Typewriters in a Very Cold Climate

Until I came across this photo last week, I had assumed that the first typewriters taken to Antarctica were Remingtons used during British Lieutenant Ernest Shackleton’s 1908-09 expedition. But here is evidence that French scientist and explorer Jean-Baptiste-Étienne-Auguste Charcot (1867-1936) used a Remington on his ship, the three-masted Le Français, during his 1903-07 expedition. The photo was taken by Charcot’s friend, the industrialist Paul Pléneau.

Charcot was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the son of the founder of modern neurology Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), an important influence on Sigmund Freud. Jean-Baptiste Charcot was the winner of two sailing silver medals at the 1900 Paris Olympic Games, crewing for François Texier in the two finals for boats up to half a ton, raced on the Seine in Meulan-en-Yvelines in the third week of May. His polar ship was built in Saint-Malo in 1903.

Geologist Ernest Gourdon (left) and photographer Paul Pléneau

enjoy a glass of Mumm Champagne in Antarctica on Bastille Day 1904.

Le Français left Le Havre on August 27, 1903, headed for the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula. It left Ushuaia on the Tierra del Fuego archipelago on January 23, 1904, and was in the ice and islands of the South Shetlands by the beginning of February. On January 15, 1905, the ship hit a rock off Alexander Island and began to sink. It managed to limp back to Argentina, where Charcot sold it to the Argentinian Government for use as a supply ship to its South Orkney Islands station. The expeditioners returned to France to be greeted as polar heroes, and the subsequent publication of 18 volumes of scientific reports – all typewritten on the Remington - amply justified that standing.  Charcot returned for a second Antarctic expedition in 1908-10, with his new ship Pourquoi-Pas? (“Why Not?”).

In later life Charcot explored Rockall (a desolate island of which I’ve written on this blog) in 1921 and Eastern Greenland and Svalbard from 1925 until 1936. He died when Pourquoi-Pas? was wrecked in a storm off the coast of Iceland in 1936.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard using an Underwood on Robert Scott's 1910-12 Expedition.

Shackleton’s 1908-09 expedition began on New Year’s Day, 1908, when the Nimrod set off on the British Antarctic Expedition from Lyttelton Harbour, New Zealand, and arrived at the eastern sector of the Great Ice Barrier on January 21. Shackleton sailed on to McMurdo Sound, arriving there on January 29, with a base eventually being established at Cape Royds. It took almost a full year, until January 9, 1909, for Shackleton and three companions to reach a new Farthest South latitude of 88° 23' S, a point only 112 miles from the South Pole. They became the first people to see and travel on the South Polar Plateau. Their return journey to McMurdo Sound was a race against starvation, on half-rations for much of the way. The expedition's other main accomplishments included the first ascent of Mount Erebus, and the discovery of the approximate location of the South Magnetic Pole, reached on January 16, 1909.

A Yost typewriter on Shackleton's 1914-17 expedition.

While Shackleton was in Antarctica, Commander Robert Perry had taken Remingtons with him on his final assault on the North Pole. Peary and 23 men set off from New York City on July 6, 1908, aboard the Roosevelt. They wintered near Cape Sheridan on Ellesmere Island, and from Ellesmere departed for the pole on February 28, 1909. On the final stage of the journey toward the North Pole, Peary on April 6 established Camp Jesup within three miles of the pole, according to his own readings.  News that both explorers had taken Remington typewriters with them was published across the US in November 1909, with the words, “The fact that the typewriter has now extended the field of its activities from pole to pole is typical of the conquest of the entire globe by the writing machine.”

Photos of typewriter use in Antarctica were taken of assistant biologist Apsley Cherry-Garrard by Herbert Ponting on Captain Robert Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova expedition of 1910-12. Scott’s march south toward the South Pole began on November 1, 1911, a few months after these photos were taken. Scott reached the Pole on January 11, 1912, only to find he’d been beaten there by Norwegian Roald Amundsen.

Australian Frank Hurley's remarkable photographs of Shackleton's disastrous 1914-17 expedition include one showing a Yost typewriter in Shackleton’s cabin on the Endurance.

Mention of Cape Royds finally brings me to this photo of Geoffrey Lee-Martin, my chief-of-staff on The New Zealand Herald when I worked in Auckland in the late 1960s. Lee-Martin is typing a story on his Empire Aristocrat portable typewriter at Cape Royds, which forms the west extremity of Ross Island, facing on to McMurdo Sound, in January 1956, when he was covering Sir Edmund Hillary's Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition.

