Gunther Plüschow

Gunther Plüschow was the only German PoW to make it home from captivity during either world wars. After escaping a prison camp at Donington Hall, Derbyshire on July 4 1915, he, and fellow inmate Oskar Trefftz, managed to catch a train to London. Newspapers were soon running stories about the men which led to Trefftz's capture.

Plüschow though eventually managed to stow away on a Dutch ship at Tilbury Docks and make it back to Germany. After the war he married and became an aerial explorer. The story of his escapade was published a few years after the war. Manchester Guardian review, June 25 1922:

Plüschow was killed in 1931 in a plane crash while exploring a glacier over southern Chile. His exploits had been largely forgotten until Anton Rippon set about telling his story using documents in German archives. Gunther Plüschow: Airman, Escaper and Explorer has just been published while there's more about him here, here and here.

Adolphus Greely

In 1881, Lieutenant Adolphus W. Greely led the US Lady Franklin Bay Expedition to northern Ellesmere Island as part of the first International Polar Year (a series of coordinated international expeditions to the polar regions). One of the aims was to create an Arctic base. However, the adventure ended with Greely and six others being rescued in June 1884. Soon after, the expedition received international attention due to evidence of cannibalism.

Michael Robinson writes on Time to Eat the Dogs that "the Greely Expedition was supposed to represent a new kind of Arctic exploration, one focused on international, collaborative science rather than pell mell dashes to the North Pole. In the end, however, the expedition signaled the end of serious collaboration between Arctic explorers and scientists for decades". This is followed by a excerpt about Greely from The Coldest Crucible. Michael was also an advisor and contributed to a recent PBS documentary about the exhibition which can be viewed here.

Incidentally, the post includes page images from the Illustrated London News. Between 1842 and 1971, the paper was one of London's major publishing institutions, pioneering the use of drawings in the service of reportage. At its peak, the ILN had a circulation of about 300,000 and was the publication of choice for the Victorian middle classes, transforming illustrations into a credible, factual, news reporting tool. Previously, illustrations had been used mainly for political caricatures or for sensational events like public hangings. Compared with the dense, text heavy, pages of other papers from the time, the ILN is a joy to view (and the reason why I decided against including Greely content from the Manchester Guardian in the post).

See here for access to the ILN digital archive.

Doom of English forests

The announcement that the British Government is planning a £250 million sell-off of England's publicly-owned forests has been met with huge opposition from many sections of society. While not all Forestry Commission land is to be sold off, and it will keep its role overseeing the country's woodlands, there is much uncertainty (to say the least) over guarantees over access for future generations. The fear is that private landlords may restrict walkers and mountain-bikers coming onto their land.

However, it is worth remembering that the Forestry Commission was created in 1919, not for public leisure needs, but to provide timber for the nation. The first world war had severely depleted Britain's woodlands and towards the end of the conflict, David Lloyd George, the prime minister, thought that the country was in greater danger of defeat through a shortage of timber than of food. The seriousness of the situation can be seen from this Observer report from April 21 1918 (click image to enlarge):

The Forestry Act of 1919 set up the commission with power but without a tree to its name. By 1939 though, it had planted 600,000 acres of new woods and in 1936 the first 'national forest park' was created in Argyll with others being established in Snowdonia and the Forest of Dean before the second world war.

Supporters of the forestry sale point to the fact that the commission has caused much environmental damage in the past, replacing ancient deciduous woods with commercial confiners, while whole areas have been covered in dark green blankets of forest with no regard for the surrounding area. Ennerdale in the English Lakeland is often cited as one of the worst examples of this and Harry Griffin, one of the Guardian's country diarists, was often critical of the desecration of the valley. However, the commission has changed its policy over the decades, a glimpse of which can be seen in this Griffin piece from July 1 1968:

Takeshiro Matsuura

The Daily Yomiuri reports on an exhibition about Takeshiro Matsuura, the Japanese explorer who was the first person to document the inner reaches of what is now known as Hokkaido. He explored the area extensively during the mid 19th century and created a map of the island that included parts which had been ignored by earlier cartographers. He visited Ainu communities and compiled records of the large numbers of the population who had been conscripted for forced labour far from their homes. Matsuura suggested the name Hokkaido for the area.

Artscape Japan has produced an informative article about Matsuura, while The Old Geographer Matsuura Takeshiro, by Frederick Starr can be searched here.

Matthew Flinders and his map of Australia

Australians are demanding that Britain hands back a map of the country drawn by explorer Matthew Flinders in 1804. Often referred to as the nation's 'birth certificate' on account of the fact that it's the first map to refer to the land mass as Australia, it is currently currently kept at the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) in Taunton, Somerset - but is not on display.

