That Bathysphere Guy
Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2016 3:50 pm
I recently purchased (EBook) form a book called "A Sportman's Library: 100 Engaging, Offbeat and Occasionally Odd Fishing and Hunting Books for the Adventurous Reader." The first 3rd dealt with mainly fly-fishing books and they tend to be a little too existential for my taste. However, the whole book became worth it when I got to the monograph on the writings of William Beebe- Wow, what a life. Pheasant Jungles will soon be coming my way from Amazon.
From the monograph on Beebe
>>>Will Beebe seems to be little-read today, though I don't know why. He was a scientist-generalist, an expert on birds and fish, and a student of everything, thing, a popular writer who wrote twenty-one books and countless articles. He lived a life of improbable adventure in Asia, Central America, on and under the sea, and (quite socially) in New York City; fought in World War I and against poison arrow-shooting crossbowmen in Burma; descended in the "bathysphere" to deeper than anyone had yet ventured; shot flying fish from the bows of his launch with his 28-gauge Parker; and was a friend of Theodore Roosevelt's. He survived, still writing, into the 1960s, when as a youngster I read his new articles in National Geographic.
His most lasting accomplishment may be his Monograph of the Pheasants. Its genesis sounds more like something out of a movie's idea of a scientific expedition than a real one. Just after World War I, the Museum of Natural History in New York and Anthony Kuser, a wealthy patron, gave Beebe seventeen months leave of absence to study all the known species of pheasants in the field. He visited twenty countries, from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to China, and roamed through habitats from the low river jungles of Borneo to the freezing ridges of the Himalayas. If any naturalist has ever been given a better assignment, its existence escapes me! His epic journey produced two books: the scientific monograph, later reprinted in abridged editions as Pheasants, Their Lives and Homes, and the amazing Pheasant jungles, a journalistic account (portions were published in Harper's and The Atlantic.
Jungles is Indiana Jones meets ornithology. Pheasants, not quite as wild, is one of the last monographs written as though a general reader might care to see through the traveler's eyes. (I am too hard on the modern zoologist. It's a sad fact of life that rare species disappear behind impenetrable political walls. The contemporary ornithologist who did a recent survey of the pheasants didn't have millionaire patrons and couldn't get into northern Burma or the troubled northeastern states of India, to name two places that Beebe could easily go; others have lost their wildlife.) Still, the gradual divergence of travel writing and science-we won't even talk about sporting writing!-happened only partly because of such causes. The real problem is that we've lost such generalists as Beebe.
Stephen J. Bodio. A Sportsman's Library: 100 Essential, Engaging, Offbeat, and Occasionally Odd Fishing and Hunting Books for the Adventurous Reader (Kindle Locations 850-851). Kindle Edition.
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From the monograph on Beebe
>>>Will Beebe seems to be little-read today, though I don't know why. He was a scientist-generalist, an expert on birds and fish, and a student of everything, thing, a popular writer who wrote twenty-one books and countless articles. He lived a life of improbable adventure in Asia, Central America, on and under the sea, and (quite socially) in New York City; fought in World War I and against poison arrow-shooting crossbowmen in Burma; descended in the "bathysphere" to deeper than anyone had yet ventured; shot flying fish from the bows of his launch with his 28-gauge Parker; and was a friend of Theodore Roosevelt's. He survived, still writing, into the 1960s, when as a youngster I read his new articles in National Geographic.
His most lasting accomplishment may be his Monograph of the Pheasants. Its genesis sounds more like something out of a movie's idea of a scientific expedition than a real one. Just after World War I, the Museum of Natural History in New York and Anthony Kuser, a wealthy patron, gave Beebe seventeen months leave of absence to study all the known species of pheasants in the field. He visited twenty countries, from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to China, and roamed through habitats from the low river jungles of Borneo to the freezing ridges of the Himalayas. If any naturalist has ever been given a better assignment, its existence escapes me! His epic journey produced two books: the scientific monograph, later reprinted in abridged editions as Pheasants, Their Lives and Homes, and the amazing Pheasant jungles, a journalistic account (portions were published in Harper's and The Atlantic.
Jungles is Indiana Jones meets ornithology. Pheasants, not quite as wild, is one of the last monographs written as though a general reader might care to see through the traveler's eyes. (I am too hard on the modern zoologist. It's a sad fact of life that rare species disappear behind impenetrable political walls. The contemporary ornithologist who did a recent survey of the pheasants didn't have millionaire patrons and couldn't get into northern Burma or the troubled northeastern states of India, to name two places that Beebe could easily go; others have lost their wildlife.) Still, the gradual divergence of travel writing and science-we won't even talk about sporting writing!-happened only partly because of such causes. The real problem is that we've lost such generalists as Beebe.
Stephen J. Bodio. A Sportsman's Library: 100 Essential, Engaging, Offbeat, and Occasionally Odd Fishing and Hunting Books for the Adventurous Reader (Kindle Locations 850-851). Kindle Edition.
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