The story of men who had more adventures in a month that you will probably have in your life

This story began in summer of 2016. I was on a holiday in England. Together with some friends, we wanted to hike in Hope Valley in the center of the country. We stopped for a lunch in a little town called Castleton and spent some time walking between the old buildings. There is a church made in Old English style. It is surrounded by a lot of very old gravestones. The local community organized a sale of books to support the maintenance cost of the church. I really like the old books so I spent a significant amount of time there and I left with two books in my hand. One of them was a book from 1934 titled “Recent Heroes of Modern Adventure” by T.C. Bridges and H. Hessel Tilman and published by George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd. London Bombay Sydney. I spent the rest of the day hiking. I came back to London and read a few chapters. It’s a book about adventurers and travelers from the first half of the twentieth century. Real Indiana Joneses. They had amazing adventures during the journeys you cannot repeat in the contemporary times. The world described in the book is for sure bygone by now.
I came back to Amsterdam and forgot about the book for almost a year. It came back to me when I moved to the new apartment and it was the only book I took with me. The very first night I read a chapter about the expedition that has to explore the biggest forest in South America in Bolivia. The travelers have met on their journey a very unexpected person — a white man who hunt for the jaguars armed with a spear. He saved a life of one the expedition member. His name was Sasha Siemel.
I started collecting some information about this extraordinary person. How did he find himself in the middle of Bolivian jungle in the 1920's?
Sasha was born in 1890 in Riga in the Russian Empire (now Latvia). When he was nineteen he moved to Argentina and found a job in a printing shop in Buenos Aires. Five years later he traveled to the jungles of Mato Grosso where he worked as a gunsmith and mechanic in the mining camps. He met there a native who taught him how to hunt jaguars with home-made spear and a bow. He quickly became a skillful hunter and a nickname “Tigrero” was given to him. He was the very first white man who killed a jaguar with the seven-foot spear. He worked on ranches of the Pantanal hunting jaguars hired by landowners to protect their live stock. He became famous at the beginning of the 30' when Julian Duguild wrote the biography of him. Sasha started to make lectures in explorer’s clubs all over the world. He became an actor, appearing in the 1937 series “Jungle Menace”. He purchased a farm in southern Pensylvania and made it his residence for the rest of his life. He wrote a couple of books and many articles to various travelers magazines. He spoke seven languages. He is known among the sportsmen, claiming to have successfully hunted over 300 jaguars — the biggest and the most dangerous cats in western hemispheres.

I find it amazing that person like Siemel has vanished from popular culture so fast. I ask a few of my friends if they know him, but nobody does. I couldn’t find the trial of him if not the book that I get by coincidence. I wonder how many of those forgotten heroes are so close to being found again? They could be very inspirational figures for many people in contemporary times.