The Man on the Camel with the Blickensderfer Typewriter

In the chapter (8) “Blicks at War” of the book The Five-Pound Secretary: An Illustrated History of the Blickensderfer Typewriter that he wrote in 2003 with Robert Blickensderfer, Dutch typewriter collector and historian Paul Robert mentions Lionel James.

The only known photograph of Lionel James,

and not one showing much of him, either.

Is that a Blick case on his right?
It is certainly a different mode of transport!

Punch magazine once labelled James “One of the Princes of the Golden Age of War Correspondence”.

Paul refers to James’s endorsements of the Blickensderfer – written to the Blickensderfer Manufacturing Company in Stamford, Connecticut - as a typewriter which in his own experience had stood up to the most gruelling of working tests.

Paul includes one of the letters written by James to the Blick company, in 1901, as well as the “German Cinderella or poster stamp” drawn by Munich artist Julius Edmond Robert Nitsche and showing James typing while riding a camel. As well, Paul has this page from a British trade catalogue. He dates both the stamp and the catalogue from the 1910s.

The stamp is headed “Reuters Korrespondent im Omdurman-Feldzuge [campaign]”. It’s one of my very favourite typewriter-related images, and has been for many years.

The Battle of Omdurman (September 2, 1898) is where Lionel James first “made his name” as a war correspondent. An army commanded by the British General Sir Herbert Kitchener (below) defeated the army of Abdullah al-Taashi, the successor to the self-proclaimed Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad, marking the success of British efforts to re-conquer the Sudan.

Lionel James “stole a march” on his much more seasoned newspaper rivals by banging out his description of the battle on his Blickensderfer and, “by sheer bluff”, contriving to send his story by the river steamer which carried Kitchener's official despatch to the War Office in London.

Unfortunately this is the largest size I can find for this image of Lionel James on camelback. Anyone have a larger file please?

It’s rare to be able to positively identify the subject of a turn-of-the-century typewriter-associated illustration such as this.  But the “Reuters [and later The Times of London] Korrespondent im Omdurman-Feldzuge” is most definitely Lionel James.

I only became more acutely aware of James after Anne Fadiman contacted me last week about typewriters which were used in entirely different climes: in the Antarctica (regular readers of this blog may know I have posted many times on typewriters taken on expeditions to the South Pole).

Anne (above) was researching an article for the New York Review of Books that mentions the typewriter used by Ernest Shackleton on the Discovery expedition to the Antarctic. She pointed me in the direction of a booklet (The Typewriter and Phonographic World) which contains a section on “The Typewriter at the Poles”.

I eventually found this booklet online and became absolutely engrossed by its contents. And there, among all the other gems, was this letter from Lionel James endorsing the Blickensderfer (one I had not previously seen).

If James used a Blick for all his newspaper and news agency reports, his short stories for Blackwood’s Magazine (among other publications) and his 13 books, he was indeed right to pay the typewriter a glowing tribute. You will note in the letter published by Paul Robert, James says he is agreeing to give the Blick company his typewriter as a memento in exchange for a new one – but stresses his Blick is in “perfect order” – despite its travels and its constant use.

James’s books were With the Chitral Relief Force, The Indian Frontier War, Side Tracks and Bridle Paths, With the Conquered Turk, A History of King Edward’s Horse, Times of Stress, On the Heels of De Wet, The Boy Galloper, A Subaltern of Horse, The Yellow War, Green Envelopes, A History of the Russo-Japanese War and, in 1929, High Pressure; Being Some Record of Activities in the Service of The Times Newspaper (Primarily the Record of My Work as a War Correspondent [1895-1904]). When The Times History of the South African War was being compiled, James collaborated on two volumes.

Lionel James was a most fascinating character. While working for Reuters as its War and Special Correspondent (1894-1898), he covered the Chitral (1894-5), Mohmand, Malakand and Tirah (1897-8) and Sudan (1898) campaigns. Exceeding the call of duty on one occasion, he became involved in a gunfight at the Malakand Pass, supporting and rallying the British soldiers – an action for which, although a journalist, he was mentioned in despatches.

From 1899 to 1913 James was Special and Principal War Correspondent for The Times of London. His work took him to Egypt (1899), South Africa (1899-1910), America and Macedonia (1903), Japan and Manchuria (1904), India (1907-8), Persia and Turkey (1907-8) and the Balkans (1909). In 1909 he was also with the Spanish Army in Morocco, and in 1910 with the Turkish Army in Albania.

