Mystery Atlas
Event

Fawcett's 1925 Expedition

Percy Fawcett's final expedition, launched from Cuiabá in April 1925 with his son Jack and Jack's friend Raleigh Rimell to locate the city he called Z; the three men vanished after their last message from Dead Horse Camp on 29 May 1925.

This is a knowledge-graph entry: what our data records about Fawcett's 1925 Expedition and how it connects to the rest of the atlas. It does not have a full article of its own yet.

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Percy Fawcett: The Search for Z and His Disappearance

From the manuscript that inspired Fawcett's belief in a lost city to his 1925 disappearance and the modern archaeology that partly vindicated his premise — reusable on the lost-cities and unsolved-disappearances pages.

  1. 1753

    Manuscript 512

    The document, later read by Fawcett, describes a Portuguese bandeirante's discovery of ruined stone architecture in Bahia.

  2. 1906

    Fawcett begins Royal Geographical Society boundary surveys

    His decade of surveying the Bolivia-Brazil border introduces him to indigenous accounts and archaeological traces that seed his belief in a hidden advanced civilisation.

  3. 13 February 1911

    Fawcett lectures the RGS on the Huanchaca Plateau

    Arthur Conan Doyle attends and later credits the account, with Fawcett as a partial model for Professor Challenger, as the basis for his 1912 novel The Lost World.

  4. 20 April 1925

    Fawcett's 1925 Expedition

    Fawcett, his son Jack, and Jack's friend Raleigh Rimell depart Cuiabá for the final search for Z.

  5. 29 May 1925

    Last message sent from Dead Horse Camp

    Fawcett writes that the party has "no fear of any failure" before heading into unmapped territory; none of the three men is ever seen again.

  6. 1951

    Orlando Villas-Bôas produces bones claimed to be Fawcett's

    Fawcett's son Brian disputes the identification; later dental analysis and Kalapalo testimony both confirm the bones were not his.

  7. 2003

    Michael Heckenberger publishes the Kuhikugu "garden cities" findings

    Archaeological survey of the Upper Xingu documents a genuine network of pre-Columbian towns, giving Fawcett's belief in Amazonian complexity real substance even as Z itself remains unfound.

  8. 2009

    David Grann publishes The Lost City of Z

    Drawing on Kalapalo oral testimony, it becomes the most widely cited modern reconstruction of the party's likely fate.

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