John Henry Hemming (born 1935) is a historian, explorer, and expert on the Incas and indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin. Early life and education Hemming was born in Vancouver on the 5th of January, 1935. His father, Henry Harold Hemming, who had served in the First World War, likewise foresaw the Second, and wanted his son to be born in North America. So he sent John's mother, Alice Hemming, a journalist, on a cruise through the Panama Canal that ended in British Columbia. John and his sister Louisa were brought back to London when he was two months old. He was educated in the United Kingdom at Eton College, in Canada at McGill University, and read history at Oxford where he obtained a Doctor of Letters degree and became an honorary fellow of Magdalen College. Career In 1961, with fellow Oxford graduates Richard Mason and Kit Lambert (who later managed The Who), he was part of the Iriri River Expedition into unexplored country in central Brazil. The Brazilian mapping agency, IBGE, sent a three-man survey team to help map these unknown forests and rivers and gave the Expedition permission to name features it found. However, after four months, an unknown indigenous people found the group's trail, laid an ambush, and killed Richard Mason with arrows and clubs. Mason was the last Englishman ever to be killed by a totally unknown and uncontacted tribe. His body was carried out and buried in the British cemetery in Rio de Janeiro. The tribe was contacted in 1973, and was called Panará: Hemming visited them in 1998 and wrote about this in The Times. His first book, The Conquest of the Incas, was published in 1970 and has ever since remained in print with two revisions. Because no new documents have been discovered, it is often regarded as the definitive work on the Spanish conquistadors' conquest of Peru. This book won the Robert Pitman Literary Prize and the Christopher Award in New York. Hemming had spent the year 1960 travelling to every part of Peru, was for years chairman of the Anglo-Peruvian Society, and has been awarded Peru's two highest civilian honours: El Sol del Peru ('The Sun of Peru', South America's oldest order of chivalry) and the Grand Cross of the Orden al Merito Publico (Order of Merit). He has also written, with the American photographer Edward Ranney, an account of Inca