Sir Hubert Wilkins is probably the most famous explorer you’ve never heard of (certainly I had never heard of him). Wilkins is probably so little known because he was not a self-publicist and did not always take the choice to go for glory (though well positioned to be the 1st to fly over the South Pole – he preferred to explore and map the Antarctic coast). Nevertheless Wilkins discovered more previously unchartered land and sea than anyone before or since.
This excellent biography seeks to redress the balance by recounting the extraordinary life of this man who was born in 1888 in the drought prone state of South Australia to parents who were both over 50 when he was born. Raised on the family farm Wilkins developed a self-reliant and adventurous nature that Nasht captures and develops. Nasht obviously like his subject and it comes through in this book which is all the more readable for the author’s sympathy. The majority of the book deals with Wilkin’s life before the 2nd World War and there is little of his later life or for that matter of his private life – he did not marry until he was 40 so that one doesn’t really get to know the man. Even so there is a lot to tell of this man’s life and extraordinary accomplishments up until the outbreak of the 2nd World War and the book is eminently readable.
The Amazon description of the book reads as follows:
“Aviator, war hero, explorer, reporter, prolific writer, spy, scientist and naturalist, Hubert Wilkins (1888-1958) was the most remarkable explorer of the twentieth century. The only allied war photographer to be decorated in battle, he was also the first man to fly in the Antarctic and to navigate a submarine under polar ice. He survived crashes and disasters, firing squads, sabotaged expeditions and even capture by Arab slavers, living long enough to be honoured by kings, presidents and dictators.”
Wilkins left South Australia as a stowaway in order to get to Sydney where he became interested in the then new trade of cinematography in which, surprisingly, in the early part of the 20th Century Australia was a leading nation. Quickly learning the ropes of film making he became a Newsreel cameraman and War Correspondent in the Balkan Wars of 1912/3 (where he was arrested as a spy by the Turks and lined up for execution by firing squad on several occasions – those next to him not being so lucky – but reprieved because his captors were wary of shooting a foreigner without gaining a confession). From 1913 to 1916 Wilkins was a member of Viljamhur Steffanson’s ill-fated ‘Canadian Arctic Expedition’ – as a cameraman initially but as his cameras were lost early on he took an interest in the Arctic Survival and Exploration. In 1916, Wilkins on hearing of the Great War took leave of Steffanson and joined the ANZACs in western France as a cameraman along with Frank Hurley (of Shackleton’s South expedition fame). Achieving the rank of Captain he was twice awarded the MC for bravery and wounded several times with numerous narrow escapes including having a German shell land at his feet but fail to explode. Wilkins was often found standing in no-mans land under fire calmly filming the chaos around him. Nasht states that the randomness of death experienced around him by Wilkins at Passchendaele seemed to inure him to fear of death.
Post War Wilkins continued to seek new experiences – in 1919 he was Navigator on one of the aircraft trying to fly from Britain to Australia in order to win the Australian government prize of £A10, 000 for the first Australian airman to fly a British aircraft from the UK to Australia within 30 consecutive days. The aircraft eventually crash landing in Crete with a suspected sabotaged engine. In 1921-1922 as an ornithologist aboard the Quest on the Shackleton-Rowett Expedition to the Southern Ocean and adjacent islands and from 1923 he carried out a two-year study for the British Museum of the bird life of Northern Australia. This study, though well received by the British Museum, led to Wilkin’s being somewhat ostracized by the Australian government for the rest of his life (and perhaps leading to his modern day obscurity) because of his criticisms of the deliberate damage being done to the native fauna and the appalling treatment (including mass murder) of the indigenous population.
In 1927 despite having written off 2 aircraft in just 2 days trialling them for Arctic operations, Wilkins and his pilot Carl Ben Eielson exploring the drift ice of the Arctic Ocean in search for land that it was thought might be present were able to prove none was present by carrying out the first land-plane landing onto drift ice and taking soundings that proved the water depth was more than 5000m. Returning to Alaska from this flight they suffered engine failure and were forced to land and then walk out over several days.
On 15 April 1928 Wilkins and Eielson made the 1st a trans-Arctic crossing from Point Barrow, Alaska, to Spitsbergen, taking around 20 hours. For this Wilkins was knighted but not content to rest on his laurels he switched his attentions to the Antarctic. Carrying out explorations over 2 years with an interlude of the 1st round the world trip by Airship as an observer/reporter in the off season. On the second season in Antarctica, Wilkins could have chosen to be the 1st to fly over the South Pole but he eschewed the opportunity in order carry out explorations and scientific observations along the coastline. On hearing of the death on Eilson and on his return he declared that he was done with flying (though he would fly many times over the coming years) and turned his attention to becoming the 1st person to reach the North Pole by Submarine.
Whilst the Submarine expedition was to be a failure in many terms (its scientific results were later to prove more than useful) and its failure was to have a profoundly negative effect on Wilkins’ reputation, one can only admire the ambition of privately financing a submarine expedition to the North Pole in the pre-nuclear age.
In 1936 Wilkins did indeed return to flying in a7 month long Search and Rescue effort, at the request of the USSR, for find a missing Soviet aircraft that was attempting to reach the USA from Moscow.
The above represents a brief outline of the adventures covered brilliantly in Nasht’s book. The book does go onto talk about Wilkins’ work in the 2nd World War and his influence on US Navy plans to transit the Arctic Ocean by nuclear submarine in the 1950s but these are really only footnotes to the main events I have outlined.
Overall I would give this book a 5/5 – If you read nothing else this year then read this.
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