I Married Adventure

by Osa Johnson

  Drifting on down the Kinabatangan, we sat on the front porch of our floating home and contemplated the abundant and sometimes repellent beauties of the Borneo jungle. Trees of strange shapes sometimes tied themselves in complete knots in their efforts to reach the light, and some bore leaves of deep red and lemon-yellow that gave the effect of sunlight where there was none. There were times when my husband and I, hearing the death scream of a jungle creature caught and killed for food by a stronger creature, were oppressed by nature’s cruelty.

  Arriving at Sandakan and back once more in the hilltop place we had leased, Martin gloomily reviewed the notes he had made of our trip. Kalowatt, now plump as a butterball, sat on his shoulder and pulled his ear. Bessie sat on his knee and studied his hands, one after the other.

  “Looks to me,” he said, “as though we may have to chalk up this Borneo trip as a failure.” He sighed. “Time wasted, money wasted.”

  I put my arm around him but received a sharp pinch from Bessie for my pains. She was frankly jealous of me where Martin was concerned, and this was her way of warning me to keep my distance.

  “You can’t help it that the jungles here are so thick,” I said, “and that the animals run the way they do. We didn’t know it would be like this.”

  “Well, we should have known—I mean, I should. Any wild animal will run, even a chipmunk, and by the time the camera’s set up here and focused, they’ve put a wall of jungle between us.”

  “That camera.” I was disgusted. “Why, it weighs a ton, and, besides, it’s obsolete!”

  “Yes, and a new one would cost a lot of money which we haven’t got.”

  “No man can work without proper tools,” I said severely, “and before we go on another trip you’re going to have a new camera.”

  “Yes, and what’s more, before we’re through with this trip, I’m at least going to have some pictures of elephants.”

  “Well, if you can get any place where you can see them, at least they’re big,” I said as encouragingly as possible.

  With our single, clumsy motion-picture camera, two still cameras, Jack London’s old Marlin, and our pistols, we set out once more in the government launch up still another waterway out of Sandakan Bay, this time to a place some twenty miles distant, which from all accounts was elephant country. We took with us four hunters and a half-dozen coolies, the latter to carry food, film, and camp stuff.

  Leaving the launch at a designated place along the narrow stream, we shouldered our equipment and struck out through the steaming jungle. Cutting and fighting our way for three days, we finally came just at nightfall to a clear, beaten elephant trail and took to our bed on the ground. While our small tent was designed to keep snakes and insects out, I remembered the python that swallowed the pig and was able to sleep only fitfully. The men disposed themselves in the branches of the banyan.

  Martin too was restless. The mosquitoes, of course, had found us. The tent was airless, and the ground through our canvas flooring was both moist and hard.

  “Why in the world did we ever pick Borneo?” I said at length, with as much irritation as I have ever permitted myself.

  Martin chuckled. I’ve never known anyone with such steady good nature.

  “Oh, I charged that up to just plain dumbness on my part long ago,” he said.

  “But you still haven’t told me how you plan to photograph the elephants.”

  “Why, the same as we did with the orangutan. Only elephants, being built the way they are, won’t be able to escape through the treetops. See?” he added brightly.

  “Well, I suppose so. You mean you’ll set up the camera in the trail and have the men go back of the elephants and drive them toward you?”

  “Right!” Martin yawned sleepily.

  I slapped mosquitoes and wondered whether I could still climb a tree. Then I yawned and probably fell asleep, for I was awakened by a great thudding sound that seemed to shake the earth, followed by a thrashing in the brush apparently only a hundred yards or so away. Definitely we were in elephant country. I shivered with delight and woke Martin.

