”The tension between the armchair and adventure, between security and possibility, lies at the heart of Verne, as of his age--an age of scientific, te”The tension between the armchair and adventure, between security and possibility, lies at the heart of Verne, as of his age--an age of scientific, technical , industrial, colonial expansion, but also of questioning and reverie...The template of Verne’s great novels [is] a fusing of myth and the real; a new, modern, awestruck apprehension of the manmade and the natural; a dream--yet sometimes nightmare--of the possibilities of mankind, technology and the sublime.” ---From the introduction by Tim Farrant
As I was reading Journey to the Center of the Earth, I kept thinking to myself about those Victorian Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and Europeans of all stripes, who were feeling the thrill of adventure as they sat in their favorite reading chairs and cracked open the latest scientific thriller from Jules Verne. This particular book was first published in 1864. The Civil War in America was still raging to its bloody conclusion, and I’m sure there were many Americans of means who couldn’t wait to escape to wherever Jules Verne was willing to take them.
The Victorian age was an age of discovery. Men were tramping to the deepest heart of Africa, to the highest peaks in Tibet, and courting death in the Sahara Desert, all in an attempt to be the first to discover something. Nothing, of course, existed until a white man laid eyes on it. These days, nothing has been seen unless one has taken a selfie with it. Believe me, the great Victorian explorers would have loved to travel with an iPhone X to faithfully record all of their feats of valor and chronicle the dark mysteries they unraveled.
No one better exemplifies the Victorian explorer than the radical geologist, Dr. Otto Lidenbrock, who suffers strongly from an incurable case of bibliomania. He has discovered a pamphlet, hidden within another wonderful literary acquisition, a runic text written by an Icelandic writer that proposes that the center of the earth is not a fiery ball of flame, but a hidden world of wonders. He proposes to his nephew that they leave for Iceland immediately and begin a descent into the extinct volcano Snaefell. Axel, a much more cautious person than his uncle, would much rather laze about in his uncle’s study, sucking on his hookah and contemplating exactly how he is going to win the permanent affections of his uncle’s beautiful, young ward, Gräuben.
Of course, if his uncle dashes off to Iceland and becomes incinerated in the fiery hells of the Earth, it will hardly endear himself to the young lady.
Axel soon finds himself reluctantly caught up in his uncle’s mad adventure. With the help of their Icelandic guide, they descend into what Axel feels will be certain death.
Jules Verne writes with verve: ”The rain is like a roaring cataract between us and the horizons to which we are madly rushing. But before it reaches us, the cloud curtain tears apart and reveals the boiling sea; and now the electricity, disengaged by the chemical action in the upper cloudations; networks of vivid lightnings; ceaseless detonations; masses of incandescent vapour; hailstones, like a fiery shower, rattling among our tools and firearms. The heaving waves look like craters full of interior fire, every crevice darting a little tongue of flame.”
What made Verne so popular with readers during the later part of the 19th century was his gift for blending known facts with his very plausible flights of fancy. He must have subscribed to every scientific journal available at the time, and any article could prove to be the basis for his next book. The plausibility is such a key element because the armchair traveler he was taking along with him must be able to see himself in the midst of the action. A grocer dreaming of a life beyond potatoes and tomatoes, too, could descend into the bowels of the earth and hopefully return with a tale worth telling.
Next book in this Everyman’s collection is Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, one of my all time favorite Verne stories. I will definitely be rereading that one.
***This is seriously the perfect gift for the men in your life. I know how difficult we can be to buy gifts for, but your dad, husband, brothers, uncl***This is seriously the perfect gift for the men in your life. I know how difficult we can be to buy gifts for, but your dad, husband, brothers, uncles, friends, and lover(s) will absolutely love this adventure set in the snows and ice of The Farthest North.***
Let’s set the stage.
”From somewhere out in the bunched and knuckled hills came the plaintive howl of a wolf. Adolphus Greely, adjusting his spectacles and gazing at the three tall masts of the Proteus piercing the horizon, had cause for excitement and trepidation. For as his men lowered the whaleboats, and the twenty-eight-foot steam launch dubbed the Lady Greely, it occurred to him that they were 250 miles north of the last known Eskimo settlement, and more than 1,000 miles north of the Arctic Circle. They were, in fact, now the most northerly colony of human inhabitants in the world. They were being left, quite literally, at the end of the earth.”
You are, fair reader, in for a grand adventure once you decide to pick up this book, but what you may not expect is that there is a love story woven into this tale. Not the... “what happens in the sleeping bag in the Far North stays in the Far North” type of fumbling romance, but some of that soulmate mysticism. When the bumbling Adolph Greely first meets the lovely and intelligent Henrietta, I wouldn’t have bet a single farthing on his chances, but he is persistent. She finally says,…”woo me with letters.”
Don’t you just frilling love that? Not illiterate phone texts, but real letters, composed by the heart.
I can see Greely at his desk, eyeglasses askew, hair mussed, surrounded by the crumpled remains of his wooing efforts, calling for a muse, any muse, to give him the words that will win him the attention of this lovely creature.
He must have wielded a deft pen because he does convince Henrietta to be his wife. They have two daughters, and then he promptly sets off for the frozen North on a polar expedition.
