By Peter Ruber
GORDON MacCREAGH
(August 8, 1886 - August 30, 1953)
Richard Bleiler's massive Adventure magazine index provides an intriguing summation of Gordon MacCreagh's life: "Adventurer, explorer and author; his material usually had some basis of fact." Discovering what MacCreagh had written has been an easier task than documenting what he accomplished as an adventurer and explorer. But tantalizing fragments now emerging reveal his life was the stuff of legends.
Although MacCreagh never formally earned the academic acronyms to tack onto his name, he achieved a formidable reputation as an ethnologist and as an anthropologist during his career through the publication of White Waters and Black (1926) and The Last of Free Africa (1928). They leave one with the feeling that had he written a book about himself, it would have topped the best-seller lists. For his life was one continuing adventure after another, often filled with mishaps and danger; and these two books at least document two fascinating explorations for posterity with irreverent good humor.
MacCreagh's only known autobiographical sketch was a vague but breathless one-page account that appeared in "The Men Who Make The Argosy" section of that magazine on February 18, 1933. That issue also published the final installment of his adventure serial novel, "Reptile Man." Comparing the undated events in that sketch to his entry in Who's Who In America, several key facts emerge that confirm Gordon MacCreagh spent a good part of his life trekking through many unexplored regions in India, Asia (Tibet and Yunnan), the Malay peninsula, Borneo, Mexico, South America, and Africa -- either to satisfy his own lust for adventure, to capture wild animals for zoos and circuses or to lead scientific expeditions.
In a foreword to her 1977 collection of native folk-tales, African Yesterdays, Mary Elizabeth Counselman explained that "Each story is based on some tribal legend or custom...researched from the anthropology of such accepted authorities as Sir James Frazer (THE GOLDEN BOUGH), Gordon MacCreagh (THE LAST OF FREE AFRICA), Arthur Edward Waite (THE BOOKS OF CEREMONIAL MAGIC), Robert Ruark -- newsman and explorer, Sir Wallis Budge (AMULETS AND TALISMANS), among others. Their viewpoints are varied, but their knowledge of ethnic Africa cannot be denied."
MacCreagh's seminal work, The Last of Free Africa, is subtitled "The account of an expedition into Abyssinia with observations on the manners, customs and traditions of the Ethiopians with some pungent remarks on the anomalous political situation that, at present, obtains between this ancient kingdom and the nations of the world."
This book had its foundation in "The Abyssinian Expedition," a series of seven articles MacCreagh wrote for Adventure magazine (and published between June 1927 and May 1928), while he, his wife Helen, and explorer Earl Rossman were in Ethiopia. They left the United States in February 1927 with a grant from Adventure magazine to find the temple that was alleged to contain the lost Ark of the Covenant. MacCreagh spent most of 1927 and part of 1928 traveling in Abyssinia, the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia: the only free country in Africa which had not as yet become a colonial possession through the avaricious expansion goals of either Great Britain, France or Italy, whose territories surrounded it.
MacCreagh became one of the few white men to be given the freedom to travel in Abyssinia, quite possibly because he was an American, the only major power that did not covet the rich, undeveloped resources this isolated, land-locked nation in the horn of Africa had to offer. How the author became a close friend and advisor of Emperor Haile Selassie is never mentioned in the book; nor why he respectfully dedicated it to the Emperor. More important, why soon after the book was published and MacCreagh returned to Abyssinia, the Emperor made the intrepid explorer a Chevalier -- a Knight of the Empire.
One can attempt an educated guess. Although the announced purpose of the expedition was to hunt for the Ark of the Covenant, the articles MacCreagh delivered richly detail Abyssinia's cultural, political, religious and social history, as well as the aspirations and problems that this Christian country of 10 million faced. Those problems were numerous. Surrounded by Mohammedan nations under the control of European powers, it had a political and military infrastructure equivalent to Europe in the Middle Ages. He pointed out that in 1898 the country's fiercely independent tribal warriors, armed only with spears and arrows, destroyed a trained and well-equipped army of 10,000 invading Italian soldiers.