  His watch showed that we were within three quarters of an hour of daylight. Our chief hunter, Nangai, good man that he was, had already awakened his men, and, with admirable speed and quiet, they disappeared on a circuitous route that would take them to the far side of the herd. Martin found a vantage point on the trail of his camera, and I fiddled around nervously wishing there were some way in which I could help. It was now daylight, and I remembered suddenly that in the excitement my husband had had no breakfast. The elephants, probably now to windward of our hunters, began trumpeting and thrashing about, but I hurried to our tent anyway and got some biscuits and hard-boiled eggs out of the chop box. I had just reached the trail with these when I heard the shot that meant the drive was on. The tuskers screamed and trumpeted, and looking over my shoulder I saw the lead bull, followed by some twenty others, breaking for the trail. I was between them and Martin. My mouth went dry and I raced toward my husband, who was grinding as steadily and firmly as though this were not one of the biggest moments of his whole life.

  “Take the gun and get up a tree!” he barked, never looking at me.

  “But what about you?”

  “Do as I tell you!”

  The thunder and crash of the herd, not fifty yards away, and the shots and yelling of the men to drive them straight at us were all I needed. I snatched up the gun and made for the banyan just off the path.

  Martin continued to grind. The herd was no more than thirty feet off when he swept the camera, tripod and all, over his shoulder and made for the banyan I was in, and before the elephants could circle and follow him he had anchored the camera in the tangle of vines and swung himself up. Then, pulling the camera after him to a higher branch, he was out of reach of the angry tuskers, who trampled and trumpeted beneath.

  In my excitement I dropped the gun, butt down, in the center of the banyan tree. It went off, angering the elephants still more. Martin managed to unlimber the camera and take some shots of the big beasts through the branches. After a while, seeming to enjoy the whole thing, he took off his pith helmet and threw it among them.

  “Well, that was a silly thing to do,” I said. “They’ll trample it.”

  Martin grinned. “That’s why I did it. If they’ll trample it good, it’ll make a fine souvenir to take back to Independence.”

  Our hunters tried to drive the elephants off but were chased for their pains (my enterprising husband got pictures of this), and it wasn’t until morning that the big mammals lumbered away and we were able to descend from the tree.

  On the whole, Martin was quite pleased with the result of our elephant expedition. We treked jauntily back to our boat, and what was our luck on our way down the river but to see our elephant herd in the water at a bend below having its morning drink and bath. Martin ordered the motor cut. We drifted quietly down toward them, and, before they crashed off into the jungle, some more fine pictures were added to the ones we already had.

  Summing up our entire expedition, we hadn’t done so badly after all, and at last we were aboard the freighter, headed for home via Singapore. Sir West Ridgeway saw us off with a cordial Godspeed that warmed our hearts, and urged our early return. Sailing with us, and now an indispensable member of our family, was Kalowatt, our little gray gibbon. Bessie, our titian-haired orangutan, a close second in our affections, was also with us. Two cockatoos, one yellow-crested and the other black, completed our little menagerie.

  “You know, Osa,” Martin said as we watched the lovely tropical bay of Sandakan merge with the general contours of British North Borneo, “you’d never believe it, but I’ve shot nearly fifty thousand feet of film on this Borneo trip, and I’ve been thinking that instead of making it just a headhunters picture, we ought to put it together as a sort of study of Borneo—natives, animals, and all. Don’t you think so
?”

  I did, most emphatically. And, happy and proud of my husband, I led the way to dinner. This, a greasy, unnameable stew, was slapped on a rough table by a surly cabin boy, and we ate it by the faint light of a soot-encrusted coal-oil lamp. Roaches and other discomforts too numerous to mention were ours, but I minded them very little. Apparently I was becoming a hardened traveler like Martin—like Charmian London. Perhaps, I reflected hopefully, I had even taken on the look of one.

  Our cabin, as well as being lit with a coal-oil lamp, was right over the engine and unbearably hot. We gave up all thought of sleep and devoted the rest of the night to tending our little zoo, which we found, on investigation, was pathetically seasick.

  * * *

  —

  Delivered to us tardily the next morning was a cable from Martin’s father with news that left Martin bewildered and grief-sticken. His mother had died nearly two weeks earlier.

