To better understand our world, ourselves, and our future, this program is made possible
by the people of Chevron. Chevron. Giving thought to television.
To better understand our world, ourselves, and our future, this program is made possible by the people of Chevron. Chevron. Giving thought to television.
To better understand our world, ourselves, and our future, this program is made possible by the people of Chevron. Chevron.
To better understand our world, ourselves, and our future, this program is made possible by the people of Chevron.
Over the years, National Geographic has taken millions of viewers to such remote places as these, the majestic Himalayas, tallest mountains on Earth.
The endless expanse of the African desert. The tropical rainforest abounding with life.
Our cameras have traveled all over the planet, bringing back scenes of great beauty and following the work of explorers and scientists.
One of our best-loved portraits, a 25-year story of courage and patience, began in 1960 in the rugged country on the shores of Lake Tanganyika.
Jane Goodall, 4,000 miles from home, started her historic search for the wild chimpanzee.
When I arrived at the Gombe Stream Reserve, I felt that at long last my childhood ambition was being realized.
But when I looked at the wild and rugged mountains where the chimpanzees lived, I knew that my task was not going to be easy.
The chimps very gradually came to realize that I was not dangerous after all.
I shall never forget the day after about 18 months when, for the first time, a small group allowed me to approach and be near them.
Finally, I had been accepted. I think it was one of the proudest and most exciting moments of my whole life.
Chimpanzees are as distinct from one another as our human beings, and Jane gave them names as she came to recognize them.
Old Flo, with her bulbous nose and ragged ears, is matriarch of the family Jane would come to know best.
At seven weeks, infant Flint is still completely dependent on Flo.
Flo's adolescent son Figen plays with his younger sister Fifi.
Even fully mature Faben often stays with the family.
Ever since Flint's birth, his sister Fifi has been fascinated by the baby.
Repeatedly, she tries to touch and groom him.
The older chimps, less interested in babies, tend to ignore Flint.
But Fifi is persistent, actually trying to take the infant from Flo.
Though protective of her newborn, Flo is never rough with Fifi.
When she's had enough, she simply walks off, leaving Fifi looking rather frustrated.
The rainy season brings the flight of fertile-winged termites as they leave their nests to establish new colonies.
For chimp and baboon alike, they are a tasty delicacy.
But baboons can only capture the termites outside the nest as the swarms emerge and fly.
When they have gone and worker termites have resealed the nest, the baboons will move on.
But the chimps not only know termites are there hidden below the surface, they have learned how to get at them.
In defense of their nest, the termites grip onto the grass, and with utmost care, the chimp gently draws them out.
As a stem becomes bent, the chimp breaks off the end to make it work more efficiently.
Sometimes a leafy twig is selected, but first it must be stripped of its leaves.
In these actions, modifying natural objects for a specific purpose, the chimp is not only using, but actually making tools.
It seems certain that this is a learned behavior, passed from generation to generation by watching and imitation.
Flint does not yet know how to fish for termites, but already he imitates part of Flo's technique.
It seems proof that chimps make and use tools would rock the scientific world.
Tool-using always used to be considered a hallmark of the human species.
When Louis Leakey first heard about tool-using at Gombe, he got extremely excited and said,
now we have to redefine man, redefine tool, or include chimpanzees with humans.
A chimpanzee brain will never design a computer, nor even imagine a durable tool chipped from stone.
But his brain is more similar to our own than is that of any other living creature.
And surely it was thus that our distant human ancestors began, learning to master the natural world in the constant struggle to survive.
Up in the jungles of Borneo, another Leakey protege, Beirut Goldikos, worked for over a decade studying the wild orangutan,
and rehabilitating captive young orphans for return to a life in the wild.
The orangutan, mentally equipped for a treetop life demanding quickened reflexes, depth perception, and critical judgment, evolved a complex brain,
and with it curiosity, and the beginning of a simple deductive reasoning.
