Exotic Explorers Venture From the Archive

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“Slowly, rope length by rope length, we progressed. The declining sun flamed and died around us, a vivid furnace with bars of scarlet spread behind Mount Everest, and the tropic night dashed upon us.” So began an article on the front page of The New York Times in 1930, datelined Jonsong Base Camp. And if time and technology have made the Himalayas more accessible geographically, much else about this dispatch â€" the breathless prose, the heraldic portraiture â€" seems more distant and mysterious with each passing year.

The world was a big place once, an open challenge to teams of explorers, and when adventure seekers set out to explore its remote spots, The Times enlisted their talents as writers, photographers and sources of heart-pounding vicarious thrills.

To these, The Times being The Times, the staff added a touch of the paper’s own indigenous culture. Often, this surfaced in notes affixed to the backs of the photographs.

“Mr. Wood Johnson photographed wearing the high climbing equipment,” reads a note on the back of the Jonsong photograph (Slide 8). “Under the climbing suit will be worn woolen combinations, probably two pairs and a flannel shirt. Over these, thin Shetland pullovers, as it has been proved that two or three thin layers of light wool such as hand knitted Shetland are better than one thick layer.”

Or, on the back of a photo from a 1931 Arctic expedition led by the Rev. Bernard R. Hubbard, a scientist and explorer nicknamed the Glacier Priest: “A flapper of the north. A modern Tenah belle sporting what the well-dressed young lady of the northern regions will wear” (Slide 6).

Oh, the thrill of it all â€" of exertion and discovery, undertaken solely for the purpose of exertion and discovery and relayed in the black-and-white pantomime of photography and lead type! Don’t you miss it?

Carpenter Greenland Expedition Eskimo girls in Greenland. Nov. 4, 1934.

“GREAT ADVENTURES STILL LEFT FOR MAN,” declared a boldly capitalized headline from April 16, 1933. “In Spaces Between the Worlds, in Ocean Depths and at Earth’s Core Are Held the Challenging Mysteries.”

The photographs here hail mainly from the 1920s and 1930s, when explorers tested the limits of human endurance to see how much of the world they could bring home.

The articles stressed exoticism â€" the difficulty of the journey, the unfamiliarity of the people and their cultures. The photographs, by contrast, cut the world down to size, posing the Eskimo girls of Greenland (above) or the Queen Mother of Swaziland (Slide 14) in formal portraits no more foreign than “American Gothic.” If the subjects were wholly new to most American readers, the framing was as familiar as home.

Still, the domesticated portraits do nothing to hide the daredevilry of the photographers here, like George Miller Dyott (Slide 15), a British explorer who led an Amazon expedition in 1926 and wrote about it in The Times. As the group carried their canoes around one precipitous stretch of whitewater, they found an arrow planted in their path. “I scanned the rapids lapping the rocks with white tongues of foam,” Mr. Dyott wrote. “I wondered which was the better alternative: a five-foot arrow through one’s stomach or the cold embrace of the hungry water.”

He chose the water and lived to tell the tale â€" in words and pictures, from the River of Doubt, now flowing gently through the Lively Morgue.

The New York Times William Beebe in The New York Times’s photo studio. Undated.

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