Nasty Monkey Bites! Sneezing At Tigers! Stiff Upper Lips! (Crikey!)

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Outside Magazine January 2002

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Nasty Monkey Bites! Sneezing At Tigers! Stiff Upper Lips! (Crikey!)
The Intrepid Travels and Incredible Tales of Col. John Blashford-Snell, Explorer

By Marshall Sella


	Colonel John Blashford-Snell, resplendent in Saville Row khaki, near his home in Dorset, England

Explorers are not a dying breed. For the most part, they are very actually dead. Admiral Scott perished in the whirling drift; the dry bones of Henry Stanley, last white man to hear Livingstone's voice, lie not in the Congo but in Pirbright, Surrey, though he's still a long way from home.

But a few old-school explorers are still hacking their way through the brush, square-jawed envoys to the secret world—and Colonel John Blashford-Snell is the most vividly drawn of the lot. He is quite possibly the only expeditioner who has his gear tailored on Savile Row. Or to have hauled an 800-pound grand piano 350 miles through punishing jungle deep in Guyana as a publicity stunt to raise relief aid for the flood-beleaguered Wai-Wai village.

There's no telling his life narrowly. Blashford-Snell was born in 1936 on the Isle of Jersey; his father was an army chaplain and his mother ran a menagerie of wounded and orphaned wildlife. Raised in the faded shadow of empire, Blashford-Snell spent 37 years in the British Army as a Royal Engineer. In 1968, when Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie invited the Army to attempt the first (and rather unlikely) descent of the Blue Nile, Blashford-Snell was called to lead it. When his team's aluminum boats proved impossible to use in African whitewater, he rigged up inflatable Avon boats with extra rubber coating, which had the advantage of bouncing off, not smashing upon, rocks. Because of this innovation, many credit Blashford-Snell with revolutionizing whitewater adventure.

After the Blue Nile voyage, the colonel and nine other "like-minded nutcases" cofounded the Dorset, England-based Scientific Exploration Society, which shepherds researchers on improbable diving-and-archaeology-and-cryptozoological expeditions into the world's last remote climes. Blashford-Snell is forever intertwining his trips with humanitarian work—bringing eye specialists to the Dalak Islands in the Red Sea to perform cataract surgeries on the locals, setting up communication links between children in far-off lands and schoolkids in Britain.

When he's not lost in the wilds, Blashford-Snell lives with his wife of 41 years in the unforbidding terrain of Dorset. We talked with him there one day after he'd returned from a South American expedition on the reed boat Kota Mama (devised to gauge whether ancient tribes could have traveled down the Amazon into the open sea)—and he was just about to make his first foray into the northeastern Indian state of Nagaland, which has only recently allowed foreigners across its borders.

Outside: You've got quite a life story. Even the bar-bones facts are unbelievable. Where are you off to next?

Blashford-Snell: Among other things, we'll be doing our fourth Kota Mama expedition. The first one was in 1998. We took a fleet of reed boats from Lake Titicaca to Lake Poop-. And we found a number of city sites on the way that were previously undiscovered. That was a short journey, only about 250 miles. The second time we went, in 1999, we built a much bigger reed boat and sailed from the southeast corner of Bolivia, 1,800 miles through the R'o Paraguay, the R'o P aran‡, the River Plate, and ended up in the Atlantic. Same time, of course, we did a lot of archaeology and community-aid projects—because you have to do the hearts and minds to get the people to tell you where the archaeology is. Along the route, we pulled out 1,500 teeth from the local Indians.

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