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What happened to the British explorer Col. Percy Fawcett, who went missing in the Amazon jungle in 1925 along with his son while searching for what he, due to his the osophical beliefs, believed to be a mythical lost city he called "Z".
现代人试图揭开探险史上最伟大谜团之一的真相：著名探险家珀西·福西特上校在寻找……的途中究竟发生了什么？
现代人试图揭开探险史上最伟大谜团之一的真相：著名探险家珀西·福西特上校在寻找……的途中究竟发生了什么？
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00:00Coming up, in 1925, famed explorer Percy Fawcett
00:05set off into the Amazon in search of a fabled lost city.
00:08Fawcett imagined Atlantis, kind of.
00:10He vanished without a trace.
00:12I don't think he got lost in the jungle.
00:15He disappeared because somebody killed him.
00:17And new evidence suggests Fawcett's lost city
00:20may not be a myth.
00:22They're digging up more and more evidence
00:23to say that these societies had existed.
00:26Lost in the Amazon, on Secrets of the Dead.
00:46For decades, explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett captivated the world.
00:51His exploits in the Amazon featuring lost cities
00:54and fantastic creatures,
00:56inspired books and Hollywood movies.
00:59He was the original.
01:01He was the swashbuckler.
01:03This really was an Indiana Jones figure.
01:07He was the hardest explorer of his day.
01:09He was able to thrive in these incredibly tough environments
01:13simply by determination.
01:16In 1925, at the age of 58,
01:19Fawcett headed into the jungle with his son and a friend
01:22to find a mysterious lost city called Zee.
01:26It was one of the biggest news stories of the day,
01:29and millions followed reports of their exploits.
01:32Then, all three vanished without a trace.
01:37Despite countless rescue missions, Fawcett was never found.
01:42Was he killed by Indians, as most believe?
01:44And is there a factual basis for his lost city?
01:48Now, modern-day explorer Niall McCann travels to South America armed with new clues.
01:55Fawcett's signet ring, secret map coordinates,
02:00and an understanding of the mystical purpose behind Fawcett's final journey.
02:13Since Europeans first arrived in the New World,
02:16they heard stories of a legendary jungle city, El Dorado,
02:20whose king was said to dust himself with gold.
02:26In 1542, a Spanish expedition was the first of many
02:30to go deep into the Amazon in pursuit of the golden city and its riches.
02:36A monk named Gaspar de Carvajal accompanied the explorers and kept a journal.
02:44Carvajal went down the main channel of the Amazon
02:46and reported that there were millions of people living there,
02:50that there are these, you know, successful, advanced societies
02:53that were perfectly capable of defending themselves, that the Spaniards were scared of.
02:58By the 20th century, El Dorado had been declared a myth.
03:02The Amazon was clearly populated by scattered groups of tribal peoples.
03:08Carvajal's account of large populations was dismissed by archaeologists
03:12who believed this jungle could not sustain large cities.
03:17But as archaeologists have begun to go into this area,
03:21they're digging up more and more evidence to say that these societies had existed.
03:25In the way that Carvajal reported, what happened was that disease came through and wiped them out.
03:34The thirst for global exploration defined the British Victorian age.
03:40Coming at the very end of that era, Percy Fawcett was among the last of the great English explorers.
03:46It included Burton, Livingstone and Shackleton, each pushing back the veil of the unknown.
03:57Unlike the seekers of El Dorado, Percy Fawcett was no treasure hunter.
04:02A war hero, brilliant surveyor and amateur archaeologist, he became fascinated with the
04:08seemingly impossible idea that large civilizations must have once existed in the Amazon.
04:16He first stepped foot in South America in 1906.
04:20At the age of 39, Fawcett was handpicked by England's Royal Geographical Society
04:26to solve a political dispute by surveying and establishing
04:30the newly formed borders of Bolivia and Brazil.
04:36As a skilled surveyor, he crossed vast distances,
04:40facing every imaginable danger, from hostile tribes to deadly diseases.
04:45And he would drive the people who worked for him so that he was able to complete the surveys
04:51that would take three or four weeks for another team. He would do them in three or four days.
05:00Crucial to his survival was Percy's ability to learn native languages
05:04and to keep a cool head when encountering even the fiercest Indians.
05:09They were going in canoes up a narrow river. When they were suddenly attacked,
05:15arrows began to fly all over the place. These arrows, by the way, would come at you with enormous force.
05:21One of them would pass right through the canoe, right through the wooden sides of the canoe.
05:26Instead of firing a gun, Fawcett began playing music on a small accordion.
05:32This ended the attack and the natives were soon his friends, providing him safe passage through their jungle.
05:43Fawcett was very successful in his boundary work and certainly pleased the Bolivians enormously.
