Bertram Armytage

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Bertram Armytage
Armytages signature

Bertram Armytage (born September 29, 1869 in Geelong , † March 12, 1910 in Melbourne ) was an Australian cavalry officer and the first Australian-born polar explorer . He gained fame through his participation in the Nimrod Expedition (1907-1909) under Ernest Shackleton to the Antarctic . During this expedition Armytage led the so-called Western Group (Engl. Western Party ), the geological survey and geographical survey work in the area of Ferrar Glacier and Taylor Valley conducted. A few months after the end of the expedition committed Armytage not state clearly clarified motives of suicide .

Origin, youth and family

The Elcho estate in Geelong, where Armytage was born

Bertram Armytage was the youngest of four sons of the wealthy sheep farmer and wool merchant Frederick William Armytage (1838-1912) and his wife Mary Susan Armytage (born in Staughton, 1836-1924) on the Elcho estate on the outskirts of Geelong not far from Melbourne . The ancestors of the Armytage family, whose motto is Semper Paratus (German: Always ready ), originally came from Belgium . Bertram's grandfather, George Armytage (1795–1862), an engineer from London, emigrated to Australia in 1815 (according to another source, 1817).

Bertram Armytage completed his school education partly in Australia and partly in England. Between 1882 and 1885 he attended the Grammar School in his hometown Geelong before going to the Church of England Grammar School in Melbourne for two years . Finally, in 1887, he moved to Jesus College in Cambridge, England . There he impressed less with his scholastic than with his athletic achievements in rowing . In 1888 Armytage won the prestigious Head of the River Race on the Thames as a member of a team from Jesus College . In addition, a non-stop canoe tour over a distance of around 120 km has been handed down, during which Armytage paddled from Melbourne harbor to Geelong, carried his boat across the city to the Barwon River , went downriver to Bass Strait and to Passage der Wegen their tidal currents treacherous bay entrance the Rip the port Phillip Bay in full north-south extension crossed back to Melbourne.

On January 30, 1895 Armytage married the one year younger Blanch (called "Bon") Watson (1870–1955), who, like him, came from a wealthy Australian ranching dynasty. The marriage resulted in a daughter born in 1906.

Military career

Army days in 1894

After completing his school career came Armytage 1889 to Australia, where he temporarily for several years as an administrator on the sheep farm Wooloomanata in Victoria and another in Queensland worked, both to the possessions were his father. In addition, shortly after his return from England, he began military training with the Royal Victorian Field Artillery Brigade , which was stationed east of Geelong in Fort Queenscliff on Port Phillip Bay , which he completed after only six months with the rank of sub-lieutenant of the reserve. Subsequently he belonged to a cavalry regiment at Fort Queenscliff, which mainly took on representative tasks, such as the largest military parade in Australia to date on the occasion of Queen Victoria's 72nd birthday on May 24, 1891 in Melbourne. A few weeks earlier, Armytage had witnessed an accident in which a gun explosion killed and injured some of his comrades.

During the Second Boer War (1899-1902) Armytage served from 1900 in South Africa with the rank of lieutenant in the 6th Dragoon Guards , a cavalry regiment of the British Army , and received the Queen's South Africa Medal with three medals in April 1901 and in February 1902 the King's South Africa Medal with two medals.

Participation in the Nimrod expedition

→ Main article: Nimrod expedition and their crew list

After the end of the Boer War, Armytage returned to Australia in 1902. He quit his service in the army and from then on led the life of a bon vivant . The income from his parents' farm had given him financial independence, which enabled him to concentrate primarily on his obsession with sports, hunting and socializing in the Upper Class of Melbourne. His expanded intellectual circle of acquaintances included, among others, Tannatt William Edgeworth David , who was already well-known at the time and who was professor of geology at the University of Sydney . David's mediation enabled Armytage to participate in the Nimrod expedition to Antarctica, led by Ernest Shackleton , in December 1907 , during which he was initially intended as an assistant with no special area of ​​responsibility. Armytage learned of Shackleton's acceptance while he was in New Zealand to hunt deer . At the age of 38, he was one of the older members of the expedition together with the almost 50-year-old David and the 42-year-old biologist James Murray (1865-1914) and, alongside David and the geophysicist Douglas Mawson, one of three Australians who belonged to the 15-man landing crew .