Now before you start thinking that men don’t care about romance, I can assure you they do. When a man is in the trenches and mortars are landing all about him, or sitting in a cooking pot in the South Pacific surrounded by cannibals, or freezing to death on an iceberg near the Arctic Circle, I know that every man’s last thoughts will be of his wife, his mother, his sister, or a lost lover (male/female, take your pick). Henrietta, through all the trials and tribulations that are about to happen to Adolph, is never far from his mind.
Things, needless to say, go wrong for the expedition. I’ve never read an adventure story that unbelievable, disastrous things don’t happen. A clue resides in the subtitle…”The Triumph and TRAGIC Greely Polar Expedition.” Death is hardly a good trade off for triumph. The use of the word TRAGIC is why I prefer to experience wretched, cataclysmic exploration from the safety of my reading chair.
I did put off reading this book until we had a snow storm. I prefer authenticity of weather to enhance my reading experience. I was able, while taking a break from reading to stretch my legs to walk out my sliding glass door and let the flakes of snow hit me in the face. I could imagine without too much effort that my deck was an iceberg. It helped to have Buddy Levy’s vivid images in my mind. ”A giant iceberg was thundering toward them from the north. Men looked up to see a mass of white upon them and then felt a shuddering jolt of impact from the collision. The immense pressure of the striking pack tore great rifts in their small berg, splitting its surface into canyons. They scurried wildly, leaping over deep fissures, hurrying to secure food and boats and gear as the ice rent and ruptured underfoot.”
Holy whale of ice!
Or how about this one: ”There was nothing to see in the distance but vastness--water and ice and rock. Their drift was at first gradual, almost imperceptible. But constant was the awful groaning and creaking and splitting of the ice pack, a sound so eerily hideous that it had come to be known as ‘the Devil’s Symphony.’ The sound of ice grinding against ice, shearing and shrieking, was an omnipresent reminder of their unimaginable frailness in this vast and dangerous place.”
If I closed my eyes, the tinkling of the windchimes hanging from my trees, mixed with the jake braking of a semi on the bypass, became the rendering of rubbing ice.
So the goal of this expedition is to go as Far North as they can to fill in what were, at the time, blank spots on the map and take scientific readings that will be useful for future study. They accomplish both of these things. I will say that, even as their lives became imperiled, these men never stopped doing their job. Their hope was, even if they perished, that someone eventually will find their journals. When their ship does not arrive that is supposed to take them home, Greely makes the decision to head south to try and find a point that will make it easier for them to be rescued. The Arctic is not only unpredictable but also undeniably, brutally dangerous, and this trip across the frozen ice is fraught with peril.
Ships are trying to get to them, but the ice is too thick. One boat sinks with a year’s worth of supplies for them. It becomes a cocked up mess. It doesn’t help that Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln, one of the most powerful people in Washington, is against the expedition from the beginning. If his name sounds familiar, it is because he is the son of Abraham Lincoln. When the dire circumstances of the Greely expedition are relayed to him, he is none too keen on spending more money on what he feels would be a fruitless endeavor, looking for dead men.
Lincoln will soon be contending with Henrietta, who is shaking every tree and turning over every rock for any people who have any close connections capable of putting pressure on the government to try to find her husband.
I think one of the signs of a good book is when I am thinking about the book even when I’m not reading the book. It is even better when I am wondering what the characters, or in this case real people, have been doing while I was away. I would hope that Kislinbury has finally shot a walrus for the much needed meat or that Rice has finally found that cache of supplies left by another expedition or that Brainard has learned how to net more tiny shrimp for the stew. By the middle of the book, these men are as real for me as people I’ve known for years.
The book is loaded with pictures that are scattered strategically throughout the text. You won’t have to wait for the standard grouping of pictures in the middle of a book to see the visual evidence of what you have been reading about. This compelling account is written like a thriller. Buddy Levy will keep you turning the pages late into the whale oil lit night with his tension enhancing short chapters and evocative descriptions of horrendous and amazing circumstances.
Really, forget about getting this book for someone significant in your life, and keep it for yourself. You can give it to them for Father's Day or Mother's Day or their birthday... after you finish reading it. Did I say this book was for men? I must have been half in the bag when I wrote that. If you enjoy a tale well told, you will appreciate this gem of an adventure. If you are a man, woman, or alien, you will identify with their struggles and will root for them as if they are an astronaut lost on Mars.
Highly recommended! If people are disappearing from family gatherings, they have most likely been gifted this book and are squirreled away in some reading nook on their way to the Far North.
”To die is easy, very easy; it is only hard to strive, to endure, to live.”--Commander Adolph Greely
I want to thank St. Martin’s Press for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review.
”I want to forget the darkness and remember only the good; illusion is such a temptress. It won’t be long before we will both float weightlessly, unmo”I want to forget the darkness and remember only the good; illusion is such a temptress. It won’t be long before we will both float weightlessly, unmoored, our bones hollow like the birds’. I remember you once told me about mockingbirds and their special talents for mimicry. They steal the songs from others, you said. I want to ask you this: how were our own songs stolen from us, the notes dispersed, while our faces were turned away?”