05:50Those borders have stuck and people who have redone them have said that his work was quite accurate.
05:59Then in 1911, an important archaeological event rocked the world and spurred Fawcett's obsession
06:06with the search for a lost city in the jungle.
06:12In 1911, Hiram Bingham, led by native people, finds Machu Picchu and a whole bunch of other Inca sites
06:20and takes these pictures that appear subsequently in National Geographic and they just electrify people
06:26all over the world. It's the first time that these images of these lost cities have been seen in this
06:32way
06:32and it inspires people to believe that there are others and to take credence in the idea that there
06:39are these other cities and one of them of course is Percy Fawcett.
06:46Fawcett was certain the Incas had warned numerous tribes to flee the Spanish invaders and hide in the jungle.
06:52His proof? Discovery of ancient artifacts buried far inland and vivid accounts of white Indians and a stone city.
07:06After 1913, Fawcett formulated theories of a city he called simply Z, pronounced Zed in the British fashion.
07:16He refers to it in his journals.
07:19The central place I call Zed, our main objective, is in a valley about 10 miles wide and the lost
07:25city is on an eminence in the middle of it,
07:27approached by a bow roadway of stone.
07:33But there would be something special about this city he called Zed, something spiritual.
07:41And it would be this strange brew of exploration and belief that brought Percy,
07:47son Jack and his friend Raleigh Rimmel to Brazil's central regions in 1925.
07:54Since Fawcett's disappearance on that expedition, much of the true purpose behind his quest for Z has remained hidden, waiting
08:03to be uncovered.
08:07Over the decades, hundreds of would-be rescuers have sought the truth in this impenetrable jungle.
08:13None succeeded. Many paid with their lives.
08:18I can certainly understand Colonel Fawcett's motivations for being out here,
08:23and what it was like to try and travel through these incredibly tough environments.
08:30Explorer Niall McCann has crossed the Atlantic in a rowboat, beaten paths through the Amazon, and crossed the Earth's polar
08:37regions.
08:38Now, he has the legend of Colonel Fawcett in his sights.
08:43I've been able to really appreciate what he was going through, because I've not only worked in these environments,
08:49but I've been to the exact places that he's been to, and I've seen the exact animals that he was
08:54describing.
08:56Niall has come to the Royal Geographical Society in London, where Fawcett was trained to seek out any clues to
09:03his disappearance.
09:06We've been invited down here to the map room of the Royal Geographical Society here in London,
09:11and I've asked the archivist here to lay out a range of the maps as drawn by Colonel Fawcett.
09:17And the first thing that strikes you here is just the incredible level of detail that he's put into these.
09:22We've got this remarkable detail in the way the stream has been marked, in the contour lines, and in everything.
09:29A far cry from today, when I walk around a forest with a GPS, this man's done it all on
09:33foot with his own sextant.
09:37Percy's love of the jungle began at an early age.
09:42At 19, he was sent by his parents to Sri Lanka, then named Ceylon to join the British Army.
09:53His mother decided that that would be the best course for him, and she chose the Royal Artillery because she
10:00thought the uniform was so sweet.
10:02He had been influenced by his mother's strong attraction to spiritualism and to occult movements, which had become very popular
10:13in Britain at the time.
10:16Here, Percy's brother introduced him to the Theosophy Movement, created by Madame Blavatsky, a famous 19th century psychic and spiritualist.
10:28Her global religious movement influenced leading figures of the day, including Gandhi, Thomas Edison, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
10:39Blavatsky taught that enlightened master priests delivered psychic messages to help mankind.
10:44They lived in various hidden cities around the world, including Tibet and South America.
10:51Fawcett fell under the movement's spell and would never forget the masters in the hidden cities.
11:00Then in Ceylon, he met Nina, the daughter of a magistrate, who in 1901 would become his wife.
11:07And he found that she was as interested in psychic and spiritual things as he was, and they became very
11:16good friends and would go out together searching in the jungle for areas where they thought that old civilizations may
11:24have buried treasures.
11:29Inspired by what he discovered in Ceylon, Fawcett would pursue a career as an RGS explorer.
11:37In the Amazon, he began to connect ancient civilizations with Madame Blavatsky's secret cities.
11:44His first expedition to look for Zee in 1921 was a disaster.
11:49Crossing the vast Mato Grosso towards the deep jungle, men got sick, oxen drowned, and a horse had to be
11:56shot.
11:58His final search for Zee in 1925 started off well, then deteriorated, culminating in Fawcett's disappearance.
12:07Most believe he was killed deep in the Amazon, far up the Kululean River, by hostile Indians such as the
12:15Kalapallo.
12:16But the evidence for this theory is sketchy.
12:21Back at the Royal Geographical Society, Nile discovers letters and artifacts from Nina, providing clues to Fawcett's disappearance.
12:30She knew the true coordinates of his last camp, based on a code Percy had given her, so his actual
12:36position was secret from potential rivals.
12:43Also here at the RGS, a wax impression of Fawcett's signet ring, donated by Nina after his disappearance as a
12:52way to identify his body should it ever turn up.
12:59Sixty years after Fawcett went missing, the ring was found, and sent to his granddaughter Roulette, now living in Cardiff,
13:06Wales.
13:07Very well, lovely to meet you. Thank you.
13:11Do you recognize this writing at all?
13:14Yes, of course I do. It's my grandmother's, Nina's.
13:17OK. And, um, is this the family motto?
13:20It is indeed, yes.
13:21Can you translate that? My Latin's not as good as it used to be.
13:24No, as far as I know, it means they fear no obstacles.
13:27They fear no obstacles. Fantastic.
13:29Now, you actually have a copy of, well, the ring itself here.
13:32I do indeed, yes.
13:32Amazing. Can we compare the impression?
13:35I think it's pretty much that, isn't it?
13:38That seems pretty exact to me.
13:41Yeah.
13:41That's it. Excellent.
13:42That's it, yeah.
13:43For your family, what is the significance of the ring actually having been found?
13:50I think it was, um, quite significant.
13:55I was in Switzerland once, and I went to see my sister, and she had a very good friend who
14:01is a very good medium.
14:03So I handed it over to her, and she took it, and she just dropped it straight away.
14:09She said, there's a lot of blood involved here.
14:13She said, I don't want to touch it anymore.
14:16So whatever has happened, it's not been good.
14:19Either he was killed, or his finger was simply chopped off because he didn't want to give it.
14:25That is quite a possibility.
14:27Yeah.
14:28Yeah, well, we're going to have a look at these photographs.
14:30That'd be great.
14:33The story of the ring may provide a clue to Percy's fate.
14:38So might another possession, part of a Fawcett exhibit in Torquay, England.
14:47One of the artifacts being catalogued is a key part of a mapping instrument.
14:52Right, so this compass was actually the compass used by Colonel Fawcett in his Theodolite when he was out on
14:59exploration.
15:00Now, it was found eight years after he went missing, and there's been lots of speculation as to where it
15:05actually came from.
15:07Several of Percy's expedition diaries were recently given to the Torquay Museum.
15:12So these are Fawcett's diaries.
15:14In the 1950s, surviving son Brian wrote side notes about Percy's 1921 trip to find the lost city.
15:24What's most interesting for me is these coordinates here for Dead Horse Camp.
15:29Now, Dead Horse Camp was where he was supposed to have last been seen in the Bakari area.
15:33He's given one set of coordinates here, which he writes coordinates given to the RGS, and beneath, written in a
15:40different handwriting, presumed to be Brian Fawcett's handwriting, got another set of coordinates.
15:44Now, I'm going to be very interested to see, when I actually go to Brazil, to investigate both of these
15:49areas and see which was the last place that Fawcett was supposed to have been.
15:56The search takes Nile to Rio de Janeiro, where Fawcett spent time preparing his two expeditions to find Zee.
16:09There, Brazil's National Library holds a 260-year-old manuscript, which includes a treasure map describing a fantastic silver-laden
16:19lost city.
16:21A friend sent Fawcett a copy translated by Isabel Burton, wife of famed explorer Sir Richard Burton.
16:29Written by 18th-century fortune hunters who claim they discovered a stone jungle city, the document was an important clue
16:37for Fawcett and for Nile.
16:40Hi, Anna.
16:41Here's the document I wanted.
16:43Fantastic. Thank you very much.
16:45There we go. There it is. Document number 512.
16:48Yeah.
16:49This is, I presume, presented to the king in 1754.
16:53Uh-huh.
16:54It's suffered so much damage, though, over the years, hasn't it?
16:56Yeah. They tried to restore it, but...
16:58It tells of a stone city with multi-storied buildings, with wonderful architecture, soaring stone arches, very cleverly designed.
17:09Wide streets leading down to a lake, on which the adventurers saw two white Indians in a canoe, confirming everything
17:20that Fawcett believed to be right.
17:22On the sides of the buildings, there was carved letters that seemed to resemble Greek, or at least an early
17:31European alphabet.
17:34For Fawcett, it all came together.
17:36The stone city, tales of white Indians, ancient relics, Z must exist.
17:44And the legend also seemed to match Madame Blavatsky's hidden cities and psychic priests.
17:55Pale-skinned Indians may have existed, but Fawcett thought these could be Blavatsky's master priests, delivering important spiritual teachings to
18:05the world.
18:13So these are the signs that they found written on the side of the city, on the walls of the
18:18city, and from the caves that they found near a waterfall three days downstream from the city itself.
