Man of mystery and adventure: one of many independent explorers of the New World, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett gained notoriety in his fatal attempt to find the lost city of the Amazon.

• Author: Werner, Louis
• Position: Essay

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The mystery of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett (1867-1925), the English explorer of Amazonia who disappeared in Mato Grosso along with his son Jack and his son's best friend Raleigh, never seems to grow stale. The legend of his life and death owes as much to the romantically-minded yet physically tough-as-nails character of Fawcett himself as it does to modern day myth-making.

Fawcett's final expedition in search of El Dorado was financed, in return for exclusive coverage narrated breathlessly in purple prose, by an American newspaper syndicate, which kept his story alive on their front pages long after he presumably was dead. The recently published book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann has given another boost to the larger-than-life legendizing.

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The New York Times has estimated that more expeditions have set out to discover Fawcett's fate than were ever launched to discover El Dorado itself. But this should be no surprise, given the gentlemanly rules of fair play that applied to British exploration in the late Victorian and early Edwardian Age. Consider the many missions sent at great risk to discover the fates of Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin, South Pole explorer Robert Falcon Scott, and African explorer David Livingstone, who was immortalized in the words of his rescuer Henry Morton Stanley: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

How many fame-seeking explorers yearned to ask the same of Col. Fawcett?

What is little known about Fawcett is his strong belief in theosophy a kind of New Age spiritualism that imagined a hidden world unlocked by the keys of seers and séances. Such mushy romanticism was a far cry from his stiff-upper-lip reputation as a man who could bushwhack nearly barefoot through virgin jungle for months on end, eating little and sleeping less.

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Yet the personality of many British explorers of the day was exactly the same. Scott, for example, did a suicidal walk across the polar ice cap, and T.E. Lawrence marched across hundreds of miles of Arabian desert on camels without water, imagining himself to be acting a part in some Orientalist fantasy.

Indeed, Fawcett is probably the only explorer ever to write as many articles for the Geographical Journal as he did for the Occult Review . Not surprisingly, his best friend Arthur Conan Doyle--who was the...