John Hemming | |
|---|---|
 Andean explorers Hugh Thompson, John Hemming, Vince Lee, and John Beauclerk in 2010 | |
| Born | John Henry Hemming 5 January 1935 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada |
| Alma mater | |
| Occupations | |
| Spouse | Susan (Sukie) Babington Smith (m. 1979) |
John Henry Hemming CMG FSA FRSL FRGS (born January 5, 1935) is a historian, explorer, and expert on the Incas and indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin. [1]
Hemming, was born in Vancouver on 5 January 1935. His father, Henry Harold Hemming, [2] served in the First World War and was wary of a Second World War on the horizon. As a result, he sent John's mother, journalist Alice Hemming, to Canada by way of the Panama Canal. [3] John and his sister Louisa were brought back to London when he was two months old. He was educated in the United Kingdom at Eton College, in Canada at McGill University, and earned a doctorate at Oxford. He also became an honorary fellow of Magdalen College.
In 1961, with fellow Oxford graduates Richard Mason and Kit Lambert, he was part of the Iriri River Expedition into unexplored country in central Brazil. The Brazilian mapping agency, IBGE, sent a three-man survey team to help map these unknown forests and rivers and gave the Expedition permission to name features it found. However, after four months, an unknown indigenous people found the group's trail, laid an ambush, and killed Richard Mason with arrows and clubs. Mason was the last Englishman ever to be killed by a totally unknown and uncontacted tribe. His body was carried out and buried in the British cemetery in Rio de Janeiro. [4] The tribe was contacted in 1973, and was called Panará: Hemming visited them in 1998. [5]
His first book, The Conquest of the Incas, was published in 1970 and is still in print with two revisions. It won the Robert Pitman Literary Prize and the Christopher Award in New York. Hemming had spent the year 1960 travelling to every part of Peru, was for years chairman of the Anglo-Peruvian Society, and has been awarded Peru's two highest civilian honours: El Sol del Peru ('The Sun of Peru', South America's oldest order of chivalry) and the Grand Cross of the Orden al Merito Publico (Order of Merit). [6] He has also written, with the American photographer Edward Ranney, an account of Inca architecture of Peru, Monuments of the Incas, reissued in a revised edition in 2010. Among those whom he inspired and befriended is Vince Lee, a fellow Andean explorer and writer.
His experience on the Iriri River expedition led to a heightened interest in Brazilian indigenous peoples. On various expeditions he visited 45 tribes throughout Brazil – four of them (Surui, Parakana, Asurini and Galera Nambikwara) at the time that Brazilian teams made the first-ever face-to-face contact. [7] Over the following 26 years he completed a three-volume history of the indigenous peoples and exploration of the Brazilian Amazonia: Red Gold (1978), which covers the period of 1500–1760; Amazon Frontier (1985), covering the period of 1760–1910; and Die If You Must (2004), which describes their changes during the 20th century. The three volumes add up to over 2,100 pages.
In 1975, John Hemming became director and secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, a post he held until 1996. He personally led the Maracá Rainforest Project in Brazil (1987–88) which, with 200 scientists and scientific technicians, became the largest research project in Amazonia organised by any European country – in partnership with Brazilian researchers from INPA (Amazon Research Institute) and [SEMA environment agency. Hemming was awarded the RGS's Founder's Medal in recognition of his work on the Maracá project, as well as the Brazilian Ordem do Cruzeiro do Sul (Order of the Southern Cross) and medals from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and the Boston Museum of Science (Bradford Washburn Medal).
In April 2008 his book, Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon, was published by Thames and Hudson. It was described by Hugh Thomson in the Daily Telegraph as a book that "will stand as the definitive single-volume work on the subject." [8] Another notable book was Naturalists in Paradise. Wallace, Bates and Spruce in the Amazon (2015).
In 1979, John Hemming married Susan (Sukie) Babington Smith, daughter of Michael Babington Smith and granddaughter of Sir Henry Babington Smith. She worked for many years in The National Trust, became Director of Development and then Director of Corporate Affairs at the British Museum, and on retirement a trustee of English Heritage. She is the great-granddaughter of 9th Earl of Elgin on her father's side and the great-great-granddaughter of the 4th Earl of Clanwilliam on her mother's side. They have two children: publisher Beatrice (born 1981) and writer Henry Hemming. [2]
In the 1994 New Year Honours, Hemming was appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) by the British government. [9] In August 2018, he was awarded the President's Medal of the British Academy "for his work in the field of the colonial history and ethnography of Brazil and Peru, and the promotion of the protection of endangered societies". [10]
The Amazon River in South America is the largest river by discharge volume of water in the world, and the longest or second-longest river system in the world, a title which is disputed with the Nile.
The Amazon rainforest, also called Amazon jungle or Amazonia, is a moist broadleaf tropical rainforest in the Amazon biome that covers most of the Amazon basin of South America. This basin encompasses 7,000,000 km2 (2,700,000 sq mi), of which 6,000,000 km2 (2,300,000 sq mi) are covered by the rainforest. This region includes territory belonging to nine nations and 3,344 indigenous territories.
