Richard Mason (explorer)
| Richard Mason | |
|---|---|
Richard Mason c. 1961
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| Born |
10 April 1934 Hastings, Sussex, England |
| Died | 6 September 1961 (aged 27) Pará, Brazil |
| Occupation | Explorer |
| Partner(s) | Penny Knowles |
Richard Maurice Ledingham Mason (10 April 1934 – 3 September 1961) was an English explorer, and the last Englishman ever to be killed by an uncontacted Amazonian indigenous tribe.
Mason was born in 1934 in Hastings, Sussex. He was educated at Lancing College, and then read medicine at Magdalen College, Oxford. While at university he became involved with the Royal Geographical Society and made friends that would share his love of exploration. In 1958, with fellow Oxford undergraduate, Robin Hanbury-Tenison, he set out on his first expedition which involved traveling by jeep 6,000 miles across South America at its widest point, east to west from Recife, Brazil to Lima, Peru. They were the first explorers to make this journey.
In 1961, with the aid of the Society once again and additional funding from the Daily Express newspaper, Mason organized his second, and more ambitious expedition to South America. This would involve the exploration and mapping of the 1,100-kilometre Iriri River, a tributary of the Xingu in central Brazil, then believed to be the longest unexplored river in the world. He took with him fellow Oxford graduates, John Hemming, who was deputy leader of the expedition, and Christopher "Kit" Lambert. The three young men would be going where no Western man had been before. There were not only no maps, but no aerial photographs. By May 1961, the three were flying in a World War II Dakota plane to a small airstrip in the middle of the Amazon jungle called Cachimbo, 1,200 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro.
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