Roy Chapman Andrews was a Naturalist and Explorer, who worked in American Museum of Natural History (New York City, U.S.A).
Background
Roy Andrews was born on the twenty-sixth of January, 1884 in Beloit, Wisconsin, United States. Chas. E. Andrews was his father and Cora M. Chapman was his mother. In 1919 Roy Chapman arrived in China. Most of his life he lived and worked in Beijing. Andrews was a Leader of Third Asiatic Expedition of American museum.
Education
He graduated from Beloit College in 1906. Andrews had taken a master's degree from Columbia University in 1913; he received honorary doctorates from Brown University in 1926 and Beloit College in 1928.
Career
He went to New York to seek employment at the American Museum of Natural History, volunteering to scrub floors when no other positions were available. He assisted in the taxidermy department of the museum and soon received a field assignment to bring in the skeleton of a whale beached on Long Island. This initiated his scientific investigations of whales, and he was soon established as the world's leading whale authority. In his pursuit of these and other studies, Andrews traveled to Alaska, the East Indies, Japan, and Korea. He identified large "devilfish" off the Korean coast as the California gray whale, then considered an extinct species. After 1915 Andrews concentrated on land explorations; his initial foray had been into the dense northern forests of Korea, but his dream was to test the theory of Henry Fairfield Osborn that central Asia was the home of the primitive man and the source of much of the animal life of Europe and America. This work began in 1916 with a small zoological expedition to the periphery of the central Asian plateau in southwestern China and Burma. After a delay caused by World War I, during which Andrews served in Peking for the naval intelligence service, the youthful explorer returned to the United States to plan and finance his ambitious decade-long project. Andrews presented his project as a new type of exploration, a mammoth cooperative venture of various sciences, utilizing innovative techniques, including automobiles for desert exploration. He got the necessary financial support and set out in 1921. He repeatedly led teams into the less-known portions of China, Borneo, and central Asia.
He served as director of the American Museum of Natural History from 1935 to 1942, then devoted the rest of his life to writing and lecturing. A spellbinding lecturer and storyteller, he relished his popular image as a romantic explorer but claimed that life was really more dangerous in American cities than in the Gobi Desert.
Achievements
Works
Other Work
''Camps and Trails in China”
(This work was published by D. Appleton & Co., N.Y. City.)
“Across Mongolian Plains”
(This work was published by D. Appleton & Co., N.Y. City.)
“Whale Hunting with Gun and Camera”
(This work was published by D. Appleton & Co., N.Y. City.)
Membership
Beijing club
,
China
Explorer’s club
,
United States
Century club
Connections
In October 7, 1914 Roy Andrews and Yvette Borup got married.