They wed in 1901 – and later he sired two boys, Jack (born 1903) and Brian (1906-1984) – though Fawcett remained, as he described it, a “lone wolf”, exploring Ceylon, which entranced him, and even seeking buried treasure and investigating archaeological ruins.įawcett grew up in a time, at the peak of the British Empire, when swashbuckling explorers were continually looking to expand their horizons for monarch and country, and his childhood was fuelled by tales of derring-do. Happy to leave his parents in the UK, Fawcett served in the British colony of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and met his future wife, Nina Agnes Paterson, the daughter of a colonial judge. In his diaries, he recalled a childhood “devoid of parental affection”.įollowing an education at Newton Abbot Proprietary College, he received his commission as an officer of the Royal Artillery in 1886, aged 19.

His India-born father was a British aristocrat and a fellow of the RGS, though he had managed to squander two family fortunes and besmirch the Fawcett name, much to Percy’s embarrassment and disgust. Percy Harrison Fawcett was born on August 18, 1867, in Torquay on the Devonian coast, to Edward Boyd Fawcett and Myra Elizabeth. How close was Fawcett to reaching his El Dorado? A former staff writer for The New Yorker, Grann himself had tracked Fawcett’s final steps, venturing through mud-slicked gorges and across rock-strewn rapids, and discovered that a monumental civilisation known as Kuhikugu may have in fact existed near where the missing explorer was looking, intriguingly. The Lost City of Z, which premiered at the New York Film Festival last October, will be shown at UK cinemas later this year and is based on David Grann’s 2009 novel of the same name. (Even James Bond author Ian Fleming’s brother, Peter, went on one failed expedition, though lived to tell the tale.)

In January 1927, after close to two years without a word from the Fawcett trio, the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) – one of the many organisations who had part-funded their trip – declared: “We hold ourselves in readiness to help any competent, well accredited party.”Ī welter of pleading letters from volunteers followed, yet in the decades since no one has found the remains of Fawcett and it is estimated that up to a hundred explorers have themselves disappeared on his trail.

The Los Angeles Times, for example, named it “the most hazardous and certainly the most spectacular adventure of the kind ever undertaken”.Īnd when the bearded, blue-eyed and Stetson-wearing Fawcett, who is often described as a real-life Indiana Jones and may well have been the inspiration behind Harrison Ford’s intrepid filmic hero, went missing interest only increased. And yet what has been labelled “the greatest exploration mystery of the 20th century” continues to captivate and endure.Įven before the 57-year-old British explorer’s communiqués stopped while he was battling through the terra incognita of Mato Grosso (literally ‘thick bushes’) wielding his trusty 18-inch machete, the voyage into the unknown had captured the imagination of the world’s media. This May will mark 92 years since Colonel Percy Fawcett disappeared without a trace, along with eldest son Jack, 22, and his teenage friend Raleigh Rimell, deep in the Brazilian jungle, while questing after an ancient lost civilisation hidden in the Amazon which he called ‘the City of Z’.

Lost city of zed location