Amazonas is a state of Brazil, located in the North Region in the north-western corner of the country. It is the largest Brazilian state by area and the ninth-largest country subdivision in the world. It is the largest country subdivision in South America, being greater than the areas of Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay combined. Neighbouring states are Roraima, Pará, Mato Grosso, Rondônia, and Acre. It also borders the nations of Peru, Colombia and Venezuela. This includes the Departments of Amazonas, Vaupés and Guainía in Colombia, as well as the Amazonas state in Venezuela, and the Loreto Region in Peru.
Mirko Seljan and Stjepan Seljan were Croatian explorers.
Madre de Dios is a department and region in southeastern Peru, bordering Brazil, Bolivia and the Peruvian departments of Puno, Cusco and Ucayali, in the Amazon Basin. Its capital is the city of Puerto Maldonado. It is also the third largest department in Peru, after Ucayali and Loreto. However, it is also the least densely populated department in Peru, as well as its least populous department. It has one of the lowest poverty rates in Peru.
Percy Harrison Fawcett was a British geographer, artillery officer, cartographer, archaeologist and explorer of South America. He disappeared in 1925 during an expedition to find an ancient lost city which he and others believed existed in the Amazon rainforest.
Vilcabamba or Willkapampa, often called the Lost City of the Incas, is a lost city in the Echarate District of La Convención Province in the Cuzco Region of Peru. Vilcabamba, in Quechua, means "sacred plain". The modern name for the Inca ruins of Vilcabamba is Espíritu Pampa.
The North Region of Brazil is the largest region of Brazil, accounting for 45.27% of the national territory. It has the second-lowest population of any region in the country, and accounts for a minor percentage of the national GDP. The region is slightly larger than India and slightly smaller than the whole European Union. It comprises the states of Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima, and Tocantins.
The Omagua people are an indigenous people in Brazil's Amazon Basin. Their territory, when first in contact with Spanish explorers in the 16th century, was on the Amazon River upstream from the present-day city of Manaus extending into Peru. They speak the Omagua language. The Omagua exist today in small numbers, but they were a populous, organized society in the late Pre-Columbian era. Their population suffered steep decline, mostly from infectious diseases, in the early years of the Columbian Exchange. During the 18th century, the Omagua largely abandoned their indigenous identity in response to prejudice and racism that marginalized aboriginal peoples in Brazil and Peru. More tolerant attitudes led to a renewed tribal identity starting in the 1980s.
Uncontacted peoples are groups of Indigenous peoples living without sustained contact with neighbouring communities and the world community. Groups who decide to remain uncontacted are referred to as indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. Legal protections make estimating the total number of uncontacted peoples challenging, but estimates from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in the UN and the nonprofit group Survival International point to between 100 and 200 uncontacted tribes numbering up to 10,000 individuals total. A majority of uncontacted peoples live in South America, particularly northern Brazil, where the Brazilian government and National Geographic estimate between 77 and 84 tribes reside.
The Roosevelt River is a Brazilian river, a tributary of the Aripuanã River about 760 km (470 mi) in length.
Paititi is a legendary Inca lost city or utopian rich land. It allegedly lies east of the Andes, hidden somewhere within the remote rainforests of southeast Peru, northern Bolivia or northwest Brazil. The Paititi legend in Peru revolves around the story of the culture-hero Inkarri, who, after he had founded Q'ero and Cusco, retreated toward the jungles of Pantiacolla to live out the rest of his days in his refuge city of Paititi. Other versions of the legend see Paititi as an Inca refuge in the border area between Bolivia and Brazil.
William Chandless was an English explorer of the Amazon Basin in the 1860s.
The Panará are an Indigenous people of Mato Grosso in the Brazilian Amazon. They farm and are hunter-gatherers.
The Indigenous peoples of Peru or Native Peruvians comprise a large number of ethnic groups who inhabit territory in present-day Peru. Indigenous cultures developed here for thousands of years before the arrival of the Spanish in 1532.
Peruvian Amazonia, informally known locally as the Peruvian jungle or just the jungle, is the area of the Amazon rainforest in Peru, east of the Andes and Peru's borders with Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, and Bolivia. This region comprises 60% of the country and is marked by a large degree of biodiversity. Peru has the second-largest portion of the Amazon rainforest after the Brazilian Amazon.
The Battle of Ollantaytambo took place in January 1537, between the forces of Inca emperor Manco Inca and a Spanish expedition led by Hernando Pizarro during the Spanish conquest of Peru. A former ally of the Spaniards, Manco Inca rebelled in May 1536, and besieged a Spanish garrison in the city of Cusco. To end the stand-off, the besieged mounted a raid against the emperor's headquarters in the town of Ollantaytambo. The expedition, commanded by Hernando Pizarro, included 100 Spaniards and some 30,000 Indian auxiliaries against an Inca army more than 30,000 strong.
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon is a non-fiction book by American author David Grann. Published in 2009, the book recounts the activities of the British explorer Percy Fawcett who, in 1925, disappeared with his son in the Amazon rainforest while looking for the ancient "Lost City of Z". In the book, Grann recounts his own journey into the Amazon, by which he discovered new evidence about how Fawcett may have died.
Loren McIntyre, was an American photojournalist who worked extensively in South America. His photographs and writing appeared in National Geographic and hundreds of other periodicals. He has numerous books to his credit, including The Incredible Incas and Their Timeless Land (1975), Exploring South America (1990), Amazonia (1991), and Die Amerikanische Reise (2000)
Richard Maurice Ledingham Mason was a British explorer and the last British person to have been killed by an uncontacted indigenous tribe.
