PORTFOLIO Evoking the Exotic Members’ Photographs at the Explorers Club The period extending roughly from the 1870s to the 1914 outbreak of World War I is known in the United States as the Gilded Age and in Europe as the Belle Époque. This was a dynamic time of creativity and innovation, especially 154 in the development of various endeavors ranging from medicine and science to the arts and architecture, and to the exploration of the earth’s geography and non-Western cultures. This was an era when world travel excelled as adventure per se. Hans Christian Andersen believed that “to travel is to live” and Rudyard Kipling, whom we tend to associate with India, pined for “exotic” places like Rio de Janeiro. New worlds from the poles to the tropics were opening up to the West and the mood of the exploration of them was in many ways epitomized by Greek poet Constantine Cavafy’s 1911 Ithaca in the memorable lines, “When you set out on your journey to Ithaca, pray that the road is long and full of adventure…” It was in this rich zeitgeist that Henry Collins Walsh, a veteran of Arctic treks and battles with Moroccan tribesmen, invited a group of like-minded men active in exploration to meet at a dinner in New York City on May 28, 1904. This evening resulted in the founding of the Explorers Club. The biographies of the club’s founders are nothing short of remarkable. General Adolphus W. Greely, the club’s first president, and General David Legge Brainard had been two of the six survivors of the 1881–84 Lady Franklin Bay Arctic Expedition. Norwegian Carl Sofus Lumholtz was an ethnographer who had documented cultures in Australia, Mesoamerica, and Mexico. American archaeologist Marshall Howard Saville had also engaged in fieldwork in Central and South America and was director of the Museum of the American Indian (Heye Foundation). Frederick Cook, who was also a founding member of the Arctic Club and served as the Explorers Club’s second president, was a noted Arctic By James W. Reid explorer and mountain climber, albeit one with a somewhat dubious sense of direction. The club was incorporated with an initial membership of about fifty men of this ilk. The Explorers Club’s stated intention was to be “an organization to unite explorers in the bonds of good fellowship and to promote the work of exploration by every means in its power.” It inaugurated an exploration fund to further its members’ efforts and it initiated an ongoing lecture series that continues to this day. Its annual banquet of unusual edibles is legendary. The club’s first headquarters was in the Studio Building at 23 W. 67th Street. A New York Times article from 1905 describes it: The rooms of the club are not luxuriously furnished, but there is a plain simplicity about this first home of explorers, resident or visiting, in New York that betrays the simplicities of men of energy, to whom indolent luxuries are unknown. The walls of the club are covered with interesting paintings of scenes familiar enough to the men who explore unknown places, but that are strange and instructive to the average townsman. Many of these arctic pictures, these forest views are done by F. W. Stokes and Tappan Adney, both travelers in far countries. Once established, the Explorers Club moved several times over the years before settling in its current location in 1965, the handsome neo-Jacobean mansion at 46 East 70th Street originally built in 1910 for Stephen C. Clark, heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. The building was acquired in 1960, largely using funds generously donated to the club by member Lowell C. Thomas. It is named in his memory. Fittingly, its door is just steps away from José de Creeft’s picturesque Central Park Alice in Wonderland sculpture, which, though unrelated, evokes the many “wonderlands” discovered by Explorers Club members. FIG. 1 (above): Plaque in the foyer of the Explorers Club detailing some of its members’ achievements. Photo : Hendrik Smildiger. FIG. 2 (upper right): Flag of the Explorers Club. FIG. 3 (below): Author and Explorers Club member James W. Reid making a presentation to King Dedyalagni (Agoli Agba III), Abomey, Republic of Benin, 2001. Author’s photo.
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