Abyssinia fascinated MacCreagh and he reveals a remarkable knowledge of history and the political realities and diplomatic intrigues of that era. Withal, he does not spare the problems Selassie faced trying to move his country out of the dark ages in a few decades rather than the centuries it took Europe. One finds little mention of the search for the Ark of the Covenant until the end of the book. Up to that point The Last of Free Africa can be read on several levels: as a travel book, a history book filled with social commentary or as book of thrilling adventures in the wild interior.
In an article published in a 1961 issue of the Journal of the American Museum of Natural History, Bob McKnight wrote that The Last of Free Africa was "a prophetic treatment in view of what has taken place since."
It was an exceptionally popular book, and one suspects that several European governments were not pleased by the author's critical remarks about their colonial ambitions. The publisher's original edition went into several printings, and the book was reprinted in a cheap mass-market edition by Grosset & Dunlap. A British edition and foreign translations followed. The D. Appleton-Century Co. brought out a second edition in 1935 to which MacCreagh added a foreword and epilogue. Those additions make the second edition more desirable than the first.
Newspaper reports provide some interesting background about the Abyssinian Expedition. A New York Times article dated January 1, 1927, said:
"Gordon MacCreagh and Earl Rossmanm explorers, will leave New York on Feb. 10, it was announced yesterday, on an expedition into the mountains of Abyssinia in search of a temple where the Ark of the Covenent is said to be preserved. The expedition is being sent out by the Adventure Magazine.
"'It is intended,' Mr. MacCreagh said, 'to climb Mount Nebo, where, according to legend, the ark is located. The story is that Menelik, the son of Solomon and Sheba, paid a visit to his father, who gave a reproduction of the ark to him. The boy is said to have tricked Solomon, stealing the real ark and carrying it to Abyssinia. One of the tribes to be visited [the Falashas] descended from the Jews who quit the leadership of Moses at the beginning of the exodus, being skeptical of his power to part the waters of the Red Sea.'"
On February 20, 1927, the New York Times published a longer account of the MacCreagh expedition headlined, "Explorer In Abyssinia To Use Short Wave Lengths / Gordon MacCreagh Expected to Communicate with American Amateurs From African Wilderness--Receiver Similar to Byrd's Polar Set."
Here follow excerpts from that article:
"Amateur radio operators who have picked up messages from Arctic explorers and from the Dyott expedition now following Theodore Roosevelt's trail down the River of Doubt through the jungles of Brazil are likely to hear dispatches from Gordon MacCreagh, exploring in Abyssinia.
"When Gordon MacCreagh, American explorer, left New York on the Abyssinian expedition, Feb. 10, long and short wave radio traveled with him. Some of the equipment carried was that which Commander Richard E. Byrd took in his airplane on his successful flight over the North Pole.
"This apparatus consisted of a broadcast receiver, and a CR-18 short-wave set designed by A. H. Grebe & Co., Inc. The short-wave transmitting equipment to be used by the expedition will be of British make. Although the operator who will accompany the expedition has not yet been chosen, it is said he will be picked up in England on the way to Abyssinia.
"Mr. MacCreagh and his wife, who accompanied him, plan to make their way overland across Abyssinia, over the Abyssinian Mountains to the Sudan plains and out to the Nile. From the capitol of Abyssinia, Adis Ababa, the expedition will go north for big game hunting and the collection of specimens of wild life, then to the mountains near the source of the Takisazzee River, in the search for the Ark of the Covenant about which many native legends are told; and from there to the Sudanese border.
"...The short-wave amateur radio station 2ZV, at Richmond Hills, N. Y., will attempt to maintain constant communication with the expedition...Engineers have expressed the opinion that the expedition should not have any difficulty in hearing American and European broadcasting stations.
"The apparatus will be carried across the Abyssinian Mountains on the backs of camels. Dry batteries will be used for supplying energy to the receiving sets; and a hand generator will furnish the high voltage for the short-wave transmitting set. The expedition will be in the wilderness for about six months...It is expected that the transmissions will begin in about a month."
