ChatGPT is insanely powerful.

But most people waste 90% of its potential by using it like Google.

These 1,000+ proven ChatGPT prompts fix that and help you work 10X faster.

Sign up for Superhuman AI and get:

Claim your free prompts

In 1910, a sixteen-year-old named Osa Leighty from Chanute, Kansas married a traveling showman named Martin Johnson and left for the South Pacific on their honeymoon. They did not come back for two years.

She would spend the next two decades doing variations of the same thing: living in remote film camps across Kenya, the Belgian Congo, and Borneo, and returning with footage of animals and communities that no outside camera crew had documented before.

Martin Johnson had sailed with Jack London as a teenager and built a traveling show around the photographs he brought back. Osa first encountered him as an audience member at one of those shows, in Chanute, when she was fifteen.

Osa, who had almost no travel experience when they married, adapted fast.

Within months of arriving in the South Pacific, she was managing supply lines, negotiating with local leaders, and stepping in with a rifle when the situation required it.

Their earliest work documented communities in the New Hebrides (present-day Vanuatu) and the Solomon Islands. The films were marketed to American audiences in language that reflected the assumptions of the era, but the footage itself was genuine documentary work in places that had seen no outside camera crew.

The images they came back with had no American equivalent. Audiences lined up for them.

In 1921, the Johnsons shifted their base to East Africa, with backing from George Eastman and the American Museum of Natural History. They established a permanent camp they called Lake Paradise, built at the rim of an extinct volcanic crater lake in northern Kenya at roughly 4,500 feet, where they lived and worked for four years.

Their 1928 film Simba: The King of the African Jungle was among the first feature-length wildlife films to run in American cinemas, and it drew sustained audiences.

In 1930, they flew two small biplanes across equatorial Africa, filming from the air. Osa had earned her pilot's license and flew one of the planes herself, in an aircraft called Spirit of Africa.

In the early 1930s, the Johnsons spent extended time in the Belgian Congo filming mountain gorillas. The resulting film, Congorilla, released in 1932, was the first sound film made anywhere in Africa, and included some of the earliest footage of gorillas taken in the wild.

Osa ran the camps: food stores, medical supplies, personnel, and security. Martin operated the cameras while she managed the conditions that made it possible for him to do so.

Martin Johnson died in January 1937 when a commercial flight out of Burbank, California crashed shortly after takeoff. Osa survived with serious injuries.

She spent much of the following years writing, and her 1940 memoir I Married Adventure became a bestseller that remains in print. She died in New York in 1953, at 58.

The footage the Johnsons brought back from the 1920s and 1930s documented landscapes, wildlife, and communities at a specific moment, much of which has since changed significantly. A museum in Chanute, Kansas now holds their archive: cameras, correspondence, field journals, and the original film reels.

Until next time,

Emails From Afar Team

Back in September, the team behind both Letters From Afar and Emails From Afar launched a brand new venture… especially for kids.

Introducing:

Creature Cards are collectible animal trading cards packed with incredible creatures, bold artwork, fun facts, danger ratings, and holographic rares.

From deep-sea monsters to jungle predators, every pack brings the wild world to your fingertips.