Sir Wilfred Thesiger

EXPLORERS OF THE WORLD 

Sir Wilfred Thesiger (1910 – 2003) 

Sir Wilfred Patrick Thesiger, CBE, DSO, FRAS, FRGS (3 June 1910 – August 24, 2003) was a British explorer and travel writer born in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.

Thesiger was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford University where he took a third in history. Between 1930 and 1933, Thesiger represented Oxford at boxing and later (1933) became captain of the Oxford boxing team.

In 1930, Thesiger returned to Africa, having received a personal invitation by Emperor Haile Selassie to attend his coronation. He returned again in 1933 in an expedition, funded in part by the Royal Geographical Society, to explore the course of the Awash River. During this expedition, he became the first European to enter the Aussa Sultanate and visit Lake Abbe.

Afterwards, in 1935, Thesiger joined the Sudan Political Service stationed in Darfur and the Upper Nile. He served in several desert campaigns with the Sudan Defence Force (SDF) and the Special Air Service (SAS) with the rank of major.

In World War II, Thesiger fought with Gideon Force in Ethiopia during the East African Campaign. He was awarded the DSO[1] for capturing Agibar and its garrison of 2500 Italian troops. Afterwards, Thesiger served in the Long Range Desert Group during the North African Campaign.

There is a rare wartime photograph of Thesiger in this period. He appears in a well-known photograph usually used to illustrate the badge of the Greek Sacred Squadron. It is usually captioned 'a Greek officer of the Sacred Band briefing British troops'. The officer is recognisably the famous Tsigantes and one of the crowd is recognisably Thesiger. Thesiger is the tall figure with the distinct nasal profile. Characteristically, he is in Arab headdress. Thesiger was the liaison officer to the Greek Squadron.

In 1945, Thesiger worked in Arabia with the Desert Locusts Research Organisation. Meanwhile, from 1945 to 1949, he explored the southern regions of the Arabian peninsula and twice crossed the Empty Quarter. His travels also took him to Iraq, Persia (now Iran), Kurdistan, French West Africa, Pakistan and Kenya. He returned to England in the 1990s and was knighted in 1995.

Thesiger is best known for two travel books. Arabian Sands (1959) recounts his travels in the Empty Quarter of Arabia between 1945 and 1950 and describes the vanishing way of life of the Bedouins. The Marsh Arabs (1964) is an account of the Madan, the indigenous people of the marshlands of southern Iraq. The latter journey is also covered by his travelling companion, Gavin Maxwell, in A Reed Shaken by the Wind — a Journey through the Unexplored Marshlands of Iraq (Longman, 1959).

Thesiger took many photographs during his travels and donated his vast collection of 23,000 negatives to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.

Obituary from The Guardian, August 27th 2003

Explorer whose mystic vision rejected the modern technological world in favour of the tribes people of Africa and the Arabian deserts

Once, in 1946, Wilfred Thesiger lay starving on a sand dune in Arabia’s Empty Quarter for three days, waiting for his Bedu companions to bring back food, and tortured by hallucinations of cars and lorries that could carry him to safety. “No,” he wrote later, “I would rather be here starving as I was than sitting in a chair, replete with food, listening to the wireless and dependent on cars to take me through Arabia.” As an explorer, Thesiger, who has died aged 93, recognised that satisfaction in attaining a goal was directly in proportion to the hardship and challenge involved in getting there.

He reserved the word “abomination” for cars and aeroplanes, and all his life resented the intrusion of any innovation post-dating the steam engine. His mystical regard for tradition was a product both of his childhood in still-medieval Abyssinia and an intense pride in his aristocratic forebears, the Barons of Chelmsford.

Born in Addis Ababa, where his father was British minister, he grew up in the barbaric splendour of an imperial court, and was privileged to see a victorious and blooded Abyssinian army marching through the city in the full panoply of war. It was an experience he never forgot.

Daydreams of Africa and the wider world were his means of escape throughout his awkward and often unhappy schooldays at St Aubyn’s school, Rottingdean, in Sussex (1919-23), Eton College (1923-28), and his time reading history at Magdalen College, Oxford (1929-33). During his first summer vacation from the university, he set off alone, working his passage on a tramp steamer to Istanbul and returning third-class by train.

So began the travels that he recorded in fine prose and black-and-white photography. On his return, he found both a personal invitation to attend the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia, and a note from the Foreign Office appointing him honorary attaché to the Duke of Gloucester for the event - where he met Evelyn Waugh, a writer of very different sympathies.

For his second vacation, he set himself another endurance test, a month with a Hull fishing trawler off Iceland. Here he learnt to withstand the need for sleep.