High in the Virunga Mountains of Equatorial Africa, another Leakey disciple, Diane Fossey, devoted 15 years to the study and conservation of the endangered mountain gorilla.
Her years of painstaking observation in Rwanda would dispel the age-old myths and reveal to the world the shy, unaggressive creature she came to know so well.
Getting ever closer to the animals by imitating their behavior, Fossey would find one to be the most gentle and trusting of all.
One animal who was very prone to spend a great deal of time near me was Digit, and I think of this because he has no peers within his group that he was so attracted to me.
He was very curious and always very anxious to come forward and investigate things like cameras, thermoses, notebooks, or gloves.
On December 31, 1977, Fossey's world would be forever changed.
Her beloved Digit was dead, killed and beheaded by poachers.
The harmless, gentle Digit had been slain for his head and hands, sold to a trader for the equivalent of $20.
Sequested in this inaccessible universe, the giant panda was revealed to the western world only a hundred years ago.
Today, it remains mysterious and enigmatic.
So little is known about the giant panda that baffling questions about it are yet to be resolved.
How much does it eat? How far does it travel? How much space does it require?
But the most nagging question of all, can it survive?
For the giant panda is one of the most endangered species on earth.
In China, there have been 31 zoo births.
Here at the Chengdu Zoo, six-month-old Jinjin is one of their latest successes.
Perhaps he is a harbinger of some brighter future when no more pandas will be taken from the wild for zoos and captive red pandas might even be released into the wild.
National Geographic cameras travel to Australia, land of eternal mystery.
Long before the time of man, there appeared here creatures among the most bizarre on earth.
They are so unlike other animals that many early European explorers could hardly believe they were real.
In the frozen tundra of the Canadian Arctic, domain of the polar bear, we filmed a daring attempt to get close to the large and deadly carnivore.
National Geographic freelance still photographer David Heiser hopes to get exciting, high-level pictures of interaction among the bears.
This is a unique experiment. No one knows how the bears will react to a man in a cage.
That's okay, I'll lock it off.
Okay, is this thing loaded?
It's loaded, but it just shoots blanks.
Okay, I'll just use it in the last resort. Also, why don't you give me that hammer?
I can use that for protection too.
Equipped with only a camera, a hammer, and a pistol with blanks,
Heiser will have little protection if the bear should attack the cage and it begins to come apart.
Well, I've seen shark cages before in movies, but I've never heard of a polar bear cage.
That's it, come on in.
That's good, easy, a little bit at a time, get a good smell, that's it.
Close enough to get a wide angle, full frame.
Oh, there came a paw in, I was wondering when you're going to try that.
The bears do not give Heiser the kind of photographs he had expected.
Their behavior is all directed toward him and the cage.
Aha, try shoving it, huh? But they didn't get it off the ground.
That guy's pretty strong, I think we could get a bear out here big enough to turn this thing over.
In the forests of central India, National Geographic took an unprecedented look at the largest and most mysterious of the big cats.
Filmed by Stanley Breeden and Belinda Wright, this program recorded tiger behaviors never before filmed in the wild.
Yeah.
A natural kill and a tigress suckling her cubs, all by wild, free-roaming animals, are
seen for the first time.
The cubs are five months old.
Weaning has begun, but still the tigress allows them to nurse.
It is an interlude of peace and tenderness.
It is an interlude of peace and tenderness, but still the tigress allows them to nurse.
From the challenge of filming a deadly predator at close range, we moved to a challenge of
a different sort, by turning up the heat.
For more than 20 years, Maurice and Katya Kraft have traveled the world in search of
active volcanoes, from Iceland to Hawaii, from Africa to Indonesia.
They are often the first to reach the scene of an eruption.
Kraft's are scientists, probing some of the enduring mysteries of the earth.
But they've also moved beyond the laboratory to a less conventional pursuit.
Their tools are cameras, and their goal, to document the great eruptions of our time.