If this scenario sounds vaguely familiar, my colleague Richard Bleiler, senior research librarian at the University of Connecticut, at Storrs, has convinced me that Gordon MacCreagh and his search for the Ark of the Covenant could well have been the inspiration, decades later, for Indiana Jones in the film, Raiders of the Lost Ark. MacCreagh, who hailed from Indiana, embodied many of the fearless qualities one finds in the Indiana Jones character.
MacCreagh returned to Abyssinia in 1929, and apparently made several return trips in the 1930s. The September 8, 1935 New York Times Book Review had this to say about The Last of Free Africa:
"Seven years ago Mr. MacCreagh, an incorrigible explorer into remote regions on earth, chiefly because he wants to see them, decided that Abyssinia was sufficiently remote, obscure and unknown to make it a desirable place to visit, and so he made a long stay in that country, wandered around a good deal in its interior, and wrote this book concerning what he saw and the things he learned about Ethiopia's relations with the rest of the world. Now, with Haille Selassie's realm suddenly catapulted into the very center of the world stage, and all eyes fastened upon it in painful apprehension, he has brought out a new edition, with a new preface and an epilogue in which he interprets and discusses developing affairs in the light of what he saw and learned during his long expedition.
"Take the new and old parts together, and the book makes an interesting, informed and illuminating portrayal of Ethiopia...It is a timely book that tells so many of the things the ordinary reader wants to know that no one can afford to miss it who wishes to understand the significance of what is happening...
"...He has dug into the depths of some of the devious diplomacy that has woven webs around Ethiopia during the last few years, and the things he discloses are of even viler odor than many of the better-known achievements of European diplomatic strategy. And his comments and ways of putting what he wants to say are, to put it mildly, pungent. He, himself, calls this volume 'a ribald book.' But evidently he has written seriously and honestly what he believed to be the truth. At any rate, there is much to be learned from Mr. MacCreagh's book, both about European diplomacy and the land of Ethiopia."
Less than one month after that book review was published, MacCreagh was in Boston, on one of the many lecture tours he made in between his world travels. The speech he presented on the night of October 3, 1935, forecast Ethiopia's downfall at the hands of Italy's dictator, Mussolini. Reported in the New York Times the following day, the special dispatch said:
"Italy's war of conquest against Ethiopia will be over within six weeks, with the African kingdom completely subjugated, Gordon MacCreagh, adviser to and friend of Emperor Haille Salassie, tonight told an audience which was described as the wealthiest ever to assemble in a single room -- the famous Committee of One Hundred of Miami, Fla., assembled for their sixth annual Northern dinner here with a group of New England professional and industrial leaders."
MacCreagh's prediction was fairly accurate. While there were border clashes between Ethiopia and Italian troops in Eritria on the North and Italian Somaliland to the Southeast, the full invasion did not begin until early Spring 1936. Soon after completing the invasion in defiance of the League of Nations, the Italians exiled Emperor Haille Salassie (Time magazine's Man of the Year for 1934), his family and top government officials to Great Britain.
*The Last of Free Africa, with 95 photographs taken by the author, is still fascinating reading today. Copies at reasonable prices can be purchased on the Internet by going to that used-book dealer portal www.abebooks.com. As widely read and discussed as that book must have been in its day, Gordon MacCreagh's most popular book and perhaps greatest adventure was White Waters and Black.
Published by The Century Co., in 1926, and also widely reprinted in the U.S. and abroad, this journal of a two-year exploration of the Amazon jungle during 1921-1922 continues to be reprinted. Doubleday Anchor Books released a mass market paperback edition in 1961. In 1985 the University of Chicago Press brought out in trade paperback a facsimile edition of the original 1926 edition; and reprinted the book once again in June 2001 to excellent reviews.
The Washington Post Book World described it as "The highly unofficial account of an Amazon Expedition that might have been staffed by the Marx Brothers." The Explorers Journal called it a "classic in explorational literature."
