Great Places, Great Explorers (cont.)

The 19^th and 20^th centuries are full of stories of Geographers and Adventurers traveling round the earth seeking to understand our planet and discover her secrets. As the sciences of geology and geography were developed the more developed countries of the world wished to know things like what were the highest mountains and longest rivers in the world. Nations competed to reach these faraway places first, for national glory and economic advantage too. The most powerful nation on earth for most of the 19^th century and part of the 20^th century was Great Britain and they believed it to be their god-given right to reach these destinations before all others.

At the beginning of the 20^th century the British set their sights on being first to reach the South Pole situated in the middle of the newest continent discovered, Antarctica. But being first wasn’t all that mattered. The British also wished to understand the lands they traveled through, and the people they might meet. British expeditions were usually operated by the Royal Navy and their crew members were naval officers but there was always a scientific group alongside including biologists, botanists and artists. Probably the most famous scientific-expedition of all time was the Voyage of the Beagle from 1831-1836 and the development of the theory of natural selection (or evolution) by Charles Darwin, then a young scientist.

At the end of the 19^th century Robert Falcon Scott was Britain’s most decorated sea commander and he led a series of expeditions to Antarctica between 1900 and 1912. Bit by bit be made his preparations to cross the frozen landscape and claim the South Pole for his country.

But little did Scott know but the explorer Roald Amundsen had also set his sights on reaching the South Pole first. Amundsen sought the pole only for the glory of the conquest. To him it was to be a race to the pole. And Amundsen was actually a more experienced and prepared explorer than Scott. On previous expeditions to Greenland and his native Norway he had learned how to service like the Inuit peoples who lived in these regions. He wore bear and seal skin clothing like these people. He also knew how to ski and use dogs to help him travel. Scott, on the other hand, endeavored to do everything the most modern way possible. Instead of dogs and sleds Scott planned to use horses and tractors. His clothing was produced by fashionable outfitters in London such as Burberry.

In the end Amundsen breezed over the Antarctic continent in his dogsleds, reached the pole first on December 14, 1911 and hurried back. Scott’s team suffered problem after problem. The horses died. The tractors broke. And the weather was awful. They finally reached the pole on January 12, 1912 five weeks after Amundsen and were heartbroken to find the spot marked by the Norwegian flag. On the way back Scott’s team was trapped by weather in camp and they died there from the cold and starvation in late March 1912.

After his death Scott became a national hero in Great Britain. Statues were erected everywhere. His only son Peter took his middle name from Clements Markham, president of the Royal Geographic Society who had sponsored Scott’s career and Antarctic expeditions. Peter Markham Scott founded the World Wildlife Fund and gave scientific backing to the Loch Ness Monster. 

Roald Amundsen was also involved in the race for the North Pole, though only for a short time. On his way to the North Pole he learned another explorer had already been there. That’s when he decided to change the direction of his ship and sail for Antarctica, catching Scott by surprise there.

The North Pole was discovered on April 6, 1909 by one of America’s greatest explorers, Robert Peary, and his partner Matthew Henson. Peary had also attempted to reach the North Pole many times before finally succeeding. And like Amundsen he also learned from the local people of the Arctic how to dress, travel and survive in the polar regions. As well he too almost had the triumph of victory taken from them by a rival explorer who said he had reached the pole first. To this day there is still some controversy whether or not Peary truly reached the geographical North Pole. Travel to the poles is affected by something called the magnetic north and south poles. These are points on the earth that compasses naturally point too but are not the true geographic poles of the earth.  

Now the North Pole is quite different from the South Pole. Firstly it is not a continent. It is a frozen sea which can only be approached in summer when channels for ship passage open up and allow access to the region. As well the Arctic is inhabited by people, the Inuit and other cultures. No one lives or has ever lived on Antarctica. In the Arctic there is a great amount of wildlife including Polar Bears, Seals, Whales and Fox. On Antarctica there are only Penguins, birds and some seal species. Think of it this way…the Arctic is a frozen sea surrounded by land; Antarctica is a frozen continent surrounded by sea.   

                   You may be interested to know that you can visit the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, ME.

     

 Robert Peary’s summer home in Casco, ME is a tourist attraction called the Eagle Island Historic Site.

And MacMIllan Wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts is named after one of Peary’s fellow arctic explorers, Donald MacMillan, who had a home on Cape Cod for many years.

Next week I will have a blog for you called Cold Cases…stories about explorers that in most cases disappeared while on expedition. We’ll talk about the race to reach the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest, sometimes referred to as the 3^rd pole. And we’ll talk about such famous explorers as George Mallory, John Franklin, Percy Fawcett and Amelia Earhart

Great Places, Great Explorers

Planet Earth is a great, big wonderful place…full of magic and mysteries. And our Earth is full of exotic people living in very, very different worlds than the one we inhabit here in the USA.  When I was a boy I was always more interested, it seemed, in what I found in a book than what was around me in my hometown. I grew up reading adventure stories and travel books, and I dreamed about visiting the places I read about and having my own adventures. What interested me most was literature and travel. Why? Maybe because it was such a thrill to be on my own in a new country surrounded by new people, speaking a new language and observing a new culture. Coming home from a trip always seemed such a letdown. But then I’d just start reading about my next trip and the adventure would begin again.

