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"Adventure is worthwhile in itself."--Amelia Earhart "I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be a challenge to others."--Amelia Earhart |
By DA Watson
The Giant Panda, today recognized on sight by every schoolchild, was once only a 'phantom animal' to the Western world. No description of this animal even reached Western society until 1869, and it took another sixty-seven years for someone to bring a live panda out of China. That person was a brave and adventurous woman named Ruth Harkness, a New York fashion designer and socialite. Read how this unlikely heroine caused "panda-monium" in the Western world.
The giant panda was unknown to the Western world as late as 1869 when native hunters brought French missionary Père Armand David a dead specimen. The pelt of this animal was sent to the Museum of Natural History in Paris. The first Westerner to observe a live giant panda in the wild was German zoologist Hugo Weigold, who was part of the 1916 Stoetzner Expedition to China and Tibet. He obtained a panda cub from locals, but the cub did not survive.
On April 13, 1929, two of former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt’s sons, Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt, became the first Westerners to hunt and kill a giant panda, as an expedition sponsored by Chicago’s Field Museum to western China. This specimen was subsequently stuffed and exhibited at the Field Museum.
It was not until 1937, some sixty-seven years after the panda’s discovery by Westerners, that Ruth Harkness and Gerald Russell captured a live giant panda for the first time. During this period twelve well staffed and equipped professional expeditions failed to collect a single live specimen of the giant panda.
Since the discovery of the Giant Panda, the Western public had been clamoring for live specimens that could be kept and viewed in zoos. William Harkness, an independently wealthy gentleman who had captured Komodo dragons in the Dutch East Indies for the New York Bronx Zoo, was determined to bring back a Giant Panda.
In 1934, Harkness married a New York fashion designer named Ruth McCombs after a decade-long friendship. A scant two weeks after the wedding, he left Ruth behind and set off to China as part of a previously planned expedition to bring back a Panda. His party was delayed in Shanghai, and in February 1936 he died, not having fulfilled his goal.
Within days of learning of her husband’s death, Ruth decided to complete her husband’s quest. From New York, Harkness sailed through the Red Sea and to Ceylon, Singapore and Hong Kong before finally reaching Shanghai.
In Shanghai, Ruth did not hit if off with her husband’s partner, Floyd Tangier Smith. Instead, she contacted a well-known American-born Chinese hunter/explorer named Jack Young, who recommended his younger brother Quentin (Yang Tilin) for the job.
Ruth and Quentin hit it off, and got right to work organizing the expedition. Ruth had her husband’s sportswear tailored to fit her – even his woolen underwear and hobnail boots! Finally, on the night of September 26, 1936, the Harkness/Young expedition set out from Shanghai on the riverboat Whangpu. Included in Ruth’s gear was a small cardboard box containing her husband’s ashes, which she would later bury under a great rhododendron in the Mountains of the Immortals
Traveling over 1,500 miles up the Yangtze River, and then some 300 miles overland by foot, Ruth saw sights that few Westerners, let alone Western women, had ever seen. Traveling through valleys and cliffs, camping in the ruins of a Buddhist temple, Ruth found herself happy and at home in China. A Chinese name was given to her, Ha Kan Sse, approximating the sound of her last name. The Chinese meaning of the name, appropriately enough, is Sound of Laughter, Brave, Thought.
On November 9, 1936, she and her party found a three-pound giant panda cub, eyes not yet open, in a hollow tree. They named the cub Su-Lin - Chinese for "something very cute." Ruth had had the foresight to pack baby bottles and milk in the event a young panda was located. Both the expedition members and the Western scientific community mistook the cub for a female.
With cub in hand, the expedition moved quickly to depart. Hiking quickly, they reached the city of Chengdu within a week, and Ruth flew from there to Shanghai with the cub. There was some trouble in Shanghai, however, as Harkness did not have official permits to capture or transport wildlife. On December 2nd, however, Ruth was allowed to board the ocean liner ‘President McKinley,’ which was headed for San Francisco.
On December 7, 1936, Time magazine recounted the capture, calling it “a scientific prize of first magnitude.” Her husband’s former partner, Floyd Smith, was less than pleased that someone had beat him in the quest for a panda – let alone a woman. He charged that Ruth had in actuality taken a panda already “reserved” for him. Supposedly his hunters had located the mother some time previously, and had only been waiting for the baby panda to be weaned before moving in for the capture. Although today’s panda experts discount this claim, it was a source of irritation to Ruth at the time.
On December 18, 1936, Ruth returned to the U.S. carrying the first live panda onto American soil. Headline writers all over the country went wild – calling society’s reaction to the feat "panda-monium."
(Next: Panda Problems)
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