MYSTERY OF THE MATTO

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 51, 29 August 1934, Page 9

MYSTERY OF THE MATTO

SEAKCH FOR FAWCETT

MISSING SINCE 1925

LONDON, August 27.

Commander George Dyott, a former flying ace, has returned from a search for Colonel Fawcett and his companions, who disappeared in tho country round (he sources- of the Amazon beyond the Matto Grosso in 1925.

He declared that there was only a million to one chance that Colonel ]J. P. Fawcett was alive. Commander Dyott found Colonel Fawcett's trunk of clothes, traced his camps, and talked to people who had met him^ but, in view of the hostility of the Indians who surrounded' Commander Dyott's camp, which was four days' march from where Colonel Fawcett was last seen, Commander Dyott thinks that an aeroplane fitted with adjustable floats is the ' only means of ascertaining the explorers 5 fate.. Colonel Fawcett, his son, and a comrade named Ealeigh Bimmell left in 1925 for the interior of Brazil, where they were last heard of at Bakairi, near Cuyaba, on May 30, 1925. They were bound for unexplored jungles in the hope of rediscovering an old city or group of ruins.

Commander Dyott led a search party on a journey of 3000 miles through Brazil early in 1928 and returned to New York, -where he stated his opinion that Colonel Fawcetfc was dead. At the end of 1932 a Rio de Janeiro newspaper published a statement by tho German explorer Victor Oppenheim in which he expressed the belief that the explorers had died in the jungle at least sis years ago. He said that the region where Colonel Fawcett dismissed his guides, and pushed on with a small party was the Xingu Kiver and that after this he probably went another 300 miles inland, after that turning into the forest of the Cayapos. There, without food or means of conveyance, the party must inevitably have perished. This story differed from tho more common versions of Colonel Fawcett >s fate by attributing the explorer's death to other agencies than Indians. It is generally thought that the party were victims of some Indian tribe.