John grew up in Los Angeles. His mother was a housewife and his father worked his way up through the Pierce Brothers Mortuary to become their vice president, eventually turning the company into one of the largest mortuary chains in the world. From an early age, John was a voracious reader, spurred on by his parents. He devoured books about exploration, and by age 15, he knew he wanted to spend his life as an explorer. Once John decided on the Nile as his first life goal, he turned his full attention to researching its history, cultures and effects on the world.

In the late 1940s, John was contacted through the Adventurers’ Club by a noted French kayaker and explorer named Jean LaPorte who wanted to join him on his long-planned expedition. They added André Davy, another Frenchman who was an accomplished journalist and had offered to post dispatches to the international press as they proceeded down the Nile. The “Nileteers,” as they referred to themselves, were set.

John considers himself to be a cultural anthropologist—he studied anthropology and psychology at the University of Southern California—and one of his reasons for making the trip was to meet and film remote tribes of people the world had never seen or even heard of. For the Nile, kayaks seemed the perfect vehicles to approach the more than two dozen different tribes known to live along the river’s shores.

As John, Jean and André journeyed to the source of the Nile to begin their paddle, they were continually told that what they were about to attempt was impossible. One official even accused them of wanting to “commit suicide by kayak”!

John had paddled dugouts in several Third World countries but had never been in a kayak. He and Jean took a couple of shakedown kayak cruises on the Seine and Marne rivers in France before setting off to Africa. Other than Jean, John didn’t even know another kayaker at the time. Three 15-foot hickory-and-canvas kayaks with rubberized bottoms were provided by the manufacturer, J. Chauveaux of France. The seats of the 60-pound kayaks were made of hard rubber, and there were no bulkheads. The paddles were aluminum, and each kayak carried two additional two-piece wooden paddles for spares. They had no life vests, determining them to be too cumbersome.