Explorers Club FIG. 4: Lobby of the Explorers Club. Photo: Hendrik Smildiger. FIG. 5: Façade of the Explorers Club, New York City. Photo: Hendrik Smildiger. The club has evolved to encompass thirty chapters throughout the world and its members have expanded their exploration activities from the earth and its oceans to outer space. The best-known club members represent a litany of the twentieth century’s internationally distinguished and famous, including Senator John Glenn, General Chuck Yeager, L. Ron Hubbard, Gene Roddenberry, Robert Ballard, James Cameron, Admiral Richard E. Byrd, and Charles Lindbergh, to name just a few. Members who were also American presidents include Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Herbert Hoover. In 1981, the club welcomed its first female members, among them Teddy Roosevelt’s great-granddaughter, Anna Roosevelt, who discovered important Neolithic cave paintings in the Amazon. The vast spectrum of Explorers Club members’ accomplishments is remarkable. A plaque in the foyer of the Lowell Thomas Building testifies to the many “firsts” accomplished by club members. Matthew Henson and Robert Peary were the first to reach the North Pole in 1909, while Roald Amundsen was the first to arrive at the South Pole in 1911. In 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary summited Mount Everest for the first time and in 1960 Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard descended in the bathyscaphe Trieste to the deepest point of the oceans: 35,798 feet in the Marianas Trench. Finally, in 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin achieved what had always seemed a dream, landing on the surface of the moon. From the moment that one enters the club, a unique voyage of exploration begins. The magnificent interior décor is highlighted by glorious stained glass windows and by a majestic fireplace in the second-floor dining room, where lectures are held. Nearby, a superbly imposing taxidermied polar bear conjures up memories of a bygone era, as does a prolific ensemble of paintings representing places visited by explorers. Artifacts from members’ travels are everywhere to be seen, including sleds used by Henson and Peary in 1909, and by Sir Hubert Wilkins in 1928. Other artifacts range from Thor Heyerdahl memorabilia to a “yeti scalp.” The club’s famous world globe stands in a location of pride on the first floor. A hallway on the third floor serves as a private gallery for photographs by Explorers Club members depicting indigenous peoples spanning the world. As showcased in this article, some of these images are familiar and some are obscure, but all are magnificent and stand as a testament to the club’s members, who have risked their lives to increase mankind’s understanding of the world and its varied cultures. The remarkable eclecticism of these photographs of South Africa, the Belgian Congo, French Cameroon, Brazil, British Guyana, Papua New Guinea, and the U.S. Southwest demonstrates club members’ penchant for seeking out distant human cultures every bit as much as the foyer plaque succinctly details their discoveries of faraway places. With thanks to Explorers Club President Alan H. Nichols for his gracious cooperation and to Mary French, Curator of Archives, Collections, and Books, for her dedicated professional research regarding photographic data.
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