Base camp at Cape Royds

Army days (on the far right) with other expedition participants at a gramophone event in the expedition hut on Cape Royds.

In an early assessment of Armytage, Shackleton said he was "an excellent man, obedient, reliable and ready for any job ... He is very popular with everyone because he is a man of the world and knows the nature of younger people." The expedition leader This referred in particular to Armytage's work in the laborious establishment of the base camp at Cape Royds on the west side of Ross Island from January to March 1908. In the period after the beginning of the Antarctic polar winter, however, Armytage was hardly able to work in a team and had an impact on the others Expedition participants introverted, grumpy and depressed. Shackleton tried to influence him by moving into shared quarters with Armytage in the expedition hut instead of assistant geologist Philip Brocklehurst . In addition, he gave the Australian sole responsibility for the Manchurian ponies he was carrying . This was a strong vote of confidence, as the horses were considered indispensable for the transport of equipment and provisions for the planned march to the geographic South Pole and four of the eight animals originally landed had already perished from the consumption of volcanic ash that they had eaten to cover their salt needs .

In addition to caring for the ponies, Armytage assisted the biologist James Murray in the following weeks with dredging off Cape Royds in order to examine the algae there. He and Murray also dug an exploration shaft about five meters deep to the bottom of a frozen freshwater lake near the expedition hut. Armytage narrowly escaped a catastrophe when, when descending into the shaft, large amounts of water suddenly seeped in and threatened to drown.

Creation of the supply depots

Target area of ​​the Nimrod expedition in Antarctica

On August 12, 1908, the team began to build the supply depots for the South Pole March. Armytage, Shackleton and David set out that day over the frozen McMurdo Sound to the old base camp of the Discovery Expedition (1901-1904) on the Hut Point Peninsula , which was to serve as an advanced base. The weather was still too cold for the ponies with temperatures as low as −49 ° C, so that the three men had to laboriously pull the transport sledge themselves. They reached the Discovery Cabin after a distance of about 37 km two days later. After a subsequent exploration of about 20 km further south across the Ross Ice Shelf , a snow storm kept them trapped in the Discovery Hut for five days. Armytage and his two companions used the time to prepare the inhospitable quarters for the next supply teams. It was not until August 22 that they were able to return to Cape Royds. Further supply marches followed until October 13, during which equipment and provisions were carried to the Discovery hut for 91 days and a large depot was set up on the ice shelf around 200 km south of Cape Royds.

On October 29, 1908, Ernest Shackleton set off for the South Pole March together with Frank Wild , Jameson Adams , the chief expedition doctor Eric Marshall and the four remaining ponies. Armytage was a member of a five-person relief team, which with the help of the expedition car brought further material to the Discovery hut, helped with the care of the horses and the southern group (English Southern Party ) on the first route over the Ross- Accompanied by ice shelf. Since October 5 was the northern group (Engl. Northern Party ), consisting of David Mawson and Deputy expedition doctor Alistair Mackay (1878-1914), the Antarctic magnetic pole in the northeastern Victoria Land on the go. Armytage started as head of the Western Group (Engl. Western party ) together with the geologists Raymond Priestley and Philip Brocklehurst on 1 December 1908 a supply March for the northern group in which the three men around 600 kg provisions and equipment across the McMurdo Sound to Butter Point ( 77 ° 39 ′  S , 164 ° 14 ′  E ), a headland at the mouth of the Ferrar Glacier . Armytage fell seriously ill with snow blindness .

Exploration march of the western group

Camp of the Western Group on the Ferrar Glacier on December 28, 1908

After the Western Group returned to base camp on December 7, 1908, Armytage, Priestley and Brocklehurst set out again for Butter Point two days later. On December 13, they reached the so-called beach Moraines ( 77 ° 45 '  S , 164 ° 31'  O ), lateral moraines of Koettlitz Glacier of loose rubble that as a breeding area of skuas expedition Discovery had been known since. When collecting eggs, some of the equipment, storage containers and sled harness were damaged by the birds.