Burning at a temperature of more than 2,000 degrees, the lava can deliver burns at a distance
of four or five feet.
Quite aside from personal safety, it's a photographic challenge.
We have a lot of problems with cameras near volcanoes.
It's of course very hot, so sometimes you cannot touch the camera anymore, since the
acid is coming in the camera and the gases, so the film is processed in the camera before
you go to the lab.
I try to take the sound on volcanoes, it means the sound of lava fountain and also the sound
of the lava flows.
And these are very small sounds, so I have to go very close.
And there is a big problem of heat for the microphone, because it will melt if you go
too close.
A volcanic eruption is the most wonderful sight that earth can offer you.
I am convinced of that.
Flowing through endless miles of Egypt's desert sands, the precious waters of the Nile gave
birth and breath to one of the greatest civilizations that has ever taken hold on our planet.
Through the 30 centuries that the pharaohs ruled Egypt, the people of the Nile created
the most glorious monuments the world has ever seen, among them the largest place of
worship in the ancient world.
These miracles in stone were tributes to their gods and kings.
Finally, National Geographic shifted focus for a look behind the camera.
We found some brave individuals risking life and limb to get their stories on film.
Mount Everest, a symbol of towering, irresistible challenge.
Its grandeur has always inspired awe and noble effort, but Everest is also a killer.
Over 80 climbers have died on it, many more have come down broken and defeated.
This team, 19 men, had a dual objective, to reach the summit but also to film it, to create
a documentary that would become the first National Geographic television special.
The climbers were punished by Everest's devastating weather.
Temperatures 20 below zero, winds blowing at more than 60 miles an hour, climbing was
hard labor, thinking was hard, operating the camera, even remembering the camera was hard.
The rest of the world is just gone.
Nothing matters anymore.
I am going to get there if I have to crawl.
We probably spent 45 minutes to an hour on top and all that was taken up by filming really.
Filming that long, certainly you pay a price for it and Barry's price was that he lost
parts of both little fingers and his fourth finger and then in the bivouac that night
it was a result of that, he lost all 10 of his toes and part of his foot bone, both feet.
We finally were flown back to Washington sometime end of July I guess that year to get medals
and awards and part of this was to go to the Geographic and they were going to show some
raw footage and all of a sudden on the screen came my summit footage and I started to cry.
I couldn't believe it had come out and then I remembered what it looked like but I hadn't
remembered what it looked like until I saw that and it's because of that single minded
attitude of get this job done, forget everything else and then you can turn around and go home.
For those travelers looking for adventure closer to home, a train ride is just the ticket,
whether the journey takes you around the world or your own backyard.
For some no doubt steam engines are the attraction.
For others perhaps it is the appeal of travel or could it be that so many share the romantic
notion of growing up to be an engineer.
These trains are called live steamers.
Seymour Johnson loves trains so much that he donated land and equipment for a miniature
railroad at his home in Montecito, California.
One of the local members of the Goleta Valley Railroad Club spent 17 years building their
line.
Today they test their engines on more than a mile of track.
There's something nostalgic about steam engines now of course but the thing is a steam locomotive
is live.
The engine talks to you when you're running it, you can feel what it's doing, it tells
you I'm working too hard or I'm taking it easy.
You can hear it in the stack, you can hear it in the sound of the blower or the sound
of the fire.
They got steam engines that are over 100 years old that continue to run.
There are many great train rides around the world but not one can match the aura of elegance,
mystery and romance surrounding the name Orient Express.
It ran for almost a century until its demise in 1977, now two men have revived the historic
run to Istanbul.
Names of the countries the Orient Express passes through, Austria, Hungary, Romania,
Bulgaria ring with romance.
Memories of mysteries like murder on the Orient Express surround the passengers with an atmosphere
of champagne and dream.
We choose to go to the moon, we choose to go to the moon, we choose to go to the moon
in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are
hard.
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained and new rights
to be won and they must be won and used for the progress of all mankind.