  * * *

  —

  We left Singapore, and after stops in Ceylon, Cape Town, and Durban, we continued up the coast of Africa, through the Suez Canal, and finally to London.

  I never go back to London that that great and grave city does not have a tinge of the fantastic about it for me, and all because of our experiences there on this trip in 1920. Arriving, as Martin so graphically put it, short on money and long on animals, finding living quarters proved a distinct problem. We went to some five hotels before we found one that would take us in, and then, because of the early-morning chatter of our small zoo, we were asked to move.

  Three times more we succeeded in getting into hotels, and three times more we were ejected. At length we found a place in Bloomsbury Palace Street, a dingy place not more than half full, where we were given two rooms on the top floor, a good distance up from the other tenants. The general look of the thing was a little more encouraging, though here also we were warned to keep our menagerie quiet or out we’d have to go.

  Martin had looked forward to showing London to me, but so far I hadn’t even seen the Tower.

  “We might as well be keepers in a zoo and be done with it,” Martin grumbled.

  “It’s all Bessie’s fault,” I said irritably. “Yes, and yours too. If you’d stop laughing at her, she might stop thinking she’s so funny.”

  “Well, you needn’t be smug,” Martin retorted. “Kalowatt puts her up to most of it.”

  Summer in England is colder than winter in Borneo, and Bessie came down with a cough. Martin sat for days holding her and rubbing her chest with camphor oil. She loved it.

  “I guess I’ll have to go out and buy some sweaters,” he said one day after she’d fallen asleep and he had succeeded in detaching himself without arousing her. “Maybe you’d better come along,” he added. “You know more about sizes and things than I do.”

  We closed the door softly on our pets, crept out into the hall, and listened. So far so good, and we rushed and caught a tram that let us off at Selfridge’s. I flashed a quick look at the windows as we hurried past. If ever a woman had need of some new clothes, I did, but there was neither time nor money for this now, and we asked our way to “sweaters.” We got four soft, thick wool ones at a total cost sufficient to buy me a very nice and much-needed dress. The two for Bessie were size 34, and the two for Kalowatt were of a size to fit a small doll.

  Arriving back at the motel, we found a commotion of almost riot proportions. All the people living in rooms below ours were simply hysterical. The hotel was haunted, they declared, and the ghost, screeching and lusty, was up the flue.

  We rushed to our rooms and found the inner door still closed, but Bessie was gone and so was Kalowatt. The trunk, which we had pushed firmly across the fireplace, had been pulled away.

  “That Bessie!” I said.

  Finally, coaxed back down the chimney, they were a big and a little ball of black soot. Bounding past us then and out the door into the hall, they raced from top to bottom of the hotel, scattering panic and soot with equal abandon.

  Not only were we asked to leave the hotel in Bloomsbury, but we were presented with a large bill for damages besides. Martin paid it, and except for our second-class passage home, which Martin had put aside, we were down to about five dollars.

  Martin was anxious. “I was figuring on something from the South Sea pictures by now,” he said. “Maybe not much, but something.”

  “Have you called American Express?” I asked.

  “No point in calling. They’ve got our address.”

  “Which address?”

  My husband looked at me, then shot to a telephone. Yes, he was informed, there was something for us at American Express. It had been there for days, and they had been unable to reach us.

  It turned out to be a draft for ten thousand dollars!

  With money magically smoothing the way, we secured rooms in a very decent place where we could live and keep our pets. Inquiry at the zoo led us to a man whom we were able to hire to look after them for a few days, and at length we were free to do London.

  “I’m going out right this minute and have my hair done,” I said, “and maybe a manicure and a new pair of shoes.”

  Martin came to me and laid a thousand pounds in my hand.

  “This is yours,” he said, “and I don’t want to see you again until you’ve spent every penny of it!”