But Africa was his goal, and at the age of only 23 he went to explore Abyssinia’s Awash River and the forbidding Aussa sultanate with its Danakil nomads, chiefly noted for a disturbing tendency to kill men and carry off their testicles as trophies. Such practices held little horror for Thesiger, who had survived fagging and flogging at Eton, and saw at least one young Afar man, flushed from the exertion of slaughtering and mutilating four victims in a day, as “the equivalent of a nice, rather self-conscious Etonian who had just won his school colours for cricket”.

Thesiger gained his own blue, for boxing at Oxford - when he captained the university team in 1933, a victory against Cambridge was marred by the breaking of his noble nose - and like many an athletically endowed young Oxbridge graduate of the 30s, he sought a career in the country where “blues” were said to rule “blacks”: the Sudan. As an assistant district commissioner in the Sudan political service from 1935 onwards, he served in arid Darfur, and later in the steaming swamps of the Sudd, where one of his chief jobs was shooting troublesome lions that attacked local herds.

It was in Darfur that he first learned to travel by fast-riding camel with local companions, dressing as they did, eating local food out of the same bowl, and asking nothing of technology but a good rifle, a torch and a compass. During one leave he completed a long and dangerous journey to the almost unknown Tibesti mountains in the Sahara, and fell in love with the desert: “I was exhilarated by the sense of space, the silence, and the crisp cleanness of the sand. I felt in harmony with the past, travelling as men had travelled for untold generations across the deserts, dependent for their survival on the endurance of their camels and their own inherited skills.”

During the war he was a bimbashi - the most junior officer rank - in the Sudan defence force. He won the DSO in 1941 for leadership under fire in fighting the Italians, under the idiosyncratic Orde Wingate in the liberation of Abyssinia. With a masterstroke of bluff, he subsequently forced the surrender of an Italian-held fort, taking 2,500 prisoners. He later fought as a major, as second in command of a Druze legion formed to fight the Vichy French in Syria - which enabled him to visit a deserted Petra. He also served with Colonel David Stirling’s Special Air Service (SAS) in north Africa. Following the defeat of the Afrika Korps in 1943, the SAS went to Palestine, and in October of that year Thesiger left the organisation to act as an adviser to Haile Selassie in Abyssinia.

A resulting chance meeting brought him a job in what became the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation’s anti-locust unit and the opportunity to make his most famous journeys in the deserts of Arabia under its aegis, between 1945 and 1949. Arabia’s legendary Empty Quarter had been the goal of all Arabian explorers from Richard Burton onward, and although Thesiger was not the first to cross it, he was the first to explore it thoroughly, mapping the oasis of Liwa and the quicksands of Umm As-Sammim. He crossed the desert twice with Bedu companions, and his trek across the western sands from the Hadhramaut to Abu Dhabi was the last and greatest expedition of Arabian travel.

During his journeys he was caught up in inter-tribal raids, pursued by hostile raiders, and arrested by the Saudi authorities. He travelled alone in the Hejaz, the Assir and Najran, and explored the Trucial Coast and Dhofar in southern Arabia. He lived with the canoe-borne marshmen of Iraq for several periods over the seven years up to the Iraqi revolution of 1958, attaining acceptance only by learning the unusual skill of circumcision.

He still found time to travel in Kurdistan, Hunza (north-east Pakistan), Swat, Chitral (both north-west Pakistan), and Nuristan (across the border in north-east Afghanistan), where in 1956, 16,600ft up in the high passes, he bumped into a dispirited Eric Newby and friend Hugh Carless, and invited them to spend the night with him. They got on well until Thesiger saw them blowing up inflatable air-beds before retiring. “You must be a couple of pansies!” he said.

He crisscrossed postwar Abyssinia, fought on the royalist side in the civil war in Yemen (1966-67), traversed most of northern Kenya, where he spent much time between 1968 and 1994, travelled with the Bakhtiari nomads in Iran, trekked across the burning plains of the Dasht-i-Lut, the Great Sand Desert of eastern Iran, and explored inner Afghanistan. All of these travels and many more - in total tens of thousands of miles - were made either on foot or by traditional transport, be it camel, horse, mule, donkey or canoe.

Thesiger felt least at home in his own culture and with his own kind. He resented the juggernaut of western “civilisation” and its inexorable movement to squash what he believed was the colour and diversity of the earth’s peoples. His sympathies were with the indigenes, and his closest human ties were with certain of them who were his companions on his many journeys - his Zaghawa servant in the Sudan, his Bedu companions in Arabia, his paddlers in Iraq and his Samburu family in Kenya. (”Sex has been of no consequence to me, and the celibacy of desert life left me untroubled. Marriage would certainly have been a crippling handicap.”) Few other explorers of the last century have tried so genuinely to see the world through the eyes of these foreign peoples. Yet much as he despised civilisation, Thesiger was never able to forsake completely his place in it.

