Lost Worlds

It's hard to keep track of the places lost to history. They've been wiped off the face of the Earth, absorbed into larger nations, ground down into nothing or sometimes just invented by our collective imagination. The struggle to preserve these worlds in our memory makes for compelling literature.

Famed explorer Percy Fawcett disappeared into the Amazon in 1925, searching for evidence of ancient civilizations, and when it was clear he would never come back, generations of adventurers took off after him. David Grann tells us about his own search for Fawcett in The Lost City of Z, slowly revealing the layers of obsession that led so many would-be adventurers into danger and possible death.

But it doesn't need to be part of the fabled past to be lost. After Lewis and Clark found a way to the West, millionaire John Jacob Astor tried to establish a worldwide trade network by founding a colony at the mouth of the Columbia River. With deep humility, he named it Astoria, and even though it turned out to be a horrible disaster, taking the lives of half its explorers, the venture charted a path that eventually would become the Oregon Trail.

There are also those worlds that exist as purely myth and legend. Umberto Eco's novel Baudolino is told by a 12th century peasant whose quick wit and gift for tall tales sweeps him into the court of Frederick I. But when he claims to have visited the kingdom of Prester John, meeting all kinds of fantastical creatures straight out of medieval bestiaries, even falling in love with a satyr, you start to doubt the narrator's honesty. Eco also wrote The Book of Legendary Lands about more imaginary places that were lost before they were ever even found.

So keep exploring. Maybe you'll find something that never even existed in the first place.