Lost Cities of the Amazon

In 1925, British Army officer Percy Fawcett rode into Brazil's Mato Grosso region, hunting a lost city he called Z. Since 1906 he had surveyed the Amazon's borders for the Royal Geographical Society, and indigenous accounts alongside old Portuguese documents convinced him that ceramic shards and earthworks he had seen were proof of a sophisticated civilization buried beneath the canopy. Most scientists of his day dismissed the notion outright, certain the rainforest could never hide anything so complex. Fawcett pressed on regardless, joined by his son Jack and their friend Raleigh Rimell. His final letter home was sent from a camp he had named Dead Horse Camp. After that, silence. No bodies, no trail, no city was ever found, and the three men vanished into the forest for good. Their disappearance became one of the twentieth century's most famous unsolved exploration mysteries, and decades later it became the basis for David Grann's 2009 book, The Lost City of Z.