In 1798, Lincolnshire born Lieutenant Matthew Flinders, who had studied navigation and cartography under William Bligh joined Royal Navy surgeon George Bass on a voyage around Van Diemen's Land, charting its coasts and proving that it was separate from the main continent. From 1802 to 1803 he circumnavigated the continent aboard the Investigator, filling in many unknown stretches of coast on the charts. Flinders's map, produced while he was detained by the governor of Mauritius from 1803-10, was the first to call the continent Australia. The name was adopted by the British Admiralty in 1824.Flinders died in 1814.

Australian MP Greg Hunt has written to the Dr Liam Fox, the British Defence Secretary, asking for his assistance and has started a petition calling for the return of the map to Australia. However, the Daily Telegraph reports that UKHO's response to the request was to say: "Matthew Flinders was a Commander in Her Majesty's Royal Navy on board the HMS Investigator and, as such, the UK Government holds it as a public record and [it] is officially part of the UK National Archives."

Matthew Flinders's Voyage to Terra Australis can be read here and for a little more information about him see this Manchester Guardian piece that appeared on July 21 1919:

Aleister Crowley and Gilles de Rais

Put Aleister Crowley into an article and you can usually guarantee something of interest. Whether it’s about occultism, the Led Zeppelin connection or his mountaineering exploits, the so called ‘wickedest man in the world’ generates a good tale. Of course many dismiss him as a self-deluded charlatan but there’s no denying, as the latest Footless Crow posting shows, that in his youth Crowley was a bold and talented mountaineer. The blog reprints a Robin Cambell piece that originally appeared in Mountain magazine.

As ever, I was interested to see what contemporaneous news reports had to say about the man. Following the Guardian Book of Mountains thesis that at the beginning of the 20th century the Manchester Guardian was the paper of record for all things climbing, I was expecting at least something on the 1905 Kangchenjunga expedition. Unfortunately there was little apart from a few mentions. There were though some amusing reports of court cases, plus the following story about Crowley being banned from talking about the 15th century poet Gilles de Rais at Oxford University. Perhaps it was a quiet news day but the issue was thought important enough to warrant a leader column in the paper on February 4 1930. (Click images to enlarge)

In search of James Fitzjames

While the British can seem obsessed with the exploits of Scott and Shackleton in Antarctica, Canadians are fascinated with the fate of the 1845 Franklin Expedition that set out in search of Northwest Passage, an Arctic waterway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, plus 129 crew members disappeared and little is known as to what happened - other than there is evidence that some of them survived for a number of years, along with lurid tales of cannibalism and lead poisoning.

A whole publishing industry has grown up around the expedition, while marine archaeologists regularly try and establish what exactly happened to the crew. Much has been written about Sir John Franklin, the leader, but there is scant information about other members of the crew, particularly James Fitzjames, the third in command on the voyage and captain of the Erebus. That was until William Battersby's James Fitzjames: The Mystery Man of the Franklin Expedition was published last year.

The author recently talked about how he came to write Fitzjames's biography at Kennington's Durning Library, as a guest of the Friends of the library. He explained that as someone working in institutional investment marketing he travelled incessantly, often to San Francisco. On one flight the financier found himself reading Barrow's Boys while travelling above the Arctic, the area where the grisly events contained in the book took place. He became obsessed with the Franklin expedition and after leaving his job during Lehman Brothers bank collapse, decided to pursue this interest, resurrecting his original training as an archaeologist.

Battersby was aware of the many theories about the expedition but found himself irritated by numerous inconsistencies. So he decided to start from scratch and look at the subject afresh. Initial research led him to deciding to concentrate on the life of Fitzjames.

The talk consisted of a romp through the sailor's relatively short life (he was 32 when he joined the expedition). Previous references to the man usually had him down a fast-rising adventurous glamour boy of the British navy. He took part in the first steamer trip down the the Euphrates River and fought China during the first Opium War. Then, at the age of 29, he was promoted from lieutenant to commander. This has usually been attributed to an aristocratic background. However, after trawling through a mountain of archive material, Battersby discovered that Fitzjames was illegitimate and a self-made man, plus many more facts about the man.

This was a fascinating talk that brought Fitzjames and navy life in the 1840s alive. It was illustrated with such newly discovered details as unseen paintings by the sailor and the fact HMS Erebus and HMS Terror can, on close inspection, be seen reflected in the band around his hat (picture above).

There were plenty of questions but, inevitably, the one that generated the most interest was over a slide featuring the skulls, minus jawbones, of some of the Franklin expedition members. There's no getting away from the fact that all talk of this failed voyage from over 160 years ago will always turn to cannibalism.

More on the book can be seen here and here.

Thanks to the Friends of Durning Library for organising such an illuminating evening. Mention must also be made of the fact that they are fighting hard to prevent sections of the service being closed down as part of the current UK spending cuts. The talk was yet another example of the varied services public libraries provide for the community.