Born October 31, 1888,
Mount Bryan East, Australia
Died December 1, 1958,
Framingham, Massachusetts
Sir George Hubert Wilkins led a colorful life. He immersed himself in a variety of occupations that offered adventure and challenge, but he is best remembered for his exploration of the Arctic and Antarctic. Wilkins was born on October 31, 1888, in the Australian outback on a sheep station about 100 miles north of the city of Adelaide. At 20 he left Australia by hiding on a ship headed to Algiers in North Africa. He worked as a smuggler until he reached England, where he became one of the first film photographers. He learned how to fly in 1910 and then was sent by his employers to film the Balkan Wars for newsreel services.
Within a period of 12 years Wilkins pursued three different occupations and had numerous, sometimes life-threatening, adventures. In 1913 the Times of London hired him as a photographer to cover the Canadian Arctic Expedition led by Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Wilkins spent two years in the Arctic, at one point saving Stefanssonās life when the explorer got lost. After returning to Europe in 1915 Wilkins photographed battles on the Western Front during World War I; he was gassed, wounded nine times, and buried by bomb blasts on several occasions. Following the war he served as the navigator for an airplane crew that was attempting to be the first to fly from England to Australia. Engine failure caused the plane to crash into a mental institution on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean.
Then in a complete change of pace, Wilkins was chosen to be the naturalist on an expedition led by Ernest Shackleton (see entry) to Antarctica in 1920. After Shackleton died of a massive heart attack during the trip the party tried to carry on but soon became stuck in the ice; however, Wilkinsās work in collecting specimens was favorably noted. He then returned to Europe to make a documentary about the famine in Russia caused by the Russian Revolution. From 1923 to 1925 the British Museum hired Wilkins to lead an expedition to Northern Australia to study mammals and to film the life of the Aborigines.
In 1926 Wilkins was chosen to lead the Detroit Arctic Expedition, sponsored by American automobile manufacturers, to the Arctic Ocean in two airplanes to search for new land, including the reported but nonexistent Keenan Land. The expedition traveled from Seattle, Washington, to Fairbanks, Alaska, where both planes crashed. The planes were damaged only slightly and there were no human injuries; however, a reporter was killed when he walked into a propeller. After Wilkins repaired one of the aircraft he flew 150 miles north across the Arctic Ocean to Point Barrow, Alaska. He made several flights to and from Point Barrow but repeated mechanical problems thwarted his progress.
When Wilkins returned to Alaska in February 1927 with a new airplane, he flew 500 miles over the Arctic Ocean. Yet like his previous trip, this one was beset with mechanical problems. During one flight a malfunctioning engine forced Wilkins and his pilot, Carl Eielson, to land on an ice floe. Taking advantage of the situation, Wilkins took depth soundings that showed the ocean to be about 16,000 feet deep at that point, much deeper than anyone had thought. After he and Eielson had repaired the planeās engine they had to land almost immediately because there were still mechanical problems. At sunset they tried to take off again, but as soon as the plane was airborne they ran into a snowstorm. Then they ran out of fuel and were forced to land in a snowbank on an ice floe 65 miles northwest of Point Barrow. Wilkins and Eielson walked overland for 13 days to Point Barrow. More than once during the trip they fell into the water; on one occasion Wilkins, who could not swim, was almost carried away by the currentā"only an air pocket in his backpack saved him from drowning.
In 1928 Wilkins and Eielson returned to Point Barrow in a Lockheed Vega; they intended to fly across the Arctic from Alaska along the northern edge of the Canadian Arctic islands and Greenland to Spitsbergen off the northern end of Scandinavia. They left Point Barrow on April 5, 1928, following their flight plan until they ran into a storm near Spitsbergen. They flew over a small, isolated island but could find no place to land. After several other attempts, they finally landed in a snow bank on the island.
They remained there for four days until the storm broke. When they tried to leave, they found the skis at the bottom of the plane frozen so solidly that Wilkins had to stay on the ground and push while Eielson flew the plane. After Eielson was airborne he threw a rope to Wilkins, who tried to catch it in his mouth. Not only were all of Wilkinsās teeth loosened, but he was also hit by the planeās tail and knocked into the snow. Eielsonās third rescue attempt was successful and the two men were finally able to land at Green Harbor in Spitsbergen.
Wilkins and Eielson had made the first flight in a heavier-than-air craft across the Arctic; in 1926 Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (see entry) and Umberto Nobile had flown across the North Pole in the dirigible, or rigid airship, the Norge. After Wilkinsās flight Amundsen said, āNo flight has been made anywhere, at any time, which could be compared with this.ā The British government knighted Wilkins; the Royal Geographical Society also awarded him a medal.
Following this accomplishment, Wilkins became the first person to fly an airplane in Antarctica. He and Eielson headed south at the end of 1928 on an expedition sponsored by the Hearst newspapers and named the Wilkins-Hearst Expedition. Wilkins and Eielson made their first take-off on November 16, 1928; four days later, they flew 600 miles over the continent from their base on Deception Island. Wilkins did not try to fly over the South Pole, a feat that Richard Evelyn Byrd (see entry) accomplished about a week later. Weather conditions did not permit Wilkins to continue flying. He returned in December 1929 and made a limited number of flights over the Graham Peninsula and west of Peter I Island, but was again forestalled by bad weather.
On his return from Antarctica in 1930, Wilkins was able to convince the American explorer Lincoln Ellsworth (see entry) to help subsidize his next adventureā"sailing a submarine under the ice at the North Pole. Wilkins purchased a surplus World War I submarine from the U.S. Navy, which he had refitted and named the Nautilus. The ship sailed for Spitsbergen on August 18, 1931, for a trial run under the ice. The submarine had mechanical problems and the crew, apprehensive about sailing under the ice, went so far as to sabotage the Nautilus. The attempt was finally abandoned on September 8, 1931, after the submarine sailed a few hours under the ice. It was some 25 years later before a second submarine, again named the Nautilus, accomplished the feat envisaged by Wilkins.
In the following years Wilkins went to Antarctica twice with Ellsworth. Then in the winter of 1937-38 he organized a four-month effort to find a Russian pilot lost over the Arctic. These flights furnished valuable information on the climate and ice movements of the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia. At the end of 1938, Wilkins went back to Antarctica on an expedition sponsored by Ellsworth; in January 1939 he set off on his own to put out markers claiming the area of the Vestfold Hills as Australian territory.
During World War II Wilkins worked for the U.S. government in supplying aircraft for the war effort. In the early part of the war, he was aboard two different aircraft that were shot down, one over France and one over the Mediterranean, but he escaped unharmed both times. After the war he became an adviser to the U.S. military on Arctic warfare and on camouflage. He died of a heart attack in a hotel in Framingham, Massachusetts, on November 30, 1958. In response to a request he had made several times, his ashes were scattered near the North Pole in March 1959, when the U.S. submarine Skate surfaced in the Arctic Ocean. Wilkins wrote about his experiences in his book Flying the Arctic.
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