Papers and journals of Philip Mason Sears (1899-1973), 1922-3
all manuscript (pencil) unless otherwise stated, contents comprise:1) Account of a hunting trip to north Shensi, China (55 leaves, loose), together with a notebook, headed ‘Hunting Trip to North Shensi’ (approx. 50 pp, containing 3 different drafts of the same narrative. Contents include descriptions of: Kwei-Hua-Cheng (‘a city of great fascination … the farthest point to which European civilization has as yet punctuated … Like all large Chinese cities, it teems with activity. And what sights there are to see on every side … a great number of the women down to the little girls had painted faces …’); Suiyuan (‘a splendid picturesque walled city’); Antung (‘on the Manchurian side of the Yalu River … a large disagreeable commercial town’); shipping on the Yalu River; village life; local housing, food and customs including wedding ceremonies; Russian refugees in Kwei-Hua-Cheng (‘as they remarked, nothing could have been worse than living under the Bolsheviks’); and an audience and shooting competition with the dutun (/tutung, i.e. military governor) of Suiyuan, General Ma Fuxiang (1876-1932) (‘He is a Mohammedan from Kausu … the absolute ruler of his people upon whom he imposes the heaviest taxes’).2) ‘Ammon Hunting in a Land of Long Ago’. Typescript, 18 leaves, foolscap, rectos only, signed ‘Mason Sears’ in pencil, pencilled corrections. Describing the above trip, focusing on sheep hunting, with additional details of local education, Mongol caravans, bandit raids, ‘red festivities’, etc. Together with another copy of the same article, carbon typescript, pencilled corrections.3) Notes from a hunting trip in the Vietnamese jungle with French big-game hunter François J. Defosse (1881-1954), 20 bifolia of friable wood-pulp paper, comprising detailed notes on bushcraft, specific animals and their pursuit including elephants, tigers, crocodiles, boar, etc. (e.g. ‘In following up a wounded tiger it is of great advantage to use a shotgun as a charging tiger cannot pass through two charges of big buckshot’), tribal customs (including the Mois tribe), etc., the trip undertaken in the vicinity of the La Nga river and possibly Hué (‘Hu’) and the notes presumably composed ‘on the spot’, ‘Defosse’ cited throughout. Together with approx. 30 leaves of related jungle notes on smaller paper, a manuscript map of the La Nga river, and a fragment of 9 leaves of typescript and manuscript relating to tiger and elephant stalking with Defosse, including sightings of gibbon and sambar.4) Notebook containing a journal of a visit to Japan, 27 pp., (a few leaves loose), with two different drafts of the same narrative, and including descriptions of Yokohama, Kamakura, Nikko, Kyoto, etc., comments on the Japanese imperial family, Japanese culture and the adoption of western customs and institutions, Japanese children, etc. (‘They are absolutely unspoiled and never seem to show off’), ‘Note on Kashmir’ (2 pp.) at end.5) Notebook containing remarks on Korea, Chinese theatre, and Chinese cities, and comparisons between Japan and China, 15 pp., textblock loose in binding.6) ‘Monster Demonstrations in Peking’, typescript, 14 pp, apparently an account of the May Thirtieth Movement, 1925 (‘Never since the Boxer Uprising of 1900, has the foreign community of Peking seen such an outburst of wrath among the Chinese as that which followed the killing of some students by the foreign police during the rioting of May 31st in the International Settlement at Shanghai …’) together with a carbon copy.7) ‘Bird shooting and the Yalu River’, 3 leaves, lined paper; ‘Mongolian trip’, 3 leaves, lined paper, comprising notes of trip from Kalgan to Gobi desert; Notes on Manila, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Saigon, Canton, 5 leaves, lined paper.8) Short article on geographical coordinates of Peking, carbon typescript, 4 pp.; small souvenir album of 10 photographs of shooting trip in Shansi, presented by Basil Cochrane Newton, British Legation, Peking (mounts loose in wrappers); 3 pp. notes on visit to Mongolia (on single sheet folded twice); 1 leaf on hunting in India including ‘River life going down to Bandipur’; 1 leaf headed ‘The Khyber Pass, May 18, 1923’, containing remarks from a visit; fragment of an account of a trip from Baguio, Philippines; manuscript hunting calendar; letter of recommendation for Haliba Pandit, guide on hunting trip; approx. 20 bifolia of miscellaneous notes on same paper as notes on Vietnamese hunting trip; and approx. 30 additional leaves, typescript and manuscript, including letters, journal fragments, etc.(quantity)
Philip Mason Sears (1899-1973) was an American Republican politician who served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the Massachusetts Senate before helping develop US policy on Africa as representative to the UN during the 1960s. After graduating from Harvard in 1922 he spent a year travelling in the Far East with his friend Douglas Burden (1898-1978), the soon-to-be-famous naturalist who had been sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History to collect specimens from the region, and who later included his own account of the trip in his 1960 memoir Look to the Wilderness.Travelling first to Japan, Sears then proceeded to the distant Chinese province of Shensi in pursuit of the argali (mountain sheep). His description of the area is a fascinating eyewitness account of a traditional society on the eve of the epochal upheaval brought about by the Chinese Civil War, and includes an engrossing portrait of local Muslim warlord and opium trafficker Ma Fuxiang (1876-1932), who was to side with Chiang Kai-shek.Sears's guide on his next expedition to the depths of what is now Vietnam was the semi-legendary François J. Defosse (1881-1954), who had been employed by the Roosevelts during their own Asian hunting expeditions. A Conradian figure, Defosse arrived in Saigon in 1900 with the French army, and after years protecting workers on the Tonkin railway from tiger attacks was granted 'pioneer leave', probably a euphemism for intelligence work, and travelled into the jungle where he found employment with a logging company.Having chosen a course far more intrepid than most other travelling scions of the Gilded Age, Sears evidently intended these voluminous notes to form the basis of a published work, though perhaps sidetracked by his political career, he was not able to bring this intention to fruition.An article on the Mason Sears archive by Peter Robinson, Associate Professor, Japan Women's University ('Travel Writing as Historiography: Philip Mason Sears’s Unpublished Travel Writings', Journal of the Faculty of Humanities, Japan Women’s University, no. 71, March 2022) is available on request.