Closer to home, James also covered the January 1911 Sydney Street Siege in London. James was congratulated for his vivid account by his editor George Earle Buckle (above).

Under changes and cost-cutting measures introduced by Lord Northcliffe to keep The Times afloat, Buckle was forced out in mid-1911 and James resigned in 1913.

But James remained active in military matters. He had joined the King’s Colonials in 1902 and by 1914 the unit had become King Edward’s Horse. Serving with the British Expeditionary Force in the Battle of the Somme, Colonel James led a depleted regiment against heavy odds and earned the DSO for rescuing the leaderless remnants of two other British regiments. Twice during World War I he was mentioned in despatches.

One biographer says James was born in India, but other researchers say he was born in Teignmoth, Devon, in 1871, and a census form James filled out in 1881, as a 10-year-old student, supports this latter view.

Either way, James was a younger son of the by-then retired Lieutenant Colonel L.H.S. James of the Royal Artillery, who had joined the Indian Army in 1858, and Emma (née Batson).

He is said to have been returned to England aged nine, in 1880, to attend a boarding school, Surrey County School (later Cranleigh). He nonetheless failed to pass the South Kensington science examinations.

From the Dictionary of Indian Biography

James returned to India at 16, in 1887, and was employed on an indigo estate in Behar, where he worked for 10 years near Muzzaffarpur.

He played polo, which may explain his apparent (I’d say as imagined by Nitsche and others) adeptness in being able to type with a Blickensderfer while astride a camel!

James acquired a string of ponies and enlisted in the volunteer Behar Mounted Rifles. By 1895 two of his books of short stories had been published after appearing in Indian English language newspapers.

In 1894 an attempted coup using his own horse at the Allahabad racecourse landed James in serious debt. To work it off, he began what was to be a hugely successful career as a war correspondent, working for John O’Brien Saunders (1852-1905), the Calcutta-based proprietor of The Englishman, who needed someone to cover the Chitral campaign (in what is now northern Pakistan) in 1895. James also covered the revolt for Reuters and The Times of India.

Burleigh

Prior

Among the confreres of the then greenhorn James were such noted and experienced war correspondents as Bennet Burleigh (1845-1914, London Daily Telegraph), Melton Prior (1845-1910, The London Illustrated News), Frederic Villiers (1851-1922, London’s The Graphic) and George Warrington Steevens (1869-1900, London Daily Mail). James still managed to hold his own.

Villiers

Steevens

During this time James also became friendly with the famous Australian-born journalist George Ernest (“Chinese”) Morrison, after whom James would later name one of his sons. 

Morrison (above), born in Geelong in 1862, worked for The Age in Melbourne and The Sydney Morning Herald before travelling to New Guinea, Scotland, North America, the West Indies, Spain, Philippines, Burma, India, Japan and China. After publication of a book on his travels from China to Burma, Morrison was appointed a special Asia correspondent by The Times foreign editor Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol.

Valentine Chirol

In March 1897, Morrison became the first permanent correspondent of The Times in Peking (Beijing). He turned down the chance to be The Times foreign editor in 1907 and died at Sidmouth, Devon, in 1920, survived by his beautiful young New Zealand-born wife  Jennie Wark Robin (below), who had been his secretary. (Morrison's eldest son Ian [1913-1950] was killed reporting the Korean War for The Times.)

When giving a résumé of James’ character, Morrison said that he was “good, simple, hot-tempered, impatient, self-willed, and able”. But apart from James, only Morrison and William Howard Russell (below), who covered the Crimean War, forsook personal safety to such a degree while reporting.

James was not just brave but ingenious. When, Ladysmith was besieged and it was almost impossible to send news from there to Johannesburg, he decided to use carrier pigeons (shades of Evelyn Waugh’s foreign correspondent classic Scoop). Unfortunately, these were intercepted, and a Boer with a sense of humour wrote to thank James for an enjoyable meal.

Another famous “war correspondent” James encountered was Oakland-raised Jack London (below). 

In 1904, London, then just 28, sailed on the Siberia from San Francisco for Yokohama to cover the Russo-Japanese War for the Hearst Press.

Palmer

Hare haring after a photo

London travelled with fellow correspondents Frederick Palmer (1873-1958) and the renowned British war photographer James Henry “Jimmy” Hare (1856-1946), who were working together for the New York Globe, Willard Dickerman Straight (1880-1918) working for Reuters, and the celebrated British journalist Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, among others. Ashmead-Bartlett (1881-1931), who worked for London’s The Daily Telegraph, was in 1915 instrumental in the birth of the Anzac legend at Gallipoli.