On December 15th the arduous and dangerous ascent to the Ferrar glacier began due to crevasses. Priestley's search for fossils in the surrounding rock formations was unsuccessful. On December 19, they set up camp at an altitude of about 700 meters near the Solitary Rocks ( 77 ° 47 ′  S , 161 ° 12 ′  E ) on which Robert Falcon Scott and his companion in October 1903 as they ascended to the polar plateau had encountered. The geographic survey of the area revealed that the island position of the rocks within the glacier, assumed by Scott, was incorrect and that it was in fact a peninsula formation. On December 24th, not far from the Solitary Rocks , they came across the faded skeleton of a crabeater and found no explanation as to how the seal could have got here from the sea. During an ascent on the flank of the 2300  m high Knobhead ( 77 ° 55 ′  S , 161 ° 32 ′  E ) Armytage discovered green-colored lichens at an altitude of about 1,300 meters . Armytage and his two companions abandoned their intention to advance across the glacier to Depot-Nunatak ( 77 ° 45 ′  S , 160 ° 4 ′  E ) and thus to the polar plateau because of bad weather. Instead, they began walking back to Butter Point on December 27, hoping to encounter the Northern Group there. After waiting in vain for David, Mawson and Mackay until January 6, 1909, they undertook geological surveys on Moraines beach and collected rock samples there. After two days they returned to Butter Point again, but again there was no evidence of the fate of the northern group . On January 12, they set out north along the coastline into the Antarctic dry valleys . In the mouth of the Taylor Valley , they encountered large quantities of scallop shells on a sandy beach up to about 20 meters above the flushing edge , the remains of marine amphipods in the washed-up silt and the skeletons of seals along the moraine hills. From January 14th to 24th, they set up camp at Butter Point again in anticipation of the northern group .

Early in the morning of January 24, 1909, Priestley found that the ice formation on which her tent was located had separated from the coast and was drifting north towards the open sea. Several attempts to get to the mainland were in vain. In his later report to Shackleton, Armytage described how they were threatened by killer whales advancing through crevices in the ice floe. Shortly before midnight that day, Armytage noticed that their raft was moving towards a stable surface of ice near the coast. After the three men had hastily packed their equipment, they were able to escape to this ice surface, via it to the mainland and finally reach their camp at Butter Point on January 25 at three in the morning. On the afternoon of January 26th, the Nimrod came into sight, which had returned from Lyttelton, New Zealand to pick up the expedition team in McMurdo Sound, and Armytage used a heliograph to draw attention to the exact position of the western group . Before Armytage, Priestley and Brocklehurst went aboard, they left provisions and fuel for the Northern Group , which was still no trace.

Rescue the North and South Groups

Army days on the sea ice off Cape Royds

After several days waiting period, during which the vessel at the ice tongue of the Erebus Glacier between Cape Royds and Hut Point Peninsula was moored, drove the team, including Armytage, in search of the northern group with the Nimrod along the shoreline from Victorialand to the north. Finally, on February 4, 1909, David, Mawson and Mackay were discovered on the coast of Relief Inlet ( 75 ° 13 ′  S , 163 ° 45 ′  E ) north of the Drygalski Glacier and taken on board. The northern group had reached the Antarctic magnetic pole at 72 ° 15 ′  S , 155 ° 16 ′  E on January 16, 1909. The southern group, on the other hand, failed in their attempt to reach the geographic South Pole about 180 km from the destination due to insufficient equipment, lack of provisions and increasing exhaustion. After an arduous return trip, Shackleton and Wild had left Marshall and Adams in a camp north of the depot on Minna Bluff and made a hasty advance to the Hutpoint Peninsula. There they were discovered by the men on the Nimrod on March 1, 1909 . On March 4, Marshall and Adams were on board after Shackleton led a four-man crew to rescue the two men. In the meantime, the men in base camp at Cape Royds had also returned to the expedition ship. Finally, on March 9, the expedition team with the Nimrod set off for New Zealand after a fruitless attempt to advance further west at Cape Adare .

