Expeditions

While Richard Evelyn Byrd last week sought $200,000 in donations to complete his million-dollar expedition to the Antarctic, other parties were afield:

Equatorial Africa. "Seven lions surrounded our camp. One actually entered the front seat of an automobile parked nearby and another almost chewed up the rear tire. A third lion managed to get at a camera, which was soon reduced to a pulp. It was a thrilling night, but all is well." The experience befell three Boy Scouts now photographing wild animals on the high equatorial plateau just east of Lake Victoria, Africa. The boys--Robert Douglas, 16, of Greensboro, N. C., David Martin, 15, of Austin, Minn., and Douglas Oliver, 15, of Atlanta, Ga., are with Mr. and Mrs. Martin Johnson. Their message reached George Palmer Putnam, publisher, backer of their expedition, last week. Each boy has killed his lion. When they return this autumn they will write a book, Three Boy Scouts in Africa, for Mr. Putnam to publish. Commander Byrd last week was trying to choose a Boy Scout to go with him on his Antarctic trip.

Belgian Congo. Dim news from dimmer Africa tells of Negro giants seven feet and more tall. To study them Explorer Paul C. Hoefler and Writer Harold Austin, are on their way to Mozambique on the east coast of Africa. Thence they will work westerly across the Lake Nyasa country into the Belgian Congo uplands.

British Bechuanaland. Dr. Will J. Cameron, Chicago dentist and inventor of surgical instruments, is an amateur anthropologist. He believes that Roy Chapman Andrews, hunting in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia for traces of man's origin, is astray, because "in a place like the Gobi it takes the ingenuity of the devil to survive." Obviously the statement is a rhetorical exaggeration by Dr. Cameron. The Gobi was once a lake, once a swamp. Dr. Cameron's idea is that man as a distinct anthropoid began in the withering Kalahari Desert of British Bechuanaland.

To prove himself he is now in the neighborhood of Cape Town, Cape Colony, Africa--on a two-year jaunt from Cape Town to Cairo. With him are Professor R. L. Mannen, geologist, of Texas University, and Dr. C. Ernest Cadle, head of the Denver-African Expedition of 1925.

Papua (New Guinea), largest island of the archipelago that lies just north of Australia, like scattered shards of a frail continent, is the home of cannibals, gibbons, serpents and birds of paradise. To get some of those birds, and on his way to photograph other jungle life, for the New York Zoological Park, Curator Lee S. Crandall left Manhattan last week. At Port Moresby, Papua, he will make up his field expedition of habitants and natives. Particular end of his quest is the "Rudolf," largest and most gorgeous bird of paradise. When it is not drifting between twilit trees, it hangs upside down, its feathers swaying about like the chiffon drapes of a young girl's party dress.

Solomon Islands. Also hunting for rare birds, among the Solomon Islands only 500 miles from Papua, is Hannibal Hamlin, 24, great-grandson of Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln's first vice president. He heads the Whitney South Sea Expedition for the American Museum of Natural History. His present despatches report him having reached the crater of Balbi, active volcano on the northwest coast of the Island of Bougainville. For aids through tropical rains, mud and brush he could get only two Polynesian sailors. Natives, however, did not molest him.

Orinoco. When a Piarros Indian (the tribe, head hunters, live near the upper waters of the Orinoco River) becomes sick, his fellows scoop him a trench and there they stretch him with food and water. If he recovers, he may amble after the others. They will not have gone far, they are lazy. If he dies . . . earth takes back its matter very quickly along the Orinoco. Some 1,500 years ago, the ancestors of the Piarros potted their dead in urns. That was, and to some extent is, a Mongolian practice. Most anthropologists declare that a Mongolian culture is discernible down along the mountainous spine of the Americas, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, and it may be that the Piarros burial tradition is a vestige from an Oriental migration. To check for the Museum of the American Indian, Dr. Herbert Spencer Dickey and his wife are now on their way to Trinidad, base for a 1,000 mile voyage by launch and canoe up the Orinoco.