Six famous scientists and two assistants (one being MacCreagh) embarked on an expedition into the most unexplored regions of the Amazon to collect unusual plant and bug specimens. Starting on the coast of Chile, writes noted biologist and anthropologist George B. Schaller in a foreword to the University of Chicago Press edition, "they crossed the Andes to Bolivia and descended into the Amazon basin; there they paddled down the Beni and Madeira rivers...Expedition members had been selected for their scientific standing, not their field experience...In temperament they were, to put it mildly, unsuited for enforced close association and collaboration. It was a team united by distrust, insensitivity, and overblown egos."
[In the mid-1970s, Schaller says, he and several scientists retraced part of McCreagh's expedition, but called it effete: his group went by plane and did not endure one fraction of the physical and mental hardships detailed in White Waters and Black.]
Throughout the book, which he began writing in La Paz, before the scientists arrived, MacCreagh refers to the unruly scientists sarcastically by such titles as the Director, the Botanist, the Statistician, the Ichthyologist and the Botanist. From the beginning it was an expedition fraught with problems. The Director, having placed himself in charge of expedition supplies, "incurred everyone's wrath by bringing tons of it packed in 104 heavy boxes all unlabeled as to content."
It wasn't discovered until they were marooned in the jungle that the Director had forgotten such essentials as cooking pots and lanterns, and gasoline for their outboard motor. As a consequence, the scientists were at each others' throats for most of the expedition, sometimes not speaking to one another for weeks on end.
According to the book, MacCreagh was recruited to organize what New York and other newspapers were calling "the million dollar expedition." He proceeded immediately to Bolivia's capital city of La Paz, high in the Andes, to round up supplies, rifles, handguns and ammunition, secure the necessary government permits and letters of introduction; and the mules, handlers and guides they would need to cross the Andes and make their way through uncharted jungles to the head-waters of the Amazon. There were no adequate maps of that region, and MacCreagh wrote that he would have to create them as they went along. Bolivia's Minister of the Interior hinted of rumors that a large lake existed in the territory they would enter and asked for details so his country's maps could be brought up to date.
MacCreagh was astounded to learn that the scientists, gathered in New York, were bringing four tons of supplies and equipment, adding to the two tons he had already purchased, and mused that he had once "explored half of Asia with less than one hundred pounds of supplies." When the bloated caravan finally got under way, it had one hundred and seventeen mules, and stretched in serpentine fashion for more than half a mile; straggling often doubled and tripled the caravan's length. It proved to be a bizarre and unusual journey. Or as the November 12, 1926, New York Times wrote about MacCreagh's book, "A running record of the intimate doings of a party of eminent professors loose in the wildwoods."
MacCreagh made no mention of the expedition's name or the names of the scientists, because what he wrote of their activities and petty behavior would have opened the floodgates to libel suits. Victor Berch, the retired head of Special Collections at Brandeis University Library, Waltham, Mass., and my collaborator on many bibliographic projects, dug into the New York Times microfilms for 1921 and 1922, and helped me identify that White Waters and Black was the record of the Mulford Biological Expedition to the Amazon Basin, and copied a number of informative articles about MacCreagh's activities in the Amazon. It was interesting to note that he continued the expedition even after all the scientists had returned home because they could no longer take the physical punishment, the in-fighting or had come down with an illness requiring medical attention.
In addition to guiding the scientists and managing the day-to-day activities of the expedition, MacCreagh was also the official photographer. He took countless pictures and filmed the expedition. Unfortunately, most of the undeveloped reels of film, which was to become a motion picture, were lost when one of the expedition's boats overturned while navigating river rapids. The few reels that did survive the expedition and were shown at museums and scientific conferences have since disappeared.
A May 16, 1923 New York Times article headlined "Indian Picture Shown," described films MacCreagh made after the scientists had departed:
"For the benefit of persons interested in the Amazon Exploration Expedition, led by Gordon MacCreagh, ethnologist, films dealing with the Tiqui-Tucana Indians, a new tribe found on the Tiqui River, were shown yesterday in the American Museum of Natural History. The original expedition started from here in June 1921. Dr. Henry H. Rusby of the College of Pharmacy of Columbia University returned following a search for certain medicinal plants. Mr. MacCreagh did not come back until last August. He was principally interested in the new tribe of Indians, who live communally in a sort of barracks, twenty families together."