Had he done so, he might never have left us his unique glimpses of strange worlds, in his classic books The Marsh Arabs (1964) and Desert, Marsh And Mountain (1979), his autobiography The Life Of My Choice (1987), his portfolio of superb monochrome photos, Visions Of A Nomad (1987), and above all his description of the traditional life of the Bedu, Arabian Sands (1959), probably the finest book ever written about Arabia and a tribute to a world now lost forever.

He won the founder’s medal of the Royal Geographical Society, together with three other medals from learned societies, honorary fellowships of Magdalen College, Oxford, and the British Academy, and an Honorary DLitt from Leicester University. In 1968, he was awarded a CBE, and in 1995 he was knighted.

Yet, far more than these many honours, he valued the friendship and confidence of the nomadic peoples with whom and among whom he travelled. Thesiger’s best years were the five he spent among the Bedu of South Arabia, and one cherished companion from those days, Salim bin Ghabeisha, when a greybeard in his 60s, remembered him: “He was loyal, generous, and afraid of nothing. He was a wonderful man to travel with.” Thesiger would, I am sure, ask no better epitaph.


Copyright: Wikipedia, Oxford University Exploration Club

Tribe (Going Tribal)

TV SERIES REVIEW 

Title: Tribe (Going Tribal) 

Year: 2005 

Running time: 60 minutes each episode 

Country: UK 

Website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/tribe/

Plot summary:

Tribe (known as Going Tribal in the United States) is a documentary television series co-produced by the BBC and the Discovery Channel, and hosted by former British Royal Marine Bruce Parry.

In each series, Parry visits a number of remote tribes in such locales as the Himalayas, Ethiopia, West Papua, Gabon and Mongolia, spending a month living and interacting with each society. While there, Parry adopts the methods and practices of his hosts, participating in their rituals and exploring their cultural norms. This often enables him to form personal bonds with the members of each tribe.

Parry tries to learn the basics of the tribe's language but is also accompanied by a translator.

The series is co-produced by BBC Wales and the Discovery Channel. A second series aired in July, 2006 and the third began on 21 August 2007 on BBC2, and ended on 25 September 2007.

Parry was awarded the BAFTA Cymru "Best On-Screen Presenter" award in 2008 for his work on the 'Penan' Episode. A BAFTA Cymru "Best Camera: Not Drama" award was also awarded for Gavin Searle's work in the same episode.

Tribe (Going Tribal) follows former Royal Marine and expedition leader Bruce Parry as he tests the physical limits of living with ancient tribes in some of the world's most remote areas.

Parry sheds social trappings (and sometimes his Western clothes) by living alongside people from the virtually unexplored areas of the Himalayas, Ethiopia, West Papua, Gabon and Mongolia. To the degree possible, while spending a month immersed in each society, Parry also tries to adopt the methods and practices of his hosts.

Parry enthusiastically embraces jungle hunting and the rituals of the warrior, being taught by strangers how to survive using bows, arrows, blowpipes, dogs, spears, traps, snares and clubs. He must cook and eat his catch using traditional methods such as hot stones, waxy leaves and bamboo pots.

Parry is accompanied by a translator, but learns the basics of tribal language. The series is accompanied by subtitles. Viewers hear unique languages and watch the sometimes-graphic practices of living and surviving in the jungle among some of the world's disappearing cultures.

Going Tribal is co-produced by the BBC Wales and the Discovery Channel.

Series 1

#          UK Title           US Title           Plot

1          Adi       Lost Tribe: The Adis   Travelling to north eastern India. The episode involves the sacrifice of a bull.

2          Suri     Dangerous Game: The Suri  Parry travelled to Ethiopia.

3          Kombai           Living with Cannibals Parry travelled to West Papua.

4          Babongo         African Vision Quest  Parry travelled to Gabon.

5          Darhad            Horse Masters of Mongolia    Parry travelled to Mongolia. He witnessed a shamanic ritual.

6          Sanema          Waking the Spirits      Parry travelled to Brazil. He took part in a ritual involving hallucinogenic drugs.

Series 2

#          UK Title           US Title           Plot

7          Nyangatom     Return to Africa          Parry returned to Ethiopia, to stay with the tribe who are sworn enemies of the Suri, whom Parry had met in the previous series.

