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Grann visited the Kalapalo tribe in 2005 and discovered that it had passed down an oral history about Fawcett, among the first white men the tribe had ever seen. The oral account said that Fawcett and his party had stayed at their village and then left, heading eastward. The Kalapalos warned Fawcett and his companions not to go that way—that they would be killed by the “fierce Indians” who occupied that territory—but that Fawcett insisted on going. The Kalapalos observed smoke from the expedition’s campfire each evening for five days before it disappeared. The Kalapalos said they were sure the fierce Indians had killed them. The book has already been optioned by Paramount Pictures and Brad Pitt's Plan B Production Company, and a movie is forthcoming. Benedict Cumberbatch has reportedly signed on to play Fawcett.

More than 75 years after Fawcett's disappearance, David Grann, a staff writer with The New Yorker, set out to discover what happened. His book, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, is the result, published in February 2009.

Over the years, the search for Fawcett became more alluring than the search for El Dorado itself. Rescue efforts, from the serious to the farcical, materialized in the years that followed, and hundreds of others lost their lives in the search. Rewards were posted. Psychics were brought in by the family. Articles and books were written. An estimated one hundred people died looking for traces of the famed adventurer.

No sooner had the group disappeared than rumors of their fate began to circulate. Some thought they had met their death at the hands of the Indians, while others were convinced they had died of disease or fallen prey to wild animals. Percy Fawcett's son Brian made two trips to the area to try to solve the mystery of their disappearance, but returned without success. Their disappearance gave rise to what has been described as "the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century."

This was the last that anyone heard of the expedition. The three men vanished into the jungle and were never heard from again. Because he had survived several similar forays into the Amazon, his family and friends considered him to be near super-human. As before, they expected Fawcett to stumble out of the jungle, bearded and emaciated and announcing some fantastic discovery. It did not happen.

On May 29th, 1925, Fawcett telegraphed his wife saying that they were ready to enter unexplored territory in the region of the Upper Xingu, a tributary of the Amazon River. He said that they had sent the rest of the party back on account of the dangers posed by the local Indians, and that just the three of them would be going on. His message ended with the words; "You need have no fear of failure."

Fawcett believed that only a small group had any chance of surviving the horrors of the Amazon. He had seen large forces decimated by malaria, insects, snakes, poison darts, starvation, and insanity. He knew better. He and his two companions would travel light, carry their own supplies, eat off the land, pose no threat to the natives, and endure months of hardship in their search for the Lost City of Z.

In 1925, he set out to find it with his twenty-one-year-old son and his son's best friend. The world was watching. Fawcett was financed by the Royal Geographical Society in London, the world’s foremost repository of research gathered by explorers. Fawcett, then age 57, had proclaimed for decades his belief in the City of Z. His writings, speeches, and exploits had captured the imagination of millions, and reports of his last expedition were front page news.

The London Geographical Journal, the preeminent publication in its field, observed in 1953 that "Fawcett marked the end of an age. One might almost call him the last of the individualist explorers. The day of the aeroplane, the radio, the organized and heavily financed modern expedition had not arrived. With him, it was the heroic story of a man against the forest." Reading Orellano's account, he became convinced that the impenetrable jungle of the Matto Grosso concealed the remnants of an ancient civilization, which he named, simply, the City of Z. For years, most scientists had dismissed Fawcett's theory, insisting that conditions in the jungle were too brutal to support a complex society.

He was renowned as the "David Livingstone of the Amazon," and was believed to have such unrivaled powers of endurance that a few colleagues even claimed he was immune to death. An American explorer described him as "a man of indomitable will, infinite resource, fearless"; another said that he could "outwalk and outhike and outexplore anybody else."

Fawcett has been proposed as a possible inspiration for Indiana Jones. A fictionalised version of Fawcett aids Jones in the novel Indiana Jones and the Seven Veils. According to an article in Comics Scene No. 45, Fawcett was even the inspiration of Kent Allard, alter ego of the Shadow. Allard fakes his death in the South American jungles, then returns to the United States.

Doyle based his Professor Challenger character partly on Fawcett, and stories of the "Lost City of Z" became the basis for his novel The Lost World.

Arthur Conan Doyle heard Fawcett speak at the Royal Geographical Society to a packed audience in 1916.

The Lost City of Z In the early 1900’s, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett was a popular, well-known, and admired explorer of the Amazon. He was the last of the great territorial explorers who ventured into blank spots on the map with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose. He helped map the border of Argentina and Brazil, found the source of the Rio Verde, and documented several civilizations.

When other explorers returned to the Amazon basin a generation after Orellano, they found nothing but wild jungle, with no evidence of the cities he had described. Next: Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett and The Lost City of Z

The second boat crew, on arriving at Margarita, found 25 of their companions, including Ana de Ayala, who had arrived there on a ship of the original fleet. The total of 44 survivors (of an estimated 300) were eventually rescued by a Spanish ship. Many of them settled in Central America, Peru and Chile. Ana de Ayala lived for the rest of her days in Panama. She is last heard of in 1572.

Orellana and his boat crew, who had set out again to locate the principal channel, were subsequently attacked by Indians. 17 were killed by poisoned arrows. Orellana himself died of illness and grief, sometime in November 1546.

A river-going vessel was constructed but 57 men died from hunger and the remaining seagoing vessel was driven ashore. The marooned men found refuge among friendly Indians on an island in the delta, while Orellana and a boat party set off to find food and locate the principal arm of the Amazon. On returning to the shipwreck camp they found it deserted, the men having constructed a second boat in which they had set out to find Orellana. The second boat eventually gave up the search and made its way along the coast to the island of Margarita near the Venezuela coast.

Orellana was permitted by Charles to explore and settle Nueva Andalucia, with no fewer than 200 infantrymen, 100 horsemen and the material to construct two river-going ships.The commission was accepted on 18 February 1544, but preparations for the voyage were frustrated by unpaid debts, Portuguese spies and internal wranglings. Sufficient funds were raised through the efforts of Cosmo de Chaves, Orellana's stepfather, but the problems were compounded by Orellana's decision to marry a very young and poor girl, Ana de Ayala, whom he intended to take with him. On his arrival at the Amazon he was to build two towns, one just inside the mouth of the river. He set sail with four ships on 11 May 1545. By the time Orellana arrived off the Brazilian coast shortly before Christmas 1545 one ship had been lost, 98 men had died of sickness and 50 had deserted. A further ship was lost in mid-Atlantic, carrying with it 77 crew, 11 horses and a boat to be used on the Amazon. Undaunted, he proceeded 100 leagues into the Amazon delta.

This was the part of his tale that inspired the legend of El Dorado, "The Golden One."

At one point he fell ill with fever. In his delirium he reported that he had seen densely populated regions running hundreds of kilometers along the river. He described huge "cities that glistened in white", of temples and huge avenues 60 feet wide, in vast clearings in the middle of the dense jungle, surrounded by fields of fertile, irrigated land, where the king—the "Gilded Man"—wore gold dust as clothing.

The story of the fierce ambush launched by the Icamiabas, who Orellano claimed were led by fierce white skinned warrior women, that nearly destroyed the Spanish expedition was narrated to the king, Charles I, who, inspired by the Greek legend of the Amazons, named the river the Amazon.

Orellana decided to return to Spain to obtain from the Crown the governorship over the discovered lands, which he named New Andalusia. Orellana captivated the Spanish court with tales and exaggerations of his voyage down the Amazon. When Orellana went down the river in search of gold, descending from the Andes (in 1541), the river was still called Rio Grande, Mar Dulce or Rio de Canela (Cinnamon) because cinnamon trees were once thought to be located there.

During their navigation they were threatened constantly by the Omaguas, who were a populous, organized society in the late Pre-Columbian era. They reached the Negro River on June 3, 1542 and finally reached the open sea on 26 August 1542. In one of the most improbably successful voyages in known history, Orellana had managed to sail the entire length of the Amazon.

On reaching the Coca, Orellano's men constructed a brigantine. When they reached the confluence with the Napo River, his 50 surviving men threatened to mutiny.