from his own experience and information reported
by nomads and caravaneers that Mongolia's gravel-covered surface,
sporadically broken by mountains, rocky outcroppings, badlands,
and sand dunes, would allow him to utilize motorcars to cover
great distances rapidly and with relative mobility, assuming
that the supply caravan loaded with gasoline, oil, spare parts
for the cars and extra food made it to each rendezvous point
on schedule, without falling victim to bandits, drought, or insufficient
grazing for the camels. Andrews cited the fact that camels averaged
only ten or fifteen miles a day, whereas automobiles could travel
a hundred. "If all went as expected," he wrote, "...we
could do ten years' work in five months."
Perhaps as importantly, Andrews sent three
or four self-contained units to work independently (and simultaneously)
in the field to increase the number of potential discoveries.
Thus, while Andrews undertook five expeditions between 1922 and
1930 with each lasting five months (Mongolia's harsh winters
precluded year-round explorations), the explorations as measured
in man-hours were indeed considerably richer.
Inevitably, the Gobi Desert also proved itself
to be an adventurer's paradise. Aside from facing down the occasional
band of roving bandits, Andrews managed to survive accidentally
shooting himself in the thigh (he recuperated during raging sandstorms
that shut down digging), and the expeditions' joyous tension
of uncertainty was heightened by the caravan's once losing an
alarming amount of gasoline after the storage cans exploded from
the desert's extreme temperature swings. Of his sand-swept gunshot
wound recovery, Andrews wrote
I think that no one who has not endured sandstorms
can understand the torture to one's nerves, even in good health.
Physically weak, in continual pain and with fever, it became
well-nigh unendurable to me. Often I had to bury my head in the
blankets to keep from screaming. It seemed that something in
my brain would crack unless there could be a rest from the smash
and roar of the wind, the slatting of tents and the smothering
blasts of gravel.
As a biographer, Gallenkamp wisely avoids
what he calls "unfounded psychological analysis" on
the grounds that an adventurer like Andrews had little interest
in philosophical ponderings or soulful introspection. Surely,
Andrews could have been cracked open by a diligent therapist
willing to follow Andrews around and poke at him with probing
questions (his fear of water is particularly tantalizing), but
the chances of performing such maneuvers now, given Andrews's
taciturn record, are slim.
Besides, one has to wonder whether all biographical
subjects are rendered more complicated by denying they are truly
as focused on their stated goals as they seem. (As an example
of the insight-denying surface track of Andrews's life, his first
marriage seems to have ended in divorce simply because he gave
too much of his time to the expeditions and not enough to his
wife.) Andrews was an adventurer, not an armchair philosopher
or a laboratory researcher (or a wanton philanderer, for that
matter), and while he remained devoted to the idea of
science, it was the call to adventure that he most clearly heeded.
This certainly goes a long way toward explaining why Andrews
made a rather indifferent director of the American Museum of
Natural History, after China's civil wars forced him to end the
expeditions. His greatest moments came, inevitably, when science
and adventure came together in the Central Asiatic Expeditions.
Perhaps, we should simply take him at his
word, as Gallenkamp suggests, and consider a biography of him
as a doggedly patient adventurer to be complete (to say nothing
of its capacity to thrill).
Readers
too impatient to take a little science with their adventure literature,
on the other hand, will be delighted with Peter Nichols's A
Voyage for Madmen. It recounts the Golden Globe race of 1968-1969,
in which nine yachtsman vied to be the first to circumnavigate
the world solo without a single stop.
The sailing world had been riveted by Sir
Francis Chichester's 1966-1967 one-stop circumnavigation, and
as several men started designing sailboats and lining up individual
sponsors, the Sunday Times drew up rules for a race that
would insure the newspaper backed a winner. The Times
would give £5,000 to the single-handed yachtsman who completed
the fastest circumnavigation via the three Capes (Good
Hope, Leeuwin and Horn), and it would give a Golden Globe trophy
to the first to complete the circumnavigation via the
three Capes, regardless of their speed performance. (The same
yachtsman could win both awards, of course.)
It was a cunning strategy because it didn't
require an official, communal start to the race or even require
that sailboats be officially entered into the contest. Any sailboat
that left an English port (it was later broadened to include
a French yachtsman) after June 1 and before October 31, 1968
(to avoid the Southern Ocean's most severe conditions) was automatically
a participant--whether their individual sponsors (e.g., rival
newspapers) liked it or not. As Nichols points out, "no
circumnavigator could not take part."
The nine men who accepted the challenge were
a decidedly compelling, if diverse group. Among them were a mystical
Frenchman, a tough Scotsman who didn't know how to sail before
the race began, a charismatic electrical engineer (an oxymoron
if there ever was one; he cried all night before setting sail)
and a British Naval officer who methodically kept a record of
the classical music he enjoyed during his attempt. (Here's a
sample of the thoroughly British officer's notes: "Later,
ominous black clouds appeared ahead, and clad in oilskins, I
sat in the wheelhouse ready for the worst, listening to Schubert's
Unfinished Symphony.")
For many of them (in the beginning, at least),
the adventure was less important as a competitive race than as
a test of character. The non-sailing Scotsman summed up the self-aware
drive for adventure quite nicely thus:
This business of making myself thoroughly
unpleasant to the body which God gave me is something that has
fascinated me for almost as long as I can remember....I cannot
say that I enjoyed my Arctic and desert survival courses or the
rough parts of the trans-Atlantic crossing any more than I can
say I was enjoying having the stuffing knocked out of me in Dytiscus
III--and yet there is an enjoyment....And I did not want,
if I could possibly help it, to miss finding out all I could
about this round-the-world exercise simply because my boat was
not able to do the thing in one go. Survival, after all, was
the object with which I began my preparations, long before a
newspaper came along and turned it into a race. Provided I could
go on without being foolhardy, I wanted to see the thing through.
It was my voyage of discovery, and what I wanted to discover
was me.
As it progresses into the seemingly impassable
Southern Ocean, Nichols's text takes on an ominous quality of
encroaching doom. "The further I go," one yachtsman
writes in his logbook, "the madder this race seems."
Shrieking gales and eighty-foot waves aside, though, the most
compelling material may be the shocker that comes two-thirds
of the way through the book: one of the contestants decides to
fake his journey and meticulously maps out his feigned, record-breaking
progress, which he reports by radio daily to a thrilled audience
back home. (Robert Stone drew brilliantly on this element of
the race for his novel, Outerbridge Reach.) Perhaps almost
as shocking is the almost-certain winner who turns his back on
the hollow victory the race represents and sails on, not up the
Atlantic to England but past South Africa again, where he lights
out for South Pacific territories.
A veteran sailor himself, Nichols does beautiful
work bringing the minutiae of the yachtsman's daily experience
alive with arresting details like the unnerving, atonal chords
of winds howling through a boat's rigging and "the beautiful
green of land that is always startling after weeks at sea."
Cunningly, as he crosscuts between vessels in the tightening
race, Nichols keeps veiled the identity of the one man who actually
finished the race, and the effect--at least for those who don't
already know, of course--is a resurrection of the race itself,
with all its breathless momentum.
This is adventure writing at its most harrowing,
most unnerving pinnacle.
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