The honey glazed tarantulas were quite tasty, reminiscent of shrimp, but I found the skewered scorpion a little sharp. The cockroach on sweet mini-pepper slices was suitably crunchy with a creamy aftertaste, but I thought the roasted crickets a bit bland and the optic globule fritters somewhat on the chewy side.
No, I wasn’t a participant on the television show Fear Factor, though I was filmed by both CNN and National Geographic Television while feasting on these aforementioned delicacies. Rather I was attending the Centennial Dinner of the Explorers Club in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in downtown Manhattan.
Joining me were over 1600 others including Sir Edmund Hillary, lunar astronaut Buzz Aldrin, submariner Don Walsh (the first to reach the seven-mile ocean depths of the Marianas Trench), and Dr. Ken Kamler, who performed emergency surgery on casualties of Everest at an altitude of over 20,000 feet.
Canadian content was provided by British Columbia native Wade Davis, an ethno-botanist whose work on the creation of zombies in Haiti was the basis for the best seller The Serpent and the Rainbow. The book was subsequently made into a hit movie by Universal.
Dr. Peter Lewin, a University of Toro
nto Faculty member who autopsied the Egyptian mummy Nakht, was also in attendance as was Torontonian Bill Jamieson, who recently discovered the mummy of Ramses I in a collection he purchased from a defunct Niagara Falls museum. The pharaoh was later repatriated to Egypt.
Journalist and war correspondent Henry Collins Walsh founded the Explorers Club in 1904. At present it has three thousand members from all over the world including almost a hundred Canadians, many recently recruited by Joseph Frey, the new Canadian Chapter Chairman.
The Explorers Club annual dinner finds its roots in the Arctic Club, founded by physician and polar explorer Dr. Frederick A. Cook. This group in turn owes it origin to a boisterous dinner party held in Nova Scotia in 1894. Cook had attempted to bring a large contingent professionals and students to the Arctic aboard SS Miranda that year.
After a series of misadventures, the vessel sank, but all aboard, including the engineer’s canary and the ship’s cat, were saved and brought to my home province in Atlantic Canada. A joyous celebration ensued which sowed the seeds for the Arctic Club and became an annual tradition.
Ten years later, the Explorers Club absorbed the Arctic Club. Though the name disappeared, the Arctic Club’s tradition of a boisterous annual dinner was retained.
Members of the Explorers Club have encompassed not only polar explorers such as Roald Amundsen, Robert Scott, and Ernest Shackleton, but have included underwater pioneers like Robert Ballard, aviators including Charles Lindbergh and Chuck Yeager as well as astronauts John Glenn, Neil Armstrong and cosmonaut Viktor Savinykh. Anthropologists such as Richard and Louis Leakey, and Jane Goodall have graced the club’s rolls, and likewise Thor Heyerdahl, Tenzing Norgay, who climbed Everest with Hillary, and even Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry.
Presently the club is located in the Lowell Thomas Building, a Tudor mansion on New York’s East 70th Street. It houses such rarities as a table linked to Prince Henry the Navigator, sledges used in early polar expeditions and a great deal of artwork, and documents related to early exploration. A large stuffed polar bear surveys guests as they mount to the second floor.
The Explorers Club’s av
owed purpose is to support field research, scientific exploration and to maintain “…the ideal that it is vital to preserve the instinct to explore”. Members and Fellows of EC must be able to demonstrate active participation in these activities, though others may join as Friend’s with the privilege of participating in many of the club’s functions.
One might ask how consuming grubs and insects (the “road kill” buffet as my stepdaughter Meaghan calls it) relates to exploration. “Exotics” is the preferred EC term. Long before tacky reality shows had people gobbling down strange foods, the Explorers Club featured a buffet devoted to the exotic dishes which early explorers had to consume in order to survive in strange and far-off lands.
Even today, when refrigeration and processing make foods easier to transport and store, it may not be practical to bring large supplies deep into the jungle or other remote areas. Even if it were feasible, an explorer invited to dine as a guest of a local tribe can’t risk offending his hosts by refusing their “delicacies”. (My first experience of this was at age 15, chowing down on Giant Guinean Rat and fufu at a village in West Africa.) I should point out that the club is careful not to put any endangered species on its “exotics” menu.
After the exotics we made our way to the main ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria. Here we dined on more mundane fare of thick steaks washed down with a large selection of New Zealand wines, fitting since our headline speaker was New Zealander Edmund Hillary (who passed away in 2008 after this article was written). (Also fittingly, I managed to spill a glass of the pinot noir on my hitherto pristine copy of Hillary’s book, High Adventure, which the famous mountaineer had signed).
To start off the 100th Annual Dinner EC President Richard Wiese rode horseback onto the stage. Wiese’s charisma and movie star good looks, as well as a solid background of exploration have made him an able spokesman for the Explorers Club. Unfortunately his horse exhibited less decorum than its rider, depositing a small present on the table directly in front of Sir Edmund, who seemed quite unmoved by the whole event.
Later, Jim Fowler, honorary President of EC and former co-star of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, livened things up by bringing out a playful lion cub and a large eagle. At one point a two-meter long python crawled across the stage, ducking in and out from the head table. This did not appear to faze the head table guests who besides Hillary and his wife, included Bertrand Piccard, the first (with Brian Jones) to balloon non-stop around the world, and Steven Squyres, who is principal investigator for the Mars Rover Project. Also present were moon-walker Buzz Aldrin, renowned marine biologist Sylvia Earle, and many others from the “Who’s Who” of the exploration world.
Sir Edmund recounted in a warm, humorous and totally unpretentious manner the perils involved in climbing across the Khumbu glacier, up to the Western Cwm and South Col of Everest to eventually reach the 29,000-foot summit of the world’s highest mountain. Gaping crevasses and looming ice pinnacles called seracs threatened their lives at every turn. After great hardship, compounded by the rarefied oxygen of Everest’s heights, they obtained their goal. Hillary’s first words to Tenzing Norgay on the peak were, “We got the bastard.” He confessed that he later got a letter from his mother soundly scolding him for this breach of manners.
The Explorers Club welcomes qualified new members. For further information go to www.explorers.org, or to the Canadian chapter’s web site at www.explorersclub.ca.
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Photo Credits
More exotic foods at the Explorer’s Club, courtesy of The Explorer’s Club
The famous sign, courtesy of The Explorer’s Club
The author consuming an eight legged delicacy at the “Exotics” buff © George Burden
Sir Edmund Hillary and his wife at the Explorer’s Club head table at the Waldorf Ballroom, March 2004 © George Burden
Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary, Wikipedia
Article first appeared in The Medical Post.
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