Fahnestock South Sea Expeditions
Four other men specialising in various fields were also part of the expedition: herpetologist and photographer Hugh Davis, director of the Mohawk Zoo in Tulsa; ornithologist and artist Dennis Puleston from England;[1] Wilson Glass and George Harris.
After leaving Tahiti, the expedition visited Samoa, Fiji, the New Hebrides, Solomon Islands, and New Guinea, collecting many specimens for the American Museum of Natural History.
The expedition was sponsored by the National Broadcasting Company of America, the Carnegie Corporation and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).
[9] The ship carried radio equipment and it was planned to make live broadcasts on the NBC Blue Network so that the public could follow the expedition's progress.
The plane was to be used for mapping and scouting out territories and carrying supplies ashore to island bases and was equipped with a radio and a homing device.
[10] Director II left New York on 1 February 1940 with a crew of 19: Sheridan and Bruce Fahnestock, their mother Mary Sheridan Fahnestock, scientist George Folster, entomologist Coleman Glover, anthropologist John McK Scott, museum preparators George Peterson and Bryce Metcalf, artist Edward Dair, and several college students.
[12] One of the second expedition's aims was to record traditional music in the Pacific for Helen Fahnestock Hubbard's Fahnestock-Hubbard Foundation at Columbia University.
Specially-insulated microphone cable two miles long allowed the team to leave the disc cutters on the ship while making recordings on shore.
In fact, the president asked them to undertake an intelligence gathering mission to the Dutch East Indies to assess the area's defence facilities in the face of probable Japanese invasion.
In February 1941, the Fahnestocks proceeded to Surabaya and travelled through Southeast Asia for ten months in a chartered ship, recording the music of Bali, Java, Madura, and the Kangean Islands as cover for their intelligence work.
[15] Bruce Fahnestock was killed in New Guinea in October 1942 when the trawler he was on was mistaken for a Japanese vessel and was attacked by an American fighter plane.
