Wednesday 11 March 2009

these explorers are crazy

Courtesy of the Raymond Howgego, whose amazing and monumental encyclopaedia of exploration I was flicking through today, I have been alerted to twenties explorer, Walter E. Traprock. His big book was The Cruise of the Kawa, which was published in 1921 and which took its protagonist to the otherwise unknown Filbert Islands ('I cannot give you the Filberts' latitude or longitude ... But I will say their pulchritude is 100').
Here is the description that runs alongside this photograph: 'This is without question the most extraordinary picture which has ever been taken of any natural history subject. It corroborates in most convincing manner the author's claim to the discovery of the wonderful fatu-liva bird with its unique gift of laying square eggs. Here we see the eggs themselves in all the beauty of their cubical form and quaint marking; here we see the nest itself, made of delicately woven haro and brought carefully from the tree's summit by its discoverer, Babai-Alova-Babai. An extremely interesting feature of the picture is the presence in the nest of lapa or signal-feather. By close observation, Mr. Whinney, the scientist of the expedition, discovered that whenever the mother-bird left the nest in search of food she always decorated her home with one of her wing feathers which served as a signal to her mate that she would return shortly, which she invariably did. Skeptics have said that it would be impossible to lay a square egg. To which the author is justly entitled to say: "The camera never lies."'

It's a great spoof. It's very similar in flavour to The Ascent of Rum Doodle, a post-Everest mountaineering adventure.

No comments: