Forgotten Explorer

This week I and my siblings learned that a documentary on my grandfather, Dr. William Edgar Geil, will soon be given its first screening for members of the Doylestown (PA) Historical Society.

William Edgar Geil

Dr. Geil — or Uncle Edgar, as he was known to the family — contracted a bad case of wanderlust and spent much of his life traveling the globe.  Born in 1865, his peregrinations came toward the end of the golden age of Victorian travelers who visited strange places and wrote books on their adventures.  

Uncle Edgar's first trip, soon after graduation from college, was to the island of Patmos, where St. John the Divine wrote his apocalypse.  In the years that followed he crossed Central Africa, discovering a hitherto unknown tribe of pigmies along the way; traveled through Oceania and Korea; and finally explored China.  His greatest achievement was traveling the entire length of the Great Wall of China in 1907-08.  Edgar is the first person known to history to have made this journey.

He died in Venice in 1925, having fallen ill during a trip to the Holy Land.  Soon thereafter he disappeared from public consciousness until efforts began to keep the Great Wall from being lost due to war, economic development, vandalism, and governmental neglect.  

Edgar published many books on his journeys, most of which are available at little or no cost by download from Amazon.  More recently, his books on China have been republished in China in modern Chinese translations.  Surprisingly, he has become a kind of folk hero for Great Wall scholars and Chinese who like to day-trip along the Wall, because his photos have been helpful in documenting changes in the Great Wall over the past century. 

In 2009 the Doylestown Historical Society mounted a months-long exhibition on Uncle Edgar.  At that time Jennifer Lin, a journalist with the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote several stories about Dr. Geil, including the one you can read here.  The Geil exhibition was delightful.  I was able to contribute a sentimental artifact for the event: my grandmother's wedding dress, which my parents had preserved since my grandmother's death.

Last May Jennifer Lin called me to explain that she and her son planned to produce a documentary on Dr. Geil.  Their principal audience, she said, would be school children in Bucks County, PA, who were largely unaware that a great explorer had once lived in their community.  That documentary is now ready for public exhibition.  You can see a trailer here, and there is also a dedicated Facebook page. •••