18:23Yes, I believe so.
18:24Excellent.
18:26Well, Fawcett imagined a, you know, Atlantis, kind of, you know, a Greek city, basically, in the middle of the
18:32forest.
18:34That's very difficult for most of the Amazon, because there really isn't the stone to do that.
18:38You can have really impressive cities, but they're not going to be that kind of city.
18:43Then what about the city in the manuscript?
18:47Many of experts now think that it was written by adventurers who were trying to raise money, that there was
18:55no city, that they saw no city.
19:01Nile has come to the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso to pursue the clues leading to Fawcett's disappearance.
19:07Yeah, awesome. But loads of smokers were coming in.
19:09Yeah, there's a lot of fire.
19:10Fernando Garcia is a jungle survival expert who will help lead the way.
19:21Nile's destination is a Bakari Indian village, the last people known to have seen Fawcett alive.
19:31He finds this land transformed by deforestation and farming.
19:40Okay, man, we're almost hitting the Bakari village.
19:44As far as I know, no one's actually been here to speak to them.
19:47So no one knows what he was like when he came here, whether they know where he went, where he
19:52stayed, where he went afterwards.
19:53No one knows that.
19:58Nile seeks permission from the tribal leaders to speak about Fawcett.
20:03If we could please ask Don Antonio what he remembers about the stories of Colonel Fawcett himself.
20:09Did his parents speak to him? Did his relatives speak to him about Fawcett?
20:13And what kind of stories were they telling?
20:22Okay, then the chief at that time was his uncle.
20:26Okay.
20:27Okay, then they arrive at his uncle's house.
20:29Okay, and now they give him some food at the time they were staying.
20:33You know, for the two days they were staying here, they feed him.
20:36Okay, but at the time to leave, he was carrying his own supplies.
20:42In 1925, at age 58, Fawcett had just one more chance of finding the lost city of Zee.
20:52Once again, he came a thousand miles by train and riverboat from Rio.
20:57Then crossed the unforgiving Mato Grosso state, three times the size of Texas.
21:09To ensure success, he brought with him his strapping 22-year-old son, Jack, and Raleigh Rimmel,
21:16Jack's lifelong friend, who it turned out was ill-prepared to handle the physical challenges of the trip.
21:27Those challenges were compounded by the lack of funding.
21:37Fawcett managed to scrape together some backing from the Royal Geographical Society,
21:42the Rockefellers, and a large newspaper consortium.
21:45But it was much less than they needed for an expedition of this size.
21:49Percy was now an official correspondent.
21:51And the exploits of the daring party would be followed by millions.
21:55Yeah, fine, great shot.
21:58Indian runners were employed to take dispatches back to civilization,
22:02along with photographs, which Percy took great pride in.
22:06Right, excellent.
22:11Fawcett was very good at writing the dispatches.
22:14He made them quite riveting.
22:15And even reading them today, you can see how they made the front pages.
22:19This really was an Indiana Jones figure.
22:26Niles' search for Fawcett clues continues.
22:32Several miles from the Bakary village, Chief Don Antonio has located a river crossing Fawcett
22:38passed through on his last expedition.
22:44Further discussions with the Bakary's confirm what Fawcett wrote in his logs.
22:49He crossed the creek, then stayed for two days with a local cattle baron at his ranch before arriving in
22:55the Indian village.
23:02Remnants of the ranch and Colonel Fawcett's visit remain.
23:09He said that, you know, once he gets inside the Bakary village, okay,
23:15they have a very warming welcome.
23:18And he stayed there.
23:20And, you know, he said, well, I don't need anything.
23:22I just need a place to stay.
23:23I want my animals to have a rest, okay, my people only need a place to rest.
23:29Next morning, they asked him, okay, how you spend the night?
23:32He said, well, it was perfectly.
23:33I slept better here than next to the river.
23:37A report from one of the rescue missions said that Fawcett had gone up the Kululin River
23:42and was killed after insulting a fierce Indian chief, or cacique.
23:47But the visit here has given Niall some new insight.
23:51Don Antonio, whose uncle was the cacique at the time when Fawcett passed through here,
23:57specifically remembers that he was a warm and a welcoming man and very smiley,
24:01even though there were considerable language barriers.
24:03Now, that doesn't tally at all with two of the rumors surrounding Fawcett's disappearance,
24:08one of which stated that he had touched the daughter of a chief inappropriately
24:12and had subsequently been killed,
24:13and the other one which states that he had actually beaten the son of one of the local chiefs.
24:18Now, Fawcett himself in all his diaries talks about trying to maintain positive relations
24:22with the indigenous people of the area.
24:24And the way the Bakari remember him tallies exactly with what Fawcett has written.
