Page 18 - Amazonia

18 18 | Amazonia
Magazine Name

PERCY FAWCETT
Ata ipiderferumMandit
firium ciem etiam igilicam,
nostri, dan Catus Mae
& ANCIENT LOST CITY ‘Z’

Percy Fawcett
with his friends and some
indigenous people in amazon

Fawcett joined the RGS in 1901, a jungle area at the border of Fawcett made seven expedi-
in order to study surveying and Brazil and Bolivia at the behest tions between 1906 and 1924.
mapmaking. Later, he worked of the Royal Geographical Soci- He was mostly amicable with
for the British Secret Service in ety. The Society had been com- the locals through gifts, pa-
North Africa while pursuing the missioned to map the area as tience, and courteous behav-
surveyor’s craft. He served for a third party unbiased by local iour. In 1908, he traced the
the War Office on Spike Island national interests. He arrived in source of the Rio Verde (Brazil)
in County Cork from 1903 to La Paz, Bolivia, in June. While and in 1910 made a journey to
1906, where he was promoted on the expedition in 1907, Faw- Heath River (on the border be-
to major on 11 January 1905. He cett claimed to have seen and tween Peru and Bolivia) to find
became friends with authors Sir shot a 62-foot (19 m) long giant its source, having retired from
Henry Rider Haggard and Sir anaconda, a claim for which he the British army on 19 January.
Arthur Conan Doyle; the latter was ridiculed by scientists. He
used Fawcett’s Amazonian field reported other mysterious ani- After a 1913 expedition, he sup-
reports as an inspiration for his mals unknown to zoology, such posedly claimed to have seen
novel The Lost World. as a small cat-like dog about dogs with double noses. These
the size of a foxhound, which may have been double-nosed
Fawcett’s first expedition to he claimed to have seen twice, Andean tiger hounds.
South America was in 1906 (he and the giant Apazauca spider
was seconded for service there which was said to have poi- Based on documentary re-
on 2 May) when at the age of soned a number of locals. search, Fawcett had by 1914
39 he travelled to Brazil to map formulated ideas about a “lost
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Fawcett