LURE OF EXPLORATION

Evening Star, Issue 22722, 9 August 1937, Page 11

LURE OF EXPLORATION

CHALLENGE OF THE WILDS LITTLE HOPE OF REWARD REGENT EXPEDITIONS’ SUCCESSES Every once in a while someone says, “ What about exploration? Is there anything left to explore?” Well, evidently the Government of Ecuador believes there is, for it has just set up a rule that anyone wanting to hunt around for what they can find among its 171,287 square miles of wild territory never yet visited by white men must (a) present evidence that they are genuine explorers and not just dilletantes out for a lark and that (b) the genuine explorer must pay a license fee of 100 dollars for himself and 25 dollars for each member of his party for a six months’ permit (says the ‘ Christian Science Monitor ’). These conditions came about through the Government conviction that the Ecuadorean wilds had come to be altogether too full of improperly equipped expeditions of people who were just looking for excitement, rather than serious findings. True, the mountains and the Indians offer many opportunities for adventure and worth-while study, but the Ecuadorean officials think it is time that there was some revenue for the laboratory. ELECTRIC EELS. Probably Dr and Mrs Richards T. Cox and their American Museum of Natural History party, investigating the upper reaches of the Amazon did not tell the ship’s news men when they loft on the expedition that they were going to see if they could find eels so electric that they could generate as much power us man could produce in a modern power plant by using several tons of coal; but that, believe it or not, is what they found. Indeed, they found a very Man-Moun-tain Dean of an eel, which could meet any attempts to disturb his private life' - by discharging 500 volts, and a mere baby eels, less than a foot long, which could put out one-hundredth horsepower of electricity each thousandth of a second—energy enough every second to hoist a four-pound weight four inches in the air.. In the United States evidence has been found in caver; which are tucked away among the cliffs that rise 5,000 fl above Lake Mead, at Boulder Dam, of prehistoric residents; atone end of the lake mounds have been found which contain the foundations of well-ordered homes; no one knows yet who the people were, or where they went, when they jnst dropped their basketry, pottery, household implements and went off, but the fact remains that these things have been found, and that, so, the answer is emphatically, yes, when the question is raised, “ Is there anything left to explore?” The Museum of Northern Arizona has just had the satisfaction of hearing one of its returning expeditions, back from the Grand Canyon area, report on the footmarks of prehistoric sloths. Three caves have disclosed evidence that the sloths lived there 10,000 or 15,(XX) years ago. People lived in the caves, too, whether amicably with the sloths is yet to be determined, for their cooking utensils were scattered about. But the lower tunnels of the caves were worn smooth by the crawling gaits of the sloths, and the side walls were found to be worn, ns though the great animals had used them poriodically for a bit of comfortable hack scratching. ENDS OF THE EARTH AGAIN. At a dinner of the Explorers’ Club not long ago, Admiral Byrd spoke of his next expedition _ to the Antarctic region. Before ho is nrepared to -go, Sir Hubert Wilkins will have mado another effort to travel under the South Polo in a submarine. All these things mean new marks on maps. Almost any schoolboy these days can give yon sensible reasons for believing that some day the Antarctic region may he settled, as certain areas well within what we call civilisation now were once part of ice-age country. EXPLORATION OF NEW GUINEA. Daring explorers of the recent New Guinea expedition of the American

Museum of Natural History, headed.by Richard Archbold, have lately filled large, hitherto blank spaces in the map of that vast tropical island, one of the last strongholds of cannibal and head hunter, near 300,000 square miles in area. , One airplane maintained their line of supplies; where landings were impossible, packages were dropped from the air, and the explorers could give their wliole thought to penetrating the sources of the Ely River, which is deep in the mountainous backbone of the island. There are peaks rising 16,000 feet high, to support snowfields and glaciers—all within, a few degrees of the equator. There, too, are tribesmen who never even heard of white men before, much less saw them. The expedition yielded its quota of excitement. Its own airplane crashed in a storm at Port Moresby. The advance party w r as left stranded on the Ely River, 800 miles from the coast. A rescue party hustled boats and borrowed an airplane and extricated the advance party. Hunt up a member of the Explorers’ Club and ask him why explorers explore. Choose, say, Dr Leonard Outhwaite, who used to be with the Rockefeller Foundation, and who is a consultant in the planning of new museums and halls, or the revision and modernisation of old ones. Born in Sierra Madre, Calif., he was educated at Hill School and Yale, taking graduate work at the University of California and honours in anthropology, English, and philosophy. His own first expedition he took out in 1916 to Santa Cruz Island for the University of California department of anthropology. He lives in New York now, in an enormous apartment clinging to a cliff overlooking the East River, where a good deal of the lighter aspect of life is contributed by one. Buttons, a kinkajou, who sleeps all day and leaps all night, and is a very jaunty individual indeed. “ The explorer might almost be defined,” Dr Outhwaite says, “as the man who undertakes humiliating, arduous, torturing tasks with little certainty of economic or social reward. WHY DO THEY DO IT? “Why, then, do explorers keep on? Those of experience, and new ones, by the dozen, springing up to cast in their lot, too, with exploration. “ Well, history gives a number of answers, and they are at least superficially true. Alexander and the Ten Thousand Greeks went for conquest. In modern times there has been exploration of conquest or military advantage. “ The adventures of the Portuguese and Spaniards were based on the idea of plunder, or extraordinary commercial advantage. “ Emerging from the motive of forced trade there has come the purpose of establishing or strengthening a real trading relationship by which both parties may benefit. The Canadian and American fur traders, the miners, prospectors, whalers, and scores of others illustrate this. “ Then, growing out of the economic motive, and sometimes joined to it, there has developed the scientific motive for exploration. “ The explorer is usually inarticulate about liis deeper purposes. He says, ‘ I want to fill in a place on a map,’ or ‘ I have heard of an unbelievable tribe or a trace of a lost age, and I must see if 1 can find it ’; but such statements leave unsaid the philosophy that explorers arc able to sense and, somehow, to live, but like most men of action, are seldom able to put into words. * “ Of course, many of the specified objectives of exploration seem unimportant or unnecessary to the public, and wholly out of proportion to the cost, the effort, the lives put into them. It is not easy in our own day to credit tho urgency that has sent men to the North and South Poles. But tho Poles arc great and important because centuries of effort went into their conquest, and because Peary and Amundsen captured ultimate citadels, set new markers in human accomplishment. “ The chief meaning of exploration, its chief vindication undoubtedly lies in the human by-products probably far more than in its immediate objective or accomplishment; in tho acceptance of challenge, the stirring of imagination, the development of character, the conquering of difficulty. A thousand

social forces aro put forth to keep man contented, well fed, to make him manageable, tie him to safety and to home. But man seeks still further goals—a more exuberant life. The essential feature of the whole man is the capacity for growth. “ An exploration has discovered not only recesses of a physical world, but the very character of man.”-