Charles Gallenkamp

Fascinating. Dense but accessible, remember there's a ton of material on this popular explorer and topic, and the author does a great job editing it all, for us. I don't recall as a child poring over dinosaur books, that I knew Chapman had made so many trips to the Gobi, and spent so many years living in Asia. I certainly knew of his celebrity status. And now, spoiler alert, we know those eggs weren't from Protoceratops. The book definitely inspires one to read more about this time in American history full of imperialism, banditry, politics and intrigue, adventure, and treasure-hunting.… (más)

All preteen boys are fascinated by dinosaurs. The first book about dinosaurs I remember reading was Roy Chapman Andrews’ All About Dinosaurs, followed closely by All About Strange Beasts of the Past (which wasn’t about dinosaurs, but the animals involved were big, fierce and extinct, which was good enough for me). Of course, half the fascination was not the dinosaurs or extinct mammals themselves, but Andrews’ narration of how they were found, trekking through Mongolia with a caravan of motor cars and occasionally fighting off bandits. Surprisingly enough, I actually ended up as a paleontologist – for a while at least. Never did find a dinosaur, though (although I found a Dimetrodon in Oklahoma once, which is probably close enough for normal purposes).


At any rate, that brings me to Dragon Hunter, a biography of Andrews. Andrews came from a middle-class family in Beloit, Wisconsin and became fascinated with nature and natural history at an early age. Armed with a degree from Beloit College, he sent a letter to the American Museum of Natural History and received a “no positions are available” answer. Displaying the persistence, self-confidence, charm and arrogance that later served in in China and Mongolia Andrews bought a train ticket to New York and showed up at the Museum anyway, where he talked himself into a job mopping the floors in the taxidermy department. Perhaps his breakthrough came when he dissected and recovered the skeleton of a dead right whale that had washed ashore on Long Island in the dead of winter in 1907. Halfway through the whale salvage a storm blew up and buried the remains in tons of sand; Andrews had prudently tied the whale carcass down to anchors when the storm started but now the ropes just disappeared into the sand. After several weeks of digging in freezing water and mud – Andrews later said he “never suffered more in any other experience” – the whale was disinterred, defleshed, and sent to the AMNH for display. The museum was impressed, and sent him to the Pacific Coast for the summer, where he worked at whaling shore stations examining, measuring, photographing and dissecting whatever turned up. That developed into another trip, this time to the other side of the Pacific; he went to Japan where he apparently spent some time living in a brothel in Yokohama – he was always a little coy about the details – then to the Philippines, then the Dutch East Indies, collecting specimens for the Museum all along the way. He was supposed to return at the end of the cruise but talked the AMNH into allowing him to stay in Japan and study Japanese shore whaling. Eventually back in New York he developed a side career as a lecturer and magazine article author. More trips to the Orient followed, although he found time to meet and marry socialite Yvette Borup, get a master’s degree, become Curator of Mammology at the AMNH, and conduct collecting expeditions to Korea and Mongolia.


His mentor at the Museum was Henry Fairfield Osborn, at the time the “grand old man” of American paleontology. Osborn felt that the human species had originated somewhere in Central Asia (this was when the oldest known hominid was “Java Man”; the African hominids hadn’t been discovered yet). Andrews was fascinated by the Orient; Osborne was convinced it was the “Garden of Eden”; they came up with the idea of a grand expedition to Mongolia. Andrews was given the job of arranging financing, which he did with fervor; he managed to make it the socially “in” thing to contribute to the expedition. One of Andrews’ earlier ventures into Mongolia had tested the idea of using motor vehicles supported by camel caravans. The idea was the camels would set out in well in advance and cache gasoline, spare tires, motor oil, food, and other supplies at various places in the desert. The automobiles provided tactical mobility; with them the expedition could investigate likely looking geological formations and “do ten years work in five months”, as Andrews put it. Although there were skeptics who insisted using automobiles would never work, the expedition touched a chord with the public; Andrews received over ten thousand job applications. (A number were from young ladies, offering secretarial service but subtly suggesting other arrangements were possible; this sort of attention from women was a consistent theme in Andrews’ career. He saved all such letters in his files (when biographer Charles Gallenkamp examined them some were still faintly redolent of perfume); there’s no evidence Andrews ever acted on any of the offers.)


Eventually Andrews got a headquarters established in Peking, hired a staff of 18-20 servants, bought cars, gasoline, tires, food, and other supplies, and arranged for a herd of camels and an expert caravan leader to head off into Mongolia. There were, of course, some slight political problems; China was undergoing a civil war (with a varying number of parties involved, but usually at least three, plus Japan) and Mongolia had just been taken over by the Bolsheviks. (I hadn’t realized this before but the historical name for the capital of Mongolia was Urga; it was changed to “Ulaanbaatar” – which means “Red Hero” – when it became the Mongolian People’s Republic.) The expedition finally got underway on April 21, 1922.