The films MacCreagh took during expedition have been the object of a decade-long search by Susan Fraser, Head of Information Services and the Archivist of the New York Botanical Garden. The NYBG also holds copies of the unpublished manuscripts of Henry H. Rusby, the Director of the Mulford Biological Expedition, and others written by expedition scientists. The originals are archived at the National Library of History of Medicine, Bethesda, MD., and at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. It is curious to note that only MacCreagh's record of the expedition ever saw publication.
Some of MacCreagh's experiences in the Amazon were recorded in two New York Times articles. The first, dated August 20, 1922, announced that MacCreagh had returned to New York on August 19th. It was headlined "Devil-Devil Dance Caught By Camera / Gordon MacCreagh, Back From the Amazon, Describes Torture Ceremony." The first three and last paragraphs of this one-column article are worth quoting:
"Returning yesterday on the steamship Polycarp from South America, where for eighteen months he has been a member of the Mulford Biological Exploration Expedition which explored the Amazon Basin, Gordon MacCreagh, ethnologist, brought back with him a detailed description, as well as still and motion pictures of the Caapi, a Devil-Devil dance which scientists have thought extinct, but which still flourishes among Indians in sections visited by Mr. MacCreagh.
"While three young wild cats played about and a macaw, gorgeously bedecked in many hues, shifted lazily from one foot to the other, Mr. MacCreagh, in his studio at 21 East Fourteenth Street, related the story of the Caapi which he witnessed on the Tiqui River among Indians which were conquered by the Incas on the Waupea, a tributary of the Negro, in Brazil.
"Dr. Henry H. Rusby, Dean of the Columbia College of Pharmacy, who headed the Mulford Expedition, returned some months ago from the Amazon because of illness, and Mr. MacCreagh, accompanied by Duval Brown, former consul at La Paz, and Mr. Q. S. McCarthy of Philadelphia, determined to follow the Rio Negro as far as possible and then go overland to Bogota, Columbia, but were caught by the rainy season and turned back in order to a tributary of the Waupea."
Lastly:
"Mr. MacCreagh was taken ill while on the [extended] expedition and had to travel five weeks to get to a doctor. He lived for three weeks on two cans of condensed milk until he reached a rubber trader who gave him six cans which had been on a shelf for eight years. Despite its antiquity the milk was good, he said. Mr. MacCreagh brought back with him some of the caapi, which he sent to Dr. Rusby for analysis. He also brought back other data and material which will take him some time to prepare in the way of a report."
The longer middle section of this article dealt with details of the Devil-Devil Dance, which became a half-page feature article in the September 3, 1922 New York Times entitled "Devil Dancers." Included was a fascinating 6-inch by 6.5-inch photograph of MacCreagh in the costume and body painting of the Devil Dancers. He admitted in the article that over the several days the Devil-Devil Dance lasted, he had consumed a fair amount of caapi. It had no alcoholic properties or a narcotic taste like opium, but it gave him a high exhilaration that made him lose all self-consciousness to the point of allowing the natives to paint and dress him as one of the dancers--an event he did not remember too well.
"In spite of the terrible effects of the ordeal on them," the article went on, "Mr. MacCreagh managed to get the Indians to go through...[the dance] in daylight for the benefit of the moving picture camera. He had with him a camera especially designed for the expedition by Carl Akely, the African explorer."
The article also described how poison-tipped arrows and blowguns were used to sacrifice animals during the dance ritual.
White Waters and Black is such a powerful book it deserves several readings.
* * *
Gordon MacCreagh was born of Scottish parents on August 8, 1886, in Perth, Indiana. He appears to have inherited his compulsion for travel and exploration from his father, a naturalist and historian who had come to this country to study the American Indian. Young Gordon attended the Perth public schools for a short while, and was then shipped to Scotland to be raised and educated by his grandfather, a church deacon, because his father's work required him to travel extensively. He attended schools in Aldelham and Glenalmond, Scotland, and then enrolled at the University of Heidelberg, in Hanover, Germany.
