Orders, Decorations and Medals

J. B. Charcot French Polar Expeditions Medal, by Paul Richer & E. Lindauer, obv. bust of Charcot right, ‘J. B. Charcot’; rev. the ship Pourquoi Pas? moored in the ice, ‘Expéditions Polaires Françaises’, in exergue, ‘Pourquoi Pas?’, 68mm., bronze, unnamed, edge stamped ‘bronze’, minor edge bruising, good very fine £150-200

Jean Baptiste Charcot (1867-1936), French scientist and polar explorer. Charcot led two French expeditions to Antarctica, on the Français, 1904-05 and the Pourquoi Pas?, 1908-10. In the latter, he successfully mapped and surveyed some 1,250 miles of coastline and territory of Graham Land, and his maps were still in use twenty-five years later. The scientific data collected on the expedition was to fill 28 volumes. Edwin Swift Balch wrote that Charcots’s explorations, ‘occupy a place in the front rank of the most important Antarctic expeditions. No one has surpassed him and few have equaled him as a leader and as a scientific observer’. Captain Scott, with whom he trained for their respective polar expeditions, referred to him as ‘the gentleman of the Pole’.

During 1915 in the Great War, Charcot commanded the British ‘Q-Boat whaler Meg (Z.1). Because of his local knowledge his original brief was to watch the neutral Faeroe Islands but he was eventually based at Stornoway, Isle of Lewis. His command was somewhat anomalous - a Frenchman commanding a British ship, under British Admiralty authority, with a largely French crew and flying the tricolour! He was spoken of by the Royal Navy as a ‘would-be Corsair’. By the end of the year Charcot resumed command of the Pourquoi Pas? For his services he was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross.

Between 1920-36, Charcot was engaged in scientific cruises along the coasts of France, North Atlantic and the Arctic. On 15 September 1936, on an expedition to Greenland, his ship, the Pourquoi Pas?, foundered off the coast of Iceland and Charcot and all but one of his crew drowned. This medal must have been executed before 1933, the year Paul Richer died.