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It's sort of total complete silence and that beautiful view and the realization of course
that you're going 25,000 miles an hour.
You recognize that you're not there because you deserve to be there and you were just
lucky.
You're the representative of humanity at that point in history, having that experience
in a sense for the rest of mankind.
Hey John, this is perfect with the blue view and the old flag.
You really should set the flag up on a hill Charlie, but there just ain't one.
I know John, we're right here, big rock.
I was proud for our country more than I was proud for me.
There was nothing that I did.
I just happened to have gotten there at the right time.
My background carried me through, but there were a lot of other qualified people that
didn't go.
Why my name came out, I don't know.
And we very proudly deployed on the moon to stay for as long as it can in honor of all
those people who have worked so hard to put us here and to make the country and mankind
something different than it was.
It was like sitting in the last row of the balcony looking down for that play going on.
While I was in the play, it was more like I was a spectator.
From outer space to the ocean depths, we dream of exploring new frontiers and discovering
unknown treasure.
Mel Fisher found himself chasing such a dream for 16 years.
The lost treasure of the Atocha.
In August, the recovery work on the site is continuing in full swing.
The excavation of tons of silver has become almost routine.
But today, August 16th, the routine is dramatically broken.
Two divers are searching an area about 50 yards from the mother lode when something
glimmers in the sand.
It is gold, untarnished, untouched by the years.
There seems to be no end to the wealth that is scattered in the sands.
This is the stuff of a treasure hunter's fantasy.
I never dreamt about treasure before I came here.
I didn't know a full-time job existed anywhere in the world.
You wake up every day and you go look for a Spanish galleon.
My first week out at sea, I realized what I was doing.
Then I started dreaming about it.
Then after you find gold, you dream about gold every night.
I like to ring to that, man.
The most expensive xylophone.
Play in our song.
By the end of that day, 76 gold bars and discs have been found weighing over 200 pounds.
Some are covered in lengths and lengths of gold chain.
Two weeks before he found the Atocha, Fisher could barely make payroll.
Today, he stands surrounded by millions of dollars in Spanish gold.
The sea, having decided to give up the Atocha to those who searched so long and paid so
dearly for her, is now showering them with wealth beyond their imagination.
Over the years, National Geographic has found many treasures at sea and not all of it was
Spanish gold.
In 1986, a new chapter in the Titanic story began.
The men and machines involved did not even exist when Titanic went down.
From the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution came the research submarine Alvin and Dr.
Robert Ballard, a geologist and undersea explorer.
For decades, Ballard had dreamed of being the man to explore the Titanic wreck.
A rare alchemy of talent, desire, and circumstance has led Ballard to this adventure.
Many have called it foolish and at any rate impossible.
July 13, 1986, the first attempt to reach Titanic by submarine is planned for this morning.
Bob Ballard and two companions will ride to the bottom in the research submarine Alvin.
Alvin is a tried and trusted design.
It is mapped undersea mountains, located a lost H-bomb, and now is poised over the most
celebrated shipwreck of modern times.
This is the Alvin, we are at the Titanic over.
Titanic, no longer lost, no longer legend, there are people aboard the great ship once
again after 74 dark and silent years.
They are the largest creatures on earth, creatures of mystery, masters of a dark and shadowed
world human eyes have seldom seen.
One of the rarest and most awesome experiences in nature is this, an encounter with the living
whale.
More than 40 million years ago, early ancestors of modern whales adapted to the deep.
They have flourished here, but retain a fateful dependence on the sunlit world above.
Like man, they are mammals, warm-blooded creatures who must breathe to live.
Something about whales is not a mystery.
We know precisely how many of them die.
As for the rest, we have barely glimpsed this most extravagant and spectacular animal of
all.
Led by pioneering scientists, man and whale today are slowly drawing closer, and in these
first tentative contacts, a tantalizing question rises.
What does a whale do with the largest brain on earth?