Death by suicide

Melbourne Club building where Armytage committed suicide on March 12, 1909

Bertram Armytage accompanied Ernest Shackleton with his wife and daughter from Australia to England, received the silver polar medal of the Royal Geographical Society together with the other participants in the landing team and was also present at Shackleton's accolade by King Edward VII on December 13, 1909. In London he applied for a position at the British War Office, but was rejected because of his age of more than 40 years , despite the intercession of the Commander in Chief of the New South Wales Armed Forces , Sir Edward Hutton (1848-1923). In January 1909 he went back to Melbourne without a wife and daughter because, according to a local newspaper, he "obviously longed to do something tangible." A hoped-for meeting with Edgeworth David and Raymond Priestley in Sydney did not materialize because they were both not in town for the time.

Finally, on March 12, 1910, Armytage went to his room in the Gentlemen's Club on Collins Street in Melbourne. According to the later reconstruction of the events, he put on his best evening suit with several silver medals and set up the other medals for his services in Africa and Antarctica so that he could see them. He then spread the bedspread off the bed on the floor, lay down with two pillows under your head to it and shot himself at 18:20 local time with a revolver the brand Colt forehead. Two days after his suicide, Armytage was buried in the family vault at Boroondara General Cemetery in Melbourne's Kew district. In a letter to Philip Brocklehurst, Raymond Priestley wrote:

“ We [Priestley and David] were terribly disturbed by the sad death of good old Armytage. [...] Obviously he was depressed by the thought that he was of no use in the world. He was a strange fellow, very withdrawn and yet one of the best. "

In a suicide note to a friend, Armytage had written down his intentions without giving the exact motives for his suicide. A superficial motive was the rejection by the war ministry. Armytage's biographer David Burke suspects that an extramarital relationship with his wife Blanch was the actual catalyst for the crime. Historian Beau Riffenburgh thinks this assumption is speculative due to a lack of evidence.

aftermath

The 1855 m high Mount Armytage ( 76 ° 1 ′  S , 160 ° 50 ′  E ), a mountain in the Prince Albert Mountains of the Antarctic Victoria Land , is named after Bertram Armytage .

The University of Melbourne annually awards the Bertram Armytage Prize for Medicine and Surgery , which Armytage's mother donated in 1920.

The Como family estate in South Yarra , where Armytage spent part of his childhood and adolescence in the 1880s, has been owned by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) since 1959.

In the Melbourne Museum collection is a sled that Bertram Armytage used during the Nimrod expedition.

