Robert Bartlett (Explorer)

Robert Bartlett, 1914

Robert "Bob" Abram Bartlett (born August 15, 1875 in Brigus , Newfoundland and Labrador , Canada , † April 28, 1946 in New York City , United States ) was a Canadian-American polar explorer . He undertook more than 40 expeditions to the Arctic and thus holds a record to this day. He has received several awards for his achievements and successes in cartography .

biography

Robert Bartlett and Robert Edwin Peary on a ship in Battle Harbor , Labrador , 1909

Bartlett was the oldest of ten children of his parents, William James Bartlett and Mary J. Leamon, and was born into a long seafaring family tradition. At the age of 17, he took command of a ship and cultivated a lifelong love for the Arctic, which he explored and mapped in over 40 expeditions for more than 50 years . This record is still unmatched today. Bartlett was best known as the captain of the Roosevelt and companion of Robert Edwin Peary in his attempts to reach the North Pole . He was also the first man to the 88th northern latitude crossed.

Robert Bartlett took command of one of the ships involved, the Karluk, during Vilhjálmur Stefánsson's Canadian Arctic expedition in 1914 . After this was frozen in the ice north of Alaska, Stefánsson left the ship. The Karluk drifted in the ice for 5 months in the Chukchi Sea up to the vicinity of Wrangel Island , where it finally sank. Most of the team was able to save themselves on Wrangel Island. Bartlett then traveled 700 miles (around 1,125 km) with the Inuit hunter Kataktovik across the frozen Chukchi Sea and through Siberia to Alaska , where they put together a new expedition to rescue the survivors on Wrangel Island. For this act, Bartlett received the National Geographic Society's highest honor .

In 1917 he rescued the members of the disastrous Crocker Land Expedition led by Donald Baxter MacMillan (1874-1970), who had been stuck in the ice for four years at the time of their rescue.

From 1925 to 1945 he was in command of his own ship, the Effie M. Morrissey , and made a number of scientific trips with her to the Arctic, often funded by American museums, the Explorers Club and the National Geographic Society. During World War II, he mapped the Arctic on behalf of the federal government of the United States .

In 1931, Bartlett played the lead role of Captain Barker in the film The Vikings . The film was shot almost exclusively on location in Newfoundland , and during one action scene the support ship from which the film was being filmed exploded. 28 men lost their lives in the process. The film was released anyway and, ironically, was about the eponymous sealer The Viking , whose captain, played by Bartlett, was proud of never having lost a sailor.

Robert Bartlett died at age 70 in a hospital in New York City at a pneumonia and was buried in his hometown. His home there, Hawthorne Cottage , is now recognized as a National Historic Site of Canada .

Honors

The National Geographic Society awarded Bartlett the Hubbard Medal in 1909 in recognition of finding a route through the frozen Arctic Ocean to within 150 miles of the North Pole . However, he was excluded from the expedition to the North Pole itself - probably due to his rivalry with Robert Edwin Peary . In 1927 he was named one of the first "honorary scouts" by the Boy Scouts of America , including Richard E. Byrd , Charles Lindbergh and Orville Wright . The American Geographical Society made him an honorary member in 1918 and awarded him the Charles P. Daly Medal in 1925 . In 1944 Bartlett received the Peary Polar Expedition Medal .

The ship CCGS Bartlett of the Canadian Coast Guard is named after him, and the Canada Post dedicated to him on 10 July 2009 its own stamp.

In pop culture

The writer Eric Walters processed some parts of Bartlett's voyages of discovery in his novels Trapped in Ice and The Pole . Yuri Sergejewitsch Rytcheu copied events from Bartletts and Kataktovik's journey across the Chukchi Peninsula in an episode of his novel A Dream in Polar Fog .

Own works (selection)

• Robert A. Bartlett: Northward ho! : the last voyage of the Karluk . Small, Maynard, Boston 1916, OCLC 960125644 .
• Robert A. Bartlett: The log of Bob Bartlett: the true story of forty years of seafaring and exploration . Flanker Press, St. John's 2006, ISBN 978-1-897317-00-6 .

literature

• Jennifer Niven: The ice master: the doomed 1913 voyage of the Karluk and the miraculous rescue of her survivors . Hyperion, New York 2000, ISBN 978-0-7868-6529-1 .

Web links

Commons : Robert Bartlett  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Robert Bartlett in the WorldCat bibliographic database
• Robert Bartlett - Canadian Coast Guard Archives Page
• Robert Bartlett - site of the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Laurel Guadazno: Donald MacMillan, Arctic explorer, hometown hero. In: Provincetown Banner. April 18, 2002, archived from the original on July 19, 2011 ; accessed on September 11, 2017 (English).  
2. ^ Susan Doll: The Viking (1931). In: Turner Classic Movies. Retrieved September 11, 2017 .  
3. ↑ Harold Horwood: Bartlett, the great Canadian explorer . Doubleday, Garden City, NY 1977, ISBN 978-0-385-09984-4 .
4. ↑ James E. West: The boy Scout's book of true adventure . Putnam, New York 1931, OCLC 760596493 .
5. ^ National Affairs: Around the World. In: Time magazine . August 29, 1927, accessed on September 11, 2017 (English, paid access).  
6. ^ American Geographical Society Honorary Fellowships. (PDF) (No longer available online.) American Geographical Society, archived from the original March 26, 2009 ; accessed on September 11, 2017 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.   
7. ↑ July to September 2009 . In: Canada Post (Ed.): Details = En détail . Vol. XVIII, No.  3 . Canada Post, ISSN  1919-3920 , p. 16 .
8. ↑ Juri Sergejewitsch Rytcheu : A Dream in Polar Fog . Turnaround, London 2012, ISBN 978-0-9778576-1-6 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search - first edition: Archipelago, Brooklyn, NY 2005).