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Authors: Vicki Croke
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starting to have a sense of how she could chart her own course. Deliriously, she wrote, “I think I am happier here than at any time since I left home.”
DURING THE MONTHS in Shanghai, Floyd Tangier Smith behaved like an ardent suitor. He cleared the decks for Harkness, making himself availableto her at all hours, enjoying everything from prelunch drinks to meals and late-night talks. It made his wife, Elizabeth, “jealous as hell,” Harkness knew, to sit at home night after night while her husband was out with the woman who seemed to have attracted every married and unmarried man in Shanghai. “The talk usually started with previous expedition affairs, and ended always, no one knew quite how, with Buddhism, or Tibetan mysticism and adventure,” Harkness said.
Floyd Tangier Smith done up in traditional Chinese silk.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Sometimes tucked away in her hotel room, with the sounds of the river traffic wafting through the windows, the careful listener and the tireless yarner would sit sipping whiskey sodas and talk about China'sdistant borderland. The darkly attractive widow had no trouble drawing out the homely, rawboned older man. He was all too eager to pontificate, even though he must have looked and felt awful—suffering as he was from sciatica and a recurring case of malaria. But nothing, it seemed, could keep him from these all-important talks with Harkness.
She was just as eager to have them, for it was time to get down to business. The first step—before organizing the expedition, applying for permits, or mapping out the journey—would be making a decision about partnerships. She had scores to settle, and Bill's ashes to collect. She wanted desperately to untangle the mystery of his death and his finances. All roads led to Floyd Tangier Smith, who in turn stood at the fork of another, the one leading out of Shanghai and into the wild. Harkness would have to tread carefully. She had to be tough-minded and pragmatic, particularly where Smith was concerned, since he was the biggest question mark. She would assess him entirely on her own—from what she herself saw and heard.
Once lubricated with a few cocktails, he could be quite expansive. “He has been here for twenty-five years or more,” Harkness said, “and the tales are wonderful. The Panchen Lama of Tibet, the animals he has collected, the racehorses he has owned, gold in the high mountains, Chinese civil war and bandits.” Smith was a practiced storyteller who in previous trips to the States had told reporters many of the same chestnuts—how he had been the only white man for scores of miles in “barbaric” regions; that he had lived for weeks on cornmeal and game, how he had been snowbound for months on end in below-zero temperatures.
For those first few days in Shanghai, Harkness savored the accounts. They were glimpses of the rough life of adventure she intended to have for herself, even while giving her cause to have doubts about this old China hand. For Smith never tried to disguise his contempt for the Chinese. “It was a long job teaching these hunters that there is a difference between a live animal and a dead one,” he wrote of the native workers in western China, “for they are primitive, stupid and deceitful, and they lie with the greatest of ease.”
Harkness, on the other hand, found the Chinese to be an amazingly honest people. Here, her hotel room remained unlocked and nothing, down to the “little pile of coppers” left on her dresser, was ever taken. “I divide the whites in two classes out here,” she would write, “those with the superior attitude toward the yellow races, and consequently hating them and being cordially hated in return, and those who like the Chinese, try to understand them, and in turn receive the same treatment with at times a great deal of service and unbelievable loyalty thrown in.”
Smith was also a product of his age and time. The notion of a woman in command of an expedition
DURING THE MONTHS in Shanghai, Floyd Tangier Smith behaved like an ardent suitor. He cleared the decks for Harkness, making himself availableto her at all hours, enjoying everything from prelunch drinks to meals and late-night talks. It made his wife, Elizabeth, “jealous as hell,” Harkness knew, to sit at home night after night while her husband was out with the woman who seemed to have attracted every married and unmarried man in Shanghai. “The talk usually started with previous expedition affairs, and ended always, no one knew quite how, with Buddhism, or Tibetan mysticism and adventure,” Harkness said.
Floyd Tangier Smith done up in traditional Chinese silk.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Sometimes tucked away in her hotel room, with the sounds of the river traffic wafting through the windows, the careful listener and the tireless yarner would sit sipping whiskey sodas and talk about China'sdistant borderland. The darkly attractive widow had no trouble drawing out the homely, rawboned older man. He was all too eager to pontificate, even though he must have looked and felt awful—suffering as he was from sciatica and a recurring case of malaria. But nothing, it seemed, could keep him from these all-important talks with Harkness.
She was just as eager to have them, for it was time to get down to business. The first step—before organizing the expedition, applying for permits, or mapping out the journey—would be making a decision about partnerships. She had scores to settle, and Bill's ashes to collect. She wanted desperately to untangle the mystery of his death and his finances. All roads led to Floyd Tangier Smith, who in turn stood at the fork of another, the one leading out of Shanghai and into the wild. Harkness would have to tread carefully. She had to be tough-minded and pragmatic, particularly where Smith was concerned, since he was the biggest question mark. She would assess him entirely on her own—from what she herself saw and heard.
Once lubricated with a few cocktails, he could be quite expansive. “He has been here for twenty-five years or more,” Harkness said, “and the tales are wonderful. The Panchen Lama of Tibet, the animals he has collected, the racehorses he has owned, gold in the high mountains, Chinese civil war and bandits.” Smith was a practiced storyteller who in previous trips to the States had told reporters many of the same chestnuts—how he had been the only white man for scores of miles in “barbaric” regions; that he had lived for weeks on cornmeal and game, how he had been snowbound for months on end in below-zero temperatures.
For those first few days in Shanghai, Harkness savored the accounts. They were glimpses of the rough life of adventure she intended to have for herself, even while giving her cause to have doubts about this old China hand. For Smith never tried to disguise his contempt for the Chinese. “It was a long job teaching these hunters that there is a difference between a live animal and a dead one,” he wrote of the native workers in western China, “for they are primitive, stupid and deceitful, and they lie with the greatest of ease.”
Harkness, on the other hand, found the Chinese to be an amazingly honest people. Here, her hotel room remained unlocked and nothing, down to the “little pile of coppers” left on her dresser, was ever taken. “I divide the whites in two classes out here,” she would write, “those with the superior attitude toward the yellow races, and consequently hating them and being cordially hated in return, and those who like the Chinese, try to understand them, and in turn receive the same treatment with at times a great deal of service and unbelievable loyalty thrown in.”
Smith was also a product of his age and time. The notion of a woman in command of an expedition
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