page_title: James Campbell Besley
section_title: First expedition to Peru and the Amazon
hierarchical_section_title: James Campbell Besley / Besley's filming expeditions / First expedition to Peru and the Amazon
caption_attribution_description: English: A photo of the first Besley Peruvian Expedition team - Front row, left to right: William Dunn, J. K. Holbrook; back row, left to right: Franklin B. Coates, James Campbell Besley. Photo taken in 1913.
context_page_description: James Campbell Besley also known as "Handsome Jim" Besley, "Captain James Campbell Besley", "Captain Jim", "Captain Besley", "Colonel Besley" was an Australian explorer, amateur anthropologist, film producer, mine owner, polo player, rancher and entrepreneur who traveled the world.
  Besley was also a prodigious charlatan, spinning fanciful stories regarding his birth, upbringing and career. Besley manipulated the media for decades, lying to them during their efforts to report his exploits.
context_section_description: The Besley party set out on the film documentary expedition on July 19, 1913. The party of five sailed on the RMS Magdalena from New York harbor to Lima, Peru to explore "the dark and uninhabited parts of the continent". The expedition was said to be "financed by a British nobleman". Besley was detained at the last minute and said he would sail the next Saturday.
  The members of the expedition included film director Franklin B. Coates, who acted as manager; cinematographer John Knight Holbrook, and William Jerome Dunn, botanist. Besley acted as the expedition zoologist. Others were film producer F. Eugene Farnsworth of Boston and Graflex still photographer Arthur Maurice Galaid. George Shoup, an American mining engineer, and Reginald Leonard, an expert appointed by the Peruvian government to study the uta fly (Lutzomyia sand flies, the reservoir of the Leishmania parasites that cause Andean cutaneous leishmaniasis) joined the expedition in Peru and remained there after the Besley's tour ended.
  Director Coates said of Holbrook during the trip "I want to say that Holbrook is one of the bravest and gamest men I ever met. He did without hesitation and without question everything that was asked or required of him. He was in many extremely dangerous situations, but he never flinched".
  During the trip, a pack mule fell from a steep slope into a stream, severely damaging one of two Pathé motion picture cameras. 3,000 feet of film and a number of dry negative plates were lost. After returning to Lima, Besley and Coates journeyed to the "buried cities of the Incas" and decided to attempt a third trip to traverse the continent from the source of the Amazon River to its mouth through uncharted regions "from which no known white man had returned". It was claimed President Guillermo Enrique Billinghurst of Peru attempted to dissuade them. The group also met with H. Clay Howard, the US envoy to Peru. 
  Besley, Coates, Dunn and Holbrook made the journey on horseback, foot, canoe and raft. Along the way, Dunn found what the team believed were the bones of missing American explorers Mirko Seljan and Patrick O'Higgins. The team gave the remains "an impressive Christian burial and erected a cross".
caption: 1913 first Besley Peruvian Expedition team photo - Front row, left to right: William Dunn, J. K. Holbrook; back row, left to right: Franklin B. Coates, James Campbell Besley
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "200", "Image YResolution": "200", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CC 2014 (Macintosh)", "Image DateTime": "2019:02:22 08:59:31", "Image ExifOffset": "172", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "310", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6538", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1055", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1546"}