24:28And that makes me want to rule out those two possibilities as to why he disappeared.
24:42Making Fawcett feel welcome, the Bakari's would have shared their sacred kappa dance.
24:52This was a glimpse into the mysteries which lay ahead.
24:55A tangled, dark jungle filled with all manner of creatures and forest beings.
25:17A clue to the location of Fawcett's last camp is a waterfall described in the 1753 manuscript
25:23and in Fawcett's journals.
25:27About three weeks journey from here, we expect to strike the waterfall.
25:32Heard about it from the Bakari Indian Roberto.
25:36It can be heard five leagues away, and there is to be seen an upright rock with painted figures,
25:41protected from the waters.
25:44We ve just learned this morning about these waterfalls, which are of cultural significance to the Bakari.
25:50And Fawcett refers in his book to waterfalls, which he saw as a signpost to the lost city of Zed.
25:56We are here in the Bakari village of Santana.
26:00Here are the waterfalls.
26:02And right in the middle of them, on a straight line, are the new coordinates to Zed Horse Camp.
26:07These are the same coded coordinates written by son Brian into Percy's diary, and the ones Nina referred to.
26:15Fawcett used coded map coordinates to throw people off his trail.
26:19Only his family knew his exact route.
26:22Up until now, everyone who's been looking for Fawcett's last location has been looking 200 miles further to the north.
26:28Now, we have to go there. We don't know what it's going to be like.
26:30It might be completely and utterly impenetrable.
26:32But we ve got to go, we ve got to try and find it.
26:34And who knows, we might just stumble across Fawcett's genuine last location.
26:44Older map coordinates are not as accurate as today.
26:47So finding the waterfall first will help them pinpoint Fawcett's direction and the location of Dead Horse Camp.
26:58Five hours into their trip, five hours to go, and an unfinished bridge.
27:06They have few options.
27:11And they ve agreed they re going to build this bridge for us, and we re going to give it
27:14a go.
27:15We re going to take the trucks, and we re going to try and drive over this half-built rickety
27:20bridge,
27:20and it s going to save us half a day.
27:26A slight slip of the wheel could send the vehicle tumbling off the bridge.
27:35Very nicely done driving over that.
27:50Soybean farming has stripped the thick bushland that Fawcett walked through.
28:04But in Fawcett's time, he had different concerns.
28:11Heat, lack of water, snakes, and disease-carrying insects were a constant problem.
28:18Raleigh now suffered from a badly infected bite on his leg.
28:30He refused to go back.
28:32Both Jack and the Colonel tried to persuade him to return, but he wouldn t.
28:38They were proceeding with a lame person, someone who was certain to hold them up.
28:43While they still had mules, while they still had some kind of transportation,
28:48that was sort of okay. But once they had to go by foot, it couldn t have worked.
28:54He just couldn t have done it.
29:05Travelling further inland, Niall and Fernando locate a backery man,
29:09who shows them the way to the falls, considered sacred to his people.
29:18Fernando, check these out.
29:21This was a major find for Fawcett. The 1753 manuscript said the falls were close to the lost city,
29:28and home to strange inscriptions and silver mines sealed with large rock slabs.
29:37They are among the few outsiders to visit this remote location.
29:44It s not clear Percy made it here, but it is possible fortune hunters who wrote the old manuscript did.
29:56Hiding beneath the water, the sparkling treasures described by the fortune seekers.
30:01They re guarded by South American dragons, six-foot electric eels that could kill a man.
30:09What we ve got here are rocks which look exactly like blocks of silver.
30:14Now, what they ll be is mica, glistening like silver. And over there, next to all the caves,
30:19are large slab-like rocks. Now, it s just a different strata. Makes it look like a man-made slab.
30:25You can well understand how a team of Portuguese conquistadors in the 1750s,
30:32after years of hiking through the bush,
30:35starved to the point of delirium, might well have believed that these were genuinely blocks of silver,
30:40and those were man-made slabs covering the mines which contained in them enormous riches
30:45that they wanted to bring back to the king of Portugal.
30:50More pieces of the puzzle come together above the falls.
30:57The Bakari man brings Niall to an unexplored cave covered in ancient writing.
31:03The fortune hunters thought the text they saw might be Greek,
31:07and Fawcett himself reproduced them in his logs, speculating they could come from the fabled city
31:13of Atlantis. Niall thinks these designs look close to some of the text in the logs.
31:18This looks very, very Atlantean. It s going to be great to actually see when we compare
31:23on the manuscript, how closely they resemble the writings in the manuscript of 1753.
31:34With the falls as a likely Fawcett destination, they now backtrack,
31:38using GPS to line up Fawcett s last location at Dead Horse.
31:45Maps tell them it must lie on a river between the Bakari village and the falls.
