Disappeared

Several expeditions over the years set out to find what happened to Fawcett, with no tangible result. Legends grew about his disappearance, that he had founded a new religious community in the depth of the rainforest, that he had “gone native”, and so on. At least one report mentioned Fawcett as being alive, and Jack married with two blonde, blue-eyed children.

His fame inspired the Belgian cartoonist Hergé to create a fictional British explorer, Ridgewell, who appeared in the graphic “Tintin” novels The Broken Ear and Tintin and the Picaros. With his steely-blue eyes and iconic stetson hat, he has been mentioned as a partial inspiration for the fictional archaeologist-adventurer Indiana Jones. His story also inspired Sherlock Holmes’ inventor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, (both books were later made into films), and the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope comedy The Road to Zanzibar.

In the early years of this century, David Grann, an American journalist writing for the New Yorker, ventured into the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso in search of Fawcett. In 2005, he published his findings in an article, which he later expanded into a book, which provided the basis for the 2016 film The Lost City of Z.

In his book, Grann reported on the findings of Anthropologist Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida, who had teamed with the local Kuikuro people in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso to uncover 28 towns, villages and hamlets that may have supported as many as 50,000 people. Grann concluded that these discoveries matched Fawcett’s claims.