John Gilbert (naturalist)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Memorial to John Gilbert at St. James Church in Sydney
Memorial for John Gilbert at the Gilbert Lookout near Taroom

John Gilbert (* presumably in England , † June 28, 1845 on the Gulf of Carpentaria , Australia ) was a naturalist and explorer. For a long time nothing was known about his life, until 1938 several letters and diaries, which were in Ludwig Leichhardt's estate, were rediscovered in England. In the book Strange New World. The Adventures of John Gilbert and Ludwig Leichhardt by Alec Hugh Chisholm (1890–1977) Gilbert was described as one of Australia's great early ornithologists .

Live and act

John Gilbert's place and year of birth are unknown. The information ranges from 1810 to 1815. Gilbert first worked as a taxidermist at the Zoological Society of London , where he met John Gould and his wife Elizabeth and traveled to Australia with them in May 1838. In the following years he collected natural history samples that served as study objects for Gould's later publications, including The Birds of Australia . On September 19, 1838, Gould and Gilbert reached the port of Hobart on board the "Parsee" . After both of them had worked for a few months in Tasmania , Gilbert left for Western Australia on February 4, 1839 , where he worked as an animal collector, mainly in the Perth area . In June 1840 Gilbert toured the Northern Territory and in March 1841 he sailed via Timor to Singapore . At the end of September 1841 he sailed to London with a rich collection of birds . In February 1842 he left England again to continue to work as an explorer in Australia.

He reached Perth in July 1842 and stayed in Western Australia for the next 17 months . He traveled considerable distances in his expeditions and made some of his most interesting discoveries in the Wongan Hills region , about 100 miles northeast of Perth . Gilbert was an excellent naturalist, and his records of birds, their way of life, their food, their song, and the names given to them by the Aborigines are of great interest and value. Gilbert collected 432 bird hides and 318 specimens of mammals, including 36 new bird taxa and 22 new mammalian taxa. He is also regarded as the first Western researcher to paradise parrot could one since 1928 extinct species of parrot observe.

Gilbert arrived in Sydney in late January 1844 . For the next six months he was on an expedition in the Darling Downs in Queensland . In October 1844 Gilbert was allowed to take part in the Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt's first expedition to Australia to Port Essington . The initial ten participants included the explorer John Roper , the botanist James Snowden Calvert , the convict William Phillips and the sixteen-year-old John Murphy. In November 1844, Leichhardt found that the team was too big. He made the decision to dismiss the last two participants who joined the expedition. The botanist Christopher Pemberton Hodgson resigned from the trip for Gilbert and he and the African American chef Caleb left. Due to his experience in the outback , Gilbert was recognized by the expedition members as deputy expedition leader. John Murphy was too young to be of much importance to the expedition, and two Aborigines, Charles Fisher and Harry Brown, were aware of their importance to the expedition. This was not recognized and they revolted. However, when they were expelled from the camp, they gave in again.

Gilbert was on June 28, 1845 during a night of Racheakts Kokopera - Aborigines killed by a flying spear. Earlier, the two Aborigines Charles Fisher and Harry Brown molested some women from the attacking tribe. Roper and Calvert were badly wounded by spear thrusts, but were saved. Gilbert was buried near the action on the Gulf of Carpentaria. His grave has not been rediscovered to this day. Leichhardt reached Port Essington on December 17, 1845.

Gilbert's travel diary about the Leichhardt expedition

On September 20, 1938, the travel diary of the first Leichhardt expedition was discovered in London. The Australian journalist, writer and amateur ornithologist Alec Hugh Chisholm sighted it and published the book Strange New World in 1941 . The Adventure of John Gilbert and Ludwig Leichhardt . This publication describes the life of Gilbert and examines the course of the expedition and Leichhardt in a critical light.

Honors

Leichhardt named the Gilbert River , the Gilbert Range and the Gilbert Dome in the Peak Range after John Gilbert; the Gilbert rabbit kangaroo ( Potorous gilbertii ) is also named after him. The British colonists erected a memorial to him in St. James's Church in Sydney. Memorials to him were erected in Brisbane and on the Roper River and a bronze plaque was placed in Drakesbrook, Western Australia. A Trans Australia Airlines airliner also bore his name.

Web links

Commons : John Gilbert  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Justice of John Gilbert. In: The Age , January 31, 1942, in English, jimbour.com, accessed May 23, 2013
  2. ↑ a b Gilbert, John (1810? –1845). Australian Dictionary of Biography
  3. ↑ Alec Hugh Chisholm : Strange New World. The Adventure of John Gilbert and Ludwig Leichhardt . Second revised and illustrated edition, Sydney, London, Melbourne, Wellington 1955 (English)
  4. ↑ Alec Hugh Chisholm: Strange New World. The Adventure of John Gilbert and Ludwig Leichhardt . Second revised and illustrated edition, Sydney, London, Melbourne, Wellington 1955, pp. VII and 267 (English)
personal data
SURNAME Gilbert, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English naturalist and explorer
DATE OF BIRTH 19th century
PLACE OF BIRTH England
DATE OF DEATH June 28, 1845
Place of death Gulf of Carpentaria , Australia