31:51They solicit the help of locals to find their way.
31:59In 1925, the Fawcett party walked and rode overland for four weeks to get to Dead Horse camp.
32:07The Fawcett party, so named because Percy shot his sick horse there in 1921.
32:12Raleigh s health had gotten worse, and the journey had only just begun.
32:17Ahead of them lay thick jungle and hostile tribes.
32:22Why then had Percy risked his son Jack s life on this journey?
32:27The underlying purpose not divulged to anyone but his family dates back to the time of Jack s birth in
32:35Ceylon.
32:38He says he was visited by a delegation of holy men from India.
32:42And they told him that he was to become the father of a son, and that this son would be
32:51the reincarnation of a Buddhist holy man.
32:56That the son would have very special powers and be a very special person.
33:02And they predicted that he would have certain physical traits.
33:07There was to be a mole on the inside of one of his feet, and his toes were to be
33:12of an irregular shape.
33:13When the boy was born, Percy said all of these things matched, and he came to believe it.
33:21They felt that he had very high spiritual and psychic powers, and that he had some sort of destiny
33:33that would be of major importance to mankind as a whole.
33:38That he would become a leader, but not just a leader, not just a spiritual leader,
33:43but a leader who would have the powers of the masters that Blavatsky had talked about.
33:58So Jack came to Brazil to fulfill the prophecy of the Buddhist holy men and the beliefs of Madame Blavatsky.
34:05It was here in the city of Z that Jack s future would be clearly defined.
34:16It was particularly important that Jack be on the last expedition.
34:21Fawcett believed that when they reached the hidden city, the white tribe that lived there,
34:28the masters, these extremely wise superhuman people, would recognize Jack as one of their own,
34:37and would welcome them into the community and share their secrets.
34:46They arrived at dead horse camp three months after leaving Rio de Janeiro.
34:51Despite the difficulties, Fawcett continued writing dispatches for the newspapers.
34:57He knew he'd have to keep Raleigh's spirits up, even if his chances look slim.
35:05It was imperative that he and Jack make it to Z.
35:11And this would be the last chance to get a message to the outside world and to his wife, Nina.
35:18Inevitably, they ran out of runners.
35:21There were only so many people who could go back with the stories.
35:25And after they left Bacari Post and headed for dead horse camp, the last runner went with the last story.
35:34In the final dispatch, when the last of the runners returned, Fawcett sent a message to his wife, Nina.
35:42He said that she need have no fear of failure.
35:46The message reflected his own confidence and optimism that he was going to find the lost cities at last.
36:01Somewhere in a narrow strip of jungle, still surviving among these soybean fields, is the site of Fawcett's last camp.
36:09Last junction, eight kilometres, and then left at T Junction.
36:19Then a washout. There's only a narrow, crumbling strip of mud road left. No room for their truck.
36:29They have work to do.
36:42The brittle mud barely holds the truck's weight.
36:46Six inches of space. There's absolutely no, no room for error whatsoever.
36:51No margin for error. But we're over to run our way back towards dead horse camp as well.
37:01This is it. Look at this. Look how shallow this is.
37:04Yeah, this is the perfect spot to crossing.
37:06There's the crossing. Here it goes. It's an old trail.
37:14All the pieces seem to add up. It's dead horse camp.
37:18The right coordinates, a shallow river crossing, and back in the woods, a campsite used by travelers to this day.
37:28The river and jungle quickly obliterate anything that does not belong.
37:32No sign of Fawcett or his expedition remains.
37:38From as far as I can tell, this is where they would have camped. This is dead horse camp.
37:42We've had a good look around the forest for several hundred meters in either direction down the river.
37:47And this is the best place to camp.
37:49This tree here has obviously had people sitting on it for decades and decades and decades.
37:54There's lots of excellent trees here for slinging hammocks.
37:57It's actually a fireplace which must have been used, I don't know, within the last year or so.
38:01This is pretty much it.
38:07After the dispatch from dead horse, there was only silence.
38:11And most, including Nina and the RGS, believed that Percy was merely surviving as he always had.
38:18Fawcett was considered indestructible. But after a year since his last message,
38:24even the Royal Geographical Society grew skeptical.
38:27Discussions of a rescue mission began, and public interests swelled anew.
38:33The public imagination had been very firmly hooked by the Fawcett story.
38:40People, not just in Britain, but throughout the United States and Europe and Australia,
38:45all felt that Fawcett could have been captured by Indian tribes and could be quite well and thriving
38:52and living with these tribes, perhaps in one of the lost cities.
38:58As early as 1927, reports came in from Brazil. An engineer named Courtville said he met Fawcett
39:05and that the three men were thriving in a glorious Eden. It was not to be.
