Early in the 1970s I became chairman and convenor of the Senior Council for the Edinburgh University Expeditionary committee. It was our remit to vet proposals from groups of students wishing to organise an expedition, to advise them on details of their proposal and, if approved, to confer on them an ‘official’ status. If adopted as an official Edinburgh University expedition, the group received a small amount of start-up money from the University Senate, and usually found it easier to raise further capital from outside sources. Many of the expeditions we approved were biological, to parts of the world as distant as Mauritius, East Africa and Madagascar, but we also had climbing expeditions to areas such as Greenland and North America.  

It was in my capacity as chairman of this group that I received, early in 1975, a telephone call from a local business man, Stanley Hall, who wanted to organise a joint scientific and military expedition to the equatorial region of Ecuador. It was his idea to explore some newly-discovered caves in the Andes which, apart from their obvious biological interest, might also prove to be important pre-Columbian archaeological sites. The basic idea was that the Scottish and Ecuadorean armies would co-operate in providing the local organisation, including base camp and river transport, as well as a team of expert cavers. My job as ‘chief scientist’ was to raise a party of scientists interested mainly in caves, from both the U.K. and Ecuador. To do this I approached a number of scientists in various parts of the U.K. and succeeded in assembling a group comprising a variety of botanists, mycologists, entomologists and people interested in the biology of bats and oil birds. Since all expenses were to be met, all of these potential participants became very keen on the expedition, and some travelled up to Edinburgh to attend organisational meetings. Then, in December 1975, I became part of a small joint army and scientific reconnaissance group that travelled out to Ecuador, my job being to find some Ecuadorian counterparts to the U.K. scientists already ‘enlisted’.

So, about two weeks before Christmas we drove down from Edinburgh to the RAF airfield at Brize Norton where we were issued with a packet of sandwiches and a bottle of mineral water and put on a Hercules transport plane bound for Belize. The first leg of our journey to Gander in Newfoundland was long, cold and very noisy. We sat on canvas seats alongside military equipment such as armoured trucks and huge wooden packing cases for transport to the RAF base in Belize. However, soon after our arrival in Gander, where we ‘parked’ next to a Concorde in heavy snow, it was announced that a technical fault had developed that would delay any further immediate progress. The party therefore transferred to the comforts of civil airlines and flew on via Miami to Nassau in the Bahamas, where we were ‘grounded’ for two days. Here we stayed in some style at the Emerald Beach Hotel – and at the army’s expense (what a life!). Two days rest and recuperation, good food and sound sleep, then saw us on our way through Kingston, Jamaica, to a second enforced stop-over in Panama. The remainder of the journey to Ecuador was comparatively uneventful, flying via Cali, Colombia, to land at last in Quito.

At 10,000 feet but on the equator, the sun was high in the sky and quite hot, but the air temperature was strangely cool. Ecuadorians refer to the climate in Quito as ‘perpetual spring’.

We spent the day making contact with various people. I visited both the National and the Catholic Universities but could only find a couple of archaeologists interested in Incan artefacts, and no biologists interested in cave fauna. Meeting the Ecuadorean army was more productive, although by this time, judging from the glint in their eyes, it was obvious why they were so interested. There was a long-standing rumour that the last Incan king, Atuhalpa had hidden a cache of treasure in some caves ahead of the Spanish advance, and that this ‘golden library’ had never been found! We then flew down to the tropical heat of Guayaquil to meet the man who had first discovered the caves. Things got increasingly crazy when it appeared that he had a theory that all old world civilisations had originated in the Andes. According to this theory, people had built balsa-wood rafts, sailed down the Amazon, across the Atlantic Ocean, and then into the Mediterranean to become ‘proto-Sumerians’ in the Near East!  All of this, however, did not diminish the importance of his discovery of probably the largest cave system in the area.

Our return journey was by way of San Salvador to Belize City where we stayed for a couple of nights as guests of the RAF at their base in that country which, at the time, was being threatened by neighbouring Guatemala. It was here that I met R.V. Jones, newly retired Professor of Physics at Aberdeen University who was visiting his son stationed at the camp. Professor Jones was one of the wartime ‘boffins’ participating in the various programmes of scientific ‘warfare’ directed against the Germans. A more charming man you could ever have wished to meet. He also listened carefully, and with interest, to what I had to say about current work on biological clocks and, like all great scientists, could ask all the ‘right’ questions. We stayed in Belize for a couple of nights and in great comfort, before flying home again to the U.K. via Hamilton, Bermuda.

In the end I did not go on the expedition to Ecuador, passing my role over to a colleague, Philip Ashmole. However, much good science was carried out and the cavers explored what turned out to be one of the largest cave systems in that part of South America, reaching about two kilometres underground. A large underground cavern was also discovered which – understandably perhaps - was dubbed ‘Stanley Hall’. Atuhalpa’s ‘golden library’, of course, was never found, but several small pieces of Incan pottery were discovered near the mouth of the cave. Earlier on, during the organisation of the expedition, the astronaut Neil Armstrong was approached to see whether he would become patron. One day a helicopter landed at base camp and he stepped out to pay a visit, drank a cup of coffee, and then left!