H.C. Raven & H.L. Shantz January, 1920
Homer Shantz, then working as a botanist for the USDA’s Bureau of Plant Industry, was encouraged in 1919 to join an expedition to Africa, backed by the Smithsonian Institution and accompanied by a camera crew from the Universal Film Company. The director of the project, Edmond Heller, was a mammals expert who had been involved in other expeditions. Shantz’s role was to survey plant resources for future development, and to create a vegetation map of the surveyed areas.
Shantz departed from New York harbor on July 16, arriving in Cape Town in mid-August. For the next year he traversed the eastern side of Africa, from Cape Horn north to Cairo. At the beginning he often traveled with two colleagues — H. C. Raven, a naturalist, and E. M. Thierry, a journalist. Two weeks after the group’s reunion at Victoria Falls in November 1919, some of the expedition members died in a train wreck.
Shantz continued his journey north, gathering plant specimens, seeds and fruits, and soil samples, and sending them back to the States. He documented his observations and finds in photographs – an extension of work he had been doing since 1904 in the landscapes of the United States, and that would eventually encompass parts of Canada, Mexico, and Russia as well.
All of these activities during Shantz’s first Africa trip were recorded in a detailed travel journal. He listed plant and soil samples as he sent them back to the department, and chronicled his photographs in sequence. His observations about plant cultivation, the natural landscape, and the people he met are also captured. Native diet, dress, and other practices are briefly noted.
Homer Shantz continued to document plant communities in photographs, through a lengthy career that included serving as president of the University of Arizona. He returned to Africa in 1924, and again in 1956-57, shortly before his death, to continue his documentation of vegetation and soils and rephotograph some of the same sites, as well as to identify useful trees, food crops and medicinal plants.
This selection, from among over 3,500 photographs that Shantz made during his first Africa trip, samples the broad spectrum of his interests and experiences. His image descriptions from the journal, and some of his more extensive comments there, accompany the images.
Selected bibliography
Shantz, H.L. Agricultural regions of Africa. Published as a 6-part series of articles in Economic geography, v.16-19, 1940-1943.
Shantz, H.L., and Marbut, C.F. The vegetation and soils of Africa; with a section on the land classification of Africa by the joint authors, and a note on a rainfall map of Africa, by J.B. Kincer. New York: pub. jointly by the National Research Council and the American Geographical Society, 1923; reprinted 1971.
Shantz, H.L., and Turner, B.L. Photographic documentation of vegetational changes in Africa over a third of a century. Research report (University of Arizona. College of Agriculture); 169. [Tucson, 1958]
Links
Shantz photograph collection in the Digital Commons
An introduction to the Shantz collection from ARIZ, the UA herbarium
Finding aid for the Homer Shantz papers, UAL Special Collections
A note on rights and reproduction: Images from the Shantz Photographic Collection may be published without permission, however, users who utilize a substantial number of images from the database for projects are very strongly requested to contact the Curator, to provide a brief description of the project, and to grant ARIZ permission to link to any online product produced using the data or add to the bibliography kept on use of the images. This is to ensure that the use of The University of Arizona Herbarium is well documented and that the value of natural history collections is constantly demonstrated.