Martin and Osa Johnson

Martin Elmer Johnson (October 9, 1884 – January 13, 1937) and his wife Osa Helen Johnson (née Leighty, March 14, 1894 – January 7, 1953) were American adventurers and documentary filmmakers.

In the first half of the 20th century an American couple, Martin and Osa Johnson, captured the public's imagination through their films and books of adventure in exotic, faraway lands. Photographers, explorers, marketers, naturalists and authors, Martin and Osa studied the wildlife and peoples of East and Central Africa, the South Pacific Islands and British North Borneo. They explored then-unknown lands and brought back film footage and photographs, offering many Americans their first understanding of these distant lands.

Osa Leighty was born and raised in Chanute, Kansas. Although born in Rockford, Illinois, Martin Johnson grew up in Lincoln, Kansas, and Independence, Kansas.

Martin Johnson took part as a crew member and cook in Jack London's 1907–1909 voyage across the Pacific aboard the Snark. After that, he started a traveling road show that toured the United States displaying photographs and artifacts collected on the voyage. He met Osa Leighty while passing through her hometown of Chanute, Kansas, and they married in May 1910.

In 1917, Martin and Osa departed on a nine-month trip through the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and Solomon Islands. The highlight of the trip was a brief, but harrowing, encounter with a tribe called the Big Nambas of northern Malekula. Once there, the chief was not going to let them leave. The intervention of a British gunboat helped them escape. The footage they got there inspired the feature film Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Seas (1918).

...
Wikipedia