SS-Sturmbannführer Ernst Schäfer is a man of destiny. He is determined to be a man who leaves his mark on history. Failure is not an option and anything or anyone who keeps him from achieving his goals will have to be eliminated. His wife Herta Volz is a childhood sweetheart who will always see Ernst as a sweet boy, even as he grows into a demanding man filled with rage and brainwashed by the Nazi belief in the Superman.
He is a hunter even more so than he is a scientist. He can see the beauty in the flight of a bird, but at the same time he knows, godlike, that he can bring that beauty crashing to earth. He decides if that bird lives or dies, and he revels in it. Ernst wants nothing more than to go back to Tibet to be seduced once more by the wild beauty, but also to bend it to his own design. As Herta points out to him. ”’You will never be able to see the real Tibet, Ernst. You are too busy dissecting it.’”
His ticket to get back to Tibet rests in the office of Heinrich Himmler, and fortunately Himmler sees Ernst as a perfect specimen of Germanic stock. His beautiful wife Herta, though resisting all of this in private, has been a model of what a Nazi wife should be. She even goes to a Nazi bride camp for wives where they are taught what is expected of them...submission.
Polish his boots, clean his rife, submit to his desires, bear his children, and be the rock behind his efforts to help the Third Reich rule for a thousand years.
The interesting thing is Herta, sweet flute playing Herta, convinces me that Ernst is salvageable, that he would not be the way he is if not for the influence of the Nazi regime. She understands he can not achieve his goals without being a fervent member of the Nazi party, and she believes that when the day comes, when all this madness is stopped, that he will prove to be the man she sees in the boy.
Maybe going to Tibet will set him right, will bring back the honorable aspects she wishes to see in him. ”Part of him ached to escape from trying to be a perfect husband, a studious scientist, a spotless officer of the Reich. Tibet, like a sultry mistress, waited in the background, beckoning him irrevocably towards her seductive terrain.” Is that just a man wanting to shrug off the responsibilities of his life, or is he wanting to move beyond a persona that has been superimposed upon him by everyone perceiving him to be so much more than what he is really capable of being?
Himmler, of course, has an agenda for backing Ernst’s trip to Tibet. It can’t possibly be just for the sake of science. He wants him to find traces of Aryan influences in the Tibetan people to support the story that Germans once lived there. Bring out the calipers to measure their skulls and lips. Bring out the eye color chart to see if there are any traces of Aryanism among the natives. Weigh and measure and find wanting.
You can’t find two people more different than Ernst and Herta. Maybe if they hadn’t been living in the wrong age, they would have had completely different lives. She would have softened him, and he would have strengthened her. Maybe if the world was not on fire and men are not rewarded with Death’s Head Rings for special service, then quite possibly they both would have had the opportunity to be the best versions of themselves. ”He had carved out who he was in nature, whereas she preferred to disappear in its folds, melting into its beauty.” I want to think, in a different time, that Herta would have lovingly taken Ernst’s rifle from his hands and replaced it with a pair of binoculars, and that he would have encouraged her to pursue her music.
This novel is based upon true events. Ernst and Herta Schäfer did really exist, and their story is a compelling one, brought vividly to life by Leah Kaminsky. This is the best kind of historical fiction made more real than nonfiction. It is quirky and bold with splashes of spicy history and sweet music.
I’m not a birder, certainly not a lister, though Jonathan Franzen in his recent collection of essays does his bloody best to turn me into one. I will say the hoopoe bird on the cover of this book is certainly one of the loveliest birds on the planet. Birds figure strongly in this book, and both Ernst and Herta see the beauty in them, but Herta wants to join them flying above the earth, while Ernst wants to bring them crashing to earth to become a dead eyed curiosity on a shelf. The conclusion rocked me back in my seat. I had to backtrack a few pages and read forward again...thinking to myself...did I miss something? My goodness, I did not see that coming.
Yes, the unthinkable does happen. It was the age when unthinkable things happened to many people. Most people survived, but not without bearing the wounds of their near demise.
I want to thank Leah Kaminsky, who made the extra effort to send me a copy of her book from Down Under in exchange for an honest review. I want to thank my friend, Elyse Walters, who so adamantly brought this book to my attention.
”For scientific leadership, give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems to be ”For scientific leadership, give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems to be no way out, get on your knees and pray for Shackleton.”
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Every time I see this photograph of Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, frozen in the ice, I get a chill.
One of the most selfless acts in the history of exploration happened in 1908 when Ernest Shackleton made the decision to turn back from his goal of reaching the South Pole, a mere 97 nautical miles away. The Holy Grail was only a few days travel. It was all but within his grasp.
There was something more important to Shackleton than his own personal aggrandizement; it was the safety of his men. He calculated the status of the remaining supplies and determined that the risk to his men was too great to make it to the Pole and make it back safely...alive. He did the unthinkable, something few other leaders would have the courage to do; he turned back. He did not worry about the aspersions that would be cast at him for cowardice or the ridicule that his jeering competition would hurl his direction. He would much rather live with that than live with the deaths of his men.
I had to ask myself, would I have been courageous enough to make that decision, or would I have given an Antarctica version of the Henry the 5th speech at the Battle of Agincourt and pressed on? Being the first to reach the South Pole was what would insure immortality, turning back meant, in all probability, that someone else would have that honor. Roald Amundsen, the great Norwegian explorer, would reach it first in 1911.
