Harriet Chalmers Adams was an American explorer, writer and photographer. She traveled extensively in South America, Asia and the South Pacific in the early 20th century, and published accounts of her journeys in the National Geographic magazine. She lectured frequently on her travels and illustrated her talks with color slides and movies.
Life and travels
Harriet Chalmers Adams was born in Stockton, California to Alexander Chalmers and Frances Wilkens. On October 5, 1899 she married Franklin Pierce Adams. In 1900, Adams went on her first major expedition, a three-year trip around South America with her husband, during which they visited every country, and traversed the Andes on horseback. The New York Times wrote that she "reached twenty frontiers previously unknown to white women." In a later trip she retraced the trail of Christopher Columbus's early discoveries in the Americas, and crossed Haiti on horseback.
War correspondent
Adams served as a correspondent for Harper's Magazine in Europe during World War I. She was the only female journalist permitted to visit the trenches. When she and her husband visited eastern Bolivia during a second extended trip to South America in 1935, she wrote twenty-one articles for the National Geographic Society that featured her photographs, including "Some Wonderful Sights in the Andean Highlands", "Kaleidoscopic La Paz: City of the Clouds" and "River-Encircled Paraguay". She wrote on Trinidad, Surinam, Bolivia, Peru and the trans-Andean railroad between Buenos Aires and Valparaiso. In 1925, Adams helped launch the Society of Woman Geographers. In all, Adams is said to have travelled more than a hundred thousand miles, and captivated hundreds of audiences. The New York Times wrote "Harriet Chalmers Adams is America's greatest woman explorer. As a lecturer no one, man or woman, has a more magnetic hold over an audience than she." She died in Nice, France, on July 17, 1937, at age 61. An obituary in The Washington Post called her a "confidant of savage head hunters" who never stopped wandering the remote corners of the world. She is interred at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, California. Of women as adventurers, she wrote
