The lost city of Z
All fans of mysterious or frontier archaeology, have no doubts: "Colonel" Fawcett was the only true Indiana Jones of the 20th century, the EXPLORER par excellence, the quintessence of ADVENTURE (1).
However, this writing is not intended to be a detailed exposition of Fawcett's life, given that there are many books on the subject. Much less does he intend to exasperate his biography with esoteric or mystical interpretations regarding the purpose of his travels. Instead, it is important to clearly frame the essence of his theories - which we have partly made our own - also trying to understand the reason for which this character, now legendary, took such risks in his expeditions until he disappeared forever in the forests of Brazil in 1925. And even today no one knows, in reality, what his fate was, even if his nephew Timothy Paterson thinks he knows.
It is therefore necessary to extrapolate from Fawcett's life the most concrete side of him, and useful for us. For example, already in 1893 Percy Harrison Fawcett, (1867-1925?) then a young British Army officer stationed in Ceylon, stood out for his strong passion for archeology and the mysteries of the past. As soon as he had the chance, he also went into the forests of the island for several days in search of ancient ruins.
One day, after a violent storm, he discovered a large rock covered with very ancient inscriptions. Wanting to investigate further, he was later told that these inscriptions must have been very similar to the ancient Sansar alphabet, the language of the lost continent of MU (or Rutas) (2).
For the young Fawcett it was like a revelation: from that day forward he would dedicate his life to the search for the Lost Continents, Atlantis first and foremost.
So as not to make skeptical readers smile, let's say straight away that the existence of an ancient continent, now submerged, which connected South India, Ceylon to Madagascar has recently been demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt (3). So, incidentally, James Churchward's studies on Mu (4), which are from the early twentieth century, were not quite as absurd as is believed today. The scholar Graham Hancock went to visit some islands in South East Asia and the Pacific already mentioned by Churchward (5).
Returning to Fawcett's life, after getting married, starting from 1901 he was transferred to various locations in the British Empire: North Africa, Malta, Hong Kong. Meanwhile, during his military experience, he was developing in the studies that he found most interesting for his profession: Topography.
In 1906, unexpectedly, while stationed in Ireland, he was recalled to London. the President of the Royal Geographical Society, of which Fawcett himself was a member, wanted to entrust him with an important task: on behalf of the Bolivian Government he would have to survey and delimit large border areas between Bolivia, Peru and Brazil. Fawcett accepted and from then on began the most astonishing adventure of his career as an explorer which ended only following his mysterious and legendary disappearance during his last expedition in 1925. From then on his life was a succession of explorations which led him to travel across a large part of South America, driven by the unstoppable desire to succeed in an incredible undertaking: to discover and therefore demonstrate the real existence of what he considered the remains of the ancient Colonies of Atlantis in South America. In fact, since 1908, while carrying out his topographic survey work, he had become convinced that all the known pre-Columbian civilizations must have had, inevitably, a common prehistoric phase derived from the existence of an unknown ancient civilization, the whose great lost cities must surely lie half-buried in the heart of the Amazon.
But what were the clues that Fawcett relied on to support these theories? Let's try to analyze them. First of all, a very valid detail even today, he had known with certainty of the existence of ancient inscriptions, petroglyphs and very similar drawings present in caves or on rocks scattered throughout South America: Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil. We know well, for example, that these mysterious inscriptions, not yet deciphered, are still discovered and studied today amidst a thousand controversies, triggered above all by the conflicting hypotheses that scientists provide regarding their dating. Therefore there is no doubt in recognizing that Fawcett, regarding the problem of petroglyphs, was right in considering them of extreme importance.
But there were many other elements on which the Colonel based himself to give greater consistency to his archaeological deductions.
In fact, from information collected in his first expeditions, Fawcett wrote in 1911:
"All the most advanced Indian tribes have inherited traditions from an even more remote great civilization, that is, from a race perhaps progenitor of the Incas, and even of the mysterious people who left the gigantic remains found by the Inca invaders who subsequently incorporated them into their constructions...the enigma of ancient South America and perhaps of the prehistoric world can only be solved when these ancient cities have been discovered and scientifically excavated".