Late in his first year, or perhaps early in his second year at Heidelberg, MacCreagh was provoked into a saber duel by another student, and skewered him. Believing he had killed the student and would not be able to defend himself successfully in court because he was an American, MacCreagh packed his possessions and fled Heidelberg in the middle of the night. Later he learned the student recovered from his wound.
After some months of traveling he arrived in India. The year we assume is 1905 and young Gordon MacCreagh was nineteen. His funds nearly exhausted, he found himself a job as captain of a Nile barge. He states in his Argosy profile that he was fired because the owner of the shipping firm did his utmost to avoid paying him.
However, Bob McKnight, who knew MacCreagh, wrote that the budding explorer awoke one morning to find that seven of the crew of ten had died of bubonic plague during the night and that the others had jumped overboard and swam to shore. MacCreagh did likewise. "Later, after a long walk," McKnight said, "he got in touch with his firm, and was told he would have to go back to the barge and await fumigation. This would have meant almost certain death."
Instead, he worked his way to Darjeeling, West Bengal, and found a job as overseer of a tea plantation. It was dull work so he developed a sideline collecting "those marvelous Himalayan beetles and butterflies, for a museum collector," recalls MacCreagh. "And from that I graduated to collecting on my own. I got into bigger stuff. Live animals for Jamrach, then the big Liverpool dealer...I moved into the Malay islands and sent in various leopards and tigers and things. But my specialty was big snakes and orang-utans."
When he had saved enough money to leave Indo-China, he headed for Africa. Landing in Kenya, he talked himself into a contract to furnish wild animals for the Hagenback-Wallace circus, then traveling throughout Germany. McKnight states, "MacCreagh had that amazing quality of being ready and willing to tackle anything, regardless of whether he knew anything about it or not, or how dangerous it was."
He soon had acquired more animals than the circus could use and went broke caring for the animals that remained in his charge. Returning to India, he was hired by British Post Office Intelligence. In his fifth year on the job, MacCreagh decided to write, as the job had begun to pall on him. Once again, McKnight says, "The fact that he knew nothing about writing was no deterrent."
He wrote a two-act play that he cast with Hindu actors and a Hindu princess in the lead role. It met with success in local productions, and was seen by a New York producer named Mike Leavitt, who encouraged MacCreagh to bring the troupe to New York. [Michael B. Leavitt and his father both were noted theatrical producers in Boston and New York from the 1870s onward.] The play opened on the Amsterdam Roof, a theatre in New York, but was shut down by the authorities because it contained too much nudity.
Stranded in New York, MacCreagh turned to more serious writing. This time it was adventure tales set in India and Africa, which he sold to Adventure magazine. For the next 40 years, Adventure would publish the bulk of his fiction. The first of these stories, "The Brass Idol" and "The Getting of Boh Na-Ghee" were published in the October and November 1913 issues. Three more stories followed in 1914; six in 1915. A seventh that year, "Heart of the Hillman," appeared in the August number of Argosy.
His story output came in fits and spurts throughout his lifetime. In some years he wrote only two or three; seldom more than six or seven (though several were either serials or book-length novels; in quite a few years none at all. He wrote only when he needed money to tide him over between his travels; and after writing small groups of stories and selling them to the pulp fiction magazines, he was either overcome by the urge to travel or was offered an expeditionary opportunity.
What expeditions he participated in during the decade of 1910 and what jobs he might have held is not known. One leans to the opinion that a chronological reading of his adventure fiction may provide clues as to where he was or had been recently.
MacCreagh wrote that he returned home when the war came along and lost a lot of time in a Navy training station, where he "met a god called discipline." This statement is at odds with his Who's Who bio, which said he was in the U.S. Air Force. Whichever service it was, he apparently was not sent overseas -- perhaps due to his age -- for during 1918 and 1919 he had one of his more active writing spurts, mostly for Adventure, Argosy and Munsey's, including a three-part serial novel, "The Naked Men of Naga," which finally ran during April and May, 1920. MacCreagh published only one story in 1921, "A Good Sword and a Good Horse," a costume drama set in France. It appeared in the January 15 issue of Adventure and was one of his few stories which didn't have a jungle or expeditionary background.
