Free The Lost City of Z by David Grann

who never can be wrong, and will never acknowledge an error.” In September of 1864, the two men, who had once nursed each other back from death on an expedition, were supposed to square off in a public meeting. The London
Times
called it a “gladiatorial exhibition.” But, as the meeting was about to begin, the gatherers were informed that Speke would not be coming: he had gone hunting the previous day, and was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. “By God, he’s killed himself!” Burton reportedly exclaimed, staggering on the stage; later, Burton was seen in tears, reciting his onetime companion’s name over and over. Although it was never known for certain if the shooting was intentional, many suspected, like Burton, that the protracted feud had caused the man who had conquered the desert to take his own life. A decade later, Speke’s claim to having discovered the Nile’s source would be proved correct.
    During the Society’s early years, no member personified the organization’s eccentricities or audacious mission more than Sir Francis Galton. A cousin of Charles Darwin’s, he had been a child prodigy who, by the age of four, could read and recite Latin. He went on to concoct myriad inventions. They included a ventilating top hat; a machine called a Gumption-Reviver, which periodically wet his head to keep him awake during endless study; underwater goggles; and a rotating-vane steam engine. Suffering from periodic nervous breakdowns—“sprained brain,” as he called it—he had a compulsion to measure and count virtually everything. He quantified the sensitivity of animal hearing, using a walking stick that could make an inconspicuous whistle; the efficacy of prayer; the average age of death in each profession (lawyers: 66.51; doctors: 67.04); the exactamount of rope needed to break a criminal’s neck while avoiding decapitation; and levels of boredom (at meetings of the Royal Geographical Society he would count the rate of fidgets among each member of the audience). Notoriously, Galton, who like so many of his colleagues was a profound racist, tried to measure levels of intelligence in people and later became known as the father of eugenics.
    In another age, Galton’s monomania with quantification might have made him a freak. But, as the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once observed, “no man expressed his era’s fascination with numbers so well as Darwin’s celebrated cousin.” And there was no place that shared his fascination more than the Royal Geographical Society. In the 1850s, Galton, who had inherited enough money to enable him to avoid the burden of a conventional career, became a member of the Society and, with its endorsement and guidance, explored southern Africa. “A passion for travel seized me,” he wrote, “as if I had been a migratory bird.” He mapped and documented everything that he could: latitudes and longitudes, topography, animals, climate, tribes. Returning to great fanfare, he received the Royal Geographical Society’s gold medal, the field’s most prestigious honor. In 1854, Galton was elected to the Society’s governing body, on which, for the next four decades, he served in varying capacities, including honorary secretary and vice president. Together, Galton and this collection of men—they were all men until a divisive vote at the end of the nineteenth century admitted twenty-one women—began to attack, as Joseph Conrad put it of such militant geographers, “from north and south and east and west, conquering a bit of truth here and a bit of truth there, and sometimes swallowed up by the mystery their hearts were so persistently set on unveiling.”
    “ WHAT MATERIALS are you looking for?” one of the archivists asked me.
    I had gone down into the small reading room in the basement.
    Bookshelves, illuminated under fluorescent lights, were crammed with travel guides, atlases, and bound copies of the
Proceedings of the Royal Geographical