George Hubert Wilkins

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For the seventeenth century English dramatist and pamphleteer George Hubert Wilkins, see George Wilkins.

Sir George Hubert Wilkins MC and bar (October 31, 1888 - November 30, 1958) was an Australian polar explorer, pilot, soldier, geographer and photographer.

Wilkins was a native of Hallett, South Australia, the last of 13 children in a family of pioneer settlers and sheep farmers. As a teenager, he moved to Adelaide where he found work with a traveling cinema, and thence to England where he became a pioneering aerial photographer whilst working for Gaumont Studios. His photographic skill earned him a place on various Arctic expeditions, including the controversial 1913 Vilhjalmur Stefansson-led Canadian Arctic Expedition.

In 1923 Wilkins began a comprehensive study of northern Australia for the British Museum. His work was greatly acclaimed by the museum but derided by Australian authorities because of the sympathetic treatment afforded the Aboriginals.

On 22 April 1928, only a year after Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic, Wilkins and his pilot Carl Ben Eielson made a trans-Arctic crossing from Point Barrow, Alaska, to Spitsbergen, touching along the way at Grant Land on Ellesmere Island. For this feat and his prior work, Wilkins was knighted, and during the ensuing celebration, he met and married actress Suzanne Bennett.

Now financed by William Randolph Hearst, Wilkins continued his polar explorations, now flying over Antarctica. He named the island of Hearst Land after his sponsor, and Hearst thanked Wilkins by giving him and his bride a flight aboard Graf Zeppelin.

Wilkins led the failed Nautilus expedition to the North Pole in the summer of 1931. Despite the failure to meet his intended objective, he was able to prove that submarines were capable of operating beneath the polar ice cap, thereby paving the way for future successful missions.

The US Navy took his ashes to the North Pole aboard the submarine USS Skate on 17 March 1959.

The majority of Wilkins' papers and effects are archived at The Ohio State University Byrd Polar Research Center.

Scholars and researchers acknowledge that Wilkins was one of the most accomplished and acclaimed explorers of the 20th Century but is greatly under-reported mainly because of his "aggressive modesty".^{[citation needed]}

1 See also
2 Works
3 Further reading
4 External links

[edit] See also

Thomas George Lanphier, Sr.

[edit] Works

1928 Flying the Arctic: Grosset & Dunlap
1928 Undiscovered Australia: Putnam
1931 Under The North Pole: Brewer, Warren & Putnam

[edit] Further reading

R. A. Swan, 'Wilkins, Sir George Hubert (1888 - 1958)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Online Edition,

Thomas, Lowell Sir Hubert Wilkins: His World of Adventure McGraw-Hill 1961
Nasht, Simon The Last Explorer: Hubert Wilkins Australia’s Unknown Hero Hachette 2005
Voyage of the Nautilus Documentary 2006
Jenness, Stuart E. "The Making of an Explorer" McGill Queen University Press 2006