WORLD'S LONELIEST MAN

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 16488, 4 November 1927, Page 4

WORLD'S LONELIEST MAN

A HERMIT <JF THE WILDS. OTTAWA (by mail). Tho loneliest man in the world is dead. He died oil or about New Year’s Day, 1927, and his passing was not "known to the outer world until the second week in August. His name was Hector Pitchforth, age unknown, representing the Sabellpm Trading Co., of London, at an isolated and unnamed spot on the east coast of Baffin Island. Tho brief fact of Pitchforth’s death was wirelessed from Pond’s Inlet by the s.s. Beothic, which this year took tho Canadian Government Arctic Expedition into the* far north. For seven years Pitchforth has lived in this desolate spot, far into tho Arctic circle, and within a few degrees of the Pole itself. His nearest neighbors were several hundred miles distant; his only friends a few half-savage husky dogs. All last summer Pitchforth waited in vain for the relief steamer to leave him food and : coal, but she never appeared. The natives deserted his post, and it is surmised that he died of cold and starvation. . Few knew anything of Pitchforth except that he was a graduate of a famous British University and an authority on astronomy, geology and topography. Some of his maps of the Baffin coast have been accepted by the British Admiralty'. During tho war he was an officer in a. British minesweeper, which was torpedoed, and 1 this episode cost him his hearing. Last year Inspector C. E. Wilcox, of "the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, while making a dog-team patrol on Baffin Island, met Pitchforth some miles from him “ home ” suffering from snow blindness. “ I must walk, I must walk,” ho said, “ L> keep warm, for I have no fuel.” Inspector Wilcox offered to take him to the R.M.P. post, hut ho declined. The last entry made in Pitchforih’s diary was on Christmas Day, 1926. He was then ill. and evidence supports the theorv that alone in tho frozen desolation of the Arctic night he died of the combined effects of exposure and under-nourishment.