Fawcett, born in Devon in 1867, lost his father, Indian-born army officer and cricketer Edward Boyd Fawcett when only 17. He joined the Royal Artillery, in which he learnt surveying, and found himself posted to Fort Frederick, Trincomalee in 1886.
Sri Lanka would not have been totally unfamiliar to him. His brother, science fiction writer, chess player, racing car driver, aviator and mountain climber Edward Douglas Fawcett, had joined the Theosophists, helping edit Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine. He came out East and settled in the Theosophist headquarters at Adyar, Chennai.
Edward wrote prolifically, as E. Douglas Fawcett or E. D. Fawcett, his works including three science fiction books in which he predicted air raids and tank warfare, and―significantly, in the light of what happened later―wrote of a hollow earth. He also published numerous theosophist articles, notably A Talk with Sumangala – Is Southern Buddhism Materialistic?, published in the journal Lucifer in April 1890: he had taken Pansil and accepted Buddhism.
Percy Fawcett may also have accepted Buddhism. Certainly, he became an ardent spiritualist and follower of Madame Blavatsky, and his belief in the lost Amazonian civilization may have stemmed in part from a belief in a portal to the hollow centre of the Earth.
That obsession led to his disappearance, the publicity surrounding which nourished the idea of a lost Amazonian civilisation. The many archaeological findings which have emerged from the Amazon basin may not match early 20th century imaginings of what the ancient South American civilisation should have looked like. There are no vast stone structures, no pyramids or ziggurats.