8          Hamar Rites of Passage: The Hamar           Parry stayed in Ethiopia.

9          Dassanech     Crocodile Hunting       Parry again remained in Ethiopia.

Series 3

#          UK Title           US Title           Plot

10        Matis   Hunting with the Jaguar Tribe            Parry visited Brazil in South America.

11        Nenets            Nomads of the Siberian Tundra        Parry travelled to Russia.

12        Anuta   Lost Island of Anuta    Parry travelled to the Solomon Islands.

13        Akie     Life in the African Bush: The Akie      Parry travelled to Tanzania in Africa.

14        Layap  Journey to the Clouds: Bhutan          Parry travelled to Bhutan in Asia.

15        Penan Ghosts of the Forest  Parry travelled to Sarawak, Borneo.

About Bruce Parry:

Commissioned by the British Royal Marines in May 1988, Bruce Parry completed one year of management, leadership and commando training before spending several years as a troop commander.

In the Royal Marines, Parry specialized as a physical training instructor and became the youngest officer ever to be in charge of all physical aspects of Royal Marines commando training. He also served in Norway and Iraq before retiring as a lieutenant after six years of service.

As an expeditioner, the 35-year-old resident of England has personally organized and led more than 15 major expeditions to extreme parts of the world. Parry has extensive remote experience in the desert, arctic, jungle and mountains.

In film and television productions, Parry has worked as a location manager, assistant director, camera operator, director and host.

In addition, Parry hosted BBC's Extreme Lives: Cannibals and Crampons, the award-winning film about his journey into the heart of Irian Jaya, and he has recently appeared in an award-winning kids' series called Serious Jungle.

© Text and image: Discovery Channel, BBC

Carl Sofus Lumholtz

ANTHROPOLOGISTS OF THE WORLD 

Carl Sofus Lumholtz (1851 - 1922) 

Norwegian explorer and ethnographer, best known for his meticulous field research and ethnographic publications on indigenous cultures of Australia and Mesoamerican central Mexico. 

Born in Faberg, Norway, Lumholtz graduated in theology in 1876 from the University of Christiania, now the University of Oslo.

Lumholtz travelled to Australia in 1880, where he spent ten months from 1882-1883 amongst the indigenous inhabitants of the Herbert-Burdekin region in North Queensland. He wrote a book about his experience, Among Cannibals: An Account of Four Years' Travels in Australia and of Camp Life with the Aborigines of Queensland, first published in 1889, which is regarded as the finest ethnographic research of the period for the northern Queensland Aborigines. Whereas previous authors had commented only upon the aesthetic physical appearances and material culture of the region's indigenous people, Lumholtz added a level of academic research that was unique for the period. His work recorded for the first time the social relationships, attitudes and the role of women in the society. He also gave a series of two lectures on "Among Australian Natives" for the Lowell Institute for their 1889-90 season.

He spent a total of four years in Queensland, his expeditions included visits to the Valley of Lagoons and the Herbert River area. He made collections of mammals while living with the local peoples, these specimens were used for the descriptions of four new species. One of these was named for the type locality, Pseudochirulus herbertensis (Herbert River Ringtail Possum), and another commemorates his name, Dendrolagus lumholtzii (Lumholtz's Tree Kangaroo).

Lumholtz later travelled to Mexico with the Swedish botanist C. V. Hartman. He stayed for many years, conducting several expeditions from 1890 through to 1910 which were paid for by the American Museum of Natural History. His work, Unknown Mexico, was a 1902 two-volume set describing many of the indigenous peoples of northwestern Mexico, including the Cora, Tepehuán, Pima Bajo, and especially the Tarahumara, among whom he lived for more than a year. Lumholtz was one of the first to describe artifacts from the ancient shaft tomb and the Tarascan cultures. He described archaeological sites, as well as the flora and fauna, of the northern Sierra Madre region called the Gran Chichimeca. He gave a series of three lectures on "The Characteristics of Cave Dwellers of the Sierra Madre" for the Lowell Institute's 1893-94 season.

In 1905 Lumholtz was a founding member of the Explorers Club, an organization to promote exploration and scientific investigation in the field. He went on a brief expedition to India from 1914–1915, then to Borneo from 1915 to 1917, which was his last expedition.

In 1922 Lumholtz died of tuberculosis at Saranac Lake, New York, where he was seeking treatment at a sanatorium. He had published six books on his discoveries, as well as the autobiography My Life of Exploration (1921).

