Forgotten Explorer

On the road:  As I've been traveling, another traveler in the family has been getting a bit of his just due. This weekend, in Doylestown, PA, a documentary about my grandfather was premiered.  Click here to read a story in the Philadelphia media about the film's debut.

William Edgar Geil

William Edgar Geil was known to our family as Uncle Edgar.  As it happens, some of my reading on the road is Uncle Edgar's first book, The Isle That Is Called Patmos, about his trip to the island where St. John the Divine wrote his Revelation.  It reveals a man deeply faithful to Christ, but harboring religious attitudes and biases which today seem quaint.  Honestly, reading it is a bit of a struggle.  Uncle Edgar's prose is very 19th century; after all, he was born in 1865, long before the spare style of modern writers took hold.  However, this is the first published evidence of Edgar's wanderlust.  In the years to follow he would explore the Holy Land, Central Africa, Oceania, Korea, and finally China.

China became the dominant passion of Edgar's life, documented in his several books on the country.  In 1907-08 he traveled the entire length of the Great Wall, becoming the first person known to history to have done that.  Yet after his death in 1925, from flu contracted on a visit to the Holy Land, he vanished from public memory, even in his hometown of Doylestown.  It is only in the few years, as his photographs have been used to document deterioration of the Great Wall, that the importance of his work has been recognized.

Doylestown, PA, May 4 — "Forgotten Explorer" played
to a full house at the County Theater.

At the premier: (l. to r.) Andrew Stowe,
cinematogropher; Rob LaFleur, historian
at Beloit College, WS, and Geil scholar;
and Karl Stieg, the film's director.

The purpose of the documentary, according to director Karl Stieg, is to help students in the Doylestown schools recognize that their town was once home to a fascinating man whose contributions endure to our own day. •••