Straight

Ashmead-Bartlett

By the time of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, the rules of engagement for war correspondents had changed considerably. Gone were the days when they were allowed right up on to the front lines. As their ability to report the action increasingly quickened, through the use of typewriters and telegrams, so were they pushed further back from the battle fronts. They began to be drip fed only the sort of basic information armies believed they should have, in the interests of security.

Lionel James did not much take to the changes. During the Russo-Japanese War, “scores of correspondents were kept kicking their heels in Tokyo chafing at their enforced idleness”. But James had other ideas. His way of overcoming this situation meant:

*Coming to a secret deal with the Japanese Imperial Navy, whereby a Japanese naval officer went with him to supply his admiralty with intelligence.

*Getting The Times to pay for his chartering of the steamer Halmun in Shanghai, and installing on it four tons of American inventor Lee De Forest’s wireless equipment. James had meet De Forest (below) at sea in December 1903 while on his way from England to the United States en route to covering the war.

*Finding labour to build a 180-foot high bamboo wireless mast  on the British-leased treeless promontory of Weihaiwei on the China coast.

Through these efforts, James was able to enter the conflict zone of the war at sea.

Thus James became the first war correspondent to employ wireless equipment to transit his copy. This achievement is the subject of a book by war historian Peter Slattery.

James’s first report was published in The Times on March 15, 1904; he went on to file many other despatches, including the sinking of the Russian flagship the Petropavlovsk.

War correspondents in Manchuria. Is Lionel James among them?

But James was later forced to move inland into Manchuria to continue his reporting of the war. From there, he sent a 5000-word story on one of the major land battles of the war at Liaoyang – the longest cable ever filed.

The New York Times, April 24, 1904

James married Margaret Crane. In 1897 Margaret was returning from India to England and James set off to ask for her hand in marriage. He raced on horseback to Bombay, where Margaret’s ship had just departed. Undaunted by this, James swam after the vessel, climbed aboard and proposed.

From 1929-31 James managed a racing stable and stud farm and until 1942 he was a governor of the Imperial Services College, Windsor. He then became governor of Haileybury school. He retired in 1946 and died at Newbury, Berkshire, on May 31, 1955, aged 84.

Chilly Fingers: Taking Typewriters to the Poles

The amazing Australian

Polar explorer

Sir Hubert Wilkins

and his love of Underwoods

in a Cold Climate

PLUS: See video footage of a Barr portable typewriter being used as Wilkins’ US Navy submarine Nautilus attempts to travel under pack-ice to the North Pole in 1931

(the typewriter scenes are at the end of this 1min 42sec clip). http://www.criticalpast.com/video/65675042197_Sir-Hubert-Wilkins_engine-room_turning-a-crank_radio-gear_looking-through-periscope

Australian World War I military commander General Sir John Monash once described his fellow countryman Hubert Wilkins as “the bravest man I have ever seen”. Many others thought Wilkins foolhardy in the extreme, especially when he tried to take a US Navy submarine he called the Nautilus under the North Pole in 1931. In terms of typewriter history, however, Wilkins is notable as one of the first men to take typewriters into some of the world’s coldest regions, on explorations to the North Pole and South Pole.

Sir George Hubert Wilkins (1888-1958)

A typewriter had been taken on Sir Robert Falcon Scott’s last, fatal expedition to the South Pole, in 1911-12 (see photos below). But from that latter year, over the next 45 years, Wilkins was to regularly take typewriters with him on his many journeys to both Polar regions.

These images were taken of assistant biologist Ashley George Benet Cherry-Garrard by Herbert George Ponting on the Scott expedition. The top photograph was taken on June 8, 1911. In the second photograph, Cherry-Garrard is working on the South Polar Times on August 30, 1911. Cherry-Garrard's later account of the expedition was called The Worst Journey in the World, at the suggestion of his neighbour, George Bernard Shaw.

The photograph at the top of this post was taken on board the Nautilus in 1931, and shows Wilkins at an Underwood standard typewriter writing newspaper articles about his adventures.
Wilkins was to a large degree funded by William Randolph Hearst on many of his later Polar journeys, on the understanding he would write daily reports for Hearst newspapers.

Packing his typewriter for an Arctic flight

On one of his late 1920s adventures, Wilkins flew over Antarctica in the San Francisco and named the island of Hearst Land after his sponsor. Hearst repaid the compliment by giving Wilkins and his glamorous Australian-born actress wife Suzanne Bennett (below) a flight aboard the Graf Zeppelin as it attempted the first around-the-world flight.