The stories that interested me most as a boy were about distant lands full of wild animals and dangerous tribes. Saturday afternoon Tarzan movies and Sunday night tv shows like Wild Kingdom were my favorites as a kid. As I grew older I learned that these exotic places were in danger of being destroyed. The trees of the rainforest were being cut down for furniture and the fields given to cows so we here in the USA could eat more hamburgers. The incredible wildlife of the rainforest was disappearing and with it the many traditional Indian groups that share the forest with the animals. At college I studied the literature and culture of Latin America. I became hugely obsessed with the Amazon rainforest and everything about it. After college I began to travel by myself as a backpacker throughout Latin America. And as fate would have it I met my wife-to-be in the city of Manaus, Brazil, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. My wife also happened to be a jungle guide. And that was it. I moved to Manaus to live and work there. My wife and I opened a riverboat tour company called Swallows and Amazons in 1992 and only last year we came back home to the USA with our 2 daughters. I may not be so obsessed with the Amazon today. It is still an amazing place, and a place (sadly) threatened with destruction, but I figure after 20 years it’s time to see something else of the world.

My mother and father were born and raised in Scotland. And I was born in London, England. When I was just a baby my family moved to Nigeria, a country in West Africa. My father worked for a British construction company, and in the early 1960s Nigeria was still a British territory (or colony) as that time. My first “real” hero was the Scottish missionary and explorer, David Livingstone. Besides exploring much of South and Central Africa- bringing Christianity to the native people and trying to abolish the practice of slavery- Livingstone became involved in one of the greatest geographical quests of all time…the search for the source of the Nile River.

If we look at one of Livingstone’s maps we can see that the lakes of central Africa he discovered. The Nile River flows northwards and discharges its waters finally into the Mediterranean Sea. For a long time the Nile was thought to be the longest river in the world but no one knew how long because no one knew where it began.

Livingstone’s expeditions were sponsored by the Royal Geographic Institute of Great Britain, the greatest geographical organization in history. Their mission was to explore the world in an effort to expand what was called the British Empire. Our own National Geographic Institute is modeled after this institution. As Livingstone travelled farther north each year into lands once labeled “incognito” or “unknown” the Royal Geographical Institute began suggesting he make efforts to find the source of the Nile. What was hoped for was that a better understanding of the river systems of Central Africa would help open the region to trade and civilization. Travel through the tropical rainforest was extremely difficult; river travel wherever possible was always easier and safer.

On one of his last expeditions Livingstone disappeared and was feared dead. Numerous expeditions were sent to find him. Eventually one lead by the American newspaper reporter Henry Morton Stanley found Livingstone deep in what today is the Congo Rainforest. The famous explorer was gravely ill. Their historic meeting is remembered for Stanley’s humble greeting with the famous African explorer. When the two white men met, Stanley simply said, “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”

Livingstone would never see his native Scotland again. When he died his heart was buried in the village where he had been living, and his body was brought back to England where it is entombed in London’s famous Westminster Abbey, final resting place of Britain’s greatest Kings & Queens, statesmen, soldiers and explorers. Livingstone did not find the source of the Nile. And neither did Stanley though he did go on to explore even more of Central Africa.

After Livingstone and Stanley the most famous early African explorers were Richard Burton and John Speke. In 1858 they discovered a large mountain lake they named Victoria, a lake Speke was convinced was the source of the Nile. Burton reminded Speke that without geographical proof they could not prove this conclusively. In 1862 Speke returned to Lake Victoria with another Africa explorer, James Grant, and this time he circled the lake to confirm it did indeed flow north and was the source of the Nile River. Back in England however the disagreements between Burton and Speke continued and Speke, deeply depressed, committed suicide.  Burton was a broken man himself and never returned to Africa either.

Film: The Mountains of the Moon (1990), with Patrick Bergin.

Sherlock Holmes and the Hound of the Baskervilles

I have told you something about natural mysteries (The Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman). Now I’d like to introduce you to another kind of mystery. These are written mysteries, or mystery stories.

In the United States, Washington Irving wrote “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in 1820. Nataniel Hawthorne wrote his gothic masterpiece “The Scarlet Letter” in 1850. And Mark Twain published “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in 1884. All of these stories contain elements of mystery, horror or suspense, with creepy characters in often spooky settings. But the first truly “modern” mysteries were written by the American Edgar Allen Poe. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” published in 1841 Poe introduced a new kind of fictional character to readers, a scientist-detective named C. Auguste Dupin. At theaters right now you can see the movie, The Raven, a mystery thriller about the life & works Edgar Allen Poe.   