The Australian author David Burke (* 1927) published the first and so far only biography about Bertram Armytage in 2009 under the title Body at the Melbourne Club . Burke's book is largely based on secondary sources and interviews with family members, as Armytage's diaries and correspondence were lost in 1944 in a fire that destroyed the family property in Cressy, Victoria .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Frederick William Armytage , entry on Obituaries Australia (accessed October 12, 2012).
  2. ^ Mary Susan Armytage , entry on Obituaries Australia (accessed October 12, 2012).
  3. ^ Burke: Body at the Melbourne Club . 2009, p. 6.
  4. ^ Burke: Body at the Melbourne Club . 2009, p. 5.
  5. ^ Burke: Body at the Melbourne Club . 2009, pp. 34-35.
  6. ^ Burke: Body at the Melbourne Club , 2009, p. 7.
  7. ^ PL Brown: Armytage, George (1795-1862) . Entry in the online edition of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (accessed March 9, 2013).
  8. ↑ a b c Riffenburgh: Nimrod . 2006, p. 194.
  9. ^ Burke: Body at the Melbourne Club . 2009, p. 32.
  10. ^ Army days . In: Feilding Star , Vol. IV, No. 1142, March 24, 1910, p. 4 (English, accessed March 13, 2013).
  11. ^ Burke: Body at the Melbourne Club . 2009, p. 16.
  12. ^ Burke: Body at the Melbourne Club . 2009, p. 49.
  13. ^ Bertram Armytage , entry on Obituaries Australia (accessed October 13, 2012).
  14. ^ Burke: Body at the Melbourne Club . 2009, p. 17.
  15. ^ Burke: Body at the Melbourne Club . 2009, pp. 17-18.
  16. ^ Burke: Body at the Melbourne Club . 2009, pp. 44-45.
  17. ^ Riffenburgh: Nimrod . 2006, pp. 251-252.
  18. ^ Riffenburgh: Nimrod . 2006, p. 238.
  19. ^ Burke: Body at the Melbourne Club . 2009, pp. 80-81.
  20. ^ Riffenburgh: Nimrod . 2006, p. 257.
  21. ^ Shackleton: The Heart of the Antarctic Vol. I. 1909, pp. 227-233.
  22. ^ Riffenburgh: Nimrod . 2006, pp. 257-259.
  23. ^ Riffenburgh: Nimrod . 2006, pp. 263, 267-268.
  24. ↑ Shackleton: The Heart of the Antarctic Vol. II. 1909, pp. 36-37.
  25. ↑ Shackleton: The Heart of the Antarctic Vol. II. 1909, p. 61.
  26. ^ Scott: The Voyage of the Discovery , Vol. II, 1905, p. 168.
  27. ^ Shackleton: The Heart of the Antarctic Vol. II. 1909, p. 64.
  28. ^ Shackleton: The Heart of the Antarctic Vol. II. 1909, p. 65.
  29. ↑ Shackleton: The Heart of the Antarctic Vol. II. 1909, pp. 67-68.
  30. ↑ Shackleton: The Heart of the Antarctic Vol. II. 1909, p. 69.
  31. ↑ Shackleton: The Heart of the Antarctic Vol. I. 1909, pp. 370-371.
  32. ^ Riffenburgh: Nimrod . 2006, pp. 361-363.
  33. ↑ a b Carreer cut short - Soldier and Explorer - Bertram Armytage shoots himself . In: The Argus (Melbourne) of March 14, 1910, p. 6 (English, accessed on October 21, 2012): "seems to have longed for something definite to do."
  34. ↑ a b Riffenburgh: Nimrod. 2006, p. 400.
  35. ↑ Bertram Armytage's grave ( Memento from May 10, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), information on the Boroondara General Cemetery homepage (accessed October 15, 2012).
  36. ^ Burke: Body at the Melbourne Club. 2009, pp. 136-137.
  37. ^ Beau Riffenburgh: Body at the Melbourne Club: Bertram Armytage, Antarctica's Forgotten Man, by David Burke. In: Arctic 63 (1), 2010, pp. 117–118 (accessed February 20, 2019).
  38. ^ Bertrand and Alberts: Geographic Names of Antarctica . 1956, p. 46 .
  39. ↑ Mount Armytage , information on geonames.com (accessed October 31, 2012).
  40. ↑ Mount Armytage ( English ) In: Geographic Names Information System . United States Geological Survey . Retrieved October 28, 2013.
  41. ^ University Senate . In: The Argus (Melbourne), November 24, 1920, p. 10 (accessed March 8, 2013).
  42. ^ Burke: Body at the Melbourne Club . 2009, p. 136.
  43. ^ Burke: Body at the Melbourne Club , 2009, pp. 4–5 and p. 16.
  44. ↑ Como House & the Armytage Family , information on the homepage of Culture Victoria (English, accessed on March 19, 2013).
  45. ↑ Antarctic sledge , exhibition side of the Melbourne Museum (English, accessed on March 8, 2013).
  46. ^ Adrian Howkins: Review of "Body at the Melbourne Club" . (PDF; 120 kB) In: Journal of Historical Biography (2011), No. 9, pp. 189–191 (English, accessed on March 8, 2013).
  47. ↑ Many Bush Fire Victims are Facing a Cheerless Winter . In: The Argus (Melbourne), May 18, 1944, p. 7 (accessed March 8, 2013).

additions

  1. ↑ The photo shows Armytage in 1908 during the Nimrod expedition descending into an exploration shaft that had been dug into the meter-thick ice of a freshwater lake near the base camp.
  2. ↑ V. l. From right: Frank Wild , Edgeworth David , George Marston , Ernest Shackleton (hidden), Eric Marshall , William Roberts, Jameson Adams , Philip Brocklehurst (hidden), Bertram Armytage, Ernest Joyce .
personal data
SURNAME Armytage, Bertram
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian polar explorer
DATE OF BIRTH September 29, 1869
PLACE OF BIRTH Geelong
DATE OF DEATH March 12, 1910
Place of death Melbourne