George Finlay Simmons

              Giant Tree of Africa


Edge of the Roaring Forties


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Bina Korbali, African Guide, with a Waterbuck.  (Circle) Senegambian Belle


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Vanzetti the Venetian, Navigator of the Blossom—Mountains of the Ghost, Sao Nicolau, Cape Verde Islands

GEORGE FINLAY SIMMONS
In His Own Strange Story of Adventure
Sinbads of Science


GEORGE FINLAY SIMMONS

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Sinbads of Science
The Dramatic Story of the Two-Year Cruise of The Blossom in the South Atlantic Seas for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History

MOTION PICTURES AND SLIDES

LIKE an Eighth Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor is this Odyssey of Ornithology.  It is a Saga of the tail-end of Windjammer Adventure.  The three-masted schooner Blossom, 103 tons, 109 feet overall — smaller than Columbus' Santa Maria — has just returned from one of the strangest voyages in the annals of modern exploration.  During thirty-one months she logged 20,000 miles by sail alone; crossed the Atlantic four times and Equator twice; landed on many islands of high adventure, and many islets of lava, coral and sand.


Sargasso Sea!  Blackest Africa!  Treasure Island!
Captain Geo. Finlay Simmons, commander of the Blossom, and fifteen men — as advance scouts of the army of science — visited strange ports and outposts of the sea, and brought back … tales of wonder … nearly 13,000 specimens, many rare or new; motion pictures, and 4,000 photographs; and records of great scientific value, throwing light on the origin of oceanic islands, their flora and fauna, and on a possible ancient bridge of land from West Africa to Brazil.

The Blossom put to sea from New London, the famous old sea-elephant port.  Her crew manned the pumps night and day through winter storms of the North Atlantic.  She entered the dread Sargasso Sea … She shaped her course down the Trade Winds to the Cape Verdes, Islands of the Gorgons and home of the hurricane.  Her sea-bitten Sinbads landed on the Island of Fire, and scaled its 10,000-foot smoking volcano; captured the Gongon, or Ghost, and visited the graveyard of a million Mother Carey's chickens … hunted sacred Pharaoh's chickens in Darwin's footsteps, a century after his voyage on the Beagle.

In Blackest Africa these huntsmen of science prowled on the sands of Sahara in Senegambia, in the land of black Mohammedans with caravans and thatch-roofted huts, and bagged the Gambian lion, huge antelopes, the griffon and the sunbird.  In tropical torrents that almost washed them away, they saw giant lizards race through the bush like bird-dogs; beneath relentless sun, they heard the throbbing of tomtoms and saw native maids in corybantic dance.

Waterspouts threatened, as the Blossom sailed over cobalt seas; as she wallowed in the Doldrums, and crossed the Line which is the edge of our world.

In the forgotten wake of stately East Indiamen and tea clippers from China, she anchored at St. Helena, once Gibraltar of the South Atlantic.  Captain Simmons climbed mountain peaks through forests of cabbage-trees, dined in Napoleon's quarters, and found a giant tortoise which might have seen the exiled emperor.

These scientific mariners landed at Shipwreck Reef.  They visited Pandora's lovely Fernando Noronha, with its towering palms and waving breadfruit trees … that isle of crooked men where Captain Simmons was fed by a poisoner, shaved by a cutthroat, and surrounded at night when asleep by prowling midnight assassins.  Here they fought the Vampire of the Seas, captured Davy Jones' wolf, and found the queer two-headed snake.

SUBJECT: Sinbads of Science With Still and Motion Pictures




Management
THE ALBER BUREAU
Louis J. Alber, President
3608 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, O.
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