Lieutenant-General Sir Charles William Wilson, KCB, KCMG, FRS (14 March 1836 – 25 October 1905) was a British Army officer, geographer and archaeologist.

He spent four years in North America, during which time he documented his travels in a diary, the transcription of which can be found in "Mapping the Frontier" edited by George F. G.

[2] During the resulting search, he produced the most accurate map of Jerusalem and identified the eponymous Wilson's Arch but was unable to find a new source of water.

[3][1] According to a book published in 2013, "Wilson was the first to pay proper scholarly attention to the stonework of the Haram el-Sharif (Temple Mount) walls when [conducting] the first comprehