Under a Lucky Star - A Lifetime of Adventure

Under a Lucky Star A Lifetime of Adventure by ROY CHAPMAN ANDREWS.Contents include: Chapter i Adventure Comes Early 1 1 2 I Meet a Whale 2 1 3 Submarine Courtship 32 4 Muscles and Murderers 40 5 Yokohamas Yoshiwara 50 6 Robinson Crusoes Isle 60 7 Typhoon 69 8 Yesterday in Japan 79 9 Strictly Personal Explorations 93 10 - Korean Devilfish and Killers 101 1 1 The Long White Mountain 1 09 12 A Harem on the Rocks 119 1 3 The Blue Tiger 126 1 4 Yunnan Adventures 135 15 Wartime Interlude 146 16 Dog Eats Man 158 1 7 Wall Street Ramblings 1 66 1 8 My Peking Palace 179 19 Marching Sands of the Gobi 185 20 The Emperors Bride 198 2 1 Where the Dinosaur Laid Her Eggs 210 8 CONTENTS Chapter 22 The Valley of the Jewels 217 2 3 The Great Dinosaur Egg Auction 225 2 4 Desert Dune Dwellers 235 25 Motoring Through a War 242 2 6 Politics and Palaeontology 251 27 Fate Takes a Hand 261 2 8 Dangling in the Depths 2 74 29 A Square Peg in a Round Hole 287 30 Berkshire Paradise 294. CHAPTER ONE. Adventure Comes Early. OFTEN I have had to sit on a lecture platform when I was going to speak, and listen to a long introduction. It bored me stiff and likewise the audience. I wanted to get at the business in hand and the job I came for. Thats the way I feel about this book. It is the story of a life in which I have had a lot of fun and excitement. So Tin going to begin the tale as quickly as possible without going back into an account of my ancestry and f amily Apropos of which George Putnam quotes the remark of a visiting author to his uncle Major Putnam, die matter of ancestry is all very interesting. Only, the present is so much more important than the past. I always think people who are too much concerned with the pedigree of their fore fathers are apt to be like potatoes the best part of them is underground. Of my early days there will be just enough to give a back ground for what follows. I dont think anyone except myself would give a tinkers damn about those boyhood years. As a rule, nothing of much interest happens to a young man until he is out of college. One chapter ought to suffice for the essential preliminaries. I was born in Beloit, Wisconsin, at approximately two oclock in the morning of January 26, 1884, when the temperature was thirty degrees below zero. I am told that my eyes were so slanted that when Father first looked at me he said, Why, Ive begot a Chinaman That remark was current in our family long before, in later life, I went to China to live for eighteen years. Beloit lay on the banks of the Rock River in a part of south ern Wisconsin that was all fields and woods and rushing streams. I was like a rabbit, happy only when I could run out of doors. To stay in the house was torture to me then, and it has been ever since. Whatever the weather, in sun or rain, calm or storm, day or night, I was outside, unless my parents almost literally locked me in. The greatest event of my early life was when, on my ninth birthday, Father gave me a little single-barrel shotgun. Previous to this I had been allowed to shoot Grandfathers muzzle loader once or twice, but it was too much f pr me to negotiate with its forty-inch-long barrel. It was with that little gun that I literally blew up my first wild goose. I was hunting just at dusk on the edge of a marsh north of Beloit. Six magnificent wild geese floating on a tiny patch of water showed up against the sunset sky. To stalk them, I had to crawl for nearly half a mile in mud and water, mostly on my stomach. Finally, I was near enough to shoot. At the roar of my gun, the three geese slowly collapsed with a gentle hissing sound, and out of a clump of bushes jumped Fred Fenton, a local sportsman. The sounds Fred made were far from gentle hissings...