For the following two years his typewriter was silent, except for recording his great adventure into the jungles of the Amazon with the Mulford Biological Expedition. Soon after his return to New York, in August 1922, he met and married Helen Komlosy. He was 37. Sharing his love of adventure, Helen accompanied him on an exploration of Borneo and then to Ethiopia for the Abyssinian expeditions of 1927-28 and 1929. He captioned a photo of Helen in The Last of Free Africa as "the intrepid exploress." She was a strikingly handsome woman.
"Fate had descended upon me...and she was crazy, too," MacCreagh wrote of his wife, "and came along -- and suffered for her temerity...Thin tent walls out in the open bush and lion noises outside rasped her nerves all up. And drove her crazier; so she came out again the next time."
That next time took them further into the interiors of the British East Africa and Uganda borders. There they bought some mules that had been "scientifically inoculated" against the tsetse fly so that they wouldn't have to bother with what he called "the hideous porter safari problems." The tsetse flies killed off half the mules anyhow, and they struggled on into bad country where the lions ate up the rest. So MacCreagh and his wife found it necessary to hire a safari after all. But since the safari was tsetse speckled, the porters soon ran away in droves taking most of the luggage and supplies with them. They were stranded in the woods and became ill as the rainy season came along.
Somehow they managed to reach civilization along the East coast of the continent and secured third class accommodations on a French boat sailing to Japan. From there they took a ship to Seattle, where they bought what MacCreagh described as "a very used" flivver, and drove across the U.S. stopping at many of the historical places they remembered from youthful reading. "We took in [the] Columbia River Highway and Yellowstone Park and Jackson's Hole and Shoshone Canyon and Deadwood and Cody and Custer, Dead Man's Gulch and Two Mile Bend and Snake River and Massacre Rock and Poison Springs. And we got an awful kick out of it all."
Other than several return visits to Ethiopia, where else the MacCreaghs may have traveled during the 1930s is not known. As far as can be determined at this point, he wrote only 42 stories and articles during the entire decade; not enough to keep body and soul together. It can be assumed, however, that Gordon MacCreagh was active on the lecture circuit and kept on the move as he was not inclined to settle down in any one place.
When World War II broke out, MacCreagh, then 56, got a job with Douglas Aircraft Corp., a major supplier of fighter and transport planes to the war effort, according to Bob KcNight. Because of his familiarity with Africa and his fluency with numerous tribal dialects, Douglas sent him to Africa for unknown purposes. Who's Who records it as "Special Service." MacCreagh appears to have had a gift for languages. As far as I've been able to determine, he also spoke Latin, German, Spanish and French. He was also conversant with several South American Indian dialects, plus various dialects familiar to India and Indo-China.
Arriving in North Africa, he was first loaned to the British Army; later to the American Army. All the while he remained on the Douglas payroll. During a flight in 1943 or 1944 with the American forces, his plane was riddled with bullets, and MacCreagh caught one of them. The pilot, however, managed to land safely, and MacCreagh spent some time recovering in a hospital. No doubt the scar from that incident blended well with the numerous leech bites he received on his legs and body while in the Amazon.
After the War, MacCreagh and his wife settled in St. Petersburg, Florida, for about a year, before they were off again to explore the unfinished Pan American Highway. He had traveled the Mexican and Central American jungle regions in earlier years, usually on foot or horseback. For this trip, he purchased an "ancient, asthmatic hearse" for their journey, which was unexpectedly demolished when an old adobe wall collapsed on the vehicle. That final adventure may have prompted him to write "Xipe the Skinless," a strange safari tale set in the Mexican jungles, published in the May 1947 issue of Adventure.
The couple returned to St. Petersburg, and for the remaining seven years of his life, MacCreagh pursued a rigorous schedule as a lecturer on Ethiopian and Mexican affairs, and writing occasional articles for various magazines. During those years his fiction output was almost nonexistent.
On August 30, 1953, after eighteen weeks in a St. Petersburg hospital, MacCreagh died of abdominal cancer. He was 67.