Henry Worsley worshipped Shackleton. Whenever he was in a tight spot, he would think to himself, ”What would Shacks do?” which went well with another of his favorite sayings: ”Better a live donkey than a dead lion.”
So who was Worsley?
”Worsley was a retired British Army officer who had served in the Special Air Service, a renowned commands unit. He was also a sculptor, a fierce boxer, a photographer who meticulously documented his travels, a horticulturalist, a collector of rare books and maps and fossils, and an amateur historian who had become a leading authority on Shackleton.”
And why did David Grann write a book about Worsley?
”In 2008, he led an expedition to pioneer a route through the Transantarctic Mountains, reaching a point 98 miles (157 km) from the South Pole. The expedition commemorated the centenary of Shackleton's Nimrod Expedition. He returned to the Antarctic in 2011, leading a team of six in retracing Roald Amundsen's successful 870-mile (1,400 km) journey in 1912 to the South Pole, marking its centenary. In completing the route, he became the first person to have successfully undertaken the routes taken by Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott and Amundsen. --Wikipedia”
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I love this picture of Worsley. He broke off a tooth on a frozen candy bar.”
All of this led up to Worsley’s dramatic final expedition to be the first person to make a solo crossing of Antarctica, without any assistance. He had been restless. There was something about the polar regions that got in certain men’s blood, and they just couldn’t stay away. ”What is Antarctica other than a blank canvas on which you seek to impose yourself?”
The beauty is not what we usually think of, with oceans, mountains, and trees. From a bird’s eye view, there is nothing much there, except ice and snow and cold.”There is nothing to see but white darkness.”
Desolation is best expressed by deserts, the hot ones and the cold ones. I find photographs of deserts to be very peaceful, the more desolate the better. I find expeditions that venture out into that desolation, seeking what has never been seen before, to be invigorating. So I understand the obsession that gripped Worsley to keep going back again and again.
The landscape seduced his mind, like a woman who must be chased to be had.
This is a lovely, evocative book, filled with amazing photographs. David Grann knows how to tell a story, and you will find yourself tearing up with joy and pain, more than a few times, as you make these journeys with these brave men. The book also reminded me of all the polar expedition books I still have left to read. Fortunately, there have been many explorers who were as obsessed with those regions as were Shackleton and Worsley, and most of them, the ones who lived, wrote about their adventures. This book is a quick afternoon read, and hopefully, you will all be as seduced by the landscape as Shackleton, Worsley, and yes, even I.
”The Congo in Leopold’s mind was not the one of starving porters, raped hostages, emaciated rubber slaves, and severed hands. It was the empire of his”The Congo in Leopold’s mind was not the one of starving porters, raped hostages, emaciated rubber slaves, and severed hands. It was the empire of his dreams, with gigantic trees, exotic animals, and inhabitants grateful for his wise rule. Instead of going there, Leopold brought the Congo—that Congo, the theatrical production of his imagination—to himself.”
Belgium was simply not big enough for the future king. ”When he thought about the throne that would be his, he was openly exasperated. ‘Petit pays, petits gens’ (small country, small people), he once said of Belgium.” He watched as countries like Holland, Great Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Germany were colonizing Africa and other exotic isles and becoming rich off the plunder. In the 1880s, he saw his chance and claimed the lands of the Congo. He did this without any kind of referandum from his people. He knew what was best for Belgium. ”Most Belgians had paid little attention to their king’s flurry of African diplomacy, but once it was over they began to realize, with surprise, that his new colony was bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined. It was one thirteenth of the African continent, more than seventy-six times the size of Belgium itself.”
They had no idea the level of atrocities that would be perpetrated in the name of Belgium.
I’ve always thought of Leopold II as a 2nd tier genocidal maniac. I’d always reserved the 1st tier for Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, but after reading this book and hearing the estimated number 10 million associated with the deaths in the Congo, I have officially moved Leopold II to the 1st tier genocidal maniac. So why don’t we know more about Leopold II? Why don’t we see him as the genocidal maniac that we associate with the names Hitler and Stalin?
Could it be because he was killing black people?
Another factor is the way Leopold worked tirelessly to convince people he was a great humanitarian. He found people who would help support him in this endeavor and paid them to write reports that were favorable to his reputation in Africa. He worked equally tirelessly to squash those who came back from the Congo with the lists of atrocities they had witnessed while in Africa.
The biggest thorn in Leopold’s voluminous backside turned out to be a British shipping clerk named Edmund Morel, who noticed the amount of goods coming from the Congo that were being traded or sold at prices that would not support a living wage in the Congo. The math did not add up. The only way that Leopold could be selling goods this cheaply was if they were being acquired through slave labor. Morel went on to found a paper that continued to expose Leopold’s criminal activities in the Congo. Morel hammered away at him for the rest of his life. Additionally, Roger Casement was an Irish man who risked life and limb to obtain evidence that directly refuted the rosy picture that Leopold was selling Europe. There were also two American black men, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, who did everything they could to expose Leopold’s monstrosities to the world. There were many other people who tried their best to stop what was happening, unchecked, in the Congo.
The problem was that Europe and the United States wanted to believe Leopold.
The most famous book of celebrated author Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness was set in the real Leopold’s Congo. The famous character of Kurtz was based on a man Conrad met in the Congo.
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Should I chase butterflies today or should I lob off a few heads?
”One prototype for Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz: Léon Rom. This swashbuckling officer was known for displaying a row of severed African heads around his garden. He also wrote a book on African customs, painted portraits and landscapes, and collected butterflies.”
Léon Rom was a civilized, well educated man. So how does decorating your garden with severed African heads equate with butterfly collecting and painting portraits and landscapes?
Leopold flooded the Congo with the right sort of men. Mercenaries capable of chopping off hands, raping uncooperating women, murdering men, women, and children, and lashing men who didn’t bring enough rubber back from the jungle with ”the chicotte—a whip of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into a long sharp-edged corkscrew strip.”
The strip this would cut off a man’s back, buttock, and legs would leave deep, permanent scars if the man was lucky, or in many cases unlucky, enough to live. *shudder*
White men felt free of all law in the Congo. “We have liberty, independence, and life with wide horizons. Here you are free and not a mere slave of society. . . . Here one is everything!” So to live as free as one would like, one must enslave others? These men had harems, money, and status, something they could never achieve working as clerks or plumbers in Europe. In the Congo, they were warlords.
They killed so many Congolese that they feared not having enough slaves to maintain the plundering of the Congo. “‘We run the risk of someday seeing our native population collapse and disappear,’ fretfully declared the permanent committee of the National Colonial Congress of Belgium that year. ‘So that we will find ourselves confronted with a kind of desert.’” It reminds me of hunters who hunted species to extinction and then bemoaned the fact that they couldn’t hunt those animals anymore. At no point did they think to themselves, maybe we are killing these animals faster than they can reproduce.
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So why cut off the hands? It seems counterproductive when you need these men to work. Every bullet had to be accounted for with Leopold’s mercenaries, so if a man used a bullet to kill game, he had to have an African hand to account for that bullet. Every African hand was then turned in for a reward. It is too sick to comprehend.
Every country in Africa has tales of horror and outrage at the hands of European colonizers. I do believe that what happened in the Congo was by far the worst atrocities on a native population in Africa. The sad part of it is that most of us don’t know anything about it. I knew some, but I didn’t know enough. The “cake” that was Africa was cut up into portions and served to the white European countries as casually as if they were discussing the fates of Africans at a garden party with their children playing at their feet and their wives bringing them slices of the Congo, Nigeria, Kenya, Algeria, South Africa, and Senegal with which they could gorge themselves.
Adam Hochschild had a difficult time getting this book published. It was as if the ghost of Leopold was still haunting and suppressing the truth. This is a brilliant and important book that exposes the truth of the Congo and the complicity which every “civilized” country played in allowing such atrocities to occur.
”She spread out the old map and a modern-day map of the same area, side by side. As she pointed to the town of Yampa and then indicated where it might”She spread out the old map and a modern-day map of the same area, side by side. As she pointed to the town of Yampa and then indicated where it might be on the old map, she pointed to the blotch and X. ‘This looks like an interesting place to look. I would guess it’s about a hundred miles in a straight direction from Yampa. See the kind of circular dot with an X over it?’
Warren leaned over to get a better look, then picked up the magnifying glass and zeroed in on it. ‘That’s not a dot and X,’ he said as a matter of fact. ‘That’s a skull and crossbones.’”
Or as the local Indians refer to it...The Mountain of Death.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
This all begins with Warren reading an article about the discovery of a long lost ghost town. He shows this article to Joe Evans, who by the fickleness of fate sits next to him at meals at the boarding house they both stay in. Both are in their sixties. When they add up the scope of their life and the list of their accomplishments, it is less than impressive. In fact, it is downright depressing. So why can’t they do something like this, have an adventure, discover something interesting? They are unlikely explorers, both well past their “best years” and absolutely stone cold broke.
The idea, mildly insane, certainly improbable, begins to take hold on both of them. There is nothing like the fever of shared passion to stoke the fires of craziness. To even keep the dream alive they need to start working up a plan. First step is money. Warren gets a job in a small mom and pop store that has been reduced to a mom store. Emily’s husband passed away, and though she has enjoyed running a grocery store, it just isn’t the same without her husband. Warren shares his dream, and when Emily reads the article, she doesn’t think the idea is crazy. She thinks it is exactly what she has been looking for, to put some new purpose back in her life.
What may have been an impossible dream for Joe and Warren takes on new layers of possibility with an organizer like Emily involved.
This book has me thinking about how many people have no clue of what to do after retirement. My dad used to talk about the guys who would retire from the shingle factory or from farming, and his comment was, they will be dead in a year. Unfortunately, a lot of times he was right. I think more people need to either keep working until physically they can’t anymore or have a real plan to do something worthwhile once they retire. Sitting around all day in a rocking chair, watching Judge Judy reruns, with the highlight of their day being the pepperjack cheese sandwich they are going to make for lunch is not any way to spend the remaining years of your life.
Most people can’t do something as grand as what Emily, Joe, and Warren get up to, but they can start a hobby, or maybe discover how wonderful reading is, or join community activities that let them meet new people. I take an adventure every day, usually to exotic locals, in my time machine...my library. Which reminds me, we need to get back to the place on the map with the skull and crossbones.