British writers were also producing some fantastic stuff too.  And growing up in Canada these were the books that got me excited when I was a boy and still amaze and influence me today; not just the big, atmospheric novels by Charles Dickens such as “Great Expectations and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” but faster-paced thrillers like Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”, “Kidnapped” and “Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde” or H.G. Well’s “The War of the Worlds” and “The Invisible Man”. But nothing, nothing, caught my imagination more than one book in particular that brought together a great detective and a truly great mystery. I’m talking about Sherlock Holmes and “The Hound of the Baskervilles”.

Everybody likes a good mystery, and a lot of people like a mystery that is solved by a larger-than-life detective.  The classic detectives- the ones you see on Masterpiece Television, for example- include that sweet old lady detective, Miss Marple, and the funny little Frenchmen with the moustache, Hercule Poirot. Both these detectives were created by one of the world’s greatest mystery writers, Agatha Christine). But the most popular detective of all time is Sherlock Holmes.

The creator of Sherlock Holmes was a man named Arthur Conan Doyle, an English doctor who spent his free-time writing historical novels. His inspiration for the cool, analytical character of Sherlock Holmes was one of his professors at university, Doctor Joseph Bell. And much to Conan Doyle’s surprise his Sherlock Holmes stories became an incredibly popular phenomenon. In total Conan Doyle wrote 4 novels and 56 short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes and his quiet, though able, partner, Doctor Watson.

What was unique about the detective Sherlock Holmes were his incredible powers of observation and deduction. He could just look at a man and tell you where he was from, what his job was, where he had been injured, where he had been in his life…things like that…just from information he saw on the person…the sort of shoes or clothes the person wore, how he walked, his haircut, his accent. In other words he was great observer of facts, and nothing mattered to Sherlock Holmes but the facts. His most famous saying was, “eliminate the impossible and what you are left with- no matter how strange or unlikely- must be the solution”.

Conan Doyle became famous because of Sherlock Holmes. And, remember, this was in a time before movies, before television, even before the radio. The stories of Sherlock Holmes were first published in news magazines which were the most popular medium of communication at the time. Magazines were cheap and that’s what most people read. And to make money the newspaper owners had to publish exciting stories people would pay to read, real or not. Before Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens was the first writer to realize the possibilities of newspaper publication. His novels such as Oliver Twist and Great Expectations were published first in the newspapers also- a chapter at a time each week- before they were published in the more expensive book form. Following Dicken’s example, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes’ stories were published the same way too, in the newspapers first, so they would be wider read by the public.

But even as he became rich and famous Conan Doyle eventually grew tired of writing about Sherlock Holmes and nothing else. So after some 20 stories he had Holmes die in an accident. The public however became so upset about the death of Sherlock Holmes that Conan Doyle had no choice but to bring him back to life, if only in print. He really does meet his death at Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland during a fight with his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty but Conan Doyle began writing new stories about Holmes that were set in a time before his death at the falls.

Throughout all the stories Conan Doyle uses Holmes friend Doctor Watson as the one who writes about Holmes and his detective cases. Doctor Watson is what we call “the narrator” of the stories. And it seems only fair that when Holmes did make his first appearance after Conan Doyle had “killed” him the action in the story centers around Doctor Watson for more than half the story.

The most famous Sherlock Holmes story of all is The Hound of the Baskervilles. And it is a novel not just a short story. It has all the elements of a great mystery: a great detective, a great villain, a damsel in distress, an ancient document that tells of a family curse, a monstrous beast in the form of a killer hound, a scary setting which are the misty moors of southwestern England, a haunted house which is Baskerville Hall, exciting action and chases, some funny parts and, of course, a series of murders that must be solved before it’s too late.

First published in 1902 The Hound of the Baskervilles is a popular book for readers of all ages. Anyone can read it. It’s not an adult book filled with too much blood or nasty things happening to people. And it’s not a kid’s story with little or no action. It’s a great mix of all the elements that make for a great mystery story. But, if the written story was popular, what has been even more popular are the films and television movies based upon the story. The Hound of the Baskervilles must be one of the most filmed stories of all time. Soon after it was published it was first produced in Germany as a black & white silent film in 1914. It’s most famous version in 1939 starred Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, the two actors most usually associated with Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. It was also filmed with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, famous for many low budget horror movies filmed in the late 50s and early 60s. Most recently it was a Masterpiece Television film, one of few versions actually filmed on the moors of Dartmoor.

And on May 13 this year The Hound of the Baskervilles will be presented again on Masterpiece Mystery Television in a modern version where Sherlock Holmes uses email, cell phones and GPS to get the job done but without losing the cool appeal that has always been his trademark. Don’t miss this one! Look for the older film versions too. And of course read the book…preferably alone in bed on a wild, stormy Cape Cod night!