Jan Welzl

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Welzl statue in Zábřeh

Jan Welzl , called Eskimo Welzl , (born August 15, 1868 in Hohenstadt an der March , Moravia , Austria-Hungary ; † September 19, 1948 in Dawson , Canada ) was a Czech adventurer. The books about his life in the Arctic were translated into several languages ​​and had high editions in the 1930s. However, contemporary and modern scientists pointed to numerous gross inconsistencies and obvious inventions.

Life

Jan Welzl was probably the only son of a trained hatter . At the time of Welzl's childhood he worked as a domestic worker in Vienna and died early. The boy grew up with his mother in Hohenstadt. The Topfenhannes , as the young Welzl was called because of his mother's work as a milkwoman in the house "Unter den Lauben" (see Topfen ), attended a German-Czech school. He then began an apprenticeship as a locksmith in the nearby village of Schmole and, after completing it in 1884, went to Bosnia , Serbia and Romania via Vienna and Genoa . After returning to his hometown, he did his military service from 1888 to 1891, before working in various cities in Austria-Hungary until his mother's death in 1892.

In 1893 Welzl hired a merchant ship in Genoa as a stoker. The ship took him first to Baltimore and Galveston , then to Australia and Vladivostok . Here he left his contract and worked on the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway near Irkutsk . Then, by his own admission, Welzl made his way through Siberia to the Northern Arctic Ocean . Since he did not understand the map and because the descriptions that appeared later are contradictory and contain place names that cannot be assigned, the exact route is not known. After all, Welzl claims to have reached the New Siberian Islands and lived in a cave on the Great Lyakhov Island . The later published memories of this time should be read with skepticism. He claims to have worked as a bear hunter, whaler and fur trader. With up to 24 sledges tied to one another, in front of which up to 350 dogs were harnessed , he is said to have brought goods and mail to the settlements. He claims to have sailed the Arctic Coast from Novaya Zemlya to Nome in Alaska and the Mackenzie River in Canada with his ship . Welzl reported to have been called Moojok Ojaak (bear eater) by the local population and Arctic Bird and Arctic Bismarck by settlers of European descent . He claims to have been elected judge and chief in 1903 by Eskimos on the New Siberian Islands.

After a shipwreck off the US coast, Welzl was picked up without ID and deported to Europe as a suspect. He came to Hamburg, where the Czechoslovak consulate issued him a passport. However, he did not initially travel to his old homeland. Through employees of the consulate he came into contact with the publicist Rudolf Těsnohlídek , with whom he began an exchange of letters. From the stories told in Welzl's letters, Těsnohlídek put together a first book, which appeared in 1928 under the title Paměti českého polárního lovce a zlatokopa (literally translated: Memories of a Czech polar hunter and gold digger ). To get back to the Arctic, Welzl took a freighter to Quebec , but soon returned to Europe, as the year was too far advanced for trips north. In 1928 he came to Prague , where the media noticed him. He was even invited to a meeting with President Masaryk . Then Welzl traveled to his hometown of Zábřeh. Here he gave lectures in small groups about his world travels and adventures, which, however, were not very successful. On the one hand, this was due to the fact that he spoke the Czech language in a bumpy manner, and on the other hand, because many of his stories were hardly believable. He said that he had found a breed of pygmy Eskimos who came from Mars on a meteor . Finally, he sent a written report of his adventures to the Lidové noviny newspaper . Although this was not printed, Welzl was invited to Brno , where the editors Edvard Valenta (1901–1978) and Bedřich Golombek (1901–1961) questioned him for two months. The result of the work was the book Třicet let na zlatém severu in 1930 , for which the Czech writer Karel Čapek wrote the foreword. The book was a great success and translated into several languages. The German translation by Adolf Lane appeared under the title A Life in the Arctic . The English edition sold 150,000 copies in the United States in just a few months in 1932. Welzl was hardly involved in the financial success of this and the subsequent books about his life - he had given up all rights for 2000 kroner . After eight months in Czechoslovakia, he traveled to the former gold mining town of Dawson City in the Yukon Territory of Canada with the fee he received . Here he lived on the welfare and tinkered with a perpetual motion machine . After nearly 20 years in Dawson City, he died in 1948.

Reception of his books

While Welzl's amusing stories were very popular with readers, scholars pointed out their incredulity and numerous obvious errors in the books. The Canadian polar researcher and ethnologist Vilhjálmur Stefánsson therefore initially considered the book to be a satire , possibly written by Čapek, and Jan Welzl as a fictional person. There was no doubt that the New Siberian Islands were uninhabited, and if they were occasionally visited by locals, it was by no means by Eskimos, whose settlements were over 1000 km further east. In 2009 Václav Blažek and Michal Schwarz published an analysis of the numerals of the "Eskimos" given by Welzl in order to find out which indigenous people in the north they might have lived with. But they did not find a match for any of the languages ​​in question. With a wink, the authors draw the conclusion that Welzl either discovered a completely new ethnic group with an unknown language, or thought up the words to give his stories credibility. You leave it up to the reader to decide which of the two options is more likely.

Honors

After Jan Welzl's death, an alley in the city center of Zábřeh was named after him. In 2000 he was posthumously awarded honorary citizenship of Zábřeh. A statue of Welzl created by Stanislav Lach has stood in front of the station since 1998 .

Welzl is the namesake of the Zábřežské Welzlování fun festival in Zábřeh, which also includes the Welzlovo filmobile travel film festival.

On October 13, 2000, the planetoid (15425) Welzl, discovered on September 24, 1998, was named after him.

literature

  • Jan Welzl: A life in the Arctic . Scherl, Berlin 1937 (Czech: Třicet let na zlatém severu . 1930. Translated by Adolf Lane).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jan Welzl: A life in the Arctic . Scherl, Berlin 1937, p. 243
  2. ↑ a b Jan Welzl: A life in the Arctic . Scherl, Berlin 1937, p. 307 (afterword).
  3. ↑ a b c d Lawrence Millman: Jan Welzl (1868–1948)
  4. ↑ Václav Blažek, Michal Schwarz: Jakým jazykem hovořili 'Eskimáci' na Novosibiřských Ostrovech za časů Jana 'Eskymo' Welzla?
  5. ↑ Minor Planet Circ. 41388
personal data
SURNAME Welzl, Jan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Eskimo Welzl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech adventurer, world traveler and author
DATE OF BIRTH August 15, 1868
PLACE OF BIRTH Hohenstadt an der March , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH September 19, 1948
Place of death Dawson City , Canada