The Lady and the Panda (4 page)

Too busy romping in the most notorious city in the world, Bill was not aboard the ship, the
Empress of Asia,
as it pulled away with the rest of his party. Realizing the clutch he was in, he cabled Griswold with a one-word message—SKILLIBOOTCH—which reached the
Empress
as she entered the harbor of Nagasake. It was “Bill's own invention,” Griswold would explain later, “and used to indicate an attitude of encouraging nonchalance.” In a series of maneuvers worthy of Errol Flynn, Bill Harkness quickly grabbed an express boat out of Shanghai and hopped a train at Kobe, calmly materializing in Yokohama in time to meet the ship.

Bill was at the top of his game. At thirty-two he was fit, happy, and,
having pulled off the trapping of the great Komodo lizards, successful. He had now established himself as a gifted hunter.

Back in New York in May 1934, showing off what
The New York Times
called three “Big Dragons,” the Ivy League adventurers found that the experience had only whetted their appetite. They began plotting their next collaboration.

With “a yearning desire to blaze new trails in the field of zoology,” Ruth said, Bill next made a plan as dangerous and exotic as they come. He and Griswold intended to travel to the other side of the world to capture the biggest prize of them all—a live giant panda. Very few people had ever seen one of these animals alive. Most of the population beyond the Tibetan borderland had never even heard of one. The animal was so little known, in fact, that when Bill first mentioned it to Ruth, she thought he had intended to say “panther,” not panda.

HE MEANT PANDA
all right, and that summer of 1934, he brought Ruth up to speed on the animal that was the hottest treasure in the world. Even in its native haunts, where animals were seen as sources of medicine and myth, symbols for poets and artists, little had ever been written about the panda. It was a living mystery in a mysterious region, a place that in the twenties and thirties was absolutely fascinating to Americans. And as intriguing as China was, high Tibet tantalized imagination even more, seeming as much fancy as fact. Everything related to the search for the giant panda appeared rather otherworldly, as decade after decade, the animal dodged Western stalkers with an uncanny, some would say supernatural, skill. Yet each passing year, the brutal and punishing competition was becoming more of a siren call, one that often led to death, ruin, or disappointment.

It had all begun in the spring of 1869 with the journey of a French Lazarist missionary, Père Armand David, through Baoxing, or what was then known as Muping. The holy man, who was also a naturalist of some repute, was invited for tea and biscuits at the home of a local landowner. When he noticed a great woolly pelt of a black-and-white bear, he immediately
grasped its significance. Though he would go on to be the first to describe much of this portion of the natural world to the West, and have many species named after him, nothing in his illustrious career would compare to this one dazzling moment of discovery.

Commissioning a group of hunters, he would within weeks have two skins of his own—one of a young bear, another of an adult. He wrote in his diary that this “must be a new species of
Ursus,
very remarkable not only because of its color, but also for its paws, which are hairy underneath, and for other characters.”

He named the species
Ursus melanoleucus,
or black-and-white bear, and shipped the pelts off to Alphonse Milne-Edwards at the natural history museum in Paris, gushing that this new creature was “easily the prettiest kind of animal I know.”

While Milne-Edwards may have agreed with the assessment of the animal's beauty, he objected to the missionary's placement of it within the bear family, launching a debate about its classification—and whether it was closer to a bear or a raccoon—that would live on for more than a century. At the time, there was already one panda known to science, the little raccoonlike red panda. Milne-Edwards wanted the new animal to be called
Ailuropoda
(panda-foot)
melanoleuca
(black and white).

The creature would come to be known as the great panda, then the giant panda, and very quickly, in the assessment of historians, “the most challenging animal trophy on earth.”

The appraisal of experts in the field only made it more mesmeric. In 1908 famed botanist Ernest Wilson spent months surveying the kingdom of the panda. “This animal is not common,” he wrote, “and the savage nature of the country it frequents renders the possibility of capture remote.” Despite his extensive wandering in the heart of this habitat, Wilson himself never saw any more of the panda than its dung.

Still, he would consider himself lucky, for one could encounter worse things than failure when looking for pandas. There were natural calamities, injuries, and often confusion, as the men who came to hunt the panda would find themselves utterly lost in the unforgiving terrain. The best known cautionary story was that of J. W. Brooke, a contemporary of
Wilson's, who was killed by Yi tribesmen, then known as Lolo, during his hunting expedition in search of giant pandas and other trophies. Brooke had been arguing with a local chief, and in a Western gesture of conciliation, which did not translate, he reached out to touch the man's shoulder. His faux pas was met with a slashing sword. Injured and shocked, the explorer reflexively shot and killed the chief and then was killed himself by the outraged Yi.

So elusive was the panda at this point that even “possibly” being the first westerner to see one alive in the wild was an honor. And over the next few years, two men made that claim: brigadier general George Pereira, the British military attaché in Peking, and J. Huston Edgar.

Spotting something that looked like a giant panda in the fork of an oak tree a hundred yards away inspired Edgar to write the poem “Waiting for the Panda,” which read in part:

Considering how many people had tramped through bamboo forests without coming upon a giant panda, it was natural for some to wonder if the animal had gone extinct, or perhaps never actually existed at all. Perhaps it was just “a fabulous animal,”
The New York Times
speculated, “like the unicorn or the Chinese dragon.” As doubtful,
The Washington Post
said, as a sea serpent.

By the time Teddy Roosevelt's sons Kermit and Theodore decided to step in, “the world was agog with expectation.”

In the late 1920s, just returning from a central Asian expedition, the brothers reported hearing a seductive summons. “Spirits of the high places of earth, from the barren boulders and snows, hinted of days when the driving storm caked the ice on beard and face; spirits from the desert sang of blowing sand and blinding sun,” they wrote. Vowing not to return empty-handed, the brothers decided to head east in pursuit of the animal that had “never been killed by a white man.”

Funded by a generous patron of the Field Museum, to the tune, it was
reported, of $100,000, the Roosevelts traveled to panda country via French Indochina with a strong crew that included a handsome young Chinese American named Jack Young, who would go on to conduct many expeditions himself and play an important role in Ruth Harkness's life.

Grueling as the Roosevelts' journey was, the two brothers were successful, shooting a giant panda on April 13, 1929. In an impressive show of fraternal loyalty, they would always claim to have fired simultaneously, killing the animal together, and sharing the credit in equal parts.

As their panda, as well as the purchased skin of another, went to the Field Museum for examination, stuffing, and exhibition, envious natural history museums all over America began to pine for their own pelts. The Roosevelt triumph opened the floodgates, inflaming “the imaginations of the younger generation of American would-be explorers,”
The China Journal
would write, launching waves of daredevils in “expedition after expedition” that marched into “panda country along the Tibetan borders of West China after this rare and elusive animal.”

In New York, in the summer of 1934, as Bill spoke to Ruth about his own plans for a new expedition, the bar on panda hunting had been raised even higher. Killing a panda could still bring glory, as it had for the Brooke Dolan expedition in 1931 but capturing one alive would be a historic achievement.

Noting the competitive climate,
The Washington Post
predicted a gold rush. “Want to make a small fortune—perhaps as much as $25,000?” it asked. Nab a giant panda, and “the heads of all the zoos in the world will beat a path to your door to bid on it.” It warned, however, that if hunters wanted that cash, they would have to be quick, for it would be only the very first live panda that would warrant such a large payday.

Bill Harkness and Larry Griswold did hurry, making plans to leave by the end of September. During the frenzied preparations, however, Bill found himself overtaken by something beyond expedition fever. At the very last moment, he and Ruth decided to marry.

In a civil service in Rye, New York, on Sunday, September 9, 1934, Ruth Elizabeth McCombs and William Harvest Harkness, Jr., made their relationship official. Plain and simple, the ceremony was held in a municipal
building. There had been no ambition for a proper wedding, and now, with the latest news from the field coming in, there was no time for a traditional honeymoon. Just two days before Bill and Ruth's vows, explorer Dean Sage had reached one of the farthest outposts in China in his quest to land a giant panda. The race was on.

