Elisha Kent Kane

Elisha Kent Kane

Elisha Kent Kane (born February 3, 1820 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † February 16, 1857 in Havana , Cuba ) was an American researcher, explorer and doctor.

Life

After completing his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania and a short internship as a military doctor in the US Army , he went to China in 1844 as a doctor for the US legation and visited the Philippines , Ceylon , East India , Egypt and the Nubian border in the interests of science . South Africa and Dahomey , where it penetrated to Widah . After returning to America , he took part in the Mexican-American War in 1846 , where he was wounded himself, and was then active in surveying the coast of the Gulf of Mexico .

From 1853 to 1855 he led the Henry Grinnell- funded expedition to find the missing John Franklin (so-called "2nd Grinnell Expedition"), after he had accompanied the first unsuccessful Grinnell expedition as senior physician. The search was unsuccessful - like all other of the numerous expeditions started to rescue Franklin in the middle of the 19th century - but contributed significantly to the exploration of the Canadian and Greenland Arctic .

With the brig Advance he left New York on May 30, 1853 and spent the winter in Rensselaer Bay in the Kane Basin (approx. 78.5 ° north latitude). From there, Kane and his companion Isaac Israel Hayes went on separate sleigh rides north. Kane explored northern Greenland ( Washingtonland and the Humboldt Glacier ) while Hayes explored the central part of Ellesmere Island . Geomagnetic observations were made by the astronomer August Sunday .

William Morton reached the northernmost point of the expedition with the Greenland dog sled driver Hans Hendrik . At a latitude of 81 ° 22 'N, they discovered the Kennedy Canal , which they found free of ice. Kane and Hayes interpreted this as confirmation of a theory going back to the British merchant Robert Thorne († 1527), which sparked the imagination of numerous adventurers and polar explorers in the following years: Kane thought that the constant drift of the ice floes would lead to the beyond The frozen Kane Basin, an ice-free, navigable zone of the Arctic Ocean , would allow expeditions to advance to the North Pole with relative ease. Kane was one of the main proponents of the theory of the ice-free Arctic Ocean . On August 4, 1855, the expedition finally returned to Upernavik after abandoning the still frozen ship and unspeakable exertion, partly by dog ​​sled, partly on foot, partly by dinghy .

He put the results of his research in the works The United States Grinnell Expedition (1854) and Arctic Explorations (1856).

Kane, who had suffered from rheumatism all his life , withdrew after his second polar expedition for health reasons to Havana, Cuba , where he died on February 16, 1857. The Kane Basin in the Nares Strait and the lunar crater Kane are named after Kane . He was a member of the American Philosophical Society .

literature

• Fergus Fleming : Ninety degrees north. The Dream of the Pole , Piper, 2004, ISBN 3-492-24205-7
• EK Kane: The death voyage of the “Advance” in the eternal ice . EK Kane's famous North Pole expedition edited by Hanns Reska. With a portrait and 58 text images. Leipziger Graphische Werke AG. Leipzig C1 1928
• Edmund Blair Bolles: Ice Age. How a professor, a politician and a poet discovered the eternal ice. Argon, Berlin 2000. ISBN 3-87024-522-0 (On the history of research, esp. Louis Agassiz , Charles Lyell and Elisha Kent Kane)

Web links

Commons : Elisha Kane  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Elisha Kent Kane in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by Elisha Kent Kane in the Gutenberg-DE project

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} The US Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin: a Personal Narrative . 1854. Retrieved October 2, 2013.
2. ↑ Member History: Elisha K. Kane. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 17, 2018 (incorrect election year).