Percy Fawcett

Percy Fawcett trained as an artillery officer before working for the Royal Geographical Society as a surveyor, sent from 1906 onward to establish disputed borders between Bolivia, Brazil and Peru in dense, poorly mapped rainforest. The work was slow and exacting, involving months at a time cutting survey lines through jungle, tracking astronomical positions, and negotiating with rubber companies and Indigenous communities whose land the borders cut across.

Over several expeditions Fawcett developed a reputation for stamina and self-discipline that other surveyors of the era lacked, travelling with minimal supplies and covering ground others considered impassable. He also became increasingly convinced, based on old Portuguese documents, his own observations of overgrown earthworks and stories from local communities, that the Amazon concealed the ruins of a sophisticated ancient civilisation, which he referred to in his notes as the lost city of "Z."

In 1925, funded by public subscription and newspaper backing, he set out into the Mato Grosso region of Brazil with his eldest son Jack and Jack's friend Raleigh Rimell, deliberately taking a small party rather than a large expedition, which he believed had doomed earlier attempts by drawing hostile attention and spreading supplies too thin. His last message, sent on 29 May 1925, described the party about to cross into territory with no further contact planned for some time.

They were never seen again. Numerous rescue and investigative expeditions over subsequent decades, several of which cost more lives, failed to establish definitively what happened to them, and Fawcett's fate remains one of the enduring open questions of twentieth-century exploration.