Our heroes are not deterred by the skull and crossbones on the map. Really it just means there is more probability they will find a ghost town that hasn’t been pillaged. They start the prep work, and it isn’t quiet, and it isn’t easy. They are basically preparing themselves the same way someone would have gone out into the wilderness 140 years ago. Wagons instead of cars, mules instead of combustion engines, hay instead of gasoline.
What I really enjoyed about the prep work and the trials and tribulations was the fact that Daniel Parks engages his engineering mind. The supplies needed are extensive; the resupply possibilities have to be figured out, and there are many points on the trail where ingenuity is necessary to be able to continue.
Necessity + Ingenuity = The Mother of all Invention
I couldn’t help thinking of The Little House on the Prairie books that I read as a child while I was reading this book. The language is straightforward. Parks is here to tell a story, not to wow you with extravagant literary phrase work. It took a few pages for me to settle into his writing style, but once the adventure began, I had to see what the heck was at that spot on the map in the wilderness of the Flat Tops of the Western Colorado Rockies.
Our heroes are beset by extreme weather, landslides, skulls and skeletons, Monopoly madness, bear attacks, and a very pungent smell that keeps stalking them from beyond the firelight. This is all before they reach The Place of the Skull. If you need a little inspiration to put some giddyup into your life, then let Gold River Canyon’s Dead grab you by the britches and yank you right out of the polished planks of your favorite rocking chair.
”About the same time the sun vanished, the ice began to move again. The noise was terrible---first the sounds of the ice warring with itself, then the”About the same time the sun vanished, the ice began to move again. The noise was terrible---first the sounds of the ice warring with itself, then the more dreadful sounds of the ice warring with the ship. The turbulence started early on a cold November morning. De Long was awakened by a ‘grinding and crushing---I know of no sound on shore that can be compared to it,’ he said. ‘A rumble, a shriek, a groan, and a crash of a falling house all combined might convey an idea.’”
Little was known about the Arctic in 1879, but there were a lot of theories regarding the best way to reach the Arctic and also regarding what the explorers would find once they reached their goal. Though the science of these theories may have been suspect, the enthusiasm that these theorists possessed was infectious and represented the desire that most explorers, amateur and professional, had for discovering the secrets of the Arctic. One such theory, that there was a warm polar sea on the other side of the ice barrier, was used in a story by Edgar Allan Poe called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.
George Washington De Long had long been bitten by the pagophilic bug. When the chance came for him to command a vessel to explore a route through the Arctic, he gleefully volunteered. With the financial assistance of the very rich owner of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett, Jr., they found a ship, refitted it for Arctic travel, and christened it the USS Jeannette, named after Bennett’s sister.
De Long and Bennett were an odd pairing, a matching of the self made and the silver spooned. De Long was very serious, but also determined. He was not afraid to ask for what he needed or go after what he wanted. Bennett was born rich and was quite capable of acting like a self-obsessed ass. ”Bennett had a habit of strolling into one of the finest establishments in Paris or New York and snatching the table linens as he proceeded down the aisle, smashing plates and glassware on the floor, to the horror of the dining patrons, until he reached his reserved table in the back. (He never failed to write a check for the damages.)” I couldn't imagine myself sitting there and allowing a man to walk by and yank my meal out from under my nose without taking exception. (Duel level exception.) He also lost an engagement by arriving at his fiancee’s house roaring drunk and pissed in the fireplace. I’m sure he had some good qualities, but on the most basic human level, he was lacking manners and completely undisciplined.
Bennett was the man who sent Henry Morton Stanley after David Livingstone. He sold piles of newspapers by, in a sense, creating news. As it turned out, Livingstone wasn’t in need of finding, so this idea to explore the Arctic felt like a similar story opportunity to Bennett.
The subtitle of the book is ”The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette.” The grand part was the excitement and anticipation of preparing for the trip with the hope of returning as conquering heroes of the frozen North. The whole rest of the trip was the terrible part, tragic really. They become trapped in the ice and spent two years drifting with an ice pack until the day the ice shifted and crushed the Lady Jeannette into pieces.
Then began a desperate bid for survival that took them across the ice with the help of their dogs and three small boats. They fought hunger and frostbite…”...when he pulled off his boots, Leach saw that his toes were turning blue-black, the skin and nails curling backwards, like feathers singed by a flame.” Needless to say, the conditions were abominable with howling winds, storms, and cold temperatures that plunged well below anything most of us will ever experience.
I was enthralled. I could not put this book down. Once the tale sunk it’s icy needles into my bloodstream, I was freezing off important body parts right along with the men of the Jeannette. Hampton Sides benefited from the fact that numerous members of the crew made detailed journal entries. They were well aware that what they were attempting was historic. One of the poignant aspects of the book was the letters that Emma and George De Long wrote to each other while apart. Here is one of my favorites from Emma:
”All this will be forgotten when we meet again; it will seem only as a bad dream---a fearful nightmare that has been successfully passed through. However dangerous your surroundings are at present I can still trust God and hope a little longer. I often dream of you and you seem all right, only sad and not as strong as you used to be. Oh darling! I cannot show you my love, my sympathy, my sorrow for your great sufferings. I pray to God constantly. My own darling husband, struggle, fight, live, come back to me!”
