John Hemming (explorer)
| John Hemming | |
|---|---|
John Hemming c. 1961
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| Born |
5 January 1935 Vancouver, British Columbia |
| Occupation |
Explorer Author Anthropologist |
| Awards | Order of St Michael and St George |
| Website | www |
John Henry Hemming CMG (born 5 January 1935) is a Canadian explorer and author, expert on Incas and indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin.
Hemming was born in Vancouver because his Canadian father, Henry Harold Hemming OBE, MC, had been through the trenches in the First World War, saw the Second coming, and wanted him to be born in North America. So he sent John's mother, Alice Hemming OBE, a well-known journalist, on a cruise through the Panama Canal that ended in British Columbia. John and his sister Louisa were brought back to London when he was two months old. Though a proud Canadian he has not been there since 1967. He was educated in the United Kingdom at Eton College, in Canada at McGill University, and read history at Magdalen College, Oxford.
In 1961, with fellow Oxford graduates Richard Mason and Kit Lambert (who later managed The Who), he was part of the Iriri River Expedition into unexplored country in central Brazil. The Brazilian mapping agency, IBGE, sent a 3-man survey team to help map these unknown forests and rivers and gave the Expedition permission to name features it found. Sadly, after four months, an unknown indigenous people found the group's trail, laid an ambush, and killed Richard Mason with arrows and clubs. Mason was the last Englishman ever to be killed by an uncontacted tribe. His body was carried out and buried in the British cemetery in Rio de Janeiro. The tribe was contacted in 1973, and was called Panará: Hemming visited them in 1998 and wrote about this in The Times.
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