His works

• Among Cannibals; an account of four years' travels in Australia and of camp life with the aborigines of Queensland (1889)
• Unknown Mexico; a record of five years' exploration among the tribes of the western Sierra Madre; in the tierra caliente of Tepic and Jalisco; and among the Tarascos of Michoacan (1902) 
• Through Central Borneo; an account of two years' travel in the land of the head-hunters between the years 1913 and 1917 (1920)
• My life of exploration (1921)

© Text and photo: Wikipedia

Colin Trapnell

EXPLORERS OF THE WORLD 

Colin Trapnell (1907 – 2004) 

Colin Trapnell, who died on February 9 2004 at the age of 96, was one of the last of a breed of British scientific explorers who conducted work of startling geographic proportions in an era when technology was yet to provide little help. Widely regarded as one of the earliest practitioners of ecology in the African continent, and one of the fathers of a generation of subsequent conservation ecologists, he continued his passion for conservation into retirement, publishing his final work at the age of 90 and overseeing the publication of a three-volume work on his African travels well into his nineties.

Colin Graham Trapnell was born on April 10, 1907. He was the older son of John Graham Trapnell K.C., Recorder of Plymouth and Judge Advocate of the Fleet. He was educated at Sedbergh and Trinity College, Oxford where he read Classical Greats. A keen botanist from his schooldays his real interests lay in science, and while at Oxford he joined with Max Nicholson (late of the Nature Conservancy) in founding the Oxford University Exploration Club in 1927, and in organizing its first expedition, to Greenland in 1928. His Greenland work was published in 1933.

His interest in natural history led Trapnell (rather than following his father into law) to apply for a post as ecologist with the Colonial Office. He later described how on his way to the interview he saw on a W.H. Smith’s bookstall one of the then popular science publications “Ecology”, which he bought. “I have never read before or since” he later said “with greater concentration”. In 1931 he was posted to Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, as Government Ecologist, the second of two such posts created in the Colonial Service.

On board ship returning to assignment in Northern Rhodesia Trapnell met and fell in love with Jeanne Mary Bourdas who was travelling with her mother. They were married soon after in London, following which Jeanne Trapnell accompanied her new husband back to Northern Rhodesia where in her first year of marriage they lived in no less than six separate houses.

In Northern Rhodesia Trapnell was posted to Mazabuka, and he often received letters addressed to “the geologist” or “the evangelist”, ecologist being an unknown word there. Trapnell’s brief was both broad and ambitious; he was to reconnoiter and map the soils vegetation types and indigenous agriculture of the whole territory, a task which would take him ten years. The survey was carried out in two parts: North Western Rhodesia (1930-1936) and North Eastern Rhodesia (1937-1942). He was at various times accompanied by and assisted in this work by a number of people including Neil Clothier, Peter Greenaway (later director of the herbarium in Nairobi) and William Allen (author of the seminal work: “The African Husbandman”).

This work was largely undertaken on foot, as there were in those days few tracks usable by motor vehicles. Typically Trapnell and his colleagues would depart for up to six months, with a team of native bearers carrying essentials, which generally included medical and food supplies and a copper bath. For the majority of African natives they encountered this would be their first view of a white man, and the evening ritual in the copper bath apparently drew substantial curious crowds. On one journey, as a Trinity, Oxford man, Trapnell and a travelling colleague who happened to have been at Balliol once organized a boat race on the Limpopo river, using local natives in canoes. Unhappily for the competition the course passed a sacred worship point, at which point both crews stopped paddling and stood in their canoes.

These surveys, the first of their kind in Africa to cover a whole country were published after the war and have recently been republished as they are still the basic source of essential natural resources data for the country. There are two volumes and accompanying maps: “The Soils, Vegetation and Traditional Agriculture of Zambia” Volume 1 Central and Western Zambia, Volume II by C.G. Trapnell and J.N. Clothier and C.G. Trapnell respectively. This work led Professor Hugh Bunting (Professor Emeritus of Agricultural Botany, University of Reading) in a Tropical Agricultural Association Melville Memorial Lecture to describe Trapnell along with others including Geoffrey Milne, Clement Gillman and John Phillips as “Giants who walked the earth in East and Southern Africa in earlier years.” Bunting also noted elsewhere that Trapnell was perhaps the first to establish the farming system concept by systematically describing the traditional agriculture practices found in Zambia.

In 1948 Trapnell was to have been transferred as ecologist to Malawi. He was on his way there with his wife Jeanne and their children when he was recalled by a telegram from the Colonial Office requiring him to organize experiments across Zambia to assess land for possible groundnut production. Survey plots which were duly laid out produced excellent crops in their first year. In the second year, however, several suffered devasting loss from a root fungus, thus endorsing the almost universal practice on the Zambian plateau of planting ground nuts only on new land or else on land that had previously been used for other crops. It is significant that the Overseas Food Corporation did not start groundnut schemes in Northern Rhodesia. Major schemes, which failed in Tanganyika, lacked the surveys which had been conducted in Northern Rhodesia.