The bravery and resourcefulness that was exhibited by nearly every crew member spoke to the wonderful job that De Long did in finding the right men for this arduous and dangerous trip. A few suffered from melancholy as the months passed, but most of the crew was intent on carrying their own weight and contributing to the well-being of the entire group. George Melville, a distant relative of Herman Melville, was the Macgyver of the group. He could take any pile of junk and turn it into some amazingly useful piece of machinery. He went on to have a long, successful career in the Navy. ”Melville presided over an expansive redesign of the fleet, largely completing its conversion from wood to metal, and from wind to steam power. When he retired, in 1903, the U.S. Navy boasted one of the most powerful modernized fleets in the world.”
Pull on your boots and your thickest parka, and experience the grand and the terrible. You will find, like me, that you will become fond of these men and maybe even more fond of their dogs.
”I peered out the window, transfixed. I can scarcely find words to describe the opulence of the rainforest that unrolled below us. The tree crowns wer”I peered out the window, transfixed. I can scarcely find words to describe the opulence of the rainforest that unrolled below us. The tree crowns were packed together like puffballs, displaying every possible hue, tint, and shade of green. Chartreuse, emerald, lime, aquamarine, teal, bottle, glaucous, asparagus, olive, celadon, jade, malachite--mere words are inadequate to express the chromatic infinites.”
Douglas Preston was always interested in lost civilizations, so when he got the chance to join an expedition into the mosquitia jungle in Honduras to find the Lost City of the Monkey God, he was more than interested, he was all in. There had been many explorers before who had attempted to find this “mythical” place, but except for the Indiana Jones style journalist Theodore Morde who emerged from the jungle in 1940 with a horde of fascinating objects and a story of finding the fabled White City, there had been nothing to substantiate the legend. Morde committed suicide shortly after returning from his adventures, taking his secrets with him.
Had he been cursed by the Monkey God?
The team focused in on one valley that was isolated and difficult to access easily on foot. They were going to bring new technology to the search by borrowing what is called a lidar machine. It shoots thousands of lasers at the jungle floor from a plane. It records the reflections that bounce off the objects on the ground. The software eliminates leaves, trees, and any other objects that are not part of, hopefully, the man made structures hidden beneath the canopy.
All hell broke loose over the use of this technology. The academic world, outside of the normal petty jealousies, suspicion of success, and paranoias that afflict all centers of higher learning, seemed to be more offended by the use of this technology, as if the expedition were cheating by using it.
See, the problem was the lidar mapping found not one large site of manmade structures, but two. The irrational feeling that they didn’t deserve these finds because they didn’t outfit an overland mission that went blindly slashing through the jungle hoping to stumble upon something interesting, and the fact they didn’t lose about a third of their party to disease, snakebit, and jaguar attack in the process, is frankly ludicrous.
I do have to admit it does take some of the romance out of the whole swashbuckling archaeologist image that I grew up with. The cities were still there unmolested because no one had been able to penetrate the jungle effectively to find them.
Despite being able to drop into the site with a helicopter, and despite having better gear than what most explorers can haul into the jungle in the traditional overland expedition, the group still experienced difficulties with, to name a few, sand fleas, torrential rain, and snakes. Let me share a bit about one particular snake that kept turning up over and over again in the ruins of this civilization.
”The fer-de-lance, he said, is known in these parts as the barba amarilla (Yellow Beard). Herpetologists consider it the ultimate pit viper. It kills more people in the New World than any other snake. It comes out at night and is attracted to people and activity. It is aggressive, irritable, and fast. Its fangs have been observed to squirt venom for more than six feet, and they can penetrate even the thickest leather boot. Sometimes it will strike and then pursue and strike again. It often leaps upward as it strikes, hitting above the knee. The venom is deadly; if it doesn’t kill you outright through a brain hemorrhage, it may very well kill you later through sepsis. If you survive, the limb that was struck often has to be amputated, due to the necrotizing nature of the poison.”
*Shudder* #reason number one why I don’t go into the Honduran jungle.
So why did this civilization abruptly disappear at around 1500? Preston pulls together some pretty good theories regarding that event. Some are based on the greed of the rulers doing to their civilization the same thing that the rich and powerful are currently doing to the United States. Unmitigated greed makes even the most robust economies vulnerable to a similar collapse. The celebrated author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond, has some wonderful examples, and Preston shares that wisdom with us, as well. The one that I found most interesting points to a celebrated event that happened in 1492 when Christopher Columbus “discovered” America.
The foreigners came and ”withered the flowers.”
Preston includes a wonderful chart that show the catastrophic effect of native populations making contact with the disease ridden crews of the Columbus exploration mission. ”What would a 90 percent mortality rate mean to the survivors and their society? It does not just kill people; it annihilates societies; it destroys languages, religions, histories, and cultures. It chokes off the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. The survivors are deprived of that vital human connection to their past; they are robbed of their stories, their music and dance, their spiritual practices and beliefs--they are stripped of their very identity.”