  I still had seen nothing of London when, a few days later, we boarded the S. S. Pan Handle State for home. A cablegram from Robertson-Cole had suggested an early return to New York with our Borneo picture, and “early” to Martin meant the first boat on which we could secure passage. We traveled first class, and, at Martin’s insistence, I had some of the loveliest clothes available in London, topped off by a beautifully matched moleskin cape. We had Kalowatt with us in our cabin, but Bessie and the cockatoos were properly caged and everything possible done for their comfort—and hence ours. I can’t think when I’ve ever had a lovelier or more luxurious time, and to top it all, there was Martin’s gift of lingerie—box after box of it—from the finest London shops, dainty and sheer as pink froth—and, as Martin later confessed to me, worth more than three hundred dollars.

  “I think it’s wonderful,” he said a little sheepishly as I opened the boxes, “the way you can wear those overalls and things when we’re roughing it. But I like you to have pretty things too, and gosh knows you haven’t had many since you married me!”

  Early the next morning there was a great commotion on deck—running feet, yelling and—yes, above all this, Bessie’s familiar screech. We looked at each other and rushed out in our bathrobes. Some sailors painting the stanchions on the upper deck had missed a can of paint. Empty, it had been thrown overboard—the contents were in Bessie’s stomach.

  Orangutans are supposed to be frail and difficult to raise in captivity, but with a pint of vinegar down her as an antidote for the paint, Bessie, lively as ever, got out of her cage at four o’clock the next morning and rang the fire bell. Passengers and crew alike rushed to their lifeboat stations, and Bessie, still ringing the bell, was ordered below and put in chains.

  The president of the United States Lines was aboard, and we had spent three most enjoyable evenings with him. He had even said most graciously that he thought Bessie was very bright and amusing. On the last evening at sea, however, he was plainly quite cool toward us—and small wonder. Bessie had got free of her chains, had made her way into the wine cellar, and, when found, was sitting in the midst of some twenty-three broken bottles of extra fine vermouth. At the moment of discovery she was pouring the contents of the twenty-fourth bottle over her head. Thoroughly soaked with the choice and expensive liquor, it seemed probable that this was how she had disposed of an entire case. Martin, of course, footed the bill.

  From the boat we went directly to the Hotel Astor, engaging a suite of rooms, one of them for our pets. My parents and Martin’s father arrived from Kansas just as
we were being asked to leave. Repeating our London experience, we were asked to move once more, but finally we took an eight-room apartment at 39 Fifth Avenue. Here we had one of the bathrooms completely lined with zinc, where Bessie, no matter what she might think up, could do no harm, and we lived at this address in comparative peace and comfort until it was time to leave for our next trip.

  It was part of Martin’s charm, I think, that he should have been so astonished when we were invited to attend a dinner at the Explorers’ Club, of which he was then made a member. He couldn’t see at all how his blundering around the South Seas and Borneo with a camera qualified him to join the ranks of men like Theodore Roosevelt and Carl Akeley, the great sculptor and naturalist of the Museum of Natural History.

  In all my life I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder than when Mr. Akeley came and had dinner with us in our apartment at 39 Fifth Avenue. Martin’s father was visiting us at the time, and though aged by the recent loss of his wife, he was cheerful and made no show whatever of sadness. Little Kalowatt sat at the table, as was now her custom, and did as pretty a job of eating with her small silver fork as anyone could wish to see. Mr. Akeley fell in love with her then and there and came many times to see her. As a matter of fact, Kalowatt was quite spoiled after his second visit, and there was nothing for it but that both Martin and his father must get down on the floor where she could pull their hair and bounce on their chests just as she had done with Mr. Akeley.

  “You have a very important mission, Martin,” Mr. Akeley said on one of those never-to-be-forgotten evenings. “Even more important than mine.”

  Martin and his father and I stared uncomprehendingly.

  Carl Akeley went on. “I’ve made it my mission to perpetuate vanishing wild-animal life in bronze and by securing specimens for the museum. You are doing the same thing in film, which is available to millions of people all over the world.”