Adrien de Gerlache

:"Gerlache" redirects here. For the saint of this name, see Saint Gerlache."Adrien Victor Joseph de Gerlache de Gomery (2 August 1866 – 4 December 1934) was an officer in the Belgian Royal Navy who led the Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1897 to 1899.

His early years

Born in Hasselt, Belgium, de Gerlache was educated in Brussels. He studied Engineering at the Free University of Brussels (now split into the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel), and spent his holidays as a cabin boy on board transatlantic ocean liners. After graduating in 1885, he joined the Belgian Navy on 19 January 1886.

After graduating from the nautical college of Ostend as first lieutenant, he was assigned to the "Belgica", a hydrography ship. It was while serving there that he came up with his plan to explore Antarctica.

The first expedition

In 1896, de Gerlache purchased the Norwegian-built whaling ship "Patria", which, following an extensive refit, he renamed the "Belgica". Together with a multinational crew which included Roald Amundsen, Frederick Cook, Antoni Bolesław Dobrowolski, Henryk Arctowski and Emil Racovita, he set sail from Antwerp on 16 August 1897.

During January 1898, the "Belgica" reached the coast of Graham Land. Sailing in between the Graham Land coast and a long string of islands to the west, de Gerlache named the passage Belgica Strait. Later, it was renamed Gerlache Strait in his honor. After charting and naming several islands during some 20 separate landings, they crossed the Antarctic Circle on 15 February 1898.

On 28 February 1898, de Gerlache's expedition became trapped in the ice of the Bellinghausen Sea, near Peter Island. Despite efforts of the crew to free the ship, they quickly realised that they would be forced to spend the winter on Antarctica. Several weeks later, on 17 May, total darkness set in, which lasted until 23 July. What followed were another 7 months of hardship trying to free the ship and its crew from the clutches of the ice. Several men lost their sanity, including one Belgian sailor who left the ship "announcing he was going back to Belgium". The party also suffered badly from scurvy.

Finally, on 15 February 1899, they managed to slowly start down a channel they had cleared during the weeks before. It took them nearly a month to cover 7 miles, and on 14 March they cleared the ice. The expedition returned to Antwerp on 5 November 1899.

In 1902, his book "Quinze Mois dans l'Antarctique" (published in 1901) was awarded a prize by the Académie Française.

Later life

Adrien de Gerlache participated in several other expeditions, including:
*a commercial and scientific expedition to the Persian Gulf in 1901
*the Antarctica expedition of Jean-Baptiste Charcot, which he abandoned before they reached Antarctica due to the bad atmosphere on board (1903)
*Expedition to the Greenland Sea on board the "Belgica" (1905)
*Expedition to the Barents Sea and Kara Sea (1907)
*Expedition to Greenland, Spitsbergen and the Frans-Jozef archipelago on board the "Belgica" (1909)

He had two children with his first wife, Suzanne Poulet, whom he married in 1904: Philippe (born 1906) and Marie-Louise (born 1908).After this marriage ended in 1913, de Gerlache married Elisabeth Höjer from Sweden. With her, he had another son, Gaston de Gerlache in 1919. In the 1950s, Gaston followed in his father's footsteps, participating in a Belgian research station in Antarctica.

Adrien de Gerlache died in Brussels in 1934, aged 68, from paratyphoid.