George Comer

Portrait of George Comer from 1900

George Comer (born April 22, 1858 in Québec , Province of Quebec , † April 27, 1937 in East Haddam , Connecticut ) was an American whale hunter, polar explorer, ethnologist, cartographer and photographer.

Life

Comer was the youngest of several children from Thomas and Joanna Comer. His father was British and his mother Irish. In 1860 the family emigrated to the United States, where George Comer grew up in East Haddam, Connecticut. When he was three years old, his father went missing at sea. Since the mother could no longer support the children, Comer spent his childhood in an orphanage in East Haddam. He attended school for only two years, and by the age of ten he was working on William H. Ayres' farm near East Haddam. In 1878 he married the one year older Julia Louise Chipman from Pennsylvania . The couple had two children, a daughter who was born in 1878 and a son who was born in 1886.

Between 1875 and 1912 Comer made eleven whaling trips to the Canadian Arctic . During many of these excursions, he and his crew wintered in Hudson Bay . From 1895 to 1906 he was a captain in the New Bedford - whaler Era , but the ship suffered in 1906 south of Newfoundland shipwreck. From 1907 to 1912 Comer commanded the AT Gifford during two excursions to the whaling grounds and in 1915 he accompanied Captain Donald Baxter MacMillan (1874-1970) on a scientific expedition to gather information about the Inuit culture .

Comer showed a keen interest in the Inuit he met on his whaling trips. He won their trust and respect through fair treatment and the frequent giving of gifts as a token of friendship. He had a special respect for the Aivilingmiut , whose territory stretched from Whale Point to Lyon's Inlet, where Comer did most of his whaling. He trained the most capable aivilingmiut men to be helmsmen of his whaling boats and harpooners. So the Eskimos learned to use more sophisticated devices than were normally available to them. When the owners of his ship decided to give up the practice of whaling, Comer left the whaling equipment to his Eskimo crew , confident that they would use the equipment for the benefit of their tribe.

Comer provided merchandise and groceries to many men and women of the Aivilingmiut, Netsilingmiut, and Qaernermiut in exchange for their services. The local men helped with the whaling and stocked up on fresh reindeer meat to prevent or control scurvy , and the women made the fur clothing for the winter hunting activities. To counter the boredom during the ten long months in the winter harbor, Como arranged dances, concerts, dinners and sporting events to amuse his crew and the natives alike. In his spare time he systematically recorded details of Inuit life and collected samples of their material culture. Much of his information was used by the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas , who was Comer's mentor, in his book The Central Eskimo (1888) and in two other reports on the Eskimos of Baffin Island and Hudson Bay. Comer's collections of clothing, implements, and weapons are now in museums across the United States and Germany.

Using equipment from the American Museum of Natural History , Comer photographed the Inuit, made 300 masks of their faces and hundreds of plaster casts of their hands, and recorded their dances, songs and voices with a phonograph . The wax cylinders he made during the journey of the era from 1903 to 1905 are considered to be the oldest sound recordings ever made by Canadian Inuit.

Comers Map of Southampton Island (1913)

As a navigator, George Comer was aware of the shortcomings in the published nautical charts of Hudson Bay. In two articles published in the prestigious Bulletin of the American Geographical Society of New York , he presented an improved map of Southampton Island and the surrounding area, showing the narrow strait at its northern end that is now called Comer Strait . In 1923 he published a report in the journal American Anthropologist on the Inuit of northwest Hudson Bay, including the isolated Southampton Island residents, the Sadlermiut , who died out in 1902. Comer's contributions to the Arctic weren't just limited to whaling. In 1915 he served as captain of the schooner George B. Cluett , a ship hired by the American Museum of Natural History to rescue the members of the MacMillan- Crocker Land Expedition in northwest Greenland . When the auxiliary ship was trapped in the ice for two years, Comer conducted valuable archaeological digs at Uummannaq and found evidence of the Thule culture . In 1919, Comer made his last tour as the captain of the Finback , a yacht hired by ethnographer Christian Leden to conduct Inuit trade and scientific studies in western Hudson Bay. The Finback ran aground in Fullerton Harbor, Hudson Bay and had to be abandoned. During the final years of World War I , George Comer served as a lieutenant in the United States Navy .

In addition to his trips to the Arctic, Comer also went on excursions to the Antarctic . From October 1885 to February 1886 he visited South Georgia with the Rahschon Era . When the South Georgia Survey carried out a surveying campaign in this region between 1951 and 1957 , the 635 m high Comer Crag was named after Georg Comer by the UK Antarctic Place-Names Committee . His second voyage between November 1887 and February 1887 was on the Kerguelen .

On his third trip to the Rahschoner Francis Alleyn , who until January 1889 was traveling in August, 1888, he sailed to the South Atlantic -Insel Gough Iceland . Here he collected the first three specimens of the Gough Moorhen , of which he noted:

“They cannot fly and only use their wings to help them run ... They are quite numerous and can be hand caught. They couldn't get on a table three feet high. The bushes grow to heights of about 2,000 feet on the island, and these birds can be found as high up as the bushes grow ... the tip of the beak is bright yellow, and between the eyes it is scarlet. Legs and feet yellow, with reddish spots. "

Comer called the birds Mountain Cocks . In 1892 the Gough Moorhen was scientifically described by Joel Asaph Allen and named in honor of George Comer.

literature

• W. Gillies Ross: George Comer (1858-1937) . In: Artic . Volume 36, No. 3, 1983, pp. 294-295 (English).
• William G. Ross: Comer, George . In: Mark Nuttall (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Arctic . tape 1 . Routledge, New York and London 2003, ISBN 1-57958-436-5 , pp. 412–414 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).

Web links

• George Comer's personal diary 1915–1917

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Allen, JA (1892). Description of a new gallinule, from Gough Island Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. 4 (Art. 6): 57-58.