The story of 'Eskimo' Welzl - Part One
There are perhaps few more unusual figures in late 19th, early 20th century Czech history than the traveller Jan Welzl, born in Moravia in 1868 in what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire. A locksmith's apprentice, Welzl left his village of Zahreb nad Moravou in 1884 for his first taste of wanderlust, travelling to Genoa, then to Trieste, and into the Balkans, before returning home four years later. But he wasn't to stay put: once again visiting Genoa he was taken on as a stoker, a voyage that took him across the Atlantic to North America and back again. But it is for neither of these trips that Welzl is known today, but for his 30 year journey in the Far North, where he became a true 'polarnik', or polar traveller. In Part One of a two-part Czechs in History: Beginnings for Jan Welzl in Siberia and the islands of New Siberia where he first met the Eskimo, and became something of an Eskimo himself...
Listen to Part One of 'Eskimo' Welzl's story:
