Explorers are not, perhaps, the most promising people with whom to build a society. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because
they have a streak of unsociability and need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men.
—
Anonymous member of Royal Geographical Society, quoted by David Grann in The Lost City of Z.
Nicholas Felton gave me the book and I can’t put it down. It’s an account of Col. Percy Harrison Fawcet, one of the last great explorers commissioned to chart the thousands of blanks present on maps back then. Later in life, he plotted his own expedition to find the Lost City of Z, an elusive city of gold thought to exist in the middle of South America’s jungles. He never returned, and since several modern-day Dr. Livingstones have sought to find traces of him.
