With a brilliant cast of larger-than-life characters and exotic locales, the catalogue for Christie's Exploration and Travel sale reads like a rollicking Boy's Own anthology of adventure lore. On September 26 and 27, the London saleroom in St. James's featured art and artifacts of fabled explorers: Captain James Cook, T. E. Lawrence, David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, Roald Amundsen, and Sir Ernest Shackleton, to name just a few. There were also treasures of obscure but no less extraordinary characters, like Cambridge-educated Eric Marshall, the surgeon on Shackleton's 1908-9 Antarctic expedition, who slogged 97 miles short of the South Pole with him, butchering ponies for meat and doling out cocaine tablets to keep the starving party marching. Back home, Marshall joined an expedition to Dutch New Guinea, where he eluded murderous tribesmen, reticulated pythons, and beriberi to emerge as the sole survivor. And then there's Howard Somervell, a missionary surgeon and member of the early British Mount Everest expeditions, who climbed to 28,000 feet without bottled oxygen in 1924, wearing a Norfolk shooting jacket.
William Hodges's View of a Mosque at Mounheer
Fine art is a perennial highlight; the sale included exceptional works by William Hodges, who sailed with Captain Cook to the Pacific and the Antarctic as expedition artist in 1772. His Indian landscape, "View of a Mosque at Mounheer," sold for £240,500. The sale's relics have a special allure. Having handily located Mr. Livingstone in the Congo in 1871, Henry Morton Stanley lit out on other adventures, including an expedition to the Sudan, gold watch in pocket--it sold for £25,700. Marshall's image of Shackleton's ravaged South Pole party fetched £2,750. A special category, "The Alps to Everest," celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Alpine Club, the world's first mountaineering society; high interest promises its return. John Ruskin's evocative watercolor drawing of the Matterhorn commanded a hammer price of £50,900 (estimate £15,000-20,000). Somervell's austere mountain paintings all sold on the high end or over the estimates.
First photo of the peak of Mount Everest
The breathtaking first views of the summit of Mount Everest, photographed during a 1933 bi-plane flight, sold for a total of £23,875. Then there were the intriguing photos from the 1951 Everest expedition of footprints, inscribed verso: "What it is, I don't know, but I am quite clear that it is no animal known to live in the Himalaya, & that it is big." Briton Eric Shipton was not the first mountaineer to be stopped in his tracks by the elusive Yeti--Reinhold Messner tells of his own close encounters--and probably not the last.
Photos of Yeti footprints on Mount Everest
And how could we not covet this most beguiling artifact: a miniature pocket globe, the Georgian-era gentleman's GPS. The three-inch terrestrial sphere, inscribed with the latest geographical discoveries, is nested snugly in a case depicting the heavens. For £18,500--more than triple the estimate--the lucky buyer now holds a perfect world in the palm of his hand.
Miniature pocket globe
--Kelly Tyler-Lewis
