George Hubert Wilkins

Australian explorer and cinematographer

• Born: October 31, 1888
• Birthplace: East Mount Bryan, South Australia, Australia
• Died: December 1, 1958
• Place of death: Framingham, Massachusetts

Wilkins utilized new technological developments and applied knowledge from aviation, cinematography, and meteorology to understand the diverse conditions of the polar regions during his explorations.

Early Life

George Hubert Wilkins was the thirteenth and youngest child of Harry Wilkins and the former Louisa Smith. Harry Wilkins had failed to find his fortune in the Ballarat, Victoria, gold strikes in 1851 and turned to the open range as one of the earliest drovers to bring cattle into South Australia. It was on his sheep and cattle ranch that Wilkins lived and worked as a young boy. Although he received a diploma qualifying him to enter a state high school, Wilkins had no formal secondary education because he spent nearly three years helping his father through a devastating drought. His years of living in the vastness of the country, observing and camping with the neighboring aborigines and experiencing the destructive forces of nature, influenced Wilkins’s lifetime interest in natural sciences, anthropology, climatology, and meteorology.

In 1903, his parents retired to Adelaide, where Wilkins worked in the mornings and attended classes at both the University of Adelaide and the South Australian School of Mines and Industries. Although he studied electrical and general engineering, his interests diversified to include music, botany, zoology, geology, and particularly photography. While attending school, Wilkins served as an apprentice to a mechanical engineer and later spent nearly a year in charge of the electric lighting for a touring carnival company. It was during his years with the carnival that he developed his love for travel and his expertise in the new technology of motion pictures.

In 1908, Wilkins was offered a position with the Gaumont Motion Picture Company in London, England, as a cinematographic cameraman. He stowed away on a ship, was caught and forced to work on the ship’s dynamo, and eventually arrived in England after an adventurous journey through the Mediterranean and North Africa. In London, his rare skills with cameras and motion pictures enabled him to work for both the Gaumont company and the London Daily Chronicle. While on assignment at Hendon Aerodrome, Wilkins met Claude Grahame-White, the pioneer English aviator, who took him on his first flight and arranged for him to take flying lessons. Wilkins’s flight training was interrupted when his employers jointly sent him to cover the brutal Balkan War in 1912-1913 as a cinematographer. He was briefly captured during the war and at great personal risk became the first photographer to obtain motion pictures of actual combat. After the war, Wilkins continued to build a reputation in the photographic and cinematographic fields in Europe and the West Indies while continuing his flying lessons in both airplanes and dirigibles. In 1913, his career suddenly changed when he was invited to join an expedition to the Arctic.

Life’s Work

In 1913, Wilkins joined the Vilhjalmur Stefansson Arctic Expedition, sponsored by the Canadian government. During the following three years, he walked thousands of miles across the Arctic ice and acquired great expertise in the techniques of living, traveling, and working under Arctic conditions. Although Wilkins was the expedition’s photographer, he added greatly to his knowledge of natural sciences, studied Inuit ethnology, and carried out oceanographic and meteorological experiments. He also developed plans to utilize airplanes in polar explorations and mapping and for establishing permanent weather stations in those regions as part of a worldwide weather forecasting program.

Because of World War I, Wilkins left the expedition in 1916 to accept a commission in the Royal Australian Flying Corps. He was assigned to the military history department as a photographer, navigator, and pilot. During this assignment, he was wounded nine times and received the Military Cross with Bar for his bravery. When the war ended, Wilkins returned to flying. In 1919, he participated in the England-to-Australia air race, but a fuel leak forced his Blackburn Kangaroo airplane to land in Crete.

In 1920-1921, Wilkins made his first trip to Antarctica as second in command of John Lachlan Cope’s British Imperial Expedition to survey the coastline of Graham Land. On his second visit, he served as naturalist with Sir Ernest Shackleton and John Quiller Rowett’s Quest expedition of 1921-1922, during which Shackleton died. Wilkins discovered several new species of vegetation, birds, and insects, while continuing his meteorological study of the polar regions.