Encouraged by experience with whales in captivity, the first explorers now seek the animals in
their own environment.
Join us now as we enter the domain of giants, the secret world of the great whales.
In San Ignacio Lagoon on the west coast of Mexico, one may glimpse the more tranquil
future all whales could someday enjoy.
After being almost wiped out twice before receiving protection from whales, the California
gray whale has made a slow but steady comeback.
Now scientists like Steve Swartz and Mary Lou Jones pursue the grays, counting their
replenished numbers and observing their behavior in the lagoon.
The Swartz study began routinely, a tedious experience familiar to everyone who has tried
to get close to such inaccessible and elusive animals.
But then, in February 1977, something happened.
Something so remarkable it seemed almost like a dream.
The tables were suddenly turned.
It was the whales that were investigating the scientists.
Swartz and his companions felt almost numb with astonishment as the whales grew bolder
and came closer.
As time passed, the whales seemed to take increasing delight in blowing bubbles, bumping
the boats, and drenching the camera lens.
Soon human apprehension gave way to a kind of joyous excitement, although the whales
weighed 25 tons at least and could easily have caused disaster.
A creature that repels and frightens most people was the subject of another National
Geographic production.
There are nearly 350 species of sharks.
Most are harmless to man.
In their sheer variety, sharks are wondrous animals indeed.
A basking shark, weighing over six tons.
Like great whales, this extraordinary creature strains plankton from the sea, swimming with
its huge jaws agape.
More than 1,600 tons of water an hour pass through the cavernous mouth, day after day,
year after year.
The biggest fish in the world, the whale shark, may attain more than 40 feet in length and
13 tons.
It, too, is a plankton feeder, docile and generally harmless.
Underwater encounters with the whale shark are very rare and highly exhilarating.
The cruising giant may accommodate passengers, sometimes carrying divers for miles.
Recent experiments off the California coast have addressed the problem of getting close
to sharks in safety.
Australian filmmakers Valerie Taylor and her husband Ron may know as much about shark attack
as anyone alive.
The tailors don stainless steel suits reminiscent of medieval armor.
Valerie has invited shark attack numerous times to test her 12-pound suit.
Each prototype costs about $2,000, but the suit's protection could be invaluable to those
who are impelled to dive with sharks under dangerous conditions.
The scent of bait is heavy in the water, yet Valerie Taylor has to entice the sharks to
feed.
Once they're eating, she'll draw the bait close to her body, hoping the sharks will
become confused between her and the fish.
Hooray!
The situation gets out of hand.
It's all Valerie can do to protect her face and mask.
The shark strips off Valerie's steel glove and swallows it whole.
Did he damage your hands Valerie? Yep, he damaged my hands Valerie.
He got the glove off and he continued, he wouldn't let go.
The thing that happened was, he got the glove off somehow, he just ripped it off.
And this hand, this naked hand was in his mouth.
So I put that hand in so that he couldn't crunch down on it.
I did it just like that, but you can see why he got the thumb, because it was sticking up.
A sweeping wilderness of sand and sun, space and sky stretches along the coast of southwestern Africa.
This place of wind-whipped sand and scant rain, this parched and ripple landscape is the Namib Desert.
Seemingly barren, it is unique on our planet.
For these sands are home to the largest, most varied community of animal life of any dunes on earth.
Almost everything that lives here has developed in some unusual way.
Like most reptiles, this sand lizard can only forage when its body is warm.
Its feet are especially adapted to dissipate heat.
To keep them from scorching on the hot sand, it lifts them alternately in the air.
The mating behavior of these black beetles is quite unusual.
Three males pursue a much larger female.
It seems to take all three to subdue the female for the mating to be successful.
In the endless round of predation, a female wasp has found the burrow of a trapdoor spider.
She will move incredible amounts of sand to get to her prey.
As its first defense, the spider has dug its burrow on the slope of a dune face,
so as fast as the wasp digs, the sand slides back into the hole.
