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[A book review below by Tim Bowden, on the author Jeff Maynard's recently published biography of George Wil­kins, polar explorer... and more...  There is much here (and presumably more to be found within the book itself) for those with an interest in polar navigation and its history... and more...   Over now to Tim Bowden, an Australian journalist with some personal experience of Antarctica - but that's another tale.]

I have often wondered why the career of one of Australia's most intrepid and successful polar explorers, George Wil­kins, has remained a closely guarded secret.  After reading Wings of Ice: The Mystery of the Polar Air Race, the reason is now clear: a predatory wife, the Australian actress and singer Suzanne Bennett, locked up all Wilkins's photos, cinematography and writings to try to make money from them. Sadly, a great deal of Wilkins's fascinating legacy is still out of reach of contemporary researchers. As a result, the author Jeff Maynard writes, Wilkins "became a footnote in the history books".

 

George Hubert Wilkins (no one called him "Sir" except his class-conscious missus, who insisted on it after they married in 1929) packed a great deal into his 71 years. Like Frank Hurley, another noted Austra­lian polar adventurer, he photo­graphed fearlessly on the Western Front in France during World War I, was wounded 15 times and awarded the Military Cross twice - the second time for rallying troops and leading them into battle.  He remains the only photographer in any war to receive a combat decoration.  But as he watched the aircraft over the trenches in aerial combat, he was dreaming of using them "to sail through the polar skies in pursuit, not of an enemy but of the secrets of nature that would help conquer the natural enemies of mankind".  He had already spent three years in the Arctic on an expedition led by a curi­ous individual, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, which merits a book in itself.

He was soon to clock up a series of impressive firsts, most financed by an eccentric and wealthy American businessman, Lincoln Ellsworth, including the first plane flight in Ant­arctica and across the Arctic Ocean.  Wilkins also organised the first cross­ing of the Antarctic continent by air. He was always a good story.  He took part in the England-to-Australia air race in 1919 and attempted to reach the North Pole by submarine in 1919 - notionally to exchange passengers from an airship.

Bizarrely, he thought he was one of the few earthly mortals chosen to host a "thought adjuster", a kind of messenger of God receiving inspira­tion from certain life forms that had existed on Urantia (the planet Earth before Adam and Eve were dis­patched to start a colony there]. He also took part in experiments in telepathy and obligingly continued to correspond with his medium for many years after his death in 1959.

 

But barking mad he was not - essentially a brave, practical and honest man, certainly more ethical than one of his rivals in the polar air races, Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, who claimed to be the first to fly over the North Pole but almost cer­tainly didn't, faking his navigation observations.  His pilot, Bernt Balchen, was once asked why Byrd was blocking his career and replied: "Because he didn't fly over the North Pole and he knows I know it." Balchen then detailed statistics showing that Byrd, worried about oil leaking from one of the engines of the FokkerTrimotor, turned back 190 kilometres from the Pole and fudged his figures.

 

There is a long and dishonourable tradition of falsely claiming to have reached the North Pole.  In 1909, Roald Amundsen (another player in the polar air race saga) opened his newspaper to read that Dr Frederick Cook had reached the Pole over the ice on April 21, 1908, and a week later Robert Peary said he'd got there, too, on April 6, 1909.  Both claims are now considered to be unverified.  But it was enough to turn Amundsen from attempting the North Pole himself in Nansen's wooden ship Fram.  He secretly decided instead to take his expedi­tion south to Antarctica and the rest, as they say, is history.

In 1926, the race was well and truly on to fly to the North Pole. The leading contenders were the Italians, with their airship named the Norge, because of Amundsen's involvement with the project through the Norwegian Govern­ment, although the expedition was largely financed by Ellsworth. The skipper of the Norge was Umberto Nobile, backed by Mussolini's fascist regime.  Both Byrd's and Amund­sen's attempts began from the same spot, Kings Bay, at Spitzbergen.  Nobile had got there first and the Norge was tethered to its mooring mast, repairing its engines and wait­ing for the right weather. Byrd and his party arrived by ship and demanded space at the small wharf to unload his Fokker Trimotor. Amundsen was obliging, even sug­gesting a possible site for a runway. He may have come to regret this.

 

Despite Byrd's apparent victory on May 9, 1926, the Norge managed to reach the North Pole proper on May 12.  At that moment, Amundsen and his companion, Oscar Wisting, quietly shook hands. They were unquestionably the first men to have visited both Poles.  Amundsen is said to have laughed openly when Nobile dropped a large Italian flag out of a porthole window at the North Pole.

Strangely, Nobile went again to the North Pole in 1928, for no real reason other than to drop a heavy wooden cross on it, entrusted to him by the Pope.  Not even Mus­solini supported this trip.  The Norge later crashed and Amundsen died while flying to find it.  Nobile was one of those who survived," eventually dying at 94.

This book is a truly ripping yarn.  Wilkins had no money and was largely financed by the ever-generous Ellsworth, who wanted to make his name as a polar explorer and did become the first man (with his pilot Herbert Hollick-Kenyon) to fly across the Antarctic continent in 1935.  They were picked up by Wil­kins from the Bay of Whales in the expedition ship Wyatt Earp, named after Ellsworth's boyhood hero, the gun-toting sheriff of the Wild West.  Wilkins later sold the ludicrously-named little wooden - but ice-strengthened - ship to the Australi­an Government and it was used in 1947 by the fledgling Australian Ant­arctic Division to attempt to reach the Antarctic continent.

 

Incidentally, the Fokker Trimotor Detroiter (similar to the aircraft Byrd notionally flew to the North Pole) that Wilkins flew over the Arc­tic Ocean in 1926 was sold to Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm by Wilkins, renamed the Southern Cross and flown across the Pacific Ocean in 1928. It can be seen to this" day on display at Brisbane Airport.

 

This polar adventure classic is begging to be read.

 

FOOTNOTE: On March 17,1959, the nuclear submarine USS Skate broke through the ice and became the first vessel to surface at the North Pole.  The Australian and American flags flew from the conning tower.  Lit by flares, crew members watched as Sir George Hubert Wilkins's ashes were scattered to the winds.  The Australi­an explorer had finally made it to the North Pole.