Richard Hildebrandt (officer)

Richard Hildebrandt, 1868

Richard Hildebrandt (born November 29, 1843 in Magdeburg , † June 11, 1911 in Baden-Baden ) was a German naval officer , explorer and city councilor of Charlottenburg . He was the first helmsman to take part in the First German North Pole Expedition in 1868 and in 1869/70 .

Life

Early years

The house of the Hildebrandt couple in Berlin-Charlottenburg

Wall grave of the Hildebrandt couple with a relief by Fritz Klimsch

Richard Hildebrandt was born in 1843 as the son of the future superintendent and pastor of the Magdeburg Sankt-Jakobi-Kirche Friedrich Wilhelm Hildebrandt (1811-1893). In 1861 he began his nautical career on the Schoonerbrigg Amaranth . In 1863 he was a seaman on the Bremen brig Garibaldi , and in 1865 he was on the English Alexandra . From November 1865 to March 1866 he attended the helmsman school in Vegesack and passed the understeer examination. He was drafted into the military and served for six months, initially as a second-class sailor, and from May 1866 as a helmsman's mate in the Prussian Navy on the SMS Gefion . He then drove as a helmsman on tall ships that brought emigrants to the United States . In February 1868 he attended a senior helmsman course in Bremen.

First German North Polar Expedition 1868

At the beginning of April 1868, on the recommendation of his teacher Arthur Breusing , Hildebrandt was hired by Carl Koldewey as the helmsman of the First German North Pole Expedition . While Koldewey took care of buying and equipping the expedition ship in Bergen , Hildebrandt procured maps and instruments and hired the crew. He arrived in Bergen on May 13th. Eleven days later, the expedition on board the Nordic Jagt Greenland left the port to follow the instructions of the geographer August Petermann to advance as far north as possible on the east coast of Greenland . Since the ice conditions did not allow an approach to the Greenland coast, the expedition sailed to Spitsbergen , where, among other things, the southern part of the Hinlopen Strait was mapped. On October 10, 1868, the participants arrived safely in Bremerhaven . As a good draftsman, Hildebrandt provided some templates for the illustrations in the expedition report.

Second German North Polar Expedition 1869/70

In 1869 Koldewey started with two ships for the Second German North Pole Expedition . While he was in charge of the Germania himself , Hildebrandt was the first helmsman on the escort ship Hansa under Captain Friedrich Hegemann . The ships were supposed to survey and explore the east coast of Greenland north of the 75th parallel and advance as far north as possible. Due to a misunderstanding between the captains, the Hansa was separated from the Germania in August . On September 14, she got stuck in the pack ice. The captain had the crew build a house out of hard coal briquettes on a large ice floe and store provisions there for an initial two months. When the situation of the ship became hopeless in mid-October due to the constant ice pressures, the crew removed everything that was of value to them. On the night of October 23, the Hansa sank at 70 ° 52 ′ north and 21 ° west off the coast of Liverpool Land . Within 200 days, the fourteen men drifted on their floe some 1500 km along the coast of East Greenland. Finally they continued the journey in their three dinghies. After another 36 days of hardship, they reached the Moravian mission station in Friedrichstal on the southern tip of Greenland. From Frederikshåb they were able to return to Europe on the Danish sailing ship Constance and were back in Germany in September 1870.

In the Imperial Navy

In February 1871 Hildebrandt signed up for the Imperial Navy and was trained on the training ship SMS Renown . At the beginning of May he passed his first naval exam and now finally embarked on a military career. In 1874 he married Luise Gruson (1859–1916), the daughter of the Magdeburg industrialist Hermann Gruson . In 1878 Hildebrandt was a lieutenant at sea on board the SMS Luise , with which he set sail in January 1879 for a two-year sea voyage to East Asia . In 1883 he was in the Mediterranean with the training ship SMS Nymphe . 1889 Hildebrandt was a lieutenant commander at the disposal put. He worked in the Reichsmarineamt until 1893 . His father-in-law gave the couple a late Classicist villa built by the architects Albrecht Becker and Emil Schlüter on Fasanenstrasse (No. 23) in Charlottenburg. Today's Literaturhaus Berlin was a meeting place for musicians, painters and writers as early as the turn of the century. Hildebrandt was a city councilor in Charlottenburg for several years. He died in Baden-Baden in 1911. The grave of Richard and Luise Hildebrandt is in the Luisenfriedhof III in Berlin .

Others

Cape Hildebrandt ( 66 ° 48 ′  N , 33 ° 53 ′  W ) in Kong-Christian-IX-Land on the east coast of Greenland is named after Richard Hildebrandt.

literature

• Reinhard A. Krause: Two hundred days in pack ice. The authentic reports of the "Hansa" men of the German East Greenland expedition 1869–1870 , Kabel Verlag, Hamburg 1997 (= writings of the German Maritime Museum , Volume 46), ISBN 3-8225-0412-2 .

Web links

• The history of the house at Fasanenstrasse 23 . Literaturhaus Berlin, accessed on August 2, 2020

Individual evidence

1. ^ Friedrich Wilhelm Hildebrandt in the Magdeburg Biographical Lexicon
2. ↑ Christina Deggim, Bernd Kappelhoff: Archival sources on sea traffic and the related flows of goods and culture on the German North Sea coast from the 16th to the 19th century: a subject-matter inventory . tape 1 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-525-35548-0 , p. 55–56 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
3. ↑ Gertrud Dörsing: Gruson, Helene, born Hildebrandt, related Gruson, used Meyer, used Hentschel (Magdeburg November 10, 1853 - Berlin January 4, 1934) . In: Eva Labouvie (Ed.): Women in Saxony-Anhalt 2: A biographical-bibliographical lexicon from the 19th century to 1945 . Böhlau, Cologne 2018, ISBN 978-3-412-51145-6 , pp. 185–188 ( limited preview in Google Book search).