Often the wasp, which may have been searching for days, simply gives up.
But this time the spider is uncovered.
It has powerful jaws.
The wasp a sting.
The outcome is by no means certain.
In addition, this spider has developed a most extraordinary method of escape.
It forms its legs into a circle and cartwheels down the dune.
The legless lizard forages for insects just below the surface of the sand.
It is almost blind and probably depends upon its sense of smell to locate prey.
The palmetto gecko can see particularly well at night,
and the webbed feet so effective for burrowing help the gecko to move silently in search of its prey.
But the gecko too must be on the alert for predators, and this is one of the most voracious of all.
The golden mole.
There is no animal quite like it anywhere else on earth.
It manages to live under the surface without a burrow, breathing the air trapped between the particles of sand.
Blind but equipped with a well-developed sense of smell and an extraordinary ability to detect the most minute vibrations,
the golden mole seems to swim like a tiny shark in a sea of sand,
surfacing close to its victims and pulling them under to be devoured.
It hunts beetles, spiders, termites, and the legless lizard.
With living sands of Namib, National Geographic began a continuing relationship
with an extraordinary husband and wife team, David and Carol Hughes.
Modest and shy, they feel at home in remote wilderness areas.
Their work reflects David's lifelong fascination with animals
and his exquisite sensitivity to the nuances of their behavior.
I started very, very young watching animals and maybe just time spent close to animals,
watching animals, watching them interact, gives you that kind of knowledge after a time.
You just absorb it in some mysterious way.
Right from the beginning when you start trying to photograph animals or study them,
that's what you're absorbed in, in trying to predict what they're going to do next.
If you're doing a study on the behavior of an animal,
you've only succeeded at that stage that that animal's behavior becomes predictable to you.
And I think the same thing is true of wildlife photography.
You can only really succeed when you can begin to predict what's going to happen next.
Otherwise it all comes as a surprise and you can never be in the right position
and have the right lens on and be shooting at the right time.
Here we are.
He is so pretty.
Why, it's handsome, isn't it?
I used to be very nervous of spiders, roaches, that kind of thing.
One of the first things I ever photographed actually was a roach and I couldn't bear to touch it.
But I found out that everything is more scared of you than you are of it initially.
And as soon as I realized that, then I got interested in the thing as an animal
and I've gone to the other extreme now. Maybe I'm a little incautious.
The Hughes' spend nearly two years making each film.
Most of that time they camp out, isolated, miles from the nearest road.
They love their rugged life and the challenges of their work.
They approach each project with enthusiasm and ingenuity.
Their worst experiences came in Central America,
17 months filming the fragile ecology of the rainforest in Costa Rica.
Endless rains, fungus and high temperatures played havoc with their equipment.
David and Carol were wet most of the time and knee deep in mud.
But at those infrequent times when conditions were right,
they captured on film rarely seen views of one of the richest natural endowments on Earth.
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The Hughes' spent 21 months at a vast lake bed that has been called the place of dry water.
It is the region named Etosha in southwestern Africa.
For most of the year it may go without a drop of rain.
And in these times Etosha's water holes become like open air stages.
Here, amidst one of the most spectacular displays of wildlife in Africa,
David and Carol Hughes filmed in intimate detail nature's constant interplay of life and death.
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The water holes appear abandoned and deceptively peaceful.
But turtle doves do come to drink every morning and evening.
These two are unwary, intent on their courtship.
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The victim is overwhelmed by hungry turtles, and it's soon over.
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This is called pronking. Adult springbuck pronk after being chased by a predator, perhaps as a signal to regroup the herd.
But in these young, it seems simply a delightful form of play.
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Through the rains, most animals of Etosha enjoyed a bountiful time. Strengthened and renewed, they are now prepared for the long, harsh season that lies ahead.
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As you have seen, we've taken many memorable travels around the planet. We invite you to join us as we continue to explore our world with National Geographic.
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