A pattern was set; the explorers would wander around Mongolia, collecting, photographing, mapping and measuring. The cars would get stuck now and then but were eventually hauled out; bandits would show up and fire the odd shot; the camel caravan would sometimes get delayed but always showed up in the nick of time; ferocious sandstorms would blow away the tents but they would get collected again; and the explorers would return to Peking with a load of fossils that were shipped off to New York. The pattern continued until 1930. Politics in China became increasingly chaotic and the Reds in Mongolia became increasingly obstreperous; Andrews handled all the difficulties by a judicious combination of bribes, threats, pleas, and now and then gunfire. Unfortunately he and Osborne contributed to the problem; the 1923 expedition had uncovered the first confirmed dinosaur eggs (a few previous eggs were not known to be from dinosaurs until Andrews brought back his for comparison). The idea was to auction off an egg; the publicity would be worth more than whatever the egg brought in (it went for $5000). Unfortunately this came to the attention of both the Mongolian and Chinese governments (or what passed for a Chinese government at the time). Andrews had been allowed to collect fossils for free; at that time he’d sent more than 30 dinosaur eggs back to the AMNH; one egg sold for $5000; the Chinese and Mongolians could multiply. That was just the dinosaur eggs, of course; there were also whole dinosaur and mammal skeletons as well. The Chinese press started to portray Andrews as one of the many Western looters of Chinese culture; up until the fall of the Communist regime in Mongolia there was a “mug shot” style poster of Andrews prominently displayed in the national museum describing him as a capitalist exploiter and spy. By the standards of the time there was no truth to any of this; but Andrews had accepted numerous donations from various American companies; cars from Dodge, gasoline and oil from Standard Oil; firearms from Savage, and just about anything else in exchange for the right to use “proud sponsor of the AMNH Central Asiatic Expedition” in advertisements. During his fundraising tours, Andrews had met many of America’s wealthy; he’d also done some reports to the Bureau of Naval Intelligence during WWI. If modern standards for conflict of interest are projected backward the accusations had some weight.


When the expeditions ended, Andrews had passed his peak. His first wife had essentially been abandoned in Peking while Andrews roamed the Gobi; she took some consolation in a fellow expatriate and eventually got a divorce on grounds of desertion. It was acrimonious; Yvette told Andrews his third child wasn’t actually his. Andrews became Director of the AMNH but he wasn’t really cut out for the job; he was accused of being a poor administrator and a headline seeker rather than a scientist; in the 1930s a “red cell” at the Museum published an anonymous newspaper (the Red Fossil) accusing Andrews of being a tool of the plutocrats. He and his second wife Billie retired to a farm in upstate New York; then to Arizona; then finally to California, where he died of a massive heart attack in 1960.


Andrews really wasn’t a great scientist. Although most of his popular fame came as a fossil excavator, he lacked the patience to do a good job: preparators back in the New York laboratory coined the expression “RCA’d” to describe fossils that had been damaged in excavation. He was a little cavalier with the truth in his writings; for example, he published three different accounts of falling off a whale hunting boat in Japan. In the first some sharks circled around but took no further interest; in a later version the sharks closed and had to be beaten off; in the final telling a shark bit the leg off a Japanese sailor. Andrews spent a lot of time socializing; this was necessary for his fund raising work. He didn’t seem to mind it that much; once he claimed that he had never spent an entire year of his adult life in a single country, but it was more of an after dinner anecdote than a complaint. Gallankamp once calls him a “womanizer” but has no real evidence, just the anecdote about the brothel in Yokohama and the perfumed mash notes found in Andrew’s files.


George Lucas has repeatedly claimed Andrews was not the inspiration for Indiana Jones. Well, Andrews favored a fedora (he was prematurely bald), routinely carried a pistol (he apparently favored a .38 Colt), and hated snakes. His adventure books fascinated me as a young boy; now that I know more about him I can think of worse role models.


Maps of Mongolia and North China as they were in the 1920s. Lots of photographs of the expedition, plus line drawing reconstructions of various fossils. No notes; a bibliography with every book and magazine article Andrews ever wrote, whether they have a direct bearing on this book or not. Well written and an easy read.… (más)

The Gobi desert is one of the world's best spots to find dinosaur bones. It was the same environment 100 million years ago. Dinosaurs were often caught in sand storms, or sand avalanches, or quick-sand. They were fossilized and preserved in great numbers undisturbed by predators and thus intact and of high quality. They are easy to find weathering out of the surface.

In the early 1920s no one knew this. Roy Chapman Andrews, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, wasn't even looking for "dragon" bones rather early man. His critics said he would find nothing but sand. Chinese warlords and bandits made travel dangerous. The troupe traveled by motor-car made possible by a caravan of camels leaving stockpiles of gas ahead, an innovative strategy. In the Gobi Chapman found a clutch of fossilized dinosaur eggs and stunned the world, or at least high society in New York City. More expeditions followed over the next decade funded by wealthy donors such as Morgan.

This is a serviceable biography of an American explorer, adventurer and naturalist. He probably wasn't the inspiration of Indiana Jones but an archetype of that early 20th century golden age of gentleman adventurer explorers. Chapman was largely forgotten for some decades after his death, but this book, published in 2001, restored his legacy.… (más)