Jean Baptiste Charcot was born on July 15, 1867
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July 15, 2022
French polar explorer and oceanographer Jean-Baptiste Charcot is born
French physician and polar explorer Jean-Baptiste Charcot was born on July 15, 1867 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.
Havana Cuba. – The French doctor and polar explorer Jean-Baptiste Charcot, was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France July 15, 1867. Between 1883 and 1887 he undertook numerous journeys with his father (Wales, Shetland Islands, Hebrides, Faroe Islands, Iceland, Jan Mayen Island, Holland, Spain and Morocco) and felt a real phobia of countries that were too hot. 1888 He did his military service with the Alpine hunters as a doctor’s assistant. In 1892 he bought his first boat, an 8.30 meter sloop in which he started regattas. In 1895 he received a medical degree from the Paris faculty. In 1898 he went with the millionaire Vanderbilt up the Nile to Aswan. In 1902 he sailed to Iceland, crossing the Arctic Circle for the first time and approaching the glaciers. He also became a naval officer. In 1903 he had the Saint-Malo a 32 meter three-masted schooner, the Français, and organized the first French expedition to Antarctica, which will spend the winter on the windswept Convertible Island.
On March 4, 1905, the expedition left the Antarctic Peninsula. The winter was survived without major complications and the scientific goals were achieved: a thousand kilometers of new coasts discovered and explored, three detailed nautical charts, 75 boxes with observations, notes, measurements and samples destined for the Natural History Museum in Paris. The ship is sold to the Argentine Navy under the name Austral Schooner. Between 1908 and 1910, Charcot launched his second polar expedition. The expedition returns to France in June 1910, after another winter of great scientific results, mapping the country of Alexander I and discovering a new territory, the country of Charcot. But Charcot has fallen victim to scurvy and returns considerably weakened. The results of the expedition are magnificent and include: oceanographic measurements (salinity, depth), meteorological measurements, a study of tides and magnetism, a collection of biological and botanical samples destined for the Natural History Museum of Paris and the Oceanographic Institute of Monaco, 2,000 Kilometers of shoreline have been mapped.
From 1918 to 1925 Charcot rose in the military ranks to lieutenant commander and in 1923 was promoted to frigate commander. During this period he led various scientific missions in the Gulf of Gascony, the English Channel, the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean Sea and the Faroe Islands, mainly studies of underwater lithology and geology using samples obtained by dredging, for which Charcot provided the material and designed the methods to be used. From 1925 he lost command of the ship due to the age limit, but remained on board as mission chief. The ship will make several trips to the Arctic ice. In 1926 he entered the Academy of Sciences and was entrusted with a mission to Jameson’s Land. Explore the east coast of Greenland and return with a rich collection of fossils, insects and plants. In 1934 he settled in Greenland with the ethnographic mission headed by Paul-Émile Victor, who lived with the Eskimos in Angmagssalik for a year.
In September 1936, on his way back from Greenland, where he had gone to deliver scientific material, he stopped in Reykjavík on September 3 to repair the ship’s boiler. On the 15th they continue towards Saint-Malo, but the next day the ship is caught up in a violent storm and is shipwrecked in the Alftanes reefs. The shipwreck claimed the lives of 23 crew members and 17 missing. There is only one survivor, Eugène Gonidec, nicknamed “Penguin”. Gonidec will report that Commander Charcot, realizing that the ship’s destruction on the reefs was inevitable, frees a seagull that was the ship’s pet from its cage. Jean-Baptiste Charcot, who died at sea, is buried at Montmartre Cemetery in Paris, following national funerals on October 12.
Jean-Baptiste Charcot died on September 16, 1936 in the Atlantic.