LATE COMMANDER WILD

Evening Star, Issue 23351, 22 August 1939, Page 10

LATE COMMANDER WILD

FAMOUS ANTARCTIC EXPLORER A cable published yesterday recorded the death at Klerksdorp, South Africa, of Commander Frank Wild, hitherto the only living descendant of Captain James Cook, and a famous Antarctic explorer. Commander Wild was born at Skelton, Yorkshire, in 1874. He went to Australia at the age of 15. In 1901 he was selected by Scott as a member of bis expedition to the Antarctic in the Discovery, and fqr the next 21 years his life was chiefly devoted to Antarctic exploration. He was in five expeditions and! spent more than 10 years in frozen seas—a record unequalled by Scott, Evans, Shackleton, or Amundsen. The Discovery remained in the Polar regions till February, 1904, and Wild took part in much of the exploration work.

By 1907 he was back on-the Antarctic ice as a member of the Shackleton Nimrod expedition, which in the next two years reached a point about 100 miles* from the South Pole. In 1911 Wild joined' the Australian party under Dr Mawson in the Aurora, which spent two years in investigating the coastal areas of Gaussberg and Cape Adare, and in 1914 he was a member of the Imperial Transantarctic Expedition. After serving in the Great War Wild went to Central Africa. There he heard that Shackleton was going south again and at once started to join him by the quickest possible route, involving the swimming of three rapid rivers and walking about 100 miles through flooded areas. Shackleton made him second in command of the Quest, the expedition's vessel. After the death of his leader in January, 1922, Wild took the Quest back to England, where he was received by the King at Buckingham Palace, and the Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society was conferred on him. This has been conferred) on only 10 persons since its institution. In 1923 he wrote ‘ Shackleton’s Last Voyage.’ He was the only person in the world to have the South Pole Medal with four bars. He discovered and named Queen Mary Land, was on a misison to Russia ivhen the revolution broke out, and was sent by the .Government to discover iron deposits in the Arctic. In 1922 he had married Mrs Granville Altman, whom he had rescued from Russia after her former husband, a Borneo tea planter, had been killed in the war.

Returning to Africa, he settled in Zululand and took up cotton-growing. At the end of four years, however, his capital was exhausted because of a succession of droughts, and in July. 1929, he became a porter at an hotel at Gollel. the most northerly point of the railway in Zululand, while awaiting the means to get down to the coast.