Why I Married Adventure
Became a Worldwide Bestseller in 1940
“A pleasant, forthright…exciting book.”
—Clifton Fadiman, The New Yorker
“It makes good reading…at this dark hour, as good an ‘escape story’ as you are apt to run into for some time.”
—Atlantic Monthly
“I Married Adventure is a fine book on many counts…. A good travel book, a good adventure book, a good book about animals, a good book on photography, and, best of all…a good human story about two extremely likable people, told by one of them with simplicity, humor, [and] warmth.”
—Rose Feld, Books
“It isn’t just the animal-lover who will cherish this story. Anyone who likes a thrilling tale (a true one, too) with a plucky, nervy, cheerful, and charming hero and heroine is all set. I Married Adventure is as rare and real as the people who made it possible.”
—Olga Owens, Boston Transcript
“The reader is impressed with the tremendous industriousness of these two people, their physical endurance, their patience, their understanding of animals and natives, and their love for each other…. [The] old and young will enjoy this book. It is splendidly illustrated.”
—M. N. Baker, Library Journal
“Every page of her book is readable and exciting: the photographs are plentiful and have all the dramatic quality that we are used to in the camera work of the author and her husband.”
—Manchester Guardian
“The Martin Johnsons…were simple people who loved adventure,…animals, and who, thanks to a quiet singleness of purpose, must have lived a very happy life until Martin was killed in the crash of an American airliner. Their story…is almost as interesting for the picture it gives of two happy people as it is for the account of adventures in Borneo, Africa, and the South Seas…. I Married Adventure tells the whole story unaffectedly and with a simple charm that is highly engaging. It belongs in any list of Americana, for the Johnsons were as American as Davy Crockett.”
—Joseph Wood Krutch, The Nation
“I Married Adventure will delight the rocking-chair travelers and explorers and revive the urge in those who have wandered along the byways.”
—Linton Wells, Saturday Review of Literature
Books by Martin Johnson
1913
Through the South Seas with Jack London
1922
Cannibal-Land
1924
Camera Trails in Africa
1928
Safari
1929
Lion
1931
Congorilla
1935
Over African Jungles
1980
Martin Johnson’s Cannibals of the South Seas
(edited by Sondra Alden and Kenhelm W. Stott, Jr.)
Books by Osa Johnson
1930
Jungle Babies
1932
Jungle Pets
1939
Jungle Friends
1940
I Married Adventure
1941
Four Years in Paradise
1941
Pantaloons
1942
Snowball
1944
Bride in the Solomons
1944
Tarnish
1966
Last Adventure (edited by Pascal J. Imperato)
Kodansha USA, Inc.
451 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016, U.S.A.
Published in 1997 by Kodansha America, Inc.
by arrangement with The Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum, Chanute, Kansas.
First published in 1940 by J.B. Lippincott Company. Revised edition published in 1989
by William Morrow and Company, Inc.
Copyright © 1989 by the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum.
Photographs by Martin Johnson, used by permission of The Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum.
Foreword to the Globe edition © 1997 by Nancy Landon Kassebaum.
New Foreword by Kelly Enright, adapted from “Married to Adventure,” originally published in Wilderness magazine.
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Janet Hansen
Photograph: Martin and Osa Johnson.
Courtesy of the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier edition as follows:
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson, Osa, 1894–1953.
I married adventure: the lives of Martin and Osa Johnson/Osa Johnson; with a new introduction by Nancy Kassebaum.
p. cm.—(Kodansha globe)
ISBN: 978-1-56836-128-4
1. Johnson, Martin, 1884-1937. 2. Johnson, Osa, 1894-1953. 3. Photographers—United States—Biography. 4. Nature photography. 5. Wildlife cinematography. I. Title. II. Series.
TR140.J63J64 1997
910’.92’2
96-46392
[B]—DC21
Book design by Patrice Fodero
Maps by Vikki Leib
Ebook ISBN 9781568366005
v5.4
a
Contents
Cover
Books by Martin Johnson
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Illustrations
New Foreword
Foreword to the Globe Edition
Foreword
Note to the Reader
Map
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum
Index
With all my love,
I dedicate this book
to the memory of my husband,
whose work will be an everlasting monument
to his heroic dreams and indefatigable spirit.
List of Illustrations
Osa at the tender age of one
Osa’s parents
Osa’s birthplace
Martin, a dreamer at eleven
Martin
as a traveling photographer
Osa in a party dress
Martin, aboard Jack London’s Snark
The crew of the Snark
Osa in a Hawaiian costume
Martin’s theater in Independence, Kansas
Osa and Martin soon after their marriage
Osa and Martin as traveling lecturers
An advertisement for Martin’s barnstorming tour
Osa and Martin with Jack and Charmian London
Broadside advertising Martin’s first feature film
Osa and Martin with Charlie Chaplin
Osa in stage costume
Osa in a Gibson girl dress
Osa and Martin in the New Hebrides, South Pacific, 1917
Osa in a talking circle with native islanders
Campfire of island headhunters
Osa on the Kinabatangan River
On the Tuscon River, in search of the proboscis monkey
Orangutans in the Borneo jungle
Mother bear and cubs in Borneo
Osa on her Borneo houseboat, 1917
Osa drinks from a water-vine in the Borneo jungle
Osa and a native Borneo girl
Osa hunting, unhindered by her long summer dress
Osa atop a tame zebra
Osa watching a blow gun demonstration
Osa with Bessie, a baby orangutan
Osa with a bear cub
Osa with young macaques
Osa with a gray gibbon
Osa and Martin sailing home to America
Lake Paradise
A male leopard at a cave entrance
The Johnsons’ home near Lake Paradise
Young and old giraffes in flight
A newly born giraffe
Herders, in characteristic posture, watching their flocks
The guide, Boculy, and Osa examine an elephant track
In camp with friends and colleagues
George Eastman and Osa, baking bread in camp
George Eastman puzzles over a village name on a trip up the Nile
Wild hunting dogs
A charging rhino
Osa bringing home a meal
Osa comforts a dog who defended its master from an attacking leopard
A massive herd of elephants in Lorian Swamp
Grazing zebras
Giraffes on the Northern Frontier
A lioness waiting for prey
Feeding time for a pride of lions
A Meru dandy posing for Martin
A lion leaving its cave
A hyena peering about for prey
A leopard blends into the background
Adult female gorilla
Two young gorillas
Baby gorilla Snowball and chimpanzee Beebee
Martin with Snowball on his lap
A foraging elephant
Osa covers Martin as he photographs two huge elephants
Young male lions loafing
Elephants wading in a stream
By tripping a flash, this leopard took its own portrait
One of Martin’s favorite photos
A nighttime photo of a striped hyena
Two black rhinos
Martin’s tent in the Congo
Osa, up to her hips in trouble
Dining room at Lake Paradise
Osa’s bedroom at Lake Paradise
Martin’s laboratory at Lake Paradise
Osa and Martin with cameras and porters
Relaxing after a frightening buffalo charge
A village deep in the Ituri Forest
Osa checking her rifle
The Duke and Duchess of York with Osa
Osa and the Duchess of York on safari
An aardvark scouring for food
Four cheetah cubs in Osa’s lap
All the comforts of home
Osa typing while furry friends vie for attention
Bringing in guinea fowl and partridge
The Johnsons’ houseboat with the Spirit in tow
Simba
A lion attacking
A lion in repose
A gorilla in the Alumbongo Mountains
Mount Kenya camp and the Sikorsky aircraft
Osa, Martin, and friends from the American Museum of Natural History
A baboon at rest
Conquering Mt. Kenya by air
Mt. Kenya, shot from Osa’s Ark
New Foreword
In the course of their twenty years of traveling together, from 1917 to 1937, Martin and Osa Johnson explored—by boat, foot, car, and plane—islands of the Pacific, rivers of Borneo, and savannahs and forests of Africa. They made ten popular documentary films along with more than seventy lecture films. Between them they published 120 articles in publications ranging from Natural History (the journal of the American Museum of Natural History) and Forest and Stream to the Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan. They inspired a comic strip and a kids’ club. Osa created a line of clothing featuring safari-inspired colors, and a line of stuffed animals to accompany her charming children’s picture books. Advertisers posted Martin and Osa’s faces in magazine ads hoping to boost sales of everything from beer to batteries.
