Baby Giant

Having brought back alive three Komodo dragons from the Dutch East Indies (TIME, May 21, 1934), two young Harvardmen and amateur naturalists. William Harvest Harkness Jr. of Manhattan and Lawrence T. K. Griswold of Quincy, Mass., set out in the autumn of 1934 after still rarer game--the giant panda of western China. No white man had ever seen this curious creature until a French missionary chanced on one in the late 19th Century. First white men to shoot one were Theodore Jr. and Kermit Roosevelt, in 1929. No giant panda had ever been brought out alive.

When Sportsmen Harkness & Griswold reached China early last year, the Government refused them permission to enter the giant panda's wild, bandit-infested habitat. Alone, Harkness boarded a Shanghai train at Nanking, vanished. Fortnight later, a U. S. Marshal found him in a Shanghai hotel, registered under an assumed name.

He explained that he was trying to forget his bitter disappointment at not being allowed to go panda hunting. He was ordered to report to the U. S. District Attorney every three days. Next news of William Harkness reached the U. S. nearly a year later. He had died, aged 33, in a Shanghai hospital, of cancer of the throat.

Sportsman Harkness' wife, a painter, had stayed home in Manhattan when he went to China. When she heard of his death, she at once resolved to attempt what he had tried and failed. With a young Chinese guide, she left Shanghai last September, went 1,500 miles up the Yangtze River into Szechwan Province.

From Chengtu last fortnight Hashed a message tantalizing to every zoologist in the world. It said that Mrs. Harkness had just arrived from the Tibetan border with a live panda. If it was only a panda, her catch was of no consequence. The panda --a small, bushy-tailed, raccoon-like creature--had often been captured before.

But if it were a giant panda, an entirely different animal, she had a scientific prize of first magnitude.

Last week came longer dispatches from Shanghai. The creature was definitely a giant panda, a six-week-old female 16 inches long, weighing 4 Ib. 12 oz. To capture it, Mrs. Harkness had spent $20.000. She hoped to sell it to a U. S. zoo for $15,000. But just as she was about to take it aboard the U. S.-bound Empress of Russia, Chinese customs officials seized it on the grounds that she had obtained no export permit. In near-hysteria Mrs. Harkness spent the night in the Shanghai customs house, nursing her precious cub from a bottle while the Empress of Russia sailed without her. After friends had helped her post a large cash bond, customs officials permitted Mrs. Harkness to take the baby giant to her hotel, suggested payment of an export tax of $150 Mexican ($45 U. S.). Then, just as she had given up hope, the huffy officials consented to let her take her rare prize home on the President McKinley.

About the size of a black bear, weighing 200 to 300 Ib., the giant panda has long, creamy fur, black forelegs and shoulders, black ears, black circles around its eyes, cat-like feet. It eats bamboo shoots. Natives call it beishung (white bear) and scientists call it Ailuropus melanoleucus. So scarce is it that when the Roosevelts shot theirs, inhabitants of the nearest village, 25 miles distant, had never seen or heard of such a creature.

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