were there. Late last year, archaeologists reported the discovery of "a sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society" in the general area where Col. Fawcett disappeared. Their work built on earlier reports by other scientists.
It's possible that, even if he had stumbled upon those ancient sites, Col. Fawcett may not have recognized them for what they were. Most are obvious only from the air. They're apparent now because a lot of rainforest has been cleared for cattle ranching over the past few decades.
Col. Fawcett undoubtedly dreamed of discovering another Machu Picchu, the famous lost Inca city in Peru rediscovered in 1911. But the Amazonians had more in common with the Mississippian culture that built Cahokia Mounds, across the river from St. Louis.
The Amazonians built wide, relatively shallow ditches in geometric shapes — circles, rectangles and squares. The ditches are outlined by low mounds that today are only about three feet tall. Those shapes, called geoglyphs, were connected by broad, elevated roadways. Material from one site dates to A.D. 1283, about the same time Cahokia thrived.
Who built the monumental lost geoglyphs of Amazonia and why? Like the fate of the famous explorer who sought them, that remains shrouded in mystery.
But this much, at least, is clear, and should be of some comfort to everyone who holds unconventional beliefs: Col. Percy Fawcett was right.