Regarding this point in particular, today we know well that such legends and traditions certainly exist: the problem is that these Amazonian cities have not yet been found. The development of satellite photography of the earth's surface has given additional help but, frankly, we must remember that large areas of the Amazon are perpetually covered by clouds therefore, the only way is to personally go to the places of greatest interest. By reading the report of my expedition of August 2000 ("Paititi 2000") in this blog, the reader will certainly realize how, even today, the forest hardly gives up its treasures.
Returning to Percy Fawcett's circumstantial sources, it is fair to recognize, however, that what convinced him most about the existence of one or more ancient half-buried cities within the Amazonian expanse was the reading of the famous Manuscript no. 512, still preserved in the National Library of Rio de Janeiro today, concerning the description of a fortuitous discovery, by Portuguese adventurers (Bandeirantes), of a cyclopean lost city, which occurred in the year 1753 in Brazil and was never found again. The document and the detailed description of the city are certainly considered authentic by experts even today.
It remains incredible how 250 years have passed since that discovery without any other explorer having come across this ghost city again: Fawcett was sure that it was the capital of the Amazon Empire and, for reasons of descriptive practicality, he called it the "Mysterious Zeta" or Lost city of Z (Zeta) (6).
There is no doubt in defining this manuscript and its description as truly impressive, both as regards the vision of the city that is provided therein, and as regards details on the techniques of use of the stone (largely Black Basalt) in the monolithic architecture, which closely resemble descriptions of pre-Columbian cities known today, but unknown at the time.
Another clue, which for Fawcett was of extreme importance, was the famous black basalt statuette, 25 centimeters high, representing a high priest or initiate, which was given to him by the writer Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925), author, among another of the famous book King Solomon's Mines. Percy Fawcett was convinced that this statuette originated from one of the mysterious Amazonian cities and represented a priest of this ancient civilization, an "American" colony of the mythical kingdom of Atlantis (7).
You can see a reproduction of the statuette in many publications (see “The Amazon Empire”): the original disappeared with Fawcett himself, who took it with him on his 1925 expedition. His great-grandson Timothy Paterson, he owned a copy.
In any case, if Fawcett considered the statuette as a point in favor of his theories, many scholars subsequently expressed serious doubts either about its authenticity or about the fact that it came from South America: in fact by carefully observing the reproductions on drawing one gets the impression that the object comes from some ancient Mediterranean civilization rather than pre-Columbian.
The scholar Mario Pincherle claimed to have managed to decipher the sculpted characters: they are the ancient characters of Atlantis and that priest represents a sort of biblical Noah who escaped the Great Flood (i.e. the end of the Last Ice Age). These are of course only the opinions of one scholar: when Fawcett took the statuette to be seen at the British Museum in London the experts did not dare to comment and simply told him: "If it is not a forgery, it completely surpasses all our experience". But the colonel was convinced that it was not a fake because he had seen 14 of the 22 characters contained also reproduced on parts of ancient Brazilian ceramics.
Starting from 1914, the Fawcett explorer in South America inevitably had to give way to the Fawcett artillery officer in Europe during the terrible First World War. He behaved very well and after the end of the war in 1919, at the age of 52, he decided to definitively leave active military service to dedicate himself completely to the search for the city of "ZETA" in Brazil. Gathering information and rumors during his first travels, regarding cities lost in the forest, even connected by underground channels and secret passages, he deduced that ZETA, the ancient capital of the Amazon kingdom, could only be found by following the Rio Xingu, in Brazilian Mato Grosso.
Returning to Brazil, Fawcett carried out two other expeditions both in 1920 and the following year, useful and preliminary trips to try to narrow the field of research of the presumed location of the city of Zeta, which, more precisely, should have been located between the Rio Xingu and the Rio Araguaia, at the height of the Sierra del Roncador, in the heart of Mato Grosso. He now thought he had identified the area with a certain margin of safety, but he had to wait until 1924 before completely convincing the Royal Geographical Society of London to grant him full support for what he considered the definitive expedition.