Six years later Wilkins was aboard the airship Hindenburg as it made its maiden voyage from Germany to the US. Flight stickers can be seen on one of Wilkins’ typewriter cases.

The Byrd Polar Research Center at the Ohio State University, Columbus, has an extensive collection of Wilkins artifacts. Among these are the Underwood and Royal portable typewriters that Wilkins took on his many Polar travels.

Note the rust on the keytops of the Underwood. Hardly seems surprising!

The Center’s collection of Wilkins typewriters and their cases, as well as this gorgeous Underwood 4 portable typewriter that belonged to Arctic flier Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd Jr (below) can be seen by going to https://byrdpolarmedia.osu.edu/index.cfm?listOfKeyWords=typewriter&fuseaction=search.searchBack

Wilkins bought his Royal portable typewriter from the Jonass Typewriter Service, on Broadway, New York. It appears his Underwoods may have been bought in Sydney, Australia.

George Hubert Wilkins was a famous war correspondent and photographer, newspaper reporter and author, soldier and secret agent, ornithologist and naturalist, geographer and climatologist, aviator and balloonist, submariner and navigator. All this as well as being a pioneering Polar explorer.

He was born on October 31, 1888, on a sheep station called Netfield, at Mount Bryan East, 10 miles west of Hallett and 100 miles north of Adelaide in South Australia. He was the youngest of 13 children.

His grandparents were part of the South Australian Company which had settled Glenelg in 1836. His father Henry was the first child born at the Glenelg camp in October 1836.
As a child, Hubert Wilkins experienced the devastation caused by drought and developed an interest in climatic phenomena. He was convinced that the Polar regions were responsible for the gluts and droughts that seemed to happen in climatic cycles within Australia.
In 1903 the family moved to Adelaide and Wilkins studied music at the Elder Conservatorium and engineering part-time at the South Australian School of Mines and Industries. At 18, he was wiring a theatre when he was asked to help a travelling cinema show. He joined the show, thus beginning a lifelong involvement in photography and cinematography.

In 1908, while at the grand opening of the Strand Picture Theatre on Pitt Street in Sydney, he secured a job with the Gaumont Film Company in England. He went back to Adelaide to farewell his family and stowed away on a ship he believed would return him to Sydney. When discovered as a stowaway, however, the ship was already far out in the Southern Ocean, making its way to Algiers. Wilkins agreed to work his passage to North Africa but was dumped in Algiers. Wilkins finally made his way to London. On his way he was kidnapped by Arab gun-running drug-smugglers, to be sold as a slave, but escaped with the help of a girl in the desert tribe.
In England he became the first man to film in flight – first from a balloon and later on the wing of a biplane. With his visits to aerodromes, aircraft naturally became a new interest and through meeting aviation pioneer Claude Grahame-White he soon learnt to fly.

As well as travelling extensively across Europe and North America as a cameraman for Gaumont, Wilkins worked as a reporter for the Daily Chronicle, including covering the 1909 Revolution in Spain and the 1912 Balkan wars between the Turks and Bulgarians. This was the first time moving pictures had ever been taken at the battlefront.
From 1913 to 1916 he was second-in-command on Vilhjalmur Stefansson's Canadian Arctic expedition: Wilkins became adept in the art of survival in Polar regions and conceived a plan to improve weather forecasting by establishing permanent stations at the poles.

He returned to Australia in 1917 to settle his late father’s estate and was commissioned as second lieutenant in the Australian Imperial Force (Australian Flying Corps). Wilkins was awarded the Military Cross for bringing in wounded men during the Third Battle of Ypres at Passchendaele. He later added a bar to it and was promoted to captain. During the battle of the Hindenburg line in late 1918, he organised a group of American soldiers who had lost their officers in an enemy attack and directed operations until support arrived.

One major event Wilkins witnessed was the aerial fight and death of the German air ace Baron Manfred von Richthofen.
In early 1919 Wilkins joined Charles Bean (official Australian war historian, who used a Corona 3 portable typewriter) to revisit Australia's part in the Gallipoli Peninsula campaign. He entered the England-to-Australia air race but his aircraft, a Blackburn he called the Kangaroo, experienced engine failure and crash-landed into a fence at a lunatic asylum in Crete.

In 1920-21 Wilkins made his first visit to the Antarctic, then took part in Sir Ernest Shackleton's Quest expedition of 1921-22 as an ornithologist.
He worked in the Soviet Union in 1922-23 covering the effects of famine, and was then commissioned by the British Museum to return to Australia to collect specimens of the rarer native fauna in the remote northern part of the country. His work was acclaimed by the museum but derided by Australian authorities because of his sympathetic treatment of Aborigines ("In many ways, their state of civilisation is higher than ours") and his criticism of the ongoing environmental damage in the country.