Trapnell’s ecological work in Northern Rhodesia was seen by the colonial office as a rational foundation for a wide field of development, particularly of African Agriculture and in 1950 he was invited to train ecologists for the African Territories in fields which varied from large scale vegetation and soil surveys to game and tsetse and Desert Locust investigations. This work was based at the new East African Agriculture and Forestry Research Organization (EAAFRO) at Muguga in Kenya. Meanwhile with the development of the Mau Mau in Kenya, Trapnell was enrolled in the Kenya Police Reserve for local night patrol work. The field work of the training scheme ranged from the Turkana desert region to the Congo rainforest and the Malawi highlands, according to the need of students, seven of whom were trained in the techniques of field survey and air photo interpretations.

In 1957-58 Trapnell was engaged in basic ecological studies and in 1960, in cooperation with J.E. Griffiths, he completed an important study of the rainfall-altitude ratio in relation to the natural vegetation zones of southwest Kenya. Meanwhile the Kenya Department oif Agriculture asked him to extend information on ecological zones gathers by District Agricultural Officers by preparing an overall vegetation map. This coincided with a visit to EAAFRO of M.A. Brunt, Land Use Officer of the Directorate of Overseas surveys. Provisions were made for a full year’s secondment of Mr. Brunt who became and remained a valued colleague and great friend. The survey was to cover 40,000 square miles of Southwest Kenya with field data drawn in on the air photos which were then to be processed at the Directorate and plotted at 1:250 000. This was to prove a very major undertaking which was continued through to its conclusion several years after Trapnell’s retirement.

Following his retirement, Trapnell became actively involved in conservation and joined the small group of people engaged in founding the Somerset Trust for Nature Conservation, now the Somerset Wildlife Trust. He organized land use surveys for conservation purposes of the Mendip Hillsand the Somerset peat moors. He was responsible for the acquisition of their first nature reserves at Catcott and Westhay, the latter since extended as a National Nature Reserve, and was the donor of the major woodland areas Great Breach and New Hill Woods.He also joined the newly formed Mendip society, which, at his instigation secured the scheduling of the Mendip Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. He was chairman of the Leigh Woods Committee of Management for the National Trust for thirteen years, and negotiated the the lease of the woods to the Nature Conservancy to form the Avon Gorge National Nature Reserve.

At the same time he was engaged at his home in Bristol on the completion of the air photograph interpretation for the vegetation and climate maps of South West Kenya, the sheets of which were published successively by the Directorate of Overseas Survey between 1966 and 1986. The Kenya Survey work was Trapnell’s last piece of major ecological fieldwork in Africa. However, he continued to work on field data from his time in Northern Rhodesia and together with Dick Webster of Rothamstead Experimental station he has published papers on this work. Aged 90 he published a paper entitled ” Biodiversity and Conservation of the indigenous forests of the Kenya highlands”. In this he made a plea for the remaining indigenous forests to be preserved as such and not to be exploited for timber.

In 1994 Colin Trapnell established the Trapnell Fund for Environmental Field Research in Africa at Oxford University. The fund was formerly instituted in the university statutes in 1995 with the specific object of supporting research concerned with the African environment with reference to local climate variation and geomorphology, pedology, soil biology, and soil conservation. The present chairman of the Trapnell Fund is Professor Andrew Goudie - Master of St. Cross College. Most recently the Trapnell Fund has established the Trapnell Fellow in African Terrestrial Ecology at the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University. The first Trapnell Fellow, Dr. Lindsey Gillson was appointed on September of 2001.

Aged over 90 and despite the infirmities of failing eyesight and acute deafness Trapnell then collaborated with Paul Smith and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew to produce a three volume work entitled “an Ecological Survey of Zambia”. The publication was completed in January 2002. Of Paul Smith who worked closely with him Trapnell has said many times “I am so lucky to have found him”.

Colin Trapnell was awarded the O.B.E in 1957. His dearly loved wife Jeanne, who accompanied him with great cheerfulness through many adventures in Africa, died in January of 1999. He is survived by his children Jennifer Trapnell of Bristol, England, Priscilla Higgins of Santa Ynez, California and Robert Trapnell of Torun, Poland, and six grandchildren.

© Martin Brunt 2004

Wilfred Thesiger in Africa - A Centenary Exhibition

Wilfred Thesiger in Africa: A Centenary Exhibition
4 June 2010 – 5 June 2011, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (United Kingdom)

©Pitt-Rivers Museum

Probably the greatest traveller of the twentieth century, and one of its greatest explorers, Sir Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003) is most famous for his journeys in Arabia and his sojourns among the Marsh Arabs in Iraq. Yet fifty of Thesiger’s seventy years travelling, exploring and living in remote places were spent in East and North Africa. Born in Addis Ababa, where his father served as British Minister in charge of the Legation, he lived there until 1919, when his family returned to England. Longing to return to Ethiopia, in 1930 Thesiger received a personal invitation to Ras Tafari’s coronation as Emperor Haile Selassie, and his life of travel and adventure had begun.

