William H. Gilder

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William Henry Gilder (born August 16, 1838 in Philadelphia , † February 5, 1900 in Morristown, New Jersey ) was an American soldier , journalist , explorer and author . He became famous for his reports on the Northern Sea Expedition under Captain George W. DeLong and the Arctic Expedition under Frederick Schwatka for the New York Herald .

Life

Gilder was the son of the eponymous Methodist pastor William Gilder and brother of the authors and journalists Richard Watson Gilder , Jeannette Leonard Gilder and Joseph Benson Gilder.

With the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 he was drafted into the 5th New York Infantry (Duryée's Zouaves). He was later transferred to the 40th New York Infantry, and finally the rank of Captain and brevet of major retired. For a long time he served on the staff of General Thomas W. Egan . Between 1871 and 1877 he was the chief editor of the Newark Register .

Schwatka's expedition crosses the Simpson Strait in 1879 ( engraving after a drawing by Heinrich Klutschak )

From 1878 to 1880 he was the second leader of the expedition under Frederick Schwatka's leadership to King William Land , which was looking for relics from the expedition of John Franklin . This expedition used survival techniques of the Inuit and completed the longest sled journey to date with 3251 statute miles (corresponds to around 5232 km). He reported on the trip, which was financed by James Gordon Bennett Jr. , in his newspaper New York Herald and later published the book Schwatkas Search: Sledging in the Arctic in Quest of the Franklin Records (1880).

The USS Rodgers before leaving the Bering Strait in 1881.

After his return he joined the search expedition, again financed by Bennett, under the direction of George W. DeLong, which set sail from San Francisco on the steamship Rodgers in 1881 to search for the Jeanette expedition, which began in 1879 and has since disappeared was again a search expedition for Nordenskjölds Vega . The Rodgers burned and sank on November 30, 1881 on the north coast of the Chukchi Peninsula , but the entire crew was able to save themselves on land. Gilder traveled by dog and reindeer - sled over Nizhny Kolymsk westward to Verkhoyansk and from there northward into the Lena Delta , where he heard about the search Melville with William F. C. Nindemann spoke and finally DeLong's logbook received. Via Jakutsk , Irkutsk , Tomsk and Yekaterinburg he traveled through Europe back to the USA, where he reported on the trip again in the New York Herald and later the book Ice-pack and Tundra: an Account of the Search for the Jeannette and a Sledge Journey through Siberia (1883).

In 1883 he was in northernmost Vietnam ( Tonkin ) as a war correspondent for the beginnings of the Tonkin campaign , in 1884 he reported from Spain on the earthquake in Andalusia in 1884 .

Fonts

  • Schwatkas Search: Sledging in the Arctic in Quest of the Franklin Records (1880)
  • Ice-pack and Tundra: an Account of the Search for the Jeannette and a Sledge Journey through Siberia (1883)
    • German: In ice and snow. The search for the Jeanette expedition , Leipzig: FA Brockhaus 1884
    • German, abridged edition: The Downfall of the Jeannette Expedition ( Travel and Adventure 15), Leipzig: FA Brockhaus 1921

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary, in: Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York, Volume 32/1900, p. 84
  2. ^ The sinking of the Jeannette expedition (Travel and Adventure 15), Leipzig: FA Brockhaus 1921
personal data
SURNAME Gilder, William H.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gilder, William Henry (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist and author
DATE OF BIRTH August 16, 1838
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia
DATE OF DEATH 5th February 1900
Place of death Morristown, New Jersey