Wilhelm Nindemann

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Wilhelm Nindemann around 1884
Signature of Wilhelm Nindemann

Wilhelm (William) Friedrich Carl Nindemann (born April 22, 1850 in Gingst auf Rügen , † May 6, 1913 in New York City ) was a German-American seaman and polar sailor. He participated in three US Arctic expeditions.

First years at sea

Wilhelm Nindemann was born in Gingst on Rügen as the son of Ernst and Martha Nindemann. On his mother's side, he came from a family of seafarers. At the age of 14 he hired his uncle in Wittow to sail the North and Baltic Seas on his schooner . He changed ship several times before serving on a passenger ship and commuting between Antwerp and New York a few times . In 1867 he was part of the crew of the Meteor , the yacht of the American tobacco manufacturer George L. Lorillard (1843-1892), when it sank off the North African coast. Although the accident did not claim any victims, the shipwrecked were captured by Tunisian Arabs who demanded a ransom for their release. In 1868 Nindemann sailed on the Hornet , which supplied weapons and ammunition to the Cuban insurgents in the Ten Years' War against Spain .

Polaris expedition 1871–1873

The survivors of the drift on the ice floe in 1873. Nindemann stands in the back row to the left of the man in the hat

In 1871 Nindemann hired the Polaris , which, under the command of Charles Francis Hall , drove through Smithsund towards the geographic North Pole , which was supposed to be an ice-free sea . Nindemann was one of several German expedition participants. He was characterized by particular courage and voluntarily took on particularly difficult and dangerous tasks. The expedition managed to cross the Robeson Canal between Ellesmere Island and Greenland and thus advanced further north than any of its predecessors. The expedition was overshadowed by the mysterious death of Hall. Due to unfortunate circumstances, Nindemann and 18 other expedition members were separated from the ship in October 1872 and drifted on an ice floe off the coast of the Labrador peninsula , where they were rescued on April 30, 1873 by the sealer Tigress . Since 14 men remained on board the Polaris , the American government bought the Tigress and sent her back north to rescue it. Nindemann volunteered for this rescue expedition and drove back to Smithsund in the summer of 1873. On Littleton Island , they discovered a hut built by the Polaris men, and learned from the Inuit that the men had built boats and driven south with them, where they were later rescued by the Scottish whaler Ravenscraig .

Jeannette expedition 1879–1881

Noros and Nindemann (right) 1881
Nindemann (front) and Noros 1881

In 1879, the American newspaper magnate upgraded James Gordon Bennett Jr. the ship Jeannette for an Arctic expedition, whose declared purpose was, Adolf Erik Nordenskiold to come to the aid of the Russian mission to the Vega on its way through the Northeast Passage was . George Washington DeLong , the head of the company whose real destination was the North Pole, took on the experienced Nindemann, who had become a US citizen on March 25 of that year, into his team. When DeLong learned after passing the Bering Strait that the Vega had already passed it, he set course for Wrangel Island , which had not yet been explored. Before reaching this or the smaller Herald Island , the ship was trapped in the pack ice and not released again for the next 21 months. Under the pressure of the ice, the Jeannette leaked in January 1880, and DeLong was already preparing to leave the ship when the Nindemanns managed to block the cracks that had opened while standing in the ice water and to save the ship for the time being. During the drift, the expedition discovered the Henrietta and Jeannette Islands . In June 1881 the ship sank and the men tried to reach the Siberian coast by sleighs and boats . On July 29, they discovered Bennett Island and soon afterwards abandoned the sledges as the sea ice became increasingly fragile. When the three boats were separated in a night storm, Nindemann found himself in the one that DeLong himself commanded. On September 17th, they landed on the northern tip of the Lena Delta . In the unsuccessful search for villages, they slowly advanced south, where they lost their strength and ran out of provisions. On October 9, DeLong sent the two strongest men, Nindemann and Louis Philippe Noros (1850–1927), with 40 ml of alcohol as the only food, ahead to get help. On October 22, they encountered locals, but could not make themselves understood, so that the search for DeLong's group did not begin until November 3, when Nindemann met George Wallace Melville (1841-1912), whose group had been able to save themselves in full . DeLong was already dead at this point. He was not found until March 23, 1882 by Melville and Nindemann.

For their efforts in the search for DeLong, Nindemann, Melville and six other survivors of the Jeannette expedition were awarded the Congress Gold Medal of Honor on September 30, 1890 . The Congress also decided to grant Wilhelm Nindemann a grant of 4,000 US dollars . This recognized that Nindemann, although he had only been hired as a seaman, had saved the Jeannette's crew with his manual skills when the ship was frozen in the ice. His continuous meritorious work on board would justify paying him remuneration for the activity as a ship's carpenter in addition to the seaman 's wages.