Wilkins spent 1922 and 1923 in Europe and the Soviet Union with the Society of Friends, filming the effects of drought and famine. On his return to London, he was selected by the British Museum to lead a natural history expedition in 1923-1925 to collect plant and animal specimens in tropical Northern Australia. He summarized his results in his book Undiscovered Australia (1928), which showed the extent and quality of his studies of plants, birds, insects, fish, mammals, fossils, and archaeological artifacts.

Unable to secure funding for an Antarctic expedition, Wilkins, with support from several private sources, such as the Detroit News and the American Geographical Society, returned to his earlier goal of exploring the Arctic by airplane. After two abortive efforts in 1926 and 1927, Wilkins and Carl Ben Eielson in 1928 flew their Lockheed Vega monoplane twenty-one hundred miles across previously unexplored territory between Point Barrow, Alaska, and Spitsbergen, Norway. In his book Flying the Arctic (1928), Wilkins explained that the flight was made to prove the value of airplanes for polar exploration and to further his plans for polar meteorological stations.

Wilkins was knighted by King George V on June 14, 1928, at Buckingham Palace, in recognition of his pioneer flights and other accomplishments. He won several other honors, including the Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographic Society and the Samuel Finley Breese Morse Gold Medal of the American Geographical Society.

Wilkins next launched his project for the aerial exploration of the Antarctic as the leader of the Wilkins-Hearst Expedition sponsored by the American Geographical Society and financier William Randolph Hearst. From Deception Bay in the South Shetland Islands, he and Eielson made the first flight in the Antarctic on November 16, 1928. On subsequent flights from 1928 to 1930, Wilkins flew over Graham Land, discovering Crane Channel, Stefansson Strait, and the Lockheed Mountains. He claimed the island known as Charcot Land for Great Britain and mapped more than eighty thousand square miles of Antarctica.

Wilkins’s reputation as a pioneer aviator in polar regions was firmly established. Handsome, six feet tall, and possessing a grace that belied his solid two hundred pounds, Wilkins was highly respected for his scholarship, professionalism, amiability, and integrity. In 1929, he married Suzanne Bennett, an Australian actor who lived in New York. Theirs was a childless but happy marriage that by mutual agreement permitted them to pursue their individual careers.

In all of his flights over the Arctic Sea, Wilkins had found no land on which to build his projected weather stations. Unwilling to accept ice floes as station platforms and doubting that surface ships could penetrate the icy seas to suitable locations, he turned to the submarine as an experimental weather station. Converting an obsolete navy submarine, which he named the Nautilus, into an oceanographic laboratory, Wilkins proposed crossing the Arctic basin using the vessel both above and below the ice to radio weather information to the world. A series of mishaps and malfunctions forced the Nautilus expedition of 1931 to be abandoned, but not before the feasibility of using submarines under the polar ice cap had been demonstrated. This was the first submarine trip under the Arctic ice and preceded the atomic-powered Nautilus by twenty-seven years.

From 1933 to 1937, Wilkins commanded the ship Wyatt Earp and managed four Antarctic flights by the American Lincoln Ellsworth. In November, 1935, Ellsworth, utilizing Wilkins’s planning, succeeded in the first flight across the Antarctic continent, rendezvousing with Wilkins aboard the Wyatt Earp. In August, 1937, the Soviet Union gave Wilkins the command of a search expedition to locate Soviet aviator Sigesmund Levanevsky, who had disappeared between Moscow and Alaska. During the following months, Wilkins and Herbert Hollick-Kenyon combined the search with pioneer moonlight flying in winter conditions while covering more than 150,000 square miles of the uncharted polar basin, but Levanevsky was never found.

The Levanevsky search was Wilkins’s last great feat of exploration. During World War II, Wilkins was utilized as a geographer, climatologist, and Arctic adviser to the United States Quartermaster Corps and the Office of Strategic Studies. He was specifically involved in developing clothing and equipment for troops engaged in rugged environments. Wilkins designed special parkas and underwear for troops assigned to polar regions and personally tested them in the Aleutian Islands.

