Expeditions

(See front cover)

Over the rough and tangled places of the hemispheres trains of men with beasts of burden have forayed during the past winter, as often for sport and recreation as for science. Rich men have vied with institutions to explore, and have made the hardy trips themselves. To do so has become a new fashion.

WESTERN HEMISPHERE

In the west, outstanding expeditions of the season have been:

Maya Curse (Field Museum of Chicago). In southwest Mexico, 35 miles south by southeast of Valladolid and at the western border of Quintana Roo, the Mason-Blodgett expedition sent by the Field Museum of Chicago came upon a highway built by ancient Mayans 40 feet wide and raised ten feet from the ground.

Except for trees which in 15 centuries have grown thickly upon it, the road was sufficiently smooth for motor driving. Directly in line with the recently discovered great causeway running southward from Coba past Lake Xkanha, this road seems part of a great Mayan passage towards Ixil. At the road's end is a flight of stone steps going up a dilapidated pyramid 70 feet high. At its top Mayan priests had the habit of tearing the hearts from living human sacrifices, of offering the warm and bloody things to an idol, and of heaving the maimed bodies into a ravine close by. There seemed a fell malison on this spot which the Mason-Blodgett troupe had found. Their muleteers ran fearfully away, carrying with them the supplies. Gregory Mason, scribe, fell from the top of the pyramid and hurt himself; he fell through the roof of a buried building and hurt himself more; the tree which held his hammock also fell, almost on him. So the expedition paused for a while.

This gave them an opportunity to look over Cozumel, island off the coast of Yucatan, and to discover, in a cave at Ucul ("hidden water") a shrine to the Mayan rain god, an excellently preserved little building whose stucco, after centuries of exposure, is still white.

Mayan Mosaic (Carnegie Institution). In the "Temple of the Warriors" at Chichenitza, stupendous Mayan ruin in Yucatan, President John Campbell Merriam and Dr. Alfred Vincent Kidder of the Carnegie Institution watched amazed as Earl Morris, their associate on the expedition, scraped away the filth that for centuries had hidden a beautiful mosaic disc containing several hundred pieces of polished turquoise. It had been lying under the carved and painted Mayan altar discovered two years ago and is the "most artistic and elaborate of all known relics of Mayan civilization."

Inca Gold (private adventurers). A British adventurer, one Cecil Herbert Progers, now dead, while prying about the Bolivian heights near Lake Titicaca, found back of a tall and ancient tree a slit in the face of a mountain. Into it he crawled and found a Jesuit warning of imminent and terrible danger and a silver crucifix. Riot and robbery have raged among these Andes crags since the Spaniards first wrung gold from Incas. Natives hid their piles from the first plunderers; and they, from other plunderers later come upon them. Progers thought that he had located $60,000,000 of gold cached away. Then he died, without having made his find. But he left what clues he had; and along the spoors so indicated a band of English speculators, calling themselves the "Sacambaya Exploration Company," and following the lead of a Dr. Edgar Sanders, last week were prepared to go.

Swart Indians (Museum of the American Indian). In the meshes of the jungle that cover the South American heights where Brazil abuts on Bolivia, live 350 swart and naked Indians whom, before the recent penetration of Alpheus Hyatt Verrill, agent of the Museum of the American Indian, white men had never seen. Nor had the tribe before seen white man clothes or gun. They bear no resemblance to any other South American tribe known to Mr. Merrill. Said he, in Manhattan last week: "The average height of the men is 5 ft., 8 in.; which makes them about two inches above the average of other South American Indians. They wear long beards. The men of the tribe buy their wives, taking girls 12 and 14 years old. Their religion is a mixed worship of sex and nature, while for them there is a spirit in every stone and tree and brook. They keep no calendar and no track of the days. They do not know how old anybody is." His supposition is that those black Indians have descended from black explorers who anciently fared from the Malayan Peninsula or South Sea Islands along an archipelago which, he premises, spanned the whole Pacific.

NANA in Brazil (North American Newspaper Alliance). NANA, knowing well that nothing more delights the rocking chair voyager than to read of bold men's wanderings through forests primeval, has sent Commander George M. Dyott to penetrate south central Brazil, westward from Rio de Janeiro. This expedition is to locate British Explorers P. H. Fawcett and two companions "lost" in the Brazil wilds; contingently it is to gather scientific data; also it is to furnish "copy" to those papers who belong to NANA.* Leader Dyott spent several weeks verbosely fussing over his preparations; finally quit the U. S.; reached Rio; and last week was definitely started on his admittedly difficult trek.

Galapagos Islands (private recreation). Off the equatorial west coast of South America lie the Galapagos Islands, longtime home of quaint fowl and ancient reptiles, onetime base of buccaneer expeditions. Now Ecuador owns and the U. S. explores them. Most recent pryers about the islands have been William K. Vanderbilt II and his wife, trapping sapphire-eyed cormorants, penguins pompous as bartenders, Galapagos tortoises with leathery shells, fish whose pied throats pulsate languidly. Such catch Mr. Vanderbilt carried on his yacht Ara to Miami, Fla., where on an off-shore island he maintains his private aquarium and tropical bird reservation and where, insouciantly clad in bathing suit, slippers and tennis hat he directed the unloading of his craft.

Sea Searching (private recreation). William Beebe, unlike most explorers who talk for their dinners after they have made their more or less perilous expeditions, takes his dinner parties along with him aboard the private yachts of rich friends when he goes a-faring. Last week a flotilla of four vessels bore him company along the Florida edge of the broad Atlantic from Miami southward to the Florida keys. There, while his hosts sipped ices under the southern sun, Mr. Beebe dropped, under the shield of a glass-windowed helmet, to see what he could see swimming at the bottom of the shallow sea.