And so in February 1925 the Colonel's last adventure began: with him were his eldest son Jack, aged 22, and a former schoolmate and friend of his, Raleigh Rimell.
Having reached Cuiaba (Mato Grosso) at the beginning of March, they remained there for about a month for the final preparations before making the last decisive effort. Departure was scheduled for April 20th.
During the expedition Fawcett wrote some letters to his wife Nina, which were gradually entrusted to native helpers to act as couriers. The last letter we know of dated May 29: since then Percy and Jack Fawcett with Raleigh Rimell disappeared.
In summary, this is all that is known for certain. In the following years, various expeditions were organized to try to find out what the fate of Colonel Fawcett and his group had been: it was said that he was still alive and held prisoner by warlike indigenous tribes, it was claimed on the contrary that he had been killed with the others companions. In reality, even today we do not know what happened after the date of his last letter, despite all the most conflicting and contradictory rumors relating to his end.
We are also interested in remembering that some time ago, in 1996, an expedition directed by the American James Lynch attempted to definitively resolve the mystery of Fawcett's end but this attempt also failed: around eighty Indians attacked the Lynch expedition with firearms, plundering much of the material and food and forcing all participants to return from whence they came.
This episode is enough to make us understand on the one hand how the memory of the legendary Colonel is always alive but, on the other hand, it says a lot about how dangerous it is still today to carry out exploratory expeditions in certain regions of the world. The time has now come to try to make an objective assessment of Fawcett's life and efforts aimed at solving the mysteries of South America from a current and future-oriented perspective.
First of all: we thought of him as a real "forerunner". It must be recognized that Fawcett, like it or not, started a process of modification in the historical study of this continent. He had the courage to support an idea which, to quote the famous book "Il Mattino dei Maghi" (8), can indeed, by excess, border on studies of "fantastic realism" or esoteric and therefore not scientifically demonstrable (as his detractors argue), but we don't think that's the point.
We think that Fawcett deserves the credit for having laid the foundations of a new theory useful for solving the mysteries of the archeology of South America: he never took the equality Amazonian Empire = Colony of Atlantis for granted. Of course he would have preferred it to be this way, but at least he was sure that once Zeta was found, science would establish the true origin of the city.
Therefore he has always maintained a certain empirical spirit of research. What can be said now, maintaining the validity of his basic theory, namely that an ancient, unknown civilization really existed in South America, is that the imposing Andes are also a useful ground for research, not just the Amazonian territory, our way of thinking. Macchu Picchu was discovered at 2400 meters above sea level, to make just one comparison: Fawcett's vision from a geographical point of view was probably a little reductive.
In any case, he certainly strongly contrasted the parallel South America = Atlantis, a hypothesis that has also recently come back into vogue (9). This ancient civilization of the last ice age was probably a maritime civilization with various important colonies scattered throughout the world: it is therefore very difficult to argue that it was only present on this or that continent.
In conclusion, Fawcett's goal was not to find Atlantis but the most ancient civilization in South America and on this point we explorers of South America follow his example, making the memory of a truly exceptional man perpetual.
Refereces
- See the writing of his great-grandson Timothy Paterson, The temple of Ibez, Società Teurgica Italia - Brazil, 1984.
- See David Childress, Vimana aircraft of ancient India & Atlantis, Adventures Unlimited, 1991.
- I am referring to the recent research by the US National Sciences Foundation, which by means of the Joides Resolution ship discovered the remains of an ancient continent sunk into the depths of the Indian Ocean.
- See James Churchward, The Lost Continent, SugarCo, Milan, 1978.
- I am referring to the ruins of Nan Madol on the island of Ponape, in the Pacific.
- See Percy Fawcett's book Operation Fawcett, Bompiani, Milan, 1953. According to some scholars, the real name of the Zeta city would be MATALIR.
- See Mario Pincherle, The mystery of El Dorado, Ed. Filelfo, Ancona, 1987.
- L. Pauwels, J.Bergier, The morning of the magicians, Mondadori, Milan, 1963.
- See JMAllen, Atlantis the last truth, Sperling & Kupfer, Milan, 1998.
