EXPLORER NOW BARMAN

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 718, 18 July 1929, Page 9

EXPLORER NOW BARMAN

ILL-LUCK DOGS COMMANDER FRANK WILD FARMING VENTURE FAILS (United Service) LONDON, Wednesday. The Johannesburg correspondent of the “Daily Mail” reports that Commander Frank Wild, who was a member of the Scott, Shackleton and Mawson Antarctic expeditions, spent the past four years in an unsuccessful cotton-growing enterprise. His capital is gone, and now he is a barman at the village of Goller, the northernmost point in Zululand. Commander Wild’s earnings are £4 a month. Drought ruined most of his fellow farmers. He was the last to give up.

A descendant of the great Captain Cook, Commander Wild was born at Skelton, Yorkshire, in 1874. His sister, Mrs. Northwood, recently established the descent thus; —“Captain Cook is our great-great-grandfather. My mother’s father was Robert Cook, of Lilling, York. He was the son of Captain Cook's sou, who was married at Huntingdon Church, near York. They had one son, Robert Cook, born in 1791. He married Mary Hutchinson and they had 10 children, of whom the youngest was Mary. She married Benjamin Wild, of whom the eldest son was Frank, now Commander Wild.” Commander Wild visited Australia in the Sobraon in 18S9. He accompanied Captain Robert Falcon Scott in the Discovery, 1901-4; with Sir Ernest Shackleton, 1907-9; the Mawson expedition, 1911-13; the Imperial Trans-Atlantic Expedition, 1914. In 1924 he was awarded the Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. He wrote “Sliackleton’s Last Voyage” in 1923. Recently he has been farming at the Quest Estate, McKuzi, North Zululand. When he was invited to the Cook celebrations at Honolulu last August he said he had recently had a. hard time, and had suffered from flood, drought and unnumbered pests. His cotton venture had been a dead loss, and he was then doing railway contract work “to keep the pot boiling.”