McKnight recalls that "MacCreagh was altogether a happy man, an excellent bagpiper and guitarist, and had a soft, haunting singing voice." Several photographs in White Waters and Black show him to be sporting a prematurely gray beard and wearing an Indiana Jones-type wide-brimmed Fedora hat. There was a luger automatic (his favorite weapon) strapped to his side, as he played the bagpipe for the astonished Amazon jungle natives. He wore the holster on his right hip with the luger's grip in a cross-draw position, which possibly indicates that he might have been left-handed.
In another amusing picture he is speaking with an Indian native and his two half-naked brides (looking no older than their early 'teens). The native offered his wives if MacCreagh would teach him to play the bagpipe. MacCreagh's caption read, "It has been spitefully remarked that a man who would like to learn how to play a bagpipe would have no morals anyway."
His literary legacy was small compared to other fiction-writing colleagues of his time -- slightly more than 110 stories. Of the five books he published, only four have been traced; nothing is known about his first, Big Game in the Shan States (1909), which is mentioned in Who's Who and on the front jacket flap of The Last of Free Africa. There is no copyright record, nor does it appear in any U.S. library or the British Library databases. Possibly MacCreagh created this title as a joke, or it was published in India in a small edition, as the author was then living there.
MacCreagh'a other two books were hardcover editions of novels which originally appeared in Adventure magazine -- The Inca's Ransom (1924) and Poisonous Mist (1926). Both were published by Chelsea House, New York.
Adventure published 77 of his tales between 1913 and 1955; the last, "The Devil's Son," was published posthumously, two years after his death. Another 17 appeared in Argosy (which included two serials), and a scattering of 17 tales in other magazines. A small handful of these were horror and fantasy tales. He also sold 3 stories to the Saturday Evening Post. Very possibly a few more are buried in magazines that have yet to be indexed.
One only has to read a cross-section of MacCreagh's tales to realize that he deserves high marks for storytelling. His tales have a ring of authenticity unmatched by most of his contemporaries. Only Arthur O. Friel's stories set in the South American jungles -- a region that Friel lived in and explored for many years -- come close, as do some of Theodore Roscoe's, another inveterate traveler/explorer during the 1930s.
My favorite MacCreagh stories are those about the adventures of an East Africa based white-hunter named King, whom the natives called "Kingi Bwana." He had both a social conscience for the native populations and environmental concerns for indigenous wildlife. Kingi Bwana was also an outspoken critic of the policies of colonial governments, as MacCreagh was outspoken of European goals in The Last of Free Africa.
One gets the impression that Kingi Bwana was the fictional embodiment of MacCreagh, a man who followed his own instincts without regard for the dangers that lay ahead, and who strongly believed in killing wildlife only to protect one's life and or to provide food. MacCreagh did not approve of men who shot big game simply to have photos taken with their quarry or to have them stuffed. Many of those principals come across in "The Lost End of Nowhere" (Adventure, January 15, 1931), an outstanding safari adventure novel featuring Kingi Bwana and involves the search for a German scientist missing in deepest, darkest Africa for more than a dozen years. Another favorite story is "The Safari of Danger (Argosy, February 10, 1934), featuring white hunter Sam Brown, which first introduced me to the author several years ago.
Having read Gordon MacCreagh's adventure stories before I acquired his books about the Amazon and Ethiopia, I'm discovering that more than a few were inspired by incidents and legends he encountered during his long and colorful career as an "incorrigible explorer."
One wishes MacCreagh had written more adventure stories and more books about his expeditions and travels. More regrettable is that his personal papers and correspondence files were never archived.
(My thanks to Victor A. Berch for his exceptional research assistance and advice; and to Richard Bleiler for providing copies of many Gordon MacGreagh stories from his collection of Adventure.)
Copyright Peter Ruber
Links:
White Waters and Black by MacCreagh is currently in print an available from Amazon.com. Click here for more information.
To check out a bibliography of MacCreagh's writings, please click here.
To read "The Men Who Make The Argosy" column about MacCreagh, please click here.
Posted by ds at December 7, 2002 02:51 PM
