Dinosaurs in the Attic (19 page)

Their social life in Peking consisted of an endless round of lavish dinner parties with the British and Americans living in the legation. A typical dinner might include such wild game as snipe, woodcock, pheasant, roe deer, or boar, all washed down with the very finest French wines, Scotch whiskeys, and English beers.

For sport, Andrews and his group of friends rode to hounds, played polo, raced ponies, and played tennis. During the racing season, Andrews rented a temple near the racecourse. Called the Temple of Hopeful Fecundity, the five-centuries-old building was nestled in the hills outside Peking. Ancient cedars and a profusion of flowers tended by monks graced its courtyards. Apparently no one minded that the temple was rented to foreigners, and business was conducted as usual. Worshipers journeyed there from Peking to burn joss sticks and pray for male issue.

Aside from the usual prostitutes, which some expedition members patronized, there were more unusual amusements in Peking for the foreigners. In 1926 the gates of Peking were barred and sandbagged, while the city was assaulted by an army led by a rebellious Chinese general. The foreign population, Andrews wrote, "were having a glorious time." Every morning promptly at ten o'clock, an airplane droned into the city from the south, dropped a few gunpowder bombs on the city, turned around, and flew back from whence it came. "The roof of the Peking Hotel," Andrews wrote, "was the best place from which to see the show. 'Bombing breakfast' became the newest social diversion. A dozen guests would be invited to breakfast in the hotel at nine o'clock. At five minutes to ten they would adjourn to the roof, watch the planes do their stuff and then jump into motor cars to inspect the scene of devastation. As they were small bombs filled with black powder the damage was slight."

In the beginning the Chinese civil wars were more of a nuisance than a danger. But in 1926 things began to get serious, and "all tradition and good form were knocked into a cocked hat." For the first time the Chinese soldiers did not respect a foreign flag, and instead took it as an invitation to open fire, whereas previously the expedition could cross battlefronts unscathed merely by flying the American flag. That year, in fact, Andrews nearly lost his life attempting to cross enemy lines. He needed to get to Tientsin (later named Tinnjin) from Peking on expedition business. Andrews and three others piled into a car and headed for the outskirts of Peking. The gates of the city were heavily guarded, but the soldiers let them pass. On the road they met the retreating troops of one army, retiring in good order and "almost cheerful."

We drove on slowly and eventually passed beyond the rear of the retreating army. For three or four miles the countryside was deserted, houses closed, and all as quiet as the grave. We were five or six hundred yards from the ancient marble bridge at Tungchow when there came the sharp crack of a rifle and a bullet struck beside the front wheel. A second later a mass of soldiers appeared on the road and bullets began spattering around us like hailstones. They had opened fire with a machine gun but it was aimed too low and the bullets were kicking the dust just in front of us. The soldiers could see the American flag plainly enough but that made not the slightest difference.

Fortunately this spot on the road was wide enough for the car to be turned and I swung it about in record time. The bullets now were buzzing like a swarm of bees just above our heads. Forty yards down the road a sharp curve took us out of sight of the machine gun.... The ride became an exciting one. All the houses which had seemed so peaceful actually were occupied by the advance guards of Fengtien soldiers. They had let us pass because of the American flag but when they heard the firing in our rear and saw us returning at such a mad speed, they evidently thought that we were anybody's game. Each and every one decided to take a shot at us.

For three miles we ran the gauntlet of firing from both sides of the road.... The only reason why we were not riddled with bullets is because the Chinese is the world's worst rifle shot....

New trouble began when they finally reached the rear of the retreating army. Thinking soldiers might be protection, Andrews let three or four ride on the running board of the car. One of them fell off and his arm was caught under the wheel just as Andrews slammed on the brakes, shredding his hand. Then more soldiers wanted to ride, and over Andrews' protests they piled on the car by the dozen. Inevitably, one soldier fell off and broke his leg. His enraged comrades cocked their rifles and were about to summarily execute Andrews and his companions when an officer arrived just in time to save them.
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The Russians and Buriats proved to be just as bureaucratic and dangerous as the Chinese.
^†24
On the 1925 expedition, the Russians decided that Andrews was engaged in a spying mission. In Urga (now called Ulan Bator), the capital of Outer Mongolia, one poor security agent ran himself ragged on foot trying to keep up with their motor cars. Andrews finally took pity on the man, inviting him to ride in his car. The Mongolian government insisted on assigning two Buriat security agents to accompany the expedition itself, Dalai Badmajapoff and John Dimschikoff. Dimschikoff, hoping to please his superiors, reported that Andrews was plotting with the American and British governments to annex Outer Mongolia. The other agent turned out to be a decent fellow and heartily contradicted Dimschikoffs reports, thereby saving the expedition from certain arrest. The Soviet government subsequently exiled Dimschikoff to Siberia for his fabricated reports; he was later "rehabilitated" and sent to Germany with Badmajapoff, where he reportedly robbed and murdered his companion.

The worsening political situation and rising antiforeign feeling in China finally forced Andrews to cancel the 1926 and 1927 expeditions. But Andrews had made up his mind that whatever happened, he was going to make one last try to get into Mongolia in 1928. By the spring of 1928, however, conditions on the Mongolian plateau had become very bad. Bandits swarmed over the area in such numbers that everyone who could be robbed had been, and the bandits themselves were starving from lack of booty. Finally the Chinese government made a truce with the bandits, allowing them to extract specified amounts of "protection money" from traders—five dollars per camel and $100 per car—provided it was done in a consistent and orderly fashion, with no loss of life. The expedition could only get into Inner Mongolia, where they explored a remote area in the northwest.

