In 1928, Sir George Hubert Wilkins and pilot Carl Ben Eielson flew from Alaska to Spitsbergen in a crossing of the Arctic. Later that year, they made the first successful aeroplane flight over the Antarctic continent. Wilkins was not only an explorer: he was a photographer, soldier, ornithologist and geographer whose work connected aerial observation with polar fieldwork. His later attempt to take a submarine beneath the Arctic ice did not reach the North Pole, but it tested whether a submarine could operate under the polar ice cap.
From South Australia to the Arctic
Wilkins was born on 31 October 1888 at Mount Bryan East, South Australia, the youngest of 13 children in a family of pioneer settlers and sheep farmers. He studied first in his home town and then at the Adelaide School of Mines. As a teenager he moved to Adelaide, where he found work with a travelling cinema. He later worked as a cinematographer in Sydney and moved to England, becoming a pioneering aerial photographer at Gaumont Studios.
Photography took him into polar exploration. His skill brought him places on Arctic expeditions, including the Canadian Arctic Expedition led by Vilhjalmur Stefansson in 1913. The expedition was controversial, but it formed part of Wilkins’s early experience of work in the Arctic. After the war, he again joined an expedition, serving as ornithologist aboard the Quest during the Shackleton–Rowett Expedition of 1921–22, which travelled in the Southern Ocean and to adjacent islands.
Wilkins also undertook a two-year study of the bird life of Northern Australia for the British Museum, beginning in 1923. The project occupied him until 1925. The museum acclaimed his work; Australian authorities, by contrast, criticised his sympathetic treatment of Indigenous Australians and his comments on environmental damage. That disagreement gives context to a career in which observation and documentation were not separate from the questions raised by what he saw.
War photography and military honours
In 1917, Wilkins returned to Australia and joined the Australian Flying Corps as a second lieutenant. He later transferred to the general list and, in 1918, became an official war photographer. His duties repeatedly took him close to the fighting. In June 1918, he received the Military Cross for efforts to rescue wounded soldiers during the Third Battle of Ypres. He remains the only official Australian war photographer to have received a combat medal.
The following month, promoted to captain, he became officer commanding No. 3 (Photographic) Sub-section of the Australian war records unit. At the Battle of the Hindenburg Line, he took command of a group of American soldiers whose officers had been lost in an earlier attack, directing them until support arrived. He received a bar to his Military Cross in the 1919 Birthday Honours. His wartime record therefore included more than making photographs: he also helped bring in wounded men, supplied intelligence and, in an emergency, led troops.
Aircraft over ice and continent
Wilkins and Eielson first tested the possibilities of polar flight in 1927. In March, they explored the drift ice north of Alaska and landed Eielson’s aeroplane on it, the first landing by a land-plane on drift ice. Soundings at the site indicated a water depth of 16,000 feet. Wilkins concluded that the broad expanses of open ice could be useful to future Arctic expeditions using aircraft.
On 15 April 1928, the pair set out from Point Barrow, Alaska, for Green Harbour, Spitsbergen. They completed the trans-Arctic crossing after 21 hours of flying time, with a five-day layover on Deadman’s Island off the north-eastern coast of Spitsbergen. It was a significant demonstration of aircraft operating across the Arctic, not an unqualified first flight over the entire region. For this achievement and his earlier work, Wilkins was knighted in the 1928 Birthday Honours. He also received the American Geographical Society’s first Samuel Finley Breese Morse Medal and the Royal Geographical Society’s Patron’s Medal that year.
In December 1928, Wilkins and Eielson took off from Deception Island and made the first successful aeroplane flight over the Antarctic continent, following the eastern coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Later, with financial backing from William Randolph Hearst, Wilkins continued flying over Antarctica in the aircraft San Francisco. He named Hearst Land after his sponsor. Hearst subsequently arranged a flight for Wilkins and his bride aboard the airship Graf Zeppelin. The flights extended the use of aircraft in polar exploration, where aerial observation offered a way to survey places difficult to reach on the ground.
The Nautilus and an unfinished crossing
Wilkins’s next polar project took him below the surface. In 1930, while on holiday with his wife, Suzanne, and their friend Lincoln Ellsworth, he developed plans for a submarine expedition across the Arctic. He envisaged scientific work, including meteorological study and the collection of data of academic and economic interest. A submarine, he argued, could carry a properly equipped laboratory into the Arctic.
The vessel was the disarmed American submarine O-12, which Wilkins renamed Nautilus. Since he was not a US citizen, he could not buy the submarine; instead, he leased it for five years for one dollar a year. It was fitted with a drill intended to make openings in the ice above for ventilation, and a crew of 18 was assembled. The voyage was beset by difficulties. A crew member drowned before the expedition left New York harbour. After the submarine’s engines failed, Wilkins sent an SOS and was rescued by the USS Wyoming on 14 June 1931. The Nautilus was towed to Ireland and taken to England for repairs.
Once at sea again, the expedition reached Norway to collect its scientific contingent. By 23 August, it was about 600 miles from the North Pole, but Wilkins discovered that the submarine lacked its diving planes, making it impossible to control it properly underwater. The crew managed to take ice-core samples and test water salinity and gravity near the pole, but Wilkins abandoned the attempt. Storm damage later made the submarine unusable; with US Navy permission, it was sunk off Norway on 20 November 1931. The voyage did not achieve its central goal. It did, however, demonstrate that a submarine could operate beneath the polar ice cap, an important step towards later under-ice missions.
Recognition, death and the papers he left behind
Wilkins’s honours reflected both exploration and wartime service. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1930, in addition to receiving the Military Cross and its bar, the 1928 geographical medals and his knighthood. He died in Framingham, Massachusetts, on 30 November 1958. In accordance with his last wishes, the US Navy took his ashes to the North Pole aboard the submarine USS Skate on 17 March 1959 and scattered them there.
His records and artefacts did not remain in one place. A large collection of his photographs, films, papers and other material was eventually sold to Ohio State University, whose Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center catalogued it and made it available to researchers. Other objects and papers are held in public collections around the world, while some remain privately owned. In 2023, the History Trust of South Australia took over the papers of the Wilkins Foundation and established the Wilkins Project to conserve and interpret the records. The project’s work, alongside the preservation of Wilkins material in research collections, gives his expedition history a continuing documentary life.
Why Sir Hubert Wilkins deserves a place in British Legacy
Wilkins’s place in British Legacy rests on a career that crossed national boundaries and several kinds of work. Born in Australia, he came to England and worked as an aerial photographer for Gaumont Studios; he also undertook a bird study for the British Museum. His knighthood was awarded by King George V in 1928, in recognition of his polar work. These connections make his story relevant to British history without turning his Australian origins into a footnote or claiming that his achievements belonged to Britain alone.
His practical contributions were specific. With Eielson, he demonstrated that a land-plane could land on Arctic drift ice, completed a trans-Arctic flight and made the first successful aeroplane flight over the Antarctic continent. With the Nautilus, he tried to apply submarine technology to polar science. The attempt failed to reach its destination, but its tests beneath the ice helped establish that such operations were possible. His wartime service also joined photography to rescue work, intelligence and command, earning him the Military Cross and its bar. Finally, the preservation and cataloguing of his papers have kept evidence of these expeditions available to researchers. Wilkins’s British legacy is therefore not a claim to exclusive national ownership; it is a record of how British institutions, honours and employment formed part of an Australian explorer’s international career, and of how his work advanced the practice and documentation of polar exploration.
Sources
Adapted in part from Hubert Wilkins by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.