But behind their popular faces, lay the souls of true adventurers. As Osa explains in her autobiographical I Married Adventure, both she and Martin were from restless, adventurous lineages. Martin scored his first explorer gig on board Jack London’s Snark sailing to the South Seas. When back in Kansas (both were natives of the Sunflower State) lecturing with photographs from the trip, he and Osa met when she filled in as singer for his talk. Though she claims not to have been impressed by his work, the two were quickly married in a whirlwind affair. Not long afterwards, they embarked on their first married adventure to the South Seas, after which the couple were inseparable for two decades of adventure.
Unlike the dry, matter-of-fact work of many adventurers, the Johnsons’ work revealed their personalities. In their films, books, and public personas, they were real people. They were young and energetic. They mixed humor and humility with science and pop culture. President of the American Museum of Natural History F. Trubee Davidson, who knew the Johnsons well, wrote in the Forward to I Married Adventure: “Here, in a story about everywhere else in the world, is romantic Americana that will one day be history…. The bigger story is of their life, sometimes to be read between the lines, and not quite so much of the world they went to see as of the hearts they took with them.”
The Johnsons were both keen observers of the natural world. They wanted to understand and, especially later in their journeys, protect wildlife. About looking for lions at night, Martin wrote:
It was an eerie ride. There was no moon, the night was softly brilliant with the light of the low-hanging tropical stars, but the light was not intense enough to dispel the earth’s shadows, every one of which seemed to us, as we rode, our nerves strained for animal enemies, to harbor a living thing in its deep blackness. From all sides the noises of the plain beat on our ears. The laughter of the hyenas, which so often, when we were safe in camp, had been contagiously comical, sounded mocking, threatening.
When they saw a line of six lions running single file, he continued:
It gave me a strange feeling to see them. When you have lived all your life without seeing wild animals, you get used to thinking of lions and tigers as unrealities, belonging in the same category as witches and ghosts and other childish nightmares. And now here I was, wide-awake, alert, in the full bright light of an equatorial afternoon, watching lions as calmly as if they had been jack-rabbits started from the autumn woods of Kansas.
On a later journey, lions ha
d become more familiar. “We worked with lions, we ate and slept with their roars all around us,” said Osa. Their reputation for ferocity was not true, she asserted. Lions were part of “man’s dread of Africa,” but “curiously enough [man] is the only enemy the lion really fears…. For the most part, the lion is a thoroughly agreeable personage,” explained Osa. “He lives a most leisurely existence, loafs and sleeps a great deal, has just as playful moods as a house cat, and just as decided a personality. He minds his own business, is very fond of his family and takes his duties as a family protector very seriously.” It is this musing on the ways in which animals are relatable, the ways they are like humans, their capacity to feel emotions such as loyalty or laziness, that gave the Johnsons popular appeal.
Bridging the worlds of entertainment and adventure, the Johnsons brought exciting experiences in wild places to audiences unable to undertake such adventures themselves. Though largely forgotten today, they were celebrities in their time. The popularity of the Johnsons relied upon their partnership. Audiences loved the idea of a traditional marriage played out in the wild.
In many ways, the Johnsons subscribed to traditional gender roles. Martin was the cameraman and editor of the films—the “professional.” Osa made camp and prepared meals—the “housewife.” But Osa also hunted, fished, photographed, and protected Martin at the camera with her gun ready to shoot potential charging wildlife. Osa, Martin explained, “is a pretty woman” who looks wonderful in “the fuss and frippery of New York. But,” he continued, “I think her prettiest and I like best to see her in her wilderness wardrobe.”
Being in the wild became simply their way of life. When they spent four continuous years in Africa at Lake Paradise (now a part of Marsabit National Park), adventure was their daily diet: “How strange to be a man in this alien animal world!” declared Martin, “How strange that civilized man’s need to work should have brought me into this world that knows no work! How strange to go to sleep, looking forward to a day of routine photography, from a stuffy blind looking out on an African waterhole! A day of routine in a land where even routine can be called adventure….”