Friday, March 7, 2014

Your Daily Giant 5/3/2013


Today's Daily Giant comes from the Milwaukee Sentinel, November 1, 1914 pg 5. This story about the famous explorer Captain J. Campbell Besley also ran in the New York Times in a more expanded article. First, I found the following about Captain Besley in Theophilius L. Dickerson's Artisans and Artifacts of vanished races page 167.

"Captain J. Campbell Besley, adventurer and explorer, who arrived here recently with his party after more than a year exploring through the wilds of the Amazon Valley, started through South America from Lima, Peru and made his way across the continent from the source to the delta of the Amazon river in five months. He believes that his party is the only one that has ever accomplished this feat." From Today's article, "Capt. J, Campbell Besley, who returned from South America last February with the news that he discovered a lost city of the Incas, arrived in New York recently from his second expedition. Capt. Besley and his party found relics of a giant prehistoric race. One of their finds is an incomplete skeleton, including the skull, of a human being who must have been eight feet tall. Capt. Besley has brought back with him pictures of what he says is the true source of the Amazon river. The pictures are of a stream not two inches wide, filtering out near the top of a mountain 18,000 feet high in the Andes."

The book "The Lost City of Z", about the Amazonian adventure of Col. Percy Fawcett is an enthralling read that describes the unimaginable rigors of exploring the Amazon rain forest 100 years ago. Apparently, Capt. Besley can succeed at one of the most grueling and brutal adventures in five months but somehow he ate the wrong hallucinogenic plant and was unable to describe a giant skeleton correctly. Besley joins other explorers such as Captain Newton H. Chittenden who found giant skeletons in their explorations. Newton's find of a skull of an over 8 foot skeleton was reported in the Washington Post and he gave the skull to the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian's Annual Report of 1910 pg. 82, lists the giant skull being received and documented by the Smithsonian, from the report, "Chittenden, Capt., Newton H. Brooklyn N. Y. Skull of flathead Indian.(51082)."

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