Lynch was more than an adventurer. Drawn to quests that were intellectual as well as physical, he hoped to illuminate some little-known aspect of the world, and he often spent months in the library researching a topic. He had, for instance, ventured to the source of the Amazon and had found a colony of Mennonites living in the Bolivian desert. But he had never encountered a case like that of Colonel Fawcett.
Not only had previous search parties failed to discover the party's fate-each disappearance becoming a conundrum unto itself-but no one had unraveled what Lynch considered the biggest enigma of alclass="underline" Z. Indeed, Lynch found out that unlike other lost explorers-such as Amelia Earhart, who disappeared in 1937 while trying to fly around the globe-Fawcett had made it all but impossible to trace him. He had kept his route so secret that even his wife, Nina, confessed that he had concealed crucial details from her. Lynch dug up old newspaper accounts, but they provided few tangible clues. Then he found a dog-eared copy of Exploration Fawcett, a collection of some of the explorer's writings edited by his surviving son, Brian, and published in 1953. (Ernest Hemingway had kept a copy of the book on his shelf.) The book appeared to contain one of the few hints of the colonel's final course, quoting Fawcett as saying, “Our route will be from Dead Horse Camp, 11°43' south and 54°35' west, where my horse died in 1921.” Although the coordinates were only a starting point, Lynch plugged them into his Global Positioning System. It pinpointed a spot in the southern basin of the Amazon in Mato Grosso-its name means “thick forest”-a Brazilian state bigger than France and Great Britain combined. To reach Dead Horse Camp would require traversing some of the Amazon's most intractable jungle; it would also entail entering lands controlled by indigenous tribes, which had secluded themselves in the dense forest and fiercely guarded their territory.
The challenge seemed insurmountable. But, as Lynch pored over financial spreadsheets at work, he wondered: What if there really is a Z? What if the jungle had concealed such a place? Even today, the Brazilian government estimates that there are more than sixty Indian tribes that have never been contacted by outsiders. “These forests are… almost the only place on earth where indigenous people can survive in isolation from the rest of mankind,” John Hemming, the distinguished historian of Brazilian Indians and a former director of the Royal Geographical Society, wrote. Sydney Possuelo, who was in charge of the Brazilian department set up to protect Indian tribes, has said of these groups, “No one knows for sure who they are, where they are, how many they are, and what languages they speak.” In 2006, members of a nomadic tribe called Nukak-Makú emerged from the Amazon in Colombia and announced that they were ready to join the modern world, though they were unaware that Colombia was a country and asked if the planes overhead were on an invisible road.
One night Lynch, unable to sleep, went into his study, which was cluttered with maps and relics from his previous expeditions. Amid his papers on Fawcett, he came across the colonel's warning to his son: “If with all my experience we can't make it, there's not much hope for others.” Rather than deter Lynch, the words only compelled him. “I have to go,” he told his wife.
He soon secured a partner, Rene Delmotte, a Brazilian engineer whom he had met during an adventure competition. For months, the two men studied satellite images of the Amazon, honing their trajectory. Lynch obtained the best equipment: turbocharged jeeps with puncture-resistant tires, walkie-talkies, shortwave radios, and generators. Like Fawcett, Lynch had experience designing boats, and with a shipbuilder he constructed two twenty-five-foot aluminum vessels that would be shallow enough to pass through swamps. He also put together a medical kit that contained dozens of antidotes for snake poisons.
He chose his party with equal care. He recruited two mechanics, who could repair all the equipment, and two veteran off-road drivers. He also enlisted Dr. Daniel Muñoz, an acclaimed forensic anthropologist who, in 1985, had helped to identify the remains of Josef Mengele, the Nazi fugitive, and who could help confirm the origins of any object they might find from Fawcett's party: a belt buckle, a bone fragment, a bullet.
Although Fawcett had warned that large expeditions have “only one and all come to grief,” the party soon grew to include sixteen men. Still, there was one more person who wanted to go: Lynch's sixteen-year-old son, James, Jr. Athletic and more muscular than his father, with bushy brown hair and large brown eyes, he had gone on a previous expedition and acquitted himself well. And so Lynch agreed, like Fawcett, to take his son with him.
The team assembled in Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso, along the southern edge of the Amazon basin. Lynch handed out T-shirts that he had made up with a picture of footprints leading into the jungle. In England, the Daily Mail published a story about the expedition under the headline “Are We About to Solve the Enduring Mystery of Colonel Percy Fawcett?” For days, the group drove through the Amazon basin, traversing unpaved roads scarred with ruts and brambles. The forest grew thicker, and James, Jr., pressed his face against the window. Wiping steam from the glass, he could see the leafy crowns of trees unfurling overhead, before breaking apart, as shafts of sunlight poured into the forest, the yellow wings of butterflies and macaws suddenly visible. Once, he spotted a six-foot snake, half-burrowed in mud, with a deep depression between its eyes. “Jararaca” his father said. It was a pit viper, one of the most venomous snakes in the Americas. (A jararaca bite will cause a person to bleed from the eyes and become, as a biologist put it, “a corpse piece by piece.”) Lynch swerved around the snake, while the roar of the engine sent other animals, including howler monkeys, scattering into the treetops; only the mosquitoes seemed to remain, hovering over the vehicles like sentries.
After stopping several times to camp, the expedition followed the trail to a clearing along the Xingu River, where Lynch tried to get a reading on his GPS.
“What is it?” one of his colleagues asked.
Lynch stared at the coordinates on the screen. “We're not far from where Fawcett was last seen,” he said.
A net of vines and lianas covered the trails extending from the clearing, and Lynch decided that the expedition would have to proceed by boat. He instructed several members to turn back with some of the heaviest gear; once he found a place where a bush plane could land, he would radio in the coordinates, so that the equipment could be delivered by air.
The remaining team members, including James, Jr., slipped the two boats into the water and began their journey down the Xingu. The currents carried them quickly, past spiny ferns and buriti palms, creepers and myrtles-an endless mesh that rose on either side of them. Shortly before sunset, Lynch was going around another bend, when he thought he spotted something on the distant bank. He lifted the brim of his hat. In a break amid the branches, he could see several pairs of eyes staring at him. He told his men to cut the engines; no one made a sound. As the boats drifted onto the shore, scraping against the sand, Lynch and his men leaped out. At the same time, Indians-naked, their ears pierced with dazzling macaw feathers- emerged from the forest. Eventually, a powerfully built man, his eyes encircled in black paint, stepped forward. According to some of the Indians who spoke broken Portuguese and served as translators, he was the chief of the Kuikuro tribe. Lynch told his men to get out their gifts, which included beads, candy, and matches. The chief seemed welcoming, and he granted the expedition permission to camp by the Kuikuro village and to land a propeller plane in a nearby clearing.