There is no proof that the diseases that killed so much of the indigenous population of the Americas was also the culprit that killed the civilization of the Monkey God, but the timing does make it a valid consideration. It was unavoidable that the Old World would meet the New World, so it was just more a matter of when.
The Monkey God expedition members returned to their regular life, relieved that they did not come down with any major diseases; the bites and rashes that they all suffered from disappeared, but then weeks later over half the group had a sore appear that would not heal. It became a miniature volcano. After much deliberation by doctors and contagious disease specialists, they determined that they had come down with leishmaniasis. Among the half that came down with this frankly disgusting and alarmingly difficult disease to contain was Douglas Preston. It is called white leprosy if that gives you any indication of what it does to the body once it gains enough control of your immune system.
The curse of the Monkey god?
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My signed copy of the book also came with a signed postcard of the author in the mosquitia jungle. Ephemeria is always fun for a collector.
I just finished reading The Lost City of Z, set in the Amazon, a few days ago, and it seemed a perfect pairing to read a similar book about another lost city further north in Central America. Any thoughts of chucking my rather pedestrian job as circulation manager/owner of a farm publication and joining a jungle expedition have been firmly squashed like a blood bloated flea beneath the tread of a kevlar boot. Not to mention, even the thought of tangling with one of those damn Fer-De-Lance snakes makes me break out in hives. I am a firm believer in doing my jungle travelling from the safety of my favorite reading chair.
It begins as barely a rivulet, this, the mightiest river in the world, mightier than the Nile and the Ganges, might”How easily the Amazon can deceive.
It begins as barely a rivulet, this, the mightiest river in the world, mightier than the Nile and the Ganges, mightier than the Mississippi and all the rivers in China. Over eighteen thousand feet high in the Andes, amid snow and clouds, it emerges through a rocky seam--a trickle of crystal water.”
By the time it reaches the ocean, the estuary of the Amazon river at the mouth is 202 miles wide. A trickle becomes one of the mightiest forces on the planet.
Colonel Percy Fawcett, the legend that launched a thousand explorers.
Candice Millard, in her book about Theodore Roosevelt’s trip through the Amazon, summed it up nicely: ”The rainforest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary, but rather the greatest natural battlefield on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day.”
David Grann, the author, became fascinated with Colonel Percy Fawcett after he stumbled upon a treasure trove of his journals. He wasn’t alone. Thousands have also found his story fascinating; hundreds have been so inspired by him as to go into the Amazonian jungle in search of him, their heads dancing with visions of being the next Henry Morton Stanley to find a famous missing explorer.
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There are as many visions of what El Dorado looks like as there are explorers to look for it.
On his final journey to the Amazon in 1925, Fawcett was determined to finally find El Dorado, or the City of Z as he liked to call it, but he…disappeared without a trace.
Not that it is difficult to disappear in a jungle as dangerous as the Amazon. Everything from the most microscopic insect to infections to pumas are trying to kill you, not to mention the local tribesmen who may think you are interesting enough to let live or even more interesting to roast on a spit. There was one description that made me shiver: ”Espundia, an illness with even more frightening symptoms. Caused by a parasite transmitted by sand flies, it destroys the flesh around the mouth, nose, and limbs, as if the person were slowly dissolving. ‘It develops into...a mass of leprous corruption.’”
So why do Amazonian explorers insist on trying to conquer such an inhospitable place?
Because it is there.
But also because there are people who feel an itch so intense that they have to go somewhere as far away from people as possible. ”Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men.” I resemble that comment, but my solution is less glamorous. I’m more likely to descend into the bowels of my library and let my books take me to Istanbul, Manchu Picchu, Gettysburg, or even, yes, to places as inhospitable as the Amazon. I can navigate the river without coming down with some hideous infection or being drained dry by a vampire bat because my arm flopped outside the netting in the middle of the night or feel the sting of a poisonous arrow puncturing my neck. My martini stays dry and at the proper temperature, too.
Besides the desire for discovery, Fawcett was fortunate to have an iron constitution. While other members of his party were dropping like flies from a host of illnesses or injuries, he just marched on. He lost several key years to the trenches of WW1, and when he emerged from the war to start finding funding for his final trip, he discovered that his patron, the Royal Geological Society, was broke. He had to find financing elsewhere. America beckoned.
Fawcett believed in small parties rather than large, heavily armed parties for exploring the Amazon. He had a rule that I think said a lot about his character, but also about his depth of wisdom. ”Die if you must, but never kill.” Unlike other European and American explorers, he was not in love with his guns. He was there to explore and discover, not conquer.
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Percy’s son Jack Fawcett looking very fit for his venture into the jungle.
Decades after his final dispatch from the jungle, Fawcett’s wife and remaining family (he took his teenage son Jack with him) continued to believe that one day he would emerge from the jungle with a tale so epic that only Homer could tell it properly. Grann, too, like so many others before him, became infatuated with what became of Fawcett. He is not made in the same mold as Fawcett, or really any explorer. He is short, pudgy, and not athletic, but he is helped by some modern conveniences that Fawcett would have snickered at the prospect of using. If you so dare, strap on your machete and hack your way through the Amazon with Fawcett, and see if the jungle will eat you or make you into a legend.
”Those whom the Gods intend to destroy they first make mad!”
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