Douglas Carruthers and Geographical Contrasts in Central Asia The First Douglas Carruthers Memorial Lecture

Abstract

WE ARE here tonight to honour the memory of Douglas Carruthers and to do somet ing, I hope, to conti ue his tradition. Born in 1882, Douglas Carruthers, who died in 1962, was one ofthe really remarkable scientific explorers of this century (Plate IV). When a boy, as he wrote himself, he wanted to cross what in those days was still called 'Darkest Africa', to see the rock-hewn ruins of Petra, and to reach 'that strange capital at the back ofthe world, Bukhara' (Beyond the Caspian, London, 1949 p. ix). Before he was 26, he had done all three. In 1904-05, he was in the part of Syria that is today Lebanon, at the American University in Beirut, where he made scientific collections, especially of birds, and another collection which he sent back to England. This earned him the opportunity to go to Africa with the British Museum Ruwenzori Expedition of 1905-06. After ascending Ruwenzori and making collections there, he and another man did in fact cross Africa from east to west, coming out down the Congo. In 1907-08, he spent two years in what was then Russian Turkistan, where he made great scien? tific collections, including one or two species that were named after him. In later years, he was once asked what region he would choose if he had to stay in some one place for the rest of his life. His answer was, 'the region of Bukhara-Samarkand. It has the most magnificent mountains, it has the loveliest climate, it has the nicest people'. After Russian Turkistan, he explored in desert Arabia and collected specimens of the fast-vanishing oryx. This was the subject of his book, Arabian Adventure (1935). In 1910-11, at the age of only 28, he led a remarkable expedition, accompanied by J. H. Miller, a big-game hunter (later killed at Gallipoli), and M. P. Price, who stayed on in Russia, reported the Russian Revolution as a journalist, and was later a Member of Parliament. Price was the botanist of the expedition. They explored the head-waters of the Yenisey and got up into the territory which was known in those days as Uriankhai and is today the Tuva Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic?for centuries a debatable land between the Tzarist Empire of Russia and the Manchu Empire of China, which in 1944 finally voted itself into the Soviet Union (Fig. 1). In these territories and in the Altai, they were in the ancient homeland of the Turkish-speaking peoples whose migrations in the course of history reached the Arctic, the Great Wall of China, the Indus and the Mediterranean. From there, they went into north-west Mongolia, then into Dzungaria, the northern part of Sinkiang or Chinese Turkistan, the lovely valley and ice-capped mountains of Ili, and in the end came out via Kashgar and over the Karakoram route into Ladakh, Kashmir and India. Almost immediately after this journey, for which he was awarded the Patron's Medal of our Society, he made a reconnaissance