Heading up what newspapers loftily referred to as the GriswoldHarkness Asiatic Expedition, Bill and Larry, along with two friends, headed out on September 22 for what they said could amount to a threeyear endeavor.

That meant that within two weeks of her wedding, Harkness was anchored at home in New York City, sitting vigil for a man who had darted to the other side of the world in the company of his little hell-raising fraternity. Before marriage, she would have been free to travel, but now, with a husband gone on a major expedition, her duty was to sit tight.

AFTER A FEW WILD
adventures in and around Borneo, and some highclass socializing with Hollywood leading man Ronald Colman in Indonesia, Bill Harkness and company finally reached Shanghai in January 1935. Within weeks, everything began to deteriorate.

First of all, the members of the Griswold-Harkness Asiatic Expedition were bailing out at every turn, leaving only Lawrence Griswold's handsome and wild-hearted cousin LeGrand “Sonny” Griswold and Bill to carry on. Or attempt to carry on. They could go nowhere without permits, and the documents weren't materializing. Through charm and bribery, Bill Harkness had nimbly secured visas, permissions, and transportation in many countries. Here in China the bureaucracy wouldn't yield. His advancement was opposed by the all-powerful science bureau, Academia Sinica, and also by both national and provincial agencies concerned by the movement of Communist troops.

Nonetheless,
The China Journal,
a well-respected magazine with a scientific bent, reported that given Bill's experience and the time he had allowed himself for the hunt, his chances for success were good.

Early on, Bill met up with an interesting character, nearly a generation
older than himself, named Floyd Tangier Smith. Bill had money and no expedition, and Smith had expedition camps established in panda country and experience with Chinese officials, but no money. A partnership of mutual need was suggested. Ignoring his doctor's orders for three months of complete rest followed by a year of reduced activity, Smith signed on. Each man thought the other just might get him on track; neither had any idea of the deep and long-lasting consequences of their association.

The commencement of the new affiliation with Smith didn't seem to budge the permit process one bit, which led a frustrated Bill Harkness to begin a strange series of disappearing acts. The Shanghai papers just then were filled with stories of kidnappers and ransom schemes. Bearing a draft for five thousand dollars at the time of his first escapade, Bill seemed a likely target.

On March 18, United Press carried a dispatch about him headlined

SCIENTIST VANISHES FROM TRAIN IN CHINA: POLICE DOUBT THAT W.H. HARK-NESS HAS BEEN KIDNAPED. The story said the “seeker of wild animals” was reported missing “under mysterious circumstances,” having somehow evaporated on the train between Nanking and Shanghai four days earlier. The next day, UP announced that the “famed American naturalist” was just fine at the Palace Hotel, but that he was not forthcoming about what had happened.

Weeks later Bill went missing again. WILLIAM HARKNESS HUNTED IN CHINA: SHANGHAI POLICE SEEKING NEW YORK CLUBMAN ran the headline over an Associated Press report. It seemed that Bill was back on the lam, falling out of touch with his Western friends. His one original remaining expedition member, Sonny Griswold, confided it was clear that Bill had not been taken by bandits as had been reported. This time, Bill was found holed up in a hotel under the name Hansen.

When the frustrated explorer was dragged before the district attorney, he explained that he was trying to “forget” his great disappointment over failing to secure a permit for his expedition.

Worse, that same month, Bill slid further behind in the panda-hunting roster. The fourth panda to fall to a westerner was claimed by Captain
H. Courtney Brocklehurst, a Brit who had been a game warden in the Sudan. Yet, the tally of giant pandas taken by westerners was still, according to historians, remarkably low.

More than ever, big museums in America were in a froth to get their own specimens. “As a result,” historians have noted, “these hunting parties began to overlap with increasing frequency.”

It was an exciting time to be in the field. But that was the problem. Bill wasn't in the field, he was stuck in Shanghai. And there was a further humiliation in store, as the authorities decided to monitor him. He was ordered to report personally to the district attorney's office every three days to ensure that a U.S. marshal wouldn't have to go looking again. A dejected Bill Harkness declared he would leave soon for home.