Who was the real prototype of the hero of the adventure movie saga Indiana Jones

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Watching films about Indiana Jones, his incredible twists and turns in the most remote and exotic corners of the planet, it is easy to believe that this does not happen in real life. Perhaps it does not happen with ordinary people, but Roy Chapman Andrews was not ordinary - the thirst for adventure and discovery pushed him towards adventure, where he boldly set off in his unchanged felt hat with brims.

If you look at some of Roy Chapman Andrews' photographs, he can really be confused with Indiana Jones. The creators of the adventure movie saga never spoke directly about the specific image on the basis of which this hero was created, but if you look at Roy's life, it becomes obvious that a researcher who is closer in spirit and in the number (and quality!) Of adventures is unlikely can be found. And then, of course, there is also a hat.

Roy Andrews has a lot of photographs left, as he was lucky enough to marry at one time not only a woman who loved him in return and was also passionately in love with travel and exploration, but was also an excellent photographer. And in almost all of the photographs, Roy posed in his unchanging hat - whether it was the Gobi Desert in Asia, a country house in America, or even in an advertisement for a car (after all, Roy often had to find money for his travels on his own as well).

“I was born to be an explorer. I didn't even have to make a choice. I couldn’t do anything else and remain happy,”Andrews once said. As a child, as an ordinary rural boy in the outback of Wisconsin, Roy learned, like most boys of the time, to shoot well and make stuffed animals. He was particularly good at stuffed animals and started selling them, so Roy was able to find money for his college education.

For his first full-time job, Andrews chose the American Museum of Natural History, even if he only managed to get a job as a janitor. While he was sweeping the floors of the taxidermy department, Endus unobtrusively brought his own work to the museum for everyone to see. He could not boast of stuffed exotic animals (yet), but his own work of local animals was by no means worse than professional ones. A few years later, Andrews will return to work at this museum, but already working on a master's degree in theriology (the study of mammals).

In 1908, when Andrews was 24 years old, the museum invited him on an expedition to study whales. There was no need to ask Edrus twice. Over the next eight years, he changed from one whaling vessel to another, twice completely circling the globe. “In my first 15 years of field work, I can remember at least 10 times when I barely managed to avoid death. Twice I almost drowned in typhoons, once our boat was attacked by a wounded whale, once again my wife and I were almost eaten by wild dogs, while we were fleeing from fanatical priests-lamas, two more times I fell off the rocks. And once I was caught by a python, and twice more bandits could have killed me."

In general, life at Roy Andrews was really not boring. To support himself financially, Roy wrote stories about his adventures - thus he managed to find $ 30,000. However, these stories also served to motivate wealthier people to sponsor Andrews' adventures. For example, Andrews brought a huge skeleton of a beak-winged whale to the Museum of Natural History - the one where he once worked as a cleaner and where he threw stuffed animals. Andrews named it Mesoplodon bowdoini after the sponsor who gave the money for the trip, and the skeleton can be seen in the museum even today.

But Andrews was not famous for whales. The dinosaurs made him really famous. In 1922, he went to the Gobi Desert for the first time. While the rest of the researchers roamed the sands on the backs of camels, Andrews said he would ride cars. “This is not done in paleontology,” he was told. But Andrews did just that. Instead of carefully clearing the ground at the excavation sites with camel-hair brushes, he took a pickaxe and dug holes. Just like heavy cars, such a "barbaric" way of searching for fossils, to put it mildly, was not welcomed, but it was Andrews and his team who found the largest and most important finds - a huge number of large and small dinosaur fossils, the skull of an early mammal, and most importantly - he managed to find a whole nest of dinosaur eggs.

Until that moment, no one in the world had seen dinosaur eggs and they were talked about exclusively in theoretical terms. This was the first time the scientific world had received evidence of how ancient reptiles bred. Andrews found 25 eggs and brought them to America. Selling one of them later at auction, he was able to secure himself the finances for the next trip.

Later, recalling his trip to the Gobi Desert, Andrews admitted that he associates with Asia not only the joy of discovery, but also another episode when he was close to death. One day, as he was driving down the slope, he saw a group of horsemen waiting for him below, and these people were clearly not in a friendly mood, given that they all had rifles in their hands. He could no longer turn around at full speed, it was impossible to go around them, so Andrews decided to go to the ram. Like the real Indiana Jones, he drove his car straight at the riders - the horses panicked and reared, throwing their riders off, and Andrews, as he drove by, pulled out his own gun and shot one of them in the hat. Of course, he could have killed a man with this shot, but, as he later admitted, "the temptation was too great not to shoot."

Another dangerous moment in this expedition was the attack of the snakes. One night, they literally attacked Andrews' team's tent city. Someone raised the alarm, people woke up and found that all the tents are literally teeming with poisonous reptiles. They strangled 47 snakes that night.

In 1930, with the beginning of the Great Depression, Andrews was unable to find funds for new expeditions. He became director of the American Museum of Natural History. Quite a good career considering where he started out at this establishment. In addition, he headed the Research Club in New York and retired in 1942 at the age of 58. Roy Chapman Andrews died at the age of 76 at home.

Now in that part of the Gobi Desert, where Roy Chapman Andrews once found the remains of dinosaurs, there is a museum and a large park dedicated to these ancient creatures. We just recently talked about this place in our article. "Where you can see dinosaurs kissing and tugging at the Gigantoraptor's tail."null