Henry Kellett

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Sir Henry Kellett

Sir Henry Kellett (born November 2, 1806 in Clonabody , Ireland , † March 1, 1875 ibid) was an officer in the Royal Navy , polar explorer and oceanographer . He was involved in the search for the missing Franklin expedition and the associated discovery of the Northwest Passage by Robert McClure .

Life

Kellett joined the British Navy in 1822, sailed under William Fitzwilliam Owen and Edward Belcher , took part in the 1st Opium War and was promoted to the rank of Post Captain because of his services there . In 1845 he was given command of the frigate HMS Herald , which patrolled the Pacific off Central America . The German naturalist Berthold Seemann was on board . In 1849 he was posted to the north to the Bering Strait to support the search for Franklin's expedition from the west together with Thomas EL Moore and his ship HMS Plover . On July 31, 1850, at the northern exit of the Bering Strait, he met the ship HMS Investigator under Robert McClure, which had also set out to rescue Franklin . Kellett advised McClure not to continue the voyage for the time being, as the Investigator had left the group's actual lead ship, the HMS Enterprise under Richard Collinson , far behind; McClure, however, continued his journey without his supervisor. Kellett's own search expedition was unsuccessful except for the discovery of Herald Island , and he returned to England in 1851 . The following year he had the opportunity as the second man under Edward Belcher to participate in another large-scale search operation of the Royal Navy , and he took command of the HMS Resolute . This time the expedition led from the east through Baffin Bay into the Canadian Arctic . The supply ship HMS North Star was left at Beechey Island , and Belcher explored the area north of the Wellington Channel with his ships Assistance and Pioneer , while Kellett's Resolute and the steamer HMS Intrepid headed west under the later famous Francis Leopold McClintock Should advance to Melville Island . Her focus was also on clearing up what happened to the investigator who had been missing for almost a year and who was suspected in the area. Resolute and Intrepid were winterized off Dealy Island when, in the fall of 1852, 80 km further west, a sled expedition came across a message dated spring 1852 from McClure in a stone man :

The Investigator's team had proven the existence of the Northwest Passage by sledge , the ship was still stuck in Mercy Bay, a narrow bay in the north of Bank's Island , and attempts will now be made in the summer to complete the passage with the ship. Please refrain from risking further lives in search of the Investigator .

It was clear to Kellett that the Investigator could not have completed the passage and would therefore have to be somewhere between Mercy Bay and Melville Island . However, the rapidly falling arctic winter made it impossible to send search parties to the Investigator by spring next year . In March 1853, in spite of the bitter cold, Lieutenant Bedford Pim of the Resolute finally succeeded in dog sledding to Mercy Bay, 250 kilometers away, where he found the investigator, who had been stuck for two winters, with her scurvy-weakened and malnourished crew. On Kellett's orders and against McClure's objections, the Investigator was abandoned by her crew and the journey to Dealy Island began . On the journey home, Kellett's ships got stuck in the ice near Bathurst Island in what is now Resolute Bay and spent the winter of 1853/54 here. The ships of Kellett's superior, Belcher, were also stuck in the ice further north in thick pack ice, and he finally gave the order in April 1854 by sleigh squad to abandon the ships. Kellett protests against what he sees as a completely unfounded decision by his superior, but on June 15 he finally had to bow to the latter's authority and hike across the ice to Beechey Island with the investigator's crew . The men were picked up there by the North Star and the new supply ships HMS Phoenix and HMS Talbot and brought to England.

In England, Kellett was credited with his impeccable conduct and his protest against the disproportionate actions of Belcher, who could plead that his operational papers gave him complete freedom of action in this situation, but that his reputation in the Admiralty and the public remained badly damaged throughout his life - especially when, on September 16 [1855], the Resolute was sighted drifting by an American whaling boat almost 2,000 kilometers from its last berth in Baffin Bay . The Resolute was still in seaworthy condition and could be safely sailed by the whaler's crew. The American government finally bought the ship and, completely restored, gave it back in a solemn act as a token of the good relationship between the two countries to the British Crown, which in turn thanked the British Crown with a sumptuous desk made of its wood, which is still in the Oval Office today of the White House serves as furniture for the respective President of the United States .

When McClure was to receive half of the originally advertised prize money of 20,000 pounds sterling (which in today's monetary value would correspond to about 1.6 million pounds) for his traversing the Northwest Passage by sledge, the latter categorically refused to accept the Acknowledging the need for Kellett's assistance and thus distributing the prize money exclusively among the investigator team .

On June 2, 1869 he was knighted as Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath .

Kellett eventually died in his hometown of Clonabody, Ireland after retiring from the Navy.

Several places in Hong Kong are named after Kellett: Kellett Island , Mount Kellett, and Kellett Bay .

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Knights and Dames at Leigh Rayment's Peerage
personal data
SURNAME Kellett, Henry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Royal Navy officer, polar explorer and oceanographer
DATE OF BIRTH November 2, 1806
PLACE OF BIRTH Clonabody
DATE OF DEATH March 1, 1875
Place of death Clonabody