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Shilling Nikolay Gustavovich
(01.10.1828-20.12(01.01).1910/1911)
 Russian
military sailor, admiral.
Born in a family of Baltic nobles. In
1848, Schilling graduated from the Naval Cadet Corps in St.
Petersburg, was promoted to midshipmen and left in the Higher
Officer Class to continue his studies.
In 1851, Schilling began military service in the Baltic Fleet. In
1853–1855 in
the rank of lieutenant of the frigate "Diana" under the command of
S.S Lesovsky he
made the transition from Kronstadt to the shores of Japan, proving
himself to be a skillful and courageous officer. These
qualities of his especially manifested during the collapse of the
frigate. On
returning home with part of a crew on a German merchant ship, he was
captured by the British. In
captivity, he behaved very decently, without dropping the honor of a
Russian officer.
In subsequent years, Schilling participated in numerous sea
voyages. In
1866, in the rank of Captain 2nd Rank, he sailed from Kronstadt to
Lisbon and the Azores in the frigate Oslyabya with Grand Prince
Alexei Alexandrovich, in 1871–1872. on
the frigate "Svetlana" in the squadron Admiral K.N. Posyet went
to the shores of North America, in 1877 was in the army on the
Danube.
The merits of Schilling are marked by numerous Russian and
foreign awards. Among
them are the Order of St.
Stanislaus 1 degree, St.
Anna 1 degree, St.
Vladimir 3 degrees, St.
Alexander Nevsky, the French Order of
the Legion of Honor, the Brazilian Order of the Rose, the Prussian
Order of Red Eagle with a star and diamonds, the Netherlands
Order of Leo and others. However,
he went down in history for his outstanding scientific geographical
research.
In 1865, Schilling published in the “Sea Collection”an article entitled “Considerations
for a New Way in the North Polar Sea”. In
the study of the northern seas to the fore he set not the
achievement of records, but the conduct of scientific observations
necessary for the development of these seas. Based
on a study of ice movement in the western Arctic Ocean, Schilling
came to the conclusion that between Spitsbergen
and Novaya Zemlya "there
is still undiscovered land, which extends north further than
Spitsbergen and keeps ice behind it". His
assumptions were brilliantly confirmed by the discovery in 1873 of
the Austro-Hungarian expedition of J.
Payer and C.
Weyprecht of Franz
Josef Land.
In 1871, the materials of this article were used in the “Report
of the Commission on the Equipment of the Expedition to the Northern
Seas”, compiled by P.A. Kropotkin
with the assistance of A.I. Voeikov, M.A. Rykachev,
N.G. Schilling, F.B. Schmidt and F.
F Yarzhinsky. After
Schilling's death, in some publications, it was 1871 that was called
the year of predicting the existence of Franz Josef Land, and the
authorship of this prediction was attributed to Kropotkin. The
legitimacy of this point of view is refuted by the words of
Kropotkin himself, who in his famous “Notes of a Revolutionary”,
with his characteristic objectivity, said that “the possible
existence of the archipelago Franz Josef Land was first pointed out
by Schilling in his excellent, but little-known report on the
currents in the Arctic Ocean”.
He died in Tsarskoye Selo (now Pushkin) and was buried at the
Kazan Lutheran Cemetery. The
grave could not be found.
Cape in
the west of the island of Wilczek archipelago Franz Josef Land. In
the 1950s, named by Soviet cartographers.
Cape in
the Bay of Middendorf. Named
in 1900 by the Russian Polar Expedition. |