©Pitt-Rivers Museum

This exhibition is the first to explore Thesiger’s lifelong relationship with Africa. He undertook river explorations, wartime service and travels in Ethiopia, political service in the Sudan, travels in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, and numerous journeys on foot in Kenya and Tanzania. From 1978 Thesiger lived for nine months of each year in Maralal, Kenya, before retiring permanently to England in 1994. Wilfred Thesiger took over 17,000 photographs in Africa, around two-fifths of his entire photographic output, all of which he donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum. Spanning fifty years, the photographs exhibited here document his development as a photographer, in particular as a portraitist. ‘Ever since my time in Northern Darfur,’ Thesiger wrote, ‘it has been people, not places, not hunting, not even exploration, that have mattered to me most.’ Although also known for his romantic landscape images, Thesiger saw these as secondary, ‘a setting for my portraits of the inhabitants’.
This exhibition is also a celebration of the people Thesiger photographed and the diverse cultures they represent. From the Afar (Danakil), Konso and Boran of Ethiopia, the Nuer and Dinka of Sudan, the Berbers of Morocco, and the Samburu and Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania, this exhibition offers historical glimpses of some of the most fascinating cultures and places on the African continent.

Royal Spanish Botanic Expedition

EXHIBITIONS
Exhibition: Royal Spanish Botanic Expedition 
Dates: from 25th april 2010

Place: Museu Etnològic, Barcelona, Spain

Admission: 3,50 € (free every Sunday afternoon)

Webpage: www.museuetnologic.bcn.es

Comments:

Barcelona’s Ethnologic Museum in its line of Latin American collections, presents an exhibition dedicated to Spanish botanist José Celestino Mutis.

José Celestino Mutis was an illustrated scientist and one of the firsts to study and divulge Columbian Flora. He worked as well for the Independency of the Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada or Gran Colombia, which comprised nowadays Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador.

He was the leader of the Royal Botanic Expedition to Nueva Granada (1783-1816). Most of he’s work is stored at the Real Jardín Botánico of Madrid. During his apprenticeship in this institution as botanist, he met renowned catalan naturalists like Josep Quer, Joan Minuart and Miquel Barnades. Later, once established in America, he even maintained correspondence with Carl Linné, and Linné’s son, also a botanist, dedicated him a Columbian plant (Mutisia clematis).

More about José Celestino Mutis:

José Celestino Mutis (Cádiz, Spain, April 6, 1732—Bogotá (now in Colombia), September 11, 1808) was a Spanish botanist and mathematician.

He began his medical studies at the College of Surgery in Cádiz, where he also studied physics, chemistry and botany. He graduated in medicine from the University of Seville on May 2, 1755.

On July 5, 1757 he received his doctorate in medicine. From 1757 to 1760 he was interim professor of anatomy in Madrid. During those same years he continued to study botany at the Migas Calientes Botanical Gardens (now the Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid), and also astronomy and mathematics.

After three years he decided to leave for America, as the private physician of the new viceroy of New Granada, Pedro Messía de la Cerda. He sailed on September 7, 1760, arriving at Santa Fe de Bogotá on February 24, 1761. During the long transatlantic passage he began writing his Diario de Observaciones, which he continued until 1791.

From his arrival in the Viceroyalty, Mutis concentrated on his botanical studies, beginning work on an herbal and investigating for chinchona, which was considered a panacea for the treatment of all kinds of diseases. He wrote El Arcano de la Quina.

Beginning in 1763, Mutis proposed to the king that he sponsor an expedition to study the flora and fauna of the region. He had to wait 20 years for the authorization, but in 1783 the king authorized his expedition (one of three royal botanical expeditions to the New World at about that time). In the interim, Mutis concentrated on commercial and mineralogical projects, not neglecting medicine. He also studied the social and economic conditions of the viceroyalty, and continued to expand his collection of flora and fauna. On December 19, 1772 he was ordained a priest. He was in regular correspondence with scientists in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, particularly Carl Linné.

Mutis led the Royal Botanical Expedition, established in 1783, for 25 years. It explored some 8,000 km² in a range of climates, using the Río Magdalena for access to the interior. He developed a meticulous methodology that included the harvesting of the samples in the field together with detailed descriptions, including data on the surroundings of each species and its utility. Hundreds of plants were discovered and described. More than 8,000 plates, plus maps, correspondence, notes and manuscripts were sent to Spain. His museum consisted of 24,000 dried plants, 5,000 drawings of plants by his pupils, and a collection of woods, shells, resins, minerals and skins. These treasures arrived safely at Madrid in 105 boxes, and the plants, manuscripts, and drawings were sent to the botanical gardens, where they were relegated to a tool-house.

However much of the work was wasted because the results remained unedited and unanalyzed. Also, the collation between the notes and the plates was lost during the transfer to Spain. His work on the species and varieties of chinchona had lasting influence.

He determined the longitude of Bogotá by the observation of an eclipse of a satellite of Jupiter and was a major influence on the construction of the National Astronomical Observatory.

In March 1762, at the inauguration of the chair of mathematics at the Colegio del Rosario, he expounded the principles of the Copernican system and of the experimental method of science, leading to a confrontation with the church. In 1774 he had to defend the teaching of the principles of Copernicus, as well as natural philosophy and modern, Newtonian physics and mathematics, before the Inquisition.

In 1784, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Alexander von Humboldt visited Mutis in 1801, during his expedition to America. Humboldt stayed with Mutis for two months, and greatly admired his botanical collection.

Mutis died in Bogotá on September 11, 1808 at 76 years of age, a victim of apoplexy. Because much of his botanical work was lost or unpublished, he is known to history not as a great scientist, but as a great promoter of science and knowledge.

His image was used in the old banknotes of 2000 pesetas.

Kon-Tiki expedition

© Kon-Tiki Museum, Oslo

One of the most known and renowned expeditions, the Kon-Tiki sailing from Peru to Polynesia marked a huge step on the experimental archaeology field. Its originator and leader, Thor Heyerdahl, wanted to prove the possibility of a pre-Columbian interchange between South America and Polynesia. He achieved the goal by constructing a sailing raft made of nine balsa tree trunks, an available wood in the forests of Peru. A mangrove wood mast supported a main sail of 15 by 18 feet on a yard of bamboo stems.
A plaited bamboo cabin provided refuge for the six crewmen that sailed the boat through the Pacific Ocean: Thor Heyerdahl as Expedition leader, Erik Hesselberg as navigator, Bengt Danielsson as steward in charge of supplies, Knut Haugland as radio expert, Torstein Raaby in charge of radio transmissions and Herman Watzinger as meteorological and hydrographical data collector.
The Kon-Tiki carried 250 litres of water in bamboo tubes. For food they took 200 coconuts, sweet potatoes, bottle gourds and other assorted fruit and roots. The U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps provided field rations, tinned food and survival equipment. In return, the Kon-Tiki explorers reported on the quality and utility of the provisions. They also caught plentiful numbers of fish, particularly flying fish, "dolphin fish", yellowfin tuna, bonito and shark.
Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so. (Although the expedition carried some modern equipment, such as a radio, watches, charts, sextant, and metal knives, Heyerdahl argued they were incidental to the purpose of proving that the raft itself could make the journey.)
The Kon-Tiki expedition was funded by private loans, along with donations of equipment from the United States Army. Heyerdahl and a small team went to Peru, where, with the help of dockyard facilities provided by the Peruvian authorities, they constructed the raft out of balsa logs and other native materials in an indigenous style as recorded in illustrations by Spanish conquistadores. The trip began on April 28, 1947, at Callao, Peru, and after 101 days and over 6.980 km across the Pacific Ocean, they arrived at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7. They had mainly followed the Humboldt Current. The crew's first sight of land was the atoll of Puka-Puka on July 30. They made brief contact with the inhabitants of Angatau Island on August 4, but were unable to land safely. Incidentally, the Angatau atoll was reached after 97 days of travel, the calculated absolute minimum navigational time to reach Polynesia. Three days later, on August 7, the raft struck a reef and was eventually beached on an uninhabited islet off Raroia Island in the Tuamotu group. The team had travelled a distance of around 3,770 nautical miles at an average speed of 1.5 knots. After spending a number of days alone on the tiny islet, the crew were greeted by men from a village on a nearby island who arrived in canoes, having seen washed-up flotsam from the raft. The crew were taken back to the native village, where they were feted with traditional dances and other festivities. Finally the crew were taken off Raroia to Tahiti by the French schooner Tamara, with the salvaged Kon-Tiki in tow.
Thor Heyerdahl's book about his experience became a bestseller. It was published in 1950 as The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas, later reprinted as Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft.
A documentary motion picture about the expedition, also called Kon-Tiki was produced from a write-up and expansion of the crew's filmstrip notes and won an Academy Award in 1951. This documentary can be viewed in Youtube in its whole length and it’s much worth the 58 minutes it lasts:

The original Kon-Tiki boat is now on display in the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo.