Donation of the Keystone-Mast collection stimulated other donations to the archives of the UCR CMP. One of these donations was a series of over 1,500 negatives (mostly glass, with a few acetate negatives) produced by Harry Pidgeon, an amateur photographer who traveled around the world twice (a feat which few had successfully completed at the time) in a boat he built himself after the age of 50. Commander Robert Mohle of Manhattan Beach, California had known Pidgeon as a child and was the beneficiary of his photographic industry. Around 1924 or 25, sometime after completion of his first trip around the world, Pidgeon left his negatives with Mohle's father. The negatives remained with the Mohle family even when Pidgeon set out to sea for his second trip, maintaining that it was easier to leave his negatives in one place so he would always know where they were. Robert Mohle more or less inherited the negatives from both trips, as Pidgeon died in1954 (at the age of 86) without leaving instructions for their disposition and Pidgeon's widow, Margaret, declined to claim them.

Pidgeon was apparently a rather modest, unassuming, soft-spoken and almost frail man. Nonetheless, he seems also to have been a man driven by the spirit of adventure, and from all indications he was welcomed everywhere he went. A telling story recounts how, at the age of 81, he and a nephew climbed Mt. Whitney, each carrying a watermelon to the top, presummably as sustinance. In his younger days he traveled by pony cart from Mexico to the Canadian border for no other reason than to see what it would be like to make such a journey. It is recorded in museum documents that he also practiced a variety of occupations, but the role of photographer seems to have been his constant interest. Among the Pidgeon artifacts are photographs he made in the lumber camps of California and the Pacific Northwest, as well as photographs of miners, camps and towns in Alaska during the gold rush of 1898. And, upon his return to the lower forty-eight, he traveled down the Mississippi River, documenting life in the towns and rural areas along the river corridor.

Finally, about 1920, Pidgeon embarked on the first of two voyages around the world in the Islander, the boat he had painstakingly built himself. He had never sailed before, and set about reading all he could on the art of sailing while at the same time building the Islander. His first trip was initially to be a voyage to Hawaii and back. From there, however, he traveled to various islands in the South Pacific, and then on to Australia. Instead of returning the same way he had come, he decided the most expedient course would be simply to continue around the world. This self-taught sailor had few charts and no motor on his boat, and for ballast used nuts and bolts from the San Pedro shipyard, which were later traded for food, coconuts, and other items on his voyage, with sand used to replace the ballast. Sadly, it was after his second voyage that he lost the Islander in a typhoon in Espiritu Santo. It is worth noting that Pidgeon developed his own photographs during the voyages, using a makeshift darkroom the forward cabin of his boat.

Of particular interest to researchers working in the Pacific are the nearly 300 photographs of Pacific island subjects made in the course of Pidgeon's two circumnavigations of the globe -- again, the first was undertaken sometime in the 1920s, the second made roughly during the 1940s (Pidgeon was planning a third voyage in the 1950s, but died before getting underway).

Among Pidgeon's ports-of-call in the Pacific are the following:

  • Hawaii
  • Marquesas
  • Samoa
  • Society Islands
  • New Guinea
  • New Hebrides
  • Fiji
  • Tuamotus

The images from this group portray a wide array of subjects such as architecture, people, antiquities, "modern" cities and traditional villages, crafts, traditional occupations and activities, and monuments. Some of the photographs of villages provide excellent information about the elements of construction, such as the pattern of house posts, the remnants of which have been encountered frequently in archaeological excavations. To be able to draw comparisons between what at first seem like randomly arranged clusters of post molds and images of structures raised on poles only enriches the archaeololgical record, suggesting a possible structure type that could have rested on the poles that became the post molds. This relates to a recent problem faced by the author in resolving post-mold patterns encountered in a recovery project on Guam; several photographs from the Keystone-Mast Collection as well as the Harry Pidgeon Collection have shed some light on an apparent common type of raised platform structure that might account for the patterns in question.

Among Pidgeon's images are depictions of the process of tapa manufacture and painting (tapa is cloth beaten from the bark of a tree, usually paper mulberry), as well as pictures of weaving and even tatooing. The details of his images provide information on patterns of plaiting and weaving in mats and in wall construction (evidence of crafts that have mostly faded from the material record owing to the extremes of climate, the ravages of global wars, and, not least of all, the effects of westernization); there is even good evidence of construction methods employed in the now abandoned stone walls and platforms of historical sites in several important regions of the Pacific.


PHOTOGRAPH (top of page): No. 1520 Poli and Me. Society Islands

SELECTED ILLUSTRATIONS FROM THE PIDGEON COLLECTION


Click on a selection to view photograph. Each includes a brief discussion of the photograph and the elements likely to be of interest to researchers.


Index Title Page Summary Comments Pidgeon Map
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