“I wanted to go everywhere. I would have started on a day’s notice for the North Pole or the South, to the jungle or the desert. It made not the slightest difference to me.”

So wrote Roy Chapman Andrews in Under a Lucky Star when describing his enthusiasm for exploration at the beginning of his career. Andrews never reached the Poles, and he gained his greatest fame for expeditions to the Gobi Desert of Mongolia during the 1920s.

But earlier expeditions took him to different terrains and locations, including Saint Paul’s Island, one of the Pribilof Islands of Alaska. Andrews, a zoologist by training, spent several weeks there during the summer of 1913, studying fur seals and taking still and moving photographs.

“For hours I lay concealed shooting bits of intimate seal life with the movie camera,” he reports in Under a Lucky Star. Andrews biographer Charles Gallenkamp notes that these efforts yielded “some of the most detailed footage of seals ever captured on film.” of charge.

“Don’t Court Hardships”

“Don’t court hardships,” advised Roy Chapman Andrews in On the Trail of Ancient Man. “Then…you are ready to take it in your stride and laugh while it is going on.” Andrews followed this advice when he inadvertently shot himself while trying to un-holster his revolver during the 1928 Gobi field season.

Andrews recorded his experience in The New Conquest of Central Asia. A .38-caliber bullet intended for a wounded antelope passed through the explorer’s left leg instead. Andrews noted that “I felt almost happy” after verifying that the bullet had not damaged his knee. There would be no “stiff leg for the rest of my life.”

With McKenzie Young (chief of motor transportation) acting as surgeon’s assistant, the camp doctor operated on the wound. Andrews noted that Dr. Perez “had given me such a dose of morphine that the world looked bright and rosy; in fact, I was rather pleased with myself.” The arrival of a lengthy sandstorm (and the fading of the morphine) “obscured my particular sun” later on. Nonetheless the wound healed without complication.