#samharris series

The Secrets Behind Africa Green

11 October 2021 by PJ Skinner 1 Comment

Truth is stranger than fiction

Bruno and Bala

Lucius, the alpha male chimp in Africa Greene is based on Bruno, the first chimp rescued by the Tacugama Sanctuary in Sierra Leone. In 1989. Accountant Bala Amarasekaran and his wife Sharmila were in a small village 150 kilometres north of the capital Freetown when they saw a young male chimpanzee for sale. They paid US$30 to rescue the animal and raised it in their home. After they rescued a second chimpanzee, Jane Goodall, a world reknowned expert, advised them to set up a sanctuary for abandoned and rescued chimps. With the help of land from the government, the Amarasekarans soon had 24 chimpanzees at the sanctuary.

Somehow, the santuary escaped the worst of the civil war and thrived. Bruno grew to be an imposing and unusual size for his species. He became the leader of the abandoned chimps. I saw Bruno when I visited the sanctuary in 2003 and we had to duck because he threw stones at us. In April 2006, 31 chimpanzees escaped from the sanctuary led by Bruno. Unfortunately they came in contact with four men who were in a taxi on their way to visit the sanctuary. In the ensuing chaos, one man was killed and the others injured as the chimps attacked them. Of the chimpanzees that escaped, 27 soon returned, but Bruno was among the four that did not. He has never been seen again, but images of him living with wild chimpanzees have been captured on wildlife cameras.

Prospects look gloomy for the wild chimps of Sierra Leone. In the early 1970s an estimated 20,000 of them lived there. Today there are only around 5,000. More than 100 are in the sanctuary at Tacugama. If you are interested, you can support the Tacugama centre’s work. This now includes visits to local schools and rural communities to raise awareness of the need to protect chimpanzees and their habitat

Africa Green

PJ in Sierra Leone

In 2003, I visited Sierra Leone to work in the diamond fields, just after the peace treaty had been signed ending the civil war. The country was still devastated, and the roads were lined with burned-out cars and villages. People were traumatised, and the evidence of rebel brutality could be seen every where, especially in the amputated limbs of the beggars in Freetown. I used material from my visits there to write The Star of Simbako and Africa Green While I was staying in Freetown, I drove out to the Tacugama Sanctuary to visit the chimps. On our way back from the sanctuary, we had a puncture. Some Nigerian peacekeepers helped us to change the tire. They insisted on taking a photograph with me. Sierra Leone is a lovely country and I still hope to go back some day.

I am researching a third book for the Green Family Saga, which will follow Liz Green as she escapes her troubles in London and moves back to Ireland to rescue a large country house. I am also writing a murder mystery set in space, of which more later.

Enjoy Africa Green. I think it’s my best yet.

Enjoy the lovely Autumnal weather.

Best wishes

Harriet Chalmers Adams

25 October 2020 by PJ Skinner Leave a Comment

Hi Folks,

I just finished writing Rebel Green and my manuscript is now with the editor and hope to publish on or around Christmas Day. I will put up a pre-order soon and a link for Beta Reader to get a sneak peek. Meanwhile, I thought you would enjoy looking into the lives of famous women adventurers you may never have heard of.

Harriet Chalmers, a California native, was one of the most celebrated American explorers from 1904 until her death in 1937. She became an expert on Latin America, and her knowledge was valued by government and business, and in academic circles. Adams was one of the first American women elected to membership in the Royal Geographic Society of London (1913). She was a prolific writer, contributing twenty-one articles to the National Geographic Magazine.

Perhaps the lack of a son created the then unusual situation of Harriet’s father Alexander treating his younger daughter as he would have treated a boy. At age eight, Adams and her father travelled on horseback throughout California and the Sierra Nevada. When she was fourteen, they journeyed to Oregon, and from there to Mexico before returning to Stockton. She later declared these journeys made her over “from a domestic little girl fond of knitting and skipping rope to one who wished to go to the ends of the earth and to see and study the people of all lands (HCA 1914).”

As an adult she managed to tum her passion for adventure and exploration into a successful vocation. Adams’ formal education lasted only until age eleven, and from that point consisted of exploration with her father, voracious reading, and lessons with private tutors. During this period, she developed keen powers of observation and a systematic thoroughness that later garnered the respect of other geographers and explorers.

Adams possessed an affinity for language and was fluent in Spanish and French, and conversant in Portuguese, Italian, and German. When the Spanish dictator Primo de Rivera asked whether she spoke Spanish, Adams responded, “Ungrammatically and enthusiastically”.

In 1900, Adams went on her first major expedition, a three-year trip around South America with her husband, during which they visited every country, and traversed the Andes on horseback. The New York Times wrote that she “reached twenty frontiers previously unknown to white women.” In a later trip she retraced the trail of Christopher Columbus’s early discoveries in the Americas, and crossed Haiti on horseback.

In 1907 her husband Frank began working for the Pan American Union, and Adams published her first article in National Geographic Magazine and delivered her first public lecture. Adams’ relationship with National Geographic lasted until the mid-1930s, but, despite her loyalty, they treated her as an adventurous traveller rather than a serious explorer, refusing to fund her expeditions.

Adams served as a correspondent for Harper’s Magazine in Europe during World War I. She was the only female journalist permitted to visit the trenches.

In 1925, Adams helped launch the Society of Woman Geographers. The New York Times wrote “Harriet Chalmers Adams is America’s greatest woman explorer. As a lecturer no one, man or woman, has a more magnetic hold over an audience than she.” She was the third American woman asked to join the Royal Geographical Society in England. However, the New York-based Explorers Club gave her and other prominent female adventurers the cold shoulder. (The Explorers Club didn’t allow women to join until 1981.)

Men “have always been so afraid that some mere woman might penetrate their sanctums of discussion that they don’t even permit women in their clubhouses,” Adams once said, “much less allow them to attend any meetings for discussions that might be mutually helpful.”

When she and her husband visited eastern Bolivia during a second extended trip to South America in 1935, she wrote twenty-one articles for the National Geographic Society that featured her photographs, including “Some Wonderful Sights in the Andean Highlands” (September 1908), “Kaleidoscopic La Paz: City of the Clouds” (February 1909) and “River-Encircled Paraguay” (April 1933). She wrote on Trinidad, Surinam, Bolivia, Peru and the trans-Andean railroad between Buenos Aires and Valparaiso.

By the end of her life, Adams had travelled more than 100,000 miles in South America, mostly on horseback, and spent time in every country. She later visited most Indian reservations in the United States to study linguistic and cultural similarities and differences among tribes of North and South America.

For more than twenty years, Adams captivated audiences as she recounted her adventures in lectures all over the U.S. She was widely respected by her peers, male and female She was called the “Mrs. Marco Polo of the Americas,” and the “world’s greatest woman explorer”.

While her written work initially made her famous, her lectures sparked a love affair with her audiences and the media. The combination of personality, delivery, knowledge, and visual aids made her programs enthralling. She always spoke to packed houses, sometimes to 1,500 people at a single lecture. Handbills announcing upcoming programs claimed there is no greater lecturer today, man or woman, who possesses a more magnetic hold over the audience nor a greater personal charm than she.