Meet Colonel Percy Fawcett, the British explorer who disappeared without trace, was inspiration for Indiana Jones and is hero of new movie The Lost City of Z produced by Brad Pitt
More than 100 people have died searching for clues to his death
COLONEL Percy Fawcett’s hellish experience at the Battle of the Somme convinced him there must be a better world – and he spent the rest of his life trying to find it.
His quest led him to hunt for a fabled ancient lost city in the Brazilian jungle, which he simply called Z but which was supposedly El Dorado — the legendary city of gold.
Fawcett, who later inspired the creation of movie hero Indiana Jones, went missing in the rainforest in 1925. His body has never been discovered.
Since then it is estimated that close to 100 others have died in the remote and inhospitable jungle while trying to solve the mystery of what happened to the daring explorer.
At the time, Fawcett’s adventure made him famous worldwide, but while the brave exploits of Scott of the Antarctic or Livingstone in Africa have lived on, his story has largely been forgotten.
But now Fawcett’s doomed expedition has inspired a Hollywood film, The Lost City Of Z, produced by Brad Pitt.
Charlie Hunnam plays Fawcett and Robert Pattinson stars as one of his exploration party, corporal Henry Costin.
Jungle’s fiendish grasp had captured me
The film is based on a 2009 book, The Lost City of Z, by US writer David Grann.
He says: “It’s important to look at Fawcett after the Battle of the Somme, when he had seen all these men perish and the society suddenly implode around him.
“At that point, Z became something else in his mind, a way to find some transcendence and meaning and search for the sublime.”
David believes that by a cruel irony, the ancient city had probably been right under Fawcett’s feet.
He spent three months retracing the pioneer’s Amazon journey in an attempt to discover whether Z ever existed and says: “I think Z was a fairly grounded pursuit.”
Archaeologist Michael Heckenberger showed David man-made dips in the ground which he said had been moats 800 years ago.