Percy Fawcett & The Lost City of Z

Dark Histories

Ben Cutmore

History

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2021

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The life of Percy Harrison Fawcett was never short of adventure. An amateur explorer who obtained a gold medal for his services to the Royal Geographical Society, in a time long before planes, GPS and radio communication. He was a man with a story and a character so much larger than life, that popular fiction has drawn influence on them for years, from Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Lost World” to the Hollywood archeology of Indiana Jones, even making an appearance in TinTin & The Broken Ear as a blowpipe wielding hermit. For over twenty years his career saw him delve deep into the Amazon, until, in 1925, just months before newspapers printed their headlines that the city of Atlantis had been found, he set off into the forest in search of a lost city he had christened simply “Z”. SOURCES Grann, David (2009) The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. Doubleday Publishing, USA. Fawcett, Percy (1953) Lost Trails, Lost Cities. Funk & Wagnalls, NY, USA. Thorpe, Vanessa (2004) Veil lifts on jungle mystery of the colonel who vanished. The Observer, Sun 21 March, 2004. UK Williams, Misha (2004) AmaZonia. Kennedy, Dane (2007) British Exploration in the Nineteenth Century: A Historiographical Survey. History Compass, 5: 1879-1900. UK The Atlanta Constitution (1925) Daring Exploration Party Sets Forth To Find Site of Cradle of Civilization. The Atlanta Constitution, p.14, 12 Jan, 1925. Atlanta, USA. The Leader post (1927) Fear for Col. Fawcett, Missing in Brazillian Jungle Nearly 2 Years. The Leader Post, p.1. 14 Feb, 1927. Canada The Spokesman Review (1927) Colonel Fawcett Thought Alive. The Spokesman Review, p.67, 24 July, 1927. USA. ---------- For extended show notes, including maps, links and scripts, head over to darkhistories.com Support the show by using our link when you sign up to Audible: http://audibletrial.com/darkhistories or visit our Patreon for bonus episodes and Early Access: https://www.patreon.com/darkhistories Connect with us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/darkhistoriespodcast Or find us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/darkhistories & Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dark_histories/ Or you can contact us directly via email at [email protected] or via voicemail on: (415) 286-5072 or join our Discord community: https://discord.gg/cmGcBFf The Dark Histories Butterfly was drawn by Courtney, who you can find on Instagram @bewildereye Music was recorded by me © Ben Cutmore 2017 Other Outro music was Paul Whiteman & his orchestra with Mildred Bailey - All of me (1931). It's out of copyright now, but if you're interested, that was that.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The life of Percy Harrison Forcer was never short of adventure. An amateur explorer
0:05.3	who obtained a gold medal for his services to the Royal Geographical Society in a time
0:10.1	long before planes, GPS and radio communication. He was a man with a story and a character
0:16.5	so much larger than life that popular fiction has drawn influence on him for years. From
0:22.0	Martha Conan Doyle's The Lost World to the Hollywood archaeology of Indiana Jones, even
0:27.6	making an appearance in tinting in the broken ear as a blowpipe wielding hermit. For over
0:33.4	20 years his career saw him delve deep into the Amazon until in 1925, just months before
0:40.7	newspapers printed their headlines that the city of Atlantis had been found, he set off
0:45.4	into the forest. In search of a lost city, the heed christened simply said, this is dark
0:51.6	histories, where the facts are worse than fiction.
0:57.5	Hello and welcome to Dark History, season 5, episode 10. I'm Ben. Can you believe we're
1:02.4	on episode 10 already? This year seems to be absolutely flying and we're cracking
1:07.1	onto our halfway through the fifth season already. Surely that must mean that summer is
1:11.9	somewhere, certainly not here yet, but anyway we're going to crack straight onto this episode
1:17.5	because don't have a lot of things to talk about in terms of news and I think this
1:21.5	one's another long one so let's just get on with it. This is Percy Fawcett and The Lost
1:27.2	City of Z. After the resolution of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, a new effort in exploration swept
1:36.0	across the globe. In the centuries prior, seafaring expeditions embarked from across Europe
1:41.6	to map the world, expand global trade and form imperialist colonies. By the 19th century,
1:48.4	the major routes were well travelled and the continents charted. The knowledge of the
1:53.3	interior of many of these places however was still severely lacking. Governments, natural
1:59.4	history entrepreneurs and scientists all pressed hard into a new effort to remove the vast
	...

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