In 1926 he began a program of Arctic exploration by air. Wilkins was in San Francisco in late 1927, preparing to buy an aircraft to fly over the Arctic from Alaska to Spitsbergen, Norway. He had two big Fokkers in storage, which he had previously used in the Arctic Circle, but they were unsuitable for his new purpose. He was able to sell them to two fellow Australians, aviators Charles Kingsford-Smith and Charles Ulm, who re-named one of the three-engine planes the Southern Cross and created the record for crossing the Pacific Ocean from America to Australia.

Wilkins’ own enterprise culminated in his great feat of air navigation: in April 1928, with US Army aviator Carl Ben Eielson as pilot of a Lockheed-Vega, he flew from Point Barrow, Alaska, eastward over the Arctic Sea to Spitsbergen, Norway. The 2500-mile flight took 20 hours and 20 minutes.
Wilkins was created a Knight Bachelor in King George V’s Birthday Honours List in 1928 and awarded the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society of London. He also became the first recipient of the Samuel Finley Breese Morse Medal of the American Geographical Society.
His book, Flying the Arctic (New York, 1928), publicised the achievement. At the book launch, he met fellow Australian, actress Suzanne Evans (screen name Suzanne Bennett) and married her in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929.

Wilkins made several more Antarctic journeys between 1928-1930. On the first, while travelling south, his final port of call was in the Falkland Islands. There Wilkins received a secret message from the British Government authorising him to make territorial claims to the Falkland Islands Dependency. This claim ultimately led to the Falklands War in 1982.

In 1931, Wilkins attempted to reach the North Pole by taking a surplus United States Navy submarine, the USS 0.12 (SS-73), renamed the Nautilus, under the pack-ice. Since Wilkins was not a US citizen he was unable to buy the submarine but was permitted to lease it for five years at $1 a year from Lake & Danenhower Inc. The 1930 London Naval Treaty, under which the US pledged to dismantle a range of naval ships and submarines, allowed Wilkins to strike the deal.

However, many serious mishaps and mechanical failures caused the venture to be abandoned, amid ridicule of his ideas. Wilkins was given permission from the US Navy to sink the vessel in a Norwegian fjord in November 1931.

After this adventure, Wilkins was astonished to discover that a distant forefather, Bishop John Wilkins, of Chester, the brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell, had put forward a proposal in 1648 to take an “Ark for submarine navigations” under the ice to the North Pole.
Wilkins made four further expeditions (1933-34, 1934-35, 1935-36 and 1938-39) to the Antarctic continent, as well as a trip back in 1957 (below, drinking beer with a penguin)).

During 1937 and 1938 he played a major role in the search for the Russian aviator Sigismund Levanevsky, who disappeared on a flight from Moscow to Fairbanks, Alaska. In these years Wilkins also advanced techniques of flying by moonlight, made scientific observations and experimented with telepathy.
Because of his age, Wilkins was rejected for service by the British and Australia governments at the outbreak of World War II, but became involved in a number of missions for United States Government agencies, visiting the Middle East, South-East Asia and the Aleutian Islands. From 1942 he was a consultant and geographer with the US Army Quartermaster Corps, which sought his advice on rations and equipment suitable for use in conditions of extreme cold. He served in the US Weather Bureau and the Arctic Institute of North America.

Wilkins died suddenly in his hotel room at Framingham, Massachusetts, on November 30, 1958, a month after his 70th birthday; later his ashes were scattered at the North Pole.
Wilkins Sound, the Wilkins Ice Shelf and the runway on the upper Peterson Glacier, Budd Coast, Wilkes Land in Antarctica are named after him, as are the airport at Jamestown, South Australia, and a road at Adelaide Airport.

Signed: "For Seymour Halpern with best wishes Hubert Wilkins May 12, 1930".

Here is a Corona 3 portable typewriter advertisement in which Norwegian Arctic explorer Roald Amundsen endorses the little folding portable he planned to take to the North Pole.
And here is a photo of Geoffrey Lee-Martin, my chief-of-staff on The New Zealand Herald in Auckland, typing a story on an Empire Aristocrat portable typewriter at Cape Royds, which forms the west extremity of Ross Island, facing on McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, in January 1956, when Lee-Martin was covering Sir Edmund Hillary's Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition.