Percy Harrison Fawcett (18 August 1867 disappeared 1925) was a British geographer, artillery officer, cartographer, archaeologist, and explorer of South America. Fawcett disappeared in 1925 (along with his eldest son, Jack, and one of Jack's friends, Raleigh Rimell) during an expedition to find an ancient lost city which he and others believed existed in the jungles of Brazil. Life Early life Percy Fawcett was born on 18 August 1867 in Torquay, Devon, England, to Edward Boyd Fawcett and Myra Elizabeth (née MacDougall). Fawcett received his early education at Newton Abbot Proprietary College, alongside the sportsman and journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson. Fawcett's father, who had been born in India, was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), while his elder brother, Edward Douglas Fawcett (1866–1960), was a mountain climber, an Eastern occultist, and the author of philosophical books and popular adventure novels. Fawcett attended the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich as a cadet, and was commissioned as a lieutenant of the Royal Artillery on 24 July 1886. This same year, Fawcett met his future wife, Nina Agnes Paterson, whom he married in 1901 and had two sons, Jack (1903–1925?) and Brian (1906–1984), and one daughter, Joan (1910–2005). On 13 January 1896, he was appointed adjutant of the 1st Cornwall (Duke of Cornwall's) Artillery Volunteers, and was promoted to captain on 15 June 1897. He later served in Hong Kong, Malta, and Trincomalee, Ceylon. Fawcett joined the RGS in 1901, in order to study surveying and mapmaking. Later, he worked for the British Secret Service in North Africa while pursuing the surveyor's craft. He served for the War Office on Spike Island in County Cork from 1903 to 1906, where he was promoted to major on 11 January 1905. He became friends with authors Sir Henry Rider Haggard and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; the latter used Fawcett's Amazonian field reports as inspiration for his novel The Lost World. Early expeditions Fawcett's first expedition to South America was in 1906 (he was seconded for service there on 2 May) when at the age of 39 he travelled to Brazil to map a jungle area at the border of Brazil and Bolivia at the behest of the Royal Geographical Society. The Society had been commissioned to map the area as a third party unbiased by local national interests. He arrived in La Paz, Bolivia, in June. While on the expedition in 1907, Fawcett claimed