At the end of the 1928 expedition, the Chinese authorities at Kalgan seized their collections. A group called the Society for the Preservation of Cultural Objects accused the expedition of having "stolen China's priceless treasures" (among them, of course, the dinosaur eggs) and of being "spies against the government" and of "searching for oil and minerals and smuggling opium." Andrews spent six weeks negotiating with the Chinese authorities to get his crates of fossils back. In 1929 the same society required a list of onerous demands before it would authorize the expedition. Negotiations broke down, and Andrews reluctantly canceled plans for the 1929 expedition.

But Andrews persisted. In 1930, he finally came to an agreement with the society. Once again, the expedition set out to explore in Mongolia. They made outstanding fossil discoveries, especially of large mammals; among their finds was an entire graveyard of rare, shovel-tusked mastodons, previously known only from a few bones. On this trip they had their closest call with bandits, when three Chinese attacked a lone expedition member. The man drove the bandits away by shooting one in the face and killing another's horse.

The 1930 expedition was to be the last. It had now become too difficult and dangerous to continue scientific work in Mongolia. Although the expedition had been an outstanding success, it was a great blow to Andrews that they had not discovered the Missing Link. He was still convinced that it was out there, buried somewhere in the Gobi, the paleontological Garden of Eden.

NINE

The Thirties and Beyond

The Central Asiatic Expedition did, in a sense, turn out to be Andrews' swan song in exploration. He returned to great fanfare and popular acclaim, and four years later the Director of the Museum was asked to resign and Andrews took his place. Like other outstanding explorers, Andrews turned out to be a mediocre administrator.

Andrews' real accomplishments, though, live on in the Museum. Every fossil hall in the Museum is packed with his finds, and ten thousand more specimens remain in drawers and on shelves in the Vertebrate Paleontology section, still studied diligently by scientists from around the world.

The end of the Central Asiatic Expedition, 1930, also marked the end of the golden age of expeditions. It was the end of an era at the Museum in other ways as well. The immediate cause of the change was the Depression, but profound changes were taking place in the way the Museum—and similar institutions—conducted research and promoted exploration.

The Depression hit the Museum and its wealthy trustees badly. In 1933, Osborn retired from the Museum, frustrated by the chronic shortage of funds and the elimination of the grand projects he so desired. The Museum's endowments, one-half of which were in railroad bonds, took a plunge when many railroads defaulted. The trustees, who had traditionally made up the deficit at the end of the year by "passing the hat," found themselves dealing with their own financial problems.

F. Trubee Davison succeeded Osborn as President. A kindly man, Davison was not, however, a scientist and took only a casual interest in the Museum. At his request the trustees made the Director the chief operating officer of the Museum, leaving the President with overall responsibility but no administrative or scientific duties.

During the thirties the Museum cut salaries, curtailed publications, and eliminated staff positions. In 1932 the use of Museum funds for fieldwork and expeditions was banned entirely. Andrews became Director in 1934 at a low point in the Museum's history, and he proved incapable of handling what would have been a difficult job for anyone. According to Clark Wissler, a curator in the Museum's anthropology department during the Depression years, the Museum was infected with an "atmosphere of pessimism and defeat." Without a strong President or an effective Director, the Museum continued to slide downhill.

In 1941 the trustees finally took action and hired Alexander Ruthven, president of the University of Michigan and a systematic zoologist, to make a study of the Museum and its ills. After several visits and six months of poking around the Museum, Ruthven issued the recommendations he had hitherto kept secret, despite friendly requests from several nervous Museum officials. They were not complicated, and they boiled down to one major change—get rid of Roy Chapman Andrews. Andrews was asked to resign, which he did with not a little bitterness. He lived the rest of his life in California, writing numerous books about his experiences at the Museum. He died in Carmel in 1960.

Andrews was replaced as Director by Albert E. Parr, who managed to pull the Museum out of its doldrums. The world had changed during the Museum's dark years, and it emerged a different kind of institution. The need for grand expeditions had passed. With that passage went the large-scale support from wealthy individuals, who liked to associate themselves with grand projects. Large, coordinated expeditions with supply caravans and native bearers were simply unnecessary—a curator could board an airplane and be anywhere in the world in a few days or a week. Little logistical support was needed. Efficient transportation and communications had taken all the glamour out of expeditions.

In addition, many of the curators who had lived under Andrews' directorship felt resentful of his style, his thirst for headline-grabbing discoveries. Some felt (probably unfairly) that he was a careerist who used the Museum for the advancement of his own fame. A consequence of this was that the Museum moved away from the showier kind of fieldwork and collecting for collecting's sake; a typical expedition would later consist of one curator who had a
specific
research question, and who as a result would make a very limited collection.

It is important to note that the collecting done before 1930, while not always directly related to current research, laid the groundwork for decades, if not centuries, of future scientific work. (In Part Two we will look at some of these modem-day explorers.)

Finally, the science of natural history itself, which had been ascendant in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was being partially eclipsed by the newer sciences of cellular and molecular biology, and even medicine. In the minds of some, natural history, taxonomy, and evolutionary research seemed a little old-fashioned, a science in which most of the important questions had been solved.
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With the dramatic expeditions having ended, and the science of natural history sharing a more crowded stage, the Museum did lose national visibility. But today, its research and exhibition programs are stronger than ever before. The revolution in the theory of evolution—the so-called punctuated equilibrium theory—was born at the Museum, and today more than two hundred scientists and their assistants carryon research in all fields of evolution, zoology, animal behavior, and mineral science. As we will see later, the collections made before 1930 continue to support research programs in many disciplines, from planetology and systematic zoology to crystallography and evolution. The research that is being done today at the Museum is a synthesis of all that has gone before—all the collecting, storage, and expeditions, all the people who contributed in some way to the growth of the Museum—and has set the stage for the revolution in evolutionary studies and systematic zoology that has taken place over the past generation, much of which was and is centered at the Museum. We will take a brief look at some of this research in Part Two.