Hemming was born in Vancouver because his Canadian father, Henry Harold Hemming OBE, MC, had been through the trenches in the First World War, saw the Second coming, and wanted him to be born in North America. So he sent John's mother, Alice Hemming OBE, a well-known 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. Though a proud Canadian he has not been there since 1967. He was educated in the United Kingdom at Eton College and read History at Magdalen College, Oxford.
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 3-man survey team to help map these unknown forests and rivers and gave the Expedition permission to name features it found. Sadly, 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 an 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; one reviewer believed that it was by a famous historian using a pseudonym, so high was the level of scholarship. (Hemming at the time was only an M.A.; he later received a D.Litt doctorate from Oxford as well as honorary doctorates from the University of Warwick and the University of Stirling.) This book went on to win the Robert Pitman Literary Prize and the Christopher Medal in New York. Hemming has since travelled to every part of Peru, is chairman of the Anglo-Peruvian Society, and in 2007 was awarded Peru's highest civil decoration, the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit. He has also written, with the American photographer Edward Ranney, an account of Inca architecture of Peru, Monuments of the Incas, to be reissued in a revised edition in 2009.
His experience on the Iriri River Expedition led to a heightened interest in Brazilian Indians. Between 1971-72 he visited 45 tribes throughout Brazil - four of them (Surui, Parakana, Asurini and Galera Nambikwara) at the time that Brazilian teams made the first-ever face-to-face contact. Over the following 26 years he completed a 3-volume history of the indigenous peoples of Amazonia: Red Gold (1978), which covers the period 1500-1760; Amazon Frontier (1985), covering the period 1760-1910; and Die If You Must (2004), which describes their plight during the 20th century. In recognition of this and his other work in Brazil Hemming was awarded the Order of the Southern Cross by the Brazilian government in 1998.
In 1975, John Hemming became Director and Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, a post he held until 1996. The Society changed in every way during those 21 years: its membership more than doubled; finances went from deficits to a healthy surplus; lectures expanded from about 20 per year to involve 450 speakers in a series of packed Monday-night events in London and at branches set up around the UK; expedition training was introduced with the successful Expedition Advisory Centre (run by Nigel Winser and Shane Winser); the Victorian premises beside Hyde Park were fully restored and made more inviting with meals, bars, etc.; and academic geographers of the Institute of British Geographers merged back into the RGS. Research flourished through a series of multidisciplinary projects, in Wahibah (Oman), Mulu (Sarawak), Karakoram (Pakistan), Kimberley (Australia), Kora (Kenya), Mkomazi (Tanzania) and Badia desert (Jordan) - of which Hemming was co-chairman from 1992-2004. He personally led the Maracá Rainforest Project in Brazil (1987-88) which, with 200 scientists and scientific technicians, became the largest research project in Amazonia organised by any European country - in partnership with Brazilian researchers from INPA (Amazon Research Institute) and SEMA environment agency. In 1990 Hemming was awarded the RGS's Gold Medal in recognition of his work on the Maracá project.
John Hemming is currently Chairman of the Amazon Charitable Trust, a trustee of The John Ellerman Foundation, Earthwatch, Lepra, The Hakluyt Society, The Gilchrist Educational Trust, The Rainforest Foundation, and The Global Diversity Foundation. He is also on the advisory board of charity Cool Earth, one of the founders of Survival International and for 10 years served on the board of the British Council.
Aside from his involvement in exploration and Latin America, since 1963 he has worked for the Hemming Group Ltd, setting up and running one of the UK's foremost exhibition-organising companies, Brintex Ltd, before taking over as joint chairman of this family business which also organises trade exhibitions and conferences and publishes titles including Municipal Journal and Surveyor.
In April 2008 his latest book, Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon, was published by Thames and Hudson. Described by Alexander Cockburn in The Sunday Times as a 'manly epic', and by Hugh Thomson in The Daily Telegraph as a book that 'will stand as the definitive single-volume work on the subject',.
John Hemming is the father of Beatrice and writer Henry Hemming.