39:12Two years after any word had come from Fawcett, Nina was sure Percy was still alive,
39:18and she began to encourage the RGS to send out an official rescue mission.
39:26I think Nina, she's always putting on a brave face towards everybody, but I get a great sense that
39:33inside she's not coping with it too well. At the Torquay Museum, where Nile saw Fawcett's diary and
39:40compass, a researcher is transcribing his journals and her letters.
39:46I think the first one is a very powerful story.
39:46Especially when Fawcett's gone missing, I find she's using very spiritual things to try and get her
39:54through. She's constantly focusing on there must be a reason for this, there must be a predetermined
40:01thing that I'm supposed to go through as a person. And she's always talking about one day we'll get
40:06the call and we'll go over to him and be with him in the lost city.
40:14Finally, in 1928, the Society mounted a rescue expedition and they backed a colorful adventurer
40:22named Colonel George Dyatt, who had recently retraced President Teddy Roosevelt's 1913 Amazon expedition.
40:32Diot was equipped with sophisticated two-way radios. His messages from the interior were picked up
40:39by radio hams throughout the United States who were passing them on to radio stations. And so once again,
40:45the Fawcett story made the headlines and the front pages. The story had enormous legs. It just kept on going.
40:54Diot received credible evidence that Fawcett was killed by bandits in the Mato Grosso. Ignoring this,
41:01he pursued a native claiming to have guided Fawcett much deeper into the Shingu Amazon region.
41:07Diot and his men followed him in and found themselves in hostile territory, each tribe pointing to the
41:13other as Fawcett's killers. Diot was held captive by Indians, barely escaping with his life. He did not
41:21find Fawcett, but turned his adventure into a book and a Hollywood movie. Then in 1937, a missionary
41:30named Martha Monick announced she'd found a white boy she felt certain was the son of Jack Fawcett.
41:36It turned out he was an albino native. The rescue missions continued.
41:41Diot literally thousands of people applied to go on these expeditions. People as ill qualified as Jack
41:51and Raleigh, for the most part, and dozens of expeditions, dozens, set out into the Mato Grosso
41:59looking for him and continue to look for him to this day. But new evidence points to Fawcett's
42:06signet ring found in a Mato Grosso shop in 1979 and returned to his granddaughter.
42:12Whether he went missing...
42:14I became involved in it in the 1970s.
42:17Brian Ridout, a wildlife biologist, unraveled a tangled web of shady characters leading to the ring
42:24in the Mato Grosso in the mid-1970s.
42:29Shopkeeper Vicente Grisolia and his wife claimed he got the ring on Percy's disastrous earlier hunt for Zee,
42:36either in exchange for mules or as a payment for guiding the Englishman towards the lost city.
42:44Ridout thinks Grisolia's ring story is suspicious.
42:49Nina told the RGS Percy had the ring on the final expedition and would not have given it up easily.
42:57I don't think that he needed a guide. He was a founder, gold medalist from the Royal Geographical
43:04Society. He'd gone through their surveying course and no reason to suppose that he didn't know where
43:10he was. Every day of the week I'm sure he knew precisely where he was at all times.
43:17So I don't think he got lost in the jungle. He disappeared because somebody killed him.
43:27Basically there are only three things that could have happened to them.
43:31They were either killed by Indians, they died as a result of some accident which could easily have
43:39happened. Perhaps disease, perhaps drowned in a river. Or thirdly, there had been a revolution
43:46not long before and renegade soldiers were hiding out in the area. And there had been a number of
43:54occasions within months of this expedition in which travelers had been stopped and robbed and in some
44:01cases murdered by these rebel soldiers. That could have happened to them also.
44:10All the pieces now come together to tell a new version of Fawcett's fate.
44:15Percy's Theodolite compass was found within days of Dead Horse Camp. It's possible it was stolen then
44:21abandoned. And it's unlikely a remote tribe like the Kalapalos would have traded the ring for money.
44:29And that means Fawcett likely did not get as far into the Amazon as Colonel Dyett claimed he did.
44:37When the Fawcett party actually left Cuiabah, the whole town came out to see them off.
44:43And Fawcett being there was quite an event. So I know from people I'd met who'd been there at that
44:50time,
44:51that there was a sort of massive party when they left.
44:54So everybody knew about the equipment that the Fawcett party had. It was a time when a few new
45:01rifles and a bit of money would certainly have come in handy for the sort of ne'er-do-well
45:06population
45:07of the area. And I think that the Fawcett party probably didn't get any further than Dead Horse Camp.
45:13And I think that's what happened to them. I don't think there's any evidence whatsoever
45:18that they ever went round the Kulaini River and met the Kalapalos Indians. And that everybody
45:23that's gone looking for Fawcett has headed off in the wrong direction.