Second half of life

After returning from Siberia, Nindemann worked as a sailmaker in the naval port of Brooklyn . At the end of the 1890s he became a close associate of John Philip Holland , the founder of the Holland Torpedo Boat Company and successful designer of military submarines . Nindemann worked as a gunner on Holland's prototypes , but during this time he was also involved in the development of nautical devices for displaying and recording the pounding and rolling of ships. During the Russo-Japanese War he transferred submarines to Japan.

Private

In 1883 Wilhelm Nindemann married Anna M. Newman (1858–1896), who was also of German descent. The couple had sons Fred (* 1885), William (1893–1912) and Ernest (* 1896). Anna Nindemann died two days after the birth of her son Ernest. A year before Wilhelm Nindemann's death, his son William, a student at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute , had an accident while canoeing on the Hudson River . Nindemann's grave is in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn , New York City.

Fonts

  • A German sailor drives to the North Pole. Wilhelm Nindemann's memories of the North Pole expeditions of the “Polaris” and “Jeannette” , published by Karl Knortz , Verlag-Magazin, Zurich 1885.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b John W. Leonard (ed.): Who's who in America. A Biographical Dictionary of Notable Living Men and Women of the United States 1901-1902 , AN Marquis & Co., Chicago 1901, p. 832 .
  2. ↑ a b c d To Arctic Hero. The Adventures of WFC Nindemann Among the Ice Fields (PDF; 1.64 MB), The Standard-Union of April 9, 1892, p. 5 (English).
  3. ↑ a b Hampton Sides: In the Kingdom of Ice. The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014, ISBN 978-0-385-53537-3 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  4. ↑ Bruce Henderson: Fatal North. Murder and Survival on the First North Pole Expedition . Diversion Books, 2012, ISBN 978-0-9838395-9-0 , pp. 302 f . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  5. ^ Emil Bessels : The American North Pole Expedition , Wilhelm Engelmann, Leipzig 1879, p. 212 f.
  6. ^ Emil Bessels : The American North Pole Expedition , Wilhelm Engelmann, Leipzig 1879, p. 451 .
  7. ^ Proceedings of a Court of Inquiry Convened at the Navy Department, Washington, DC, in Pursuance of a Joint Resolution of Congress Approved August 8, 1882, to Investigate the Circumstances of the Loss in the Arctic Seas of the Exploring Steamer "Jeannette" etc . , Government Printing Office, Washington 1883, p. 172 .
  8. ^ All Citizenship & Naturalization Records results for William FC Nindemann on ancestry.com, accessed September 28, 2014.
  9. ↑ Congressional Gold Medal Recipients on the United States House of Representatives website , accessed September 28, 2014.
  10. ^ Marquis James: The Farther North You Go, the Colder It Gets . In: The American Legion Weekly Vol. 7, No. 43, October 23, 1925, pp. 4-6 and Pp. 13-15.
  11. ↑ Abilene Reflector in Abilene weekly reflector (Abilene, Kansas) of September 27, 1888.
  12. ↑ Capitol Topics: Arctic Explorers in Evening star (Washington, DC), January 9, 1889.
  13. ^ Notes in Der deutsche Correspondent (Baltimore, Maryland) of March 24, 1892.
  14. ^ The Holland Submarine Boat. One of the Most Wonderful of Naval Architecture in Existence in The Star (Reynoldsville, Pennsylvania) May 18, 1898.
  15. ↑ Patent US683788 : Indicator for the pitch and roll of vessels. Registered December 17, 1900 , published October 1, 1901 , inventor: William FC Nindemann. ( View on Google patents).
  16. ↑ Patent US683703 : Indicator and recorder for the pitch or roll of vessels. Registered on March 14, 1901 , published October 1, 1901 , inventor: William FC Nindemann. ( View on Google patents).
  17. ^ William EA Nindemann in the Find a Grave database , accessed on September 25, 2014 (English). The year of birth is incorrectly given here as 1894. 1893 is correct (see photo of the tombstone).
  18. ↑ a b All Birth, Marriage & Death, including Parish results for Nindemann on the website www.ancestry.com, accessed on September 25, 2014.
  19. ↑ a b W. FC Nindemann. Survivor of Three Polar Expeditions Dies on Long Island (PDF; 64 kB), New York Times, May 8, 1913.
  20. ^ William Friedrich Carl Nindemann in the database of Find a Grave (English).
personal data
SURNAME Nindemann, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nindemann, Wilhelm Friedrich Carl (full name); Nindemann, William FC (name in US)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Sailor and polar sailor
DATE OF BIRTH April 22, 1850
PLACE OF BIRTH Went
DATE OF DEATH May 6, 1913
Place of death New York City