After the war, Wilkins worked with the U.S. Navy Office of Scientific Research from 1946 to 1947 and served as an adviser to the United States Weather Bureau (1946-1948) and the Arctic Institute of North America (1947). He was a guest lecturer in geography at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in 1947-1948 and at the National Defense College of Canada in 1948.

Wilkins was an active participant in the Antarctic studies conducted during the International Geophysical Year, 1957-1958. Wilkins died of a heart attack on December 1, 1958, in Framingham, Massachusetts, where he had worked as a consultant on polar regions for the Research and Development Command of the Department of Defense since 1953. On March 17, 1959, the U.S. nuclear submarine Skate, the first vessel to surface at the exact geographical North Pole, honored Wilkins’s lifetime wish by scattering his ashes over the icy terrain.

Significance

Wilkins was primarily a field explorer who had an inquisitive mind and the outlook of a true pioneer. He was at home with primitive people whose reverence for nature he shared. His adaptability to extreme environmental conditions made him an ideal polar explorer. At the same time, he was one of the least publicly recognized expedition leaders because he cared less for headlines than for genuine advances in knowledge of humankind’s environment. He was never interested in the races to either pole, and it was only after thousands had preceded him that he visited either one, even though he had spent five summers and twenty-six winters in the Arctic and eight summers in the Antarctic.

In addition to his pioneering efforts in cinematography and the Nautilus expedition, Wilkins was the first to fly in the Antarctic, the first to fly over the Arctic Ocean, and the first to prove the feasibility of landing a plane on packed ice. Respect from his colleagues and honors from governments were bestowed on him for his feats and scientific contributions. His greatest successes and rewards were the reorientation of geographic thought that the airplane engendered, the development of submarines capable of exploring the polar waters, and the establishment of the polar weather stations for which he had worked during his lifetime.

Wilkins was as much at home with the scientific world of the International Geophysical Year in 1957 as he had been with his early experiences in cinematography and flight. His ability to utilize new technology and ideas and to realize their long-term significance made him the consummate explorer that he was.

Bibliography

Bertrand, Kenneth J. Americans in Antarctica, 1775-1948. New York: Lane Press, 1971. An American Geographical Society special publication. Excellent information about Wilkins with particular emphasis on the Ellsworth flights.

Grierson, John. Sir Hubert Wilkins: Enigma of Exploration. London: Robert Hale, 1960. A factual and informative biography of an admirable individual whose adventurous life was lived in near obscurity.

Jenness, Stuart E. The Making of an Explorer: George Hubert Wilkins and the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913-1916. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. A history of the expedition, focusing on Wilkins’s role in the exploration.

Kirwan, Laurence P. A History of Polar Exploration. New York: W. W. Norton, 1960. Comprehensive narrative with references to Wilkins in the context of polar exploration.

MacLean, John Kennedy, and Chelsea Fraser. Heroes of the Farthest North and Farthest South. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1932. Good chapters on the early expeditions and accomplishments of Wilkins and Stefansson.

Mill, Hugh Robert. “The Significance of Sir Hubert Wilkins’s Antarctic Flights.” The Geographical Review 19 (July, 1929): 377-386. A contemporary and professional analysis of the importance of Wilkins’s early aeronautical achievements in the Arctic.

Nasht, Simon. The Last Explorer: Hubert Wilkins, Hero of the Great Age of Polar Exploration. New York: Arcade, 2006. Chronicles Wilkins’s colorful life, including his expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctica.

Stefansson, Vilhjalmur. Unsolved Mysteries of the Arctic. New York: Macmillan, 1938. An entire chapter is devoted to Wilkins’s involvement in the Levanevsky search. Comprehensive narrative by an expert in polar history.

Thomas, Lowell. Sir Hubert Wilkins, His World of Adventure. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961. Informative biography in which the author has Wilkins narrate his life from their thirty years of conversations. Excellent photographs.

Wood, Walter A. “George Hubert Wilkins.” The Geographical Review 49 (July, 1959): 411-416. Brief but informative biographical account of Wilkins’s life and accomplishments.