Roy Chapman Andrews Field Photographs of the Philippine Expedition (1907-1910) and the Japanese Whaling Expedition (1910)

Photographic print and digitized negative collection documenting Roy Chapman Andrews' participation on the Philippine Expedition, 1907-1910 and the Japanese Whaling Expedition, 1910. The photographs in this collection were taken by Andrews on nitrate negatives, glass negatives, and safety film. Though two separate expeditions, the image records from both have been grouped together historically, particularly within the box of photographic prints which organizes images by location taken, rather than by expedition or date.

The Philippine Expedition was a US Federal expedition aboard the S.S. Albatross. Commencing in 1907, director of the expedition was Hugh McCormick Smith, deputy commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. Its initial scientific crew included Frederick M. Chamberlain, Resident Naturalist; Lewis Radcliffe, General Assistant and Naturalist; H.C. Fasset, Fishery Expert; Paul Bartsch, malacologist, and representative of the Smithsonian; and Clarence M. Wells, Assistant and Clerk. Andrews was invited to join the expedition for its last leg to the Philippines in 1909 to study porpoises and collect land mammal and bird specimens on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History. Throughout his journey to join the S.S. Albatross expedition and then while on board, Andrews created a vast collection of photographs. These photographs document people, urban and rural locales, sacred places, and everyday life in East and Southeast Asia during the early twentieth century. For a detailed itinerary of Philippine Expedition, please refer to this record: https://data.library.amnh.org/archives/agents/amnhc_2000080.

After the conclusion of the Philippine Expedition, Roy Chapman Andrews found himself in Nagasaki, Japan in February 1910. It was here that Andrews first encountered the extent of the Japanese whaling industry and made the decision to stay on in Japan to study and collect whale specimens for the museum. During the Japanese Whaling Expedition, 1910, Roy Chapman Andrews collected, photographed, and sent back to New York over 80 tons of whale and porpoise specimens, including those of gray whales, blue whales, sei whales, finbacks, humpbacks, killer whales, Northern right whale dolphins, Pacific white sided dolphins, and swordfish. The images from this expedition include scenes from the Japanese whaling industry, as well as photographs of specimens. Additional photographs of specimens from this expedition that were taken by other museum employees, notably Julius Kirschner and Thomas Lunt, have been tagged with the relevant exhbiiton and can be found within the museum's digital collection. For a detailed itinerary of the Japanese Whaling Expedition, please refer to this record: https://data.library.amnh.org/archives/agents/corporate_entities/4018.

Historically at the American Museum of Natural History, photographic collections and their associated metadata have been organized and managed based on format. Over time this obscured the intellectual or contextual links between related images across formats. This finding aid is an effort to reform the intellectual connections across the formats and by digitizing the collection, to provide visual access to Andrews’ early expeditions in Asia, in chronological order.