Tea at Trianon: The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, October 22, 2023

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

After seeing the film I just had to read David Gann's book. It was utterly intriguing. From The Nation:

In early 1925, British Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, having convinced himself, based on a mix of archival research, deduction and clairvoyance, that a large undiscovered city lay hidden somewhere in the Amazon, entered the jungle to try to find it. The word “quixotic” has its origins in a story set on the Spanish plains, in the same century when Europeans were first entering South America’s vast, seemingly unending rainforest. Since then, the adjective has often been applied to those like Fawcett–explorers entranced by the promise of riches or fame, as assured in their quests as the Man of La Mancha was that the windmills he tilted at were giants. “I call it Z,” wrote Fawcett of his fabled metropolis, “for the sake of convenience.”
Fawcett, his son Jack and another companion were never heard from again, but their disappearance prompted a parade of would-be rescuers. With the US frontier closed, Africa carved up and the British Empire at its widest girth, “the big blank spaces in the map,” as a character says in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, based partly on Fawcett’s earlier travels, were “all being filled in, and there’s no room for romance anywhere”–except for the opportunity to reprise Stanley’s feat and find a lost Victorian. By 1933 so many film crews, reporters and adventurers were converging on the Amazon in the hunt for the Fawcett party that the Brazilian government, to avoid having to save yet another writer looking for material or Hollywood actor hoping for publicity, put an embargo on future trips. (Read more.)

And there was indeed a lost city, but not exactly as Fawcett pictured. From Scientific American:

In 1925 British adventurer Colonel Percy Fawcett disappeared into the wilds of the Amazon, never to be heard from again after going there in search of a lost city he called Z. But decades later, a city of sorts—actually a series of settlements connected by roads—has been found at the headwaters of the Xingu River where Fawcett went missing in an area previously buried beneath the dense foliage in what is now Xingu National Park.

Anthropologist Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida 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 within roughly 7,700 square miles (20,000 square kilometers) of forest—an area slightly smaller than New Jersey. The larger towns boasted defensive ditches 10 feet (three meters) deep and 33 feet (10 meters) wide backed by a wooden palisade as well as large plazas, some reaching 490 feet (150 meters) across.

The remains of houses and ceramic cooking utensils show that humans occupied these cities for around 1,000 years, from roughly 1,500 years to as recently as 400 years ago. Satellite pictures reveal that during that time, the inhabitants carved roads through the jungle; all plaza villages had a major road that ran northeast to southwest along the summer solstice axis and linked to other settlements as much as three miles (five kilometers) away. There were bridges on some of the roads and others had canoe canals running alongside them.

The remains of the settlements also hint at surrounding large fields of manioc, or cassava (a starchy root that is still a staple part of the Brazilian diet) as well as the earthen dams and artificial ponds of fish farming, still practiced by people who may be the present-day descendants of the Kuikuro. Although such "garden cities," as Heckenberger describes them in Science, do not match the dense urbanism of contemporary Brazilian metropolises such as Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo, they do blend seamlessly into the jungle and maximize use of limited natural resources. They also suggest that the rainforest bears the marks of intense human habitation, rather than being pristine.

But, ultimately, these cities died; most likely a victim of the diseases brought by European explorers in the early 16th century, according to Heckenberger. Two thirds or more of the original human inhabitants of Brazil are believed to have been killed by such disease, and the forest quickly swallowed the cities they left behind.

As a result, later European explorers had no idea that a civilization had once flourished in the Amazon, despite clues in kilometer-long earthworks and unusually fertile so-called terra preta (dark) soil. The 500 or so Kuikuro may have known of their ancestors' exploits—and they may have drawn the attention of Fawcett and other explorers—but only now can the "lost cities" of the Amazon claim to have been found. (Read more.)