Expeditions

Be it ever so humble, there is no place like a, corner of the earth never before visited by white men. So think ethnologists, natural historians, cartographers, photographers, hunters and peepers and priers and pushers, who year in and year out spend money and lives on arduous expeditions. Some expeditions and their results of late months:*

Strange Fish. William Beebe, one of those fortunate men who seem to be doing exactly what their spirits desire, returned to Manhattan last week from a four-month fishing and observing expedition on the coral reefs of Haiti. In the scientific-romantic vein which characterizes his writings, he excited newsgatherers with stories of prowling on the ocean floor under 60 feet of water, clad in an ordinary bathing suit and diver's helmet equipped with air-and-telephone tube./- He dictated piscatorial descriptions to an assistant in a schooner above. Occasionally he scribbled fleeting impressions on a zinc plate with a lead pencil.

Prowler Beebe captured many a specimen at night, aided by a 2,000-candlepower electric lamp, which attracted ocean-dwellers within netting range. Some fish, however, are repelled by fight. For these, dynamite was brought into play. Landlocked pools were poisoned to obtain their denizens. Some species, friendly but coy, Mr. Beebe captured by shooting tiny harpoons into them from a Daisy air rifle.

A startling specimen was a transparent bell-shaped jellyfish, about a foot in diameter, which propels itself by opening and closing like an umbrella. This creature's interior is a dining room, playground and protectorate for as many as 300 little silvery fish. Unharmed by the host's poisonous tenacles and living on its killings, the parasite's swim in and out of its mouth at will.

Mr. Beebe, submarine poet, also captured the demoiselle, a dainty fishlet which gradually changes its afternoon dress of bright yellow -- and blue to an evening dress of charcoal grey.

The Beebe expeditions are sent out by the New York Zoological Society. A party of ten went this time, traveling under sail, living in deck tents, trying to see how cheaply a four-month expedition can be run with comfort and valid results.

Elephants, Lions. Having been captured by savages at Mallicolo in the New Hebrides and rescued by a British warship, having made friends with elephants and lions in Eastern and Central Africa, Mr. & Mrs. Martin Johnson arrived in Manhattan a fortnight ago with 200,000 feet of film and 7,000 still pictures for the American Museum of Natural History. Headquarters for their three-and-a-half-year's animal observations were on the shores of a lake on the Abyssinian border, which they named Lake Paradise.

Their game came to them. Elephants visited their purposely planted sweet-potato patch so regularly that the Johnsons could recognize individuals, give them names, know them when they saw them many miles from home.

Mr. Johnson did the photographing. His wife, an expert shot, stood by with high-powered rifle. On one occasion, a cow elephant became distrustful of Mr. Johnson's maneuvers, charged him. Pretty Mrs. Johnson stopped the irate female with a bullet squarely between the eyes--only a few feet from the camera.

Concerning lions, Mr. Johnson said: "We came upon what was literally a virgin valley swarming with lions. They had never heard a shot fired, and treated us with the utmost indifference. Food for them was so plentiful that they even disdained the dead zebras we put out as bait, merely walking up and sniffing at the food we had provided. . . . Day after day, for weeks at a time we filmed them, getting them in groups and families of ten or fourteen at a time. Altogether we photographed 147 lions.

"They let us approach ridiculously close. Sometimes they were too bored even to look at us, and we had to whistle to attract their attention, though often the noise of the camera would bring them out of cover, from curiosity, to join those already before the lens. In all my experience I have never encountered anything more remarkable."

Within a few months, Mr. & Mrs. Johnson expect to set out for the Congo to film gorillas, okapi (large shy forest-dwelling herbivore, with bizarre stripes, as yet unphotographed).

Akeley. Three weeks ago, Mrs. Mary L. Akeley told the circumstances of her husband's fever last autumn on Mount Mikeno in the Belgian Congo (TIME, May 23). The Akeley expedition obtained and preserved 'gorillas, studied the scenery of their haunts, aided the Johnsons in photography. Soon, in the Akeley-African hall of the American Museum of Natural History will be many a tribute to the arduous work that hastened the death of Explorer Carl Ethan Akeley, scientist-explorer-sculptor extraordinary.

"River of Doubt." Commander George Miller Dyott, English explorer and writer, started up the Amazon River in Brazil last summer. At tantalizing intervals he informed the world, through his radio set, that he was alive. One message was broadcast from the headwaters of the Roosevelt River ("River of Doubt"). Five weeks ago, Commander Dyott arrived in Manhattan with a photographic record which substantiates the late Theodore Roosevelt's charting of this 900-mile river, running from the Brazilian plateau into the Madeira River, tributary of the Amazon. He saw stone markers which had been left by the Roosevelt expedition.

Snake-eaters, Bandits. "Robbed and maltreated by bandits. Have Nambikuara and Pareccis collections," said a cablegram dated May 5 at Sao Paulo, Brazil, from Francis Gow-Smith, explorer and ethnologist for the Museum of the American Indian (Heye Foundation). The Museum was relieved, having feared him lost in Matto Grosso (thick forest) Province, Brazil. He had previously been reported as having eaten Christmas dinner with Commander Dyott in an Indian village. He had described the Nambikuara Indians as: most primitive; eating only raw food (snakes included) ; wearing a macaw feather in their noses; and no clothes. Mr. Gow-Smith, more than six feet tall, onetime football stalwart at Purdue University, inspired awe in these Indians. Commander Dyott believes that the same bandits who annoyed Mr. Gow-Smith, also annoyed him.

Darwin's Bird. At the Field Museum in Chicago, the public may now see two specimens of a straight-billed reed "runner similar to those which Charles Darwin saw on his famed cruise in the Beagle in 1831. This species of bird, long believed to be extinct, was shipped from Uruguay by C. C. Sanborn two months ago, along with 3,342 other birds, reptiles, mammals.

Cliff City. Using cigarets and flattery, Oliver La Farge and Douglas Byers, ethnologists of Tulane University (New Orleans), gained the confidence of the Mayan Indians of Jacaltenango, a city of 2,000 inhabitants in the Guatemalan cliffs. They found a civilization strangely mixing mysticism and hard liquor, Christianity and paganism. They attended a native fiesta. They returned to New Orleans last week.

*These do not include the expeditions of scientists who dig beneath the earth's surface for lost cities, tombs, treasures, fossils, jaw bones of ancient men and animals. Diggers' recent doings will be summarized in another issue of TIME.

/-The upper end of this tube was split into two branches--one supplying Mr. Beebe with air, the other connecting with a delicate telephone receiver. Thus, Mr. Beebe utilized the column of air which kept him alive, to transmit the sound waves of his voice to an amanuensis at the sea's surface. The device was contrived by Dr. Mark Barr, English physicist, who accompanied the expedition.