45:31In this version, the end comes quickly, not far from Dead Horse Camp,
45:36when a renegade catches the old explorer and soldier off guard.
45:48Fawcett is gone. But what of his lost city? Until recently, the vast Amazon has hidden its secrets.
45:56Some evidence of advanced communal villages has emerged in the Shingu, where Percy was heading in
46:02his search for Z. But Nile has heard of even more dramatic discoveries in the Western Amazon,
46:08and he travels more than a thousand miles to the other side of Brazil to see for himself.
46:18Hidden in the jungle for 2,000 years, and only emerging as trees are felled to create farmland,
46:24a vast network of mysterious religious sites. Archaeologists believe they are part of an ancient
46:30city-state stretching some 160 square miles. These prove that ancient lost cities did exist in the
46:39Amazon, though they don't match the expectations of explorers like Fawcett.
46:45When we talk about civilization, in general, people think about, you know, buildings and things made out
46:52of rock and things like that. And in this place and in other places in the Amazon, there was no
46:59rocks.
47:00So people build things moving earth. This vast network of ancient religious sites points to the scale of
47:09the city that Fawcett was seeking. What's more, Fawcett was here in 1907 and actually may have camped
47:16inside one of these grass circles. Denise Sean helped discover the sites. Now she's the archaeologist in
47:26charge of the excavation. In the beginning, it's funny because people who came here first,
47:32he couldn't understand what these things were. And when I saw the pictures for the first time,
47:39the aerial photographs, I got amazed with this. We had this general idea that things like that don't exist
47:48in the Amazon. Are they all built to a standard design? No one fully understands the exact purpose
47:56of these deep trenches, but they do support at least one of Fawcett's main precepts. Large,
48:02sophisticated populations once lived in the Amazon rainforest. When the Spanish got there.
48:09And the more they dig and locate hundreds of sites on Google Earth,
48:13the more traditional beliefs about Amazonian settlements are made obsolete. Would this be
48:20of the same kind of age or would that be something? One thing that Amazonian archaeologists have
48:25believed for 30, 40 years that nobody was living in the the hinterland. So it's very strange to find these
48:33sites here because you need lots of people to build them.
48:39So it's it's it's what we call monumental construction.
48:46Well, Fawcett was right. If there's going to be a lost city, there has to be higher population
48:51levels back then than there are now. The estimate that I've seen from Clark Erickson at the University
48:56of Pennsylvania is about a million people. It's a swath that goes from eastern Bolivia all the way into
49:04western Brazil, 700 miles long, 1,000 miles long. And on the north and south end of it,
49:09which are the two areas that have research have been done, are these large earthworks. They're called
49:15geoglyphs sometimes. And they were clearly built by societies that, you know, weren't a couple guys in
49:23the world. They're called the Loincloths. A new picture of the western Amazon is now emerging. Here,
49:30discoveries of ceramics and nearby water sources indicate human habitation. Geoglyphs may have
49:37been religious sites surrounded by raised fields and communities of 60,000 people.
49:48So, hundreds of miles west of Fawcett's last search for Z, civilizations are being found in a state
49:55mapped by Percy in 1907. While he did not comprehend what lay under his feet, today, Fawcett's journals
50:03are being used to help scientists unravel the mystery of these lost cities.
50:10Actually, the Fawcett, you know, report was one of the things we read because he was in this very region
50:20in the beginning of the 20th century. And he talks about clearings, circular villages with Indians. Some
50:28of them were already abandoned. The Indians had left. Fawcett, in one of his itineraries that he wrote
50:37to the RGS, he says there is only one way. Now, Fawcett was a geographer, so he knows that any
50:43geographic
50:43point has 360 degrees of angles. So, in my opinion, Fawcett wasn't just talking about the geographical
50:50direction he had to go, but about a spiritual direction as well. So, he had to follow these exact
50:55points, Dead Horse Camp, then onto Kamen Kwa Kwa Falls, where he would have seen what looks like
50:59the silver bars, where he would have seen what looked like the Atlantean symbols and then carry
51:04on into the Jingu area towards the city. But from there on, it's not just about being a great
51:10geographer. It's about believing that you're actually going to your final destination. And that's
51:15what Fawcett believed. He believed that he was the one man who had both the physical capabilities
51:20and the spiritual capabilities to make it to the lost city of Zed.
51:26And I think he should be remembered,
51:30despite what anyone might think about the psychic
51:34and the spiritual side of it.
51:38He should be remembered as a very brave explorer.
51:46Marching into the sunset and never coming back,
51:48I think, is an image that really continues to capture the imagination.
51:56The man that, against all odds,
52:00stakes everything on this final throw
52:03that the legend remains with us and remains popular.
52:29The Secrets of the Dead investigation continues online.
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