Arctic Mummies (American Museum of Natural History). Under the leadership of Dr. Frank Michler Chapman, the famed polar ship Morrissey (Captain R. A. Bartlett in command) is now on its way among the Aleutian Islands, off Alaska, to collect sea otters and sea birds.

Later in the summer the expedition will go along the Arctic coast of Siberia, hunting for live and mummified animals, birds, fish.

EASTERN HEMISPHERE

On the opposite face of the earth, while these men gained their ways, George Eastman, head of the Eastman Kodak Co., was pursuing his second leisurely hunt* with camera and gun through the high lands of Uganda and southern Sudan. The scientific importance of his trip lay chiefly in the cinema films which, with the aid of Mr. and Mrs. Martin Johnson,/- he took of African mammals at their private affairs. Of lesser importance were the rare white rhinoceros and the more common water buck which he killed so that he might give them to the Natural History Museum at Rochester. N. Y. Those will be trivial gifts to the community which he has already endowed with a theatre, a school of music, a philharmonic orchestra (it has just finished its fifth season), and, source of all, an industry.

That industry, the manufacture of cameras and films and their distribution to every city of the hemispheres, explains why the public followed Mr. Eastman's movements more than they followed the movements of other adventurers. News papers reported his preparations at the end of last year for this African hunt; they reported his coming out of the rough in the early part of March ; they reported as merrily as they dared his escape (in pajamas, full dress trousers and slippers) from a train burning between Luxor and Cairo, Egypt. Correspondents cabled of his departure from Cairo and of his arrival at Naples at the end of March. They met him at Rome and, in the city where Pope Gregory XIII promulgated the present Gregorian calendar, heard him again urge adoption of "my one hobby at present"--a calendar of 13 months with 28 days each (TIME, Nov. 21, 1927, et ante).

From Rome he went sightseeing leisurely, a man who at 74 has his vast business in able hands,** to Florence. Venice, Milan, Paris, where Dr. Albert D. Kaiser his personal physician on the African expedition, finally left his party. In Paris Mr. Eastman paused to inspect the Pathe factory which the Eastman company recently bought. After Paris were to come visits to the two Eastman factories at Berlin and one in Austria. Mr. Eastman finds it entertaining to examine the institutions that his early work with camera and films has created.

When George Eastman first worked with cameras, they were cumbersome boxes "almost the size of a soap box." That was in 1878 when he was 24, a bank clerk at Rochester, N. Y. Without leaving his bank job, he applied his mechanical ingenuity to making cameras handy. He succeeded.

Negatives at that time were made on wet plates, a sheet of glass covered with collodion and silver nitrate (sensitive to light) a few minutes before exposure. George Eastman, no scientist himself, tried empirically to invent dry plates covered with silver nitrate and gelatine. After trials and troubles which a thorough knowledge of colloidal chemistry, as he later learned, might have prevented, he succeeded in this effort.

Next he applied his gelatine to a strip of paper, which might be rolled compactly. And that led to a new kind of camera, the Kodak (1888). Mr. Eastman invented the name by fiddling with a batch of separate letters until he put together a group that looked alluring and sounded sensible. The word is now a common noun, verb and radical in European languages. It appears in standard dictionaries.***

Next (in 1889) came the cellulose film that has made amateur photography a joy and made possible the cinema, one of the 10 largest U. S. industries.

Mr. Eastman did not of course accomplish all this progress in photography by his sole effort. By this time he was calling on professional scientists for information and aid; and it is with "thanks to the effort of Eastman scientists," as he, with native courtesy, states in Eastman Kodak advertisements, that the science and art of photography has gone so far.

At Rochester he maintains a laboratory upon which he yearly spends hundreds of thousands of dollars. There--under the direction of Dr. Charles Edward Kenneth Mees (B.S., D.Sc., Sc.D.) and the assistant direction of Dr. Samuel Edward Sheppard (B.Sc., D.Sc.)--work 80 chemists, physicists and photographic experts, with 60 assistants. Their problems are in the theory of photography, the development of new photographic apparatus, materials and processes, the study of the physical and chemical properties of gelatine and cellulose, the production of synthetic organic chemicals.

Two great goals those Eastman scientists have ahead of them and toward which progress has already been made--pictures that reproduce objects in their natural colors, and that give the impression of depth as well as of height and breadth. Colored cinemas are already being shown regularly. But they are painful to watch; the colors, notably the reds, do not blend properly. Pictures giving the illusion of three dimensions have also been cast and screened. To behold them, spectators have been obliged to use special and cumbersome opera-glasses. Nonetheless, these are stages on the way to perfect photography, and it may well be that upon his next trip George Eastman, to whom scientists owe as much thanks as he to them, will carry equipment that will record his exploits in three-dimensional and four-color exactitude.

*Similarly in 1868 James Gordon Bennett sent Journalist Henry Morton Stanley to locate David Livingstone in Africa.

*The first he made a year ago.

/-Photographers of the current cinema Simba (lion). Mr. Eastman's hunt having ended, they, are at present in Africa on their own filming enterprise.

**Last week were reported the Eastman Kodak Co.'s 1927 profits--$20,142,161. President of the company is William G. Stuber, whom Governor Flem D. Sampson of Kentucky has just made a colonel on his official staff. Will Rogers, critic of U. S. mores, is a colonel on the same staff.

***"Brownie," the name of the small Eastman box camera, has less universality of spelling, sound, or sense, and is less commonly used.