John Hemming (explorer)

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John Hemming (born 1935) is a Canadian-born explorer and author.

Hemming was born in Vancouver - because his father had been through the trenches in the First War, saw the Second coming, and wanted him born in North America. So he sent John's mother on a cruise through the Panama Canal that ended in British Columbia; but John was brought back to London when he was two months old. He is a proud Canadian but has not been there since visiting Expo in 1967.

He was educated in the United Kingdom, at Eton College and reading history at Magdalen College, Oxford. When his first book, The Conquest of the Incas, was published in 1970; one reviewer believed that it was by a famous historian using a pseudonym, so high was the level of scholarship. (Hemming at the time was only a B.A.; he later got a D.Litt doctorate from Oxford.)

In 1961, with his Oxford friends Kit Lambert (who later managed The Who) and Richard Mason, he was on the Iriri River Expedition in totally unexplored country in central Brazil. The Brazilian mapping people, IBGE, sent a 3-man survey team to help map these unknown forests and rivers and gave the Expedition permission to name features it found. Sadly, after four months an unknown indigenous people found the group's trail, laid an ambush, and killed Mason with arrows and clubs. He was the last Englishman ever to be killed by an uncontacted tribe. His body was carried out and buried in the British cemetery in Rio de Janeiro. The tribe was contacted in 1973, and was called Panará: Hemming visited them in 1998 and wrote about it in The Times.

This led to an interest in Brazilian Indians. During 1971 and '72, John visited 45 tribes in many parts of Brazil - four of them (Surui, Parakana, Asurini and Galera Nambikwara) at the time that Brazilian teams had made the first-ever face-to-face contact.

Subsequently, in 1975, John Hemming became Director and Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, a post he held until 1996 . The venerable RGS changed in every way during those 21 years: its membership more than doubled; finances went from the red to healthy surplus; lectures expanded from about 20 a year to 450 speakers, at branches set up around the UK and a mass of packed Monday-night events, conferences, etc.; expedition training was introduced with the successful Expedition Advisory Centre (run by Nigel and Shane Winser); the Victorian premises beside Hyde Park were fully restored and made more inviting, with meals, bars, etc.; academic geographers of the Institute of British Geographers merged back into the RGS. Research flourished through a series of multidisciplinary projects, in Sarawak, Oman (2), Karakoram (Pakistan), Kimberley (Australia), Kora (Kenya), Mkomazi (Tanzania), Badia desert (Jordan) - John Hemming was co-chairman of this one from 1992-2004 - Brunei, and Brazil. Hemming visited and helped launch all these. He personally led the Maraca Rainforest Project in Brazil (1987-88) which, with 200 scientist and scientific technicians, became the largest research project in Amazonia organised by a European country - in partnership with Brazilian researchers from INPA (Amazon Research Institute) and SEMA environment agency.

Interest in Brazilian indigenous peoples led to John Hemming writing a 3-volume history of them: Red Gold (which covers the period 1500-1760, in 1978); Amazon Frontier (1760-1910, in 1985); Die If You Must (20th century, in 2004) - all revised and available in Pan Macmillan paperback.

In April 2008 his latest book, 'Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon', was published by Thames and Hudson. Described by Alexander Cockburn in The Sunday Times as a 'manly epic', and by Hugh Thomson in the Telegraph as a book that 'will stand as the definitive single-volume work on the subject', it is aimed more at the general reader and follows a much broader historical sweep than any of his previous works as well as being written with an impressive understanding of his subject.