Thomas Witlam Atkinson

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Son of Thomas Witlam Atkinson, Alatau Tamchiboulac Atkinson

Thomas Witlam Atkinson (born March 6, 1799 in Yorkshire , † August 13, 1861 in Lower Walmer , Kent ) was an English travel writer .

Atkinson lost his parents at an early age, trained as an architect and built a church in Manchester , among other places . In addition to his specialist studies, he distinguished himself as a watercolor painter and decided to work with A. v. Humboldt's descriptions of Central Asia lively encouraged him to paint the scenes there, even though he had no fortune to travel to Asia .

After making a foray across the Urals to the Altai from Saint Petersburg in 1844 , he returned there, where he married a like-minded, very tough and enterprising English woman who then accompanied him on his travels. The following year he was back with her in Siberia and crossed the Kyrgyz steppe to Kopal at the foot of the Kyrgyz Alatau , at that time the outermost Russian outpost to the south.

In the summer of 1849 Atkinson visited the Karatau, Alatau, Aqtau and Mustau mountains and penetrated via Chowd and Uliastai into the interior of Mongolia to the aul of Sultan Sabeck. On many winding paths and under great dangers, he made a journey that has hardly any equal in the history of Asian discovery. The travel route recorded for the first time in Petermann's Geographische Mitteilungen (1872) covers a length of 3,120 km on Chinese territory alone. To be sure, science was in no way enriched by Atkinson's reports, for they give little information about geographical conditions, since its only purpose was to record drawings, which he brought back close to 600. The truthfulness of his reports (e.g. from Peter Petrovich Semenov ) has also been questioned. Smeinogorsk and Barnaul became more distant stops for the traveler; he still visited the Sayan Mountains and advanced to the Chinese border town of Maitmatschin, from where he returned to Saint Petersburg in 1852. He himself says that during his seven-year travels in Russia he covered 59,400 wererst (about 63,400 km). The account of these trips is contained in the work Exploration in oriental and western Siberia (London 1858). A second work on the Amur ( Travels in the regions of the upper and lower Amoor , London 1860) is only a compilation work.

Thomas Witlam Atkinson died on August 13, 1861 in Lower Walmer, Kent.

literature

personal data
SURNAME Atkinson, Thomas Witlam
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English travel writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 6, 1799
PLACE OF BIRTH Yorkshire
DATE OF DEATH August 13, 1861
Place of death Lower Walmer , Kent