James Stewart
speaker
3,838 appearances
20 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 3 Sep
James Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 15 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
But the allure of finding the unfindable endured well into the 20th century too, when British explorer Percy Fawcett became obsessed with finding the riches Oriana had described centuries earlier, fuelled by the fire of one main objective, to find what remained of a lost city he called Zed.
He focused on the western Amazon in Bolivia, and the southern Amazon in Brazil, but found nothing.
Along the way he did encounter indigenous people, but found them living in small villages.
A far cry from the huge cities the rumours had promised.
Rather than deter him, this seemed to spur him on even more.
He even wrote to his wife in a letter that she need have no fear of failure.
Yet on the 29th of May 1925, on his eighth Amazonian expedition, Fawcett headed into the jungle from a place somewhere in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil known as Dead Horse Camp, never to be seen again.
For decades after this last hurrah, really, scientists concluded that this place was simply too hostile, too inhospitable for humans to thrive, and was largely just an expanse filled with exotic flora and fauna.
Feedback among the scientific community was that the rainforest soil was so poor it simply could not sustain large-scale farming, and therefore cities were impossible.
But they were all missing something, something that actually Fawcett had been onto.
because it turns out he was looking roughly in the right places, but maybe he was looking for the wrong things.
Now, up until this point, the rainforest had done a pretty phenomenal job of camouflaging its secrets.
But just five years ago, everything changed.
scientists finally found the lost cities of the Amazon, because this time they had something these explorers didn't.
They had lasers.
Yeah, I know, not what I was expecting to say either, but this is pretty amazing.
In the end, the tool that cracked open this mystery is LiDAR, light detection and ranging.
Oh yeah, essentially lasers.
LiDAR works by sending pulses of laser light out towards objects, and measuring the time it takes for the reflected laser beams to return.
And with a bit of maths, as speed is distance over time, and we know the speed of light, we can then work out the exact distance to those objects.
Showing 1981–2000 of 3,838 · page 100 of 192
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