This Business of Exploring

For more books like this, please visit www.SportsmansVintagePress.com This is a facsimile of the book published in 1935. From the preface: I always like to shift the responsibility for a book of mine to some one else, or at least to divide it. The chief responsibility for this volume is my wife’s, for it was her suggestion that I write an informal account of my conception of modern exploration—the exploration of today and tomorrow—as I have told it to her. There was a selfish motive, too, for it may help to answer the questions which have come to me by the thousand: “How can I be an explorer?” “What remains to be done in exploration?” After telling in the first chapter what this business of exploration has become, I have amplified some of the details by my own experiences in the field and out of it. As a concrete example of modern scientific exploration I have given an account of the 1928-1930 Central Asiatic Expeditions in the Gobi Desert which has not been published in popular book form. These Expeditions were conducted with a background of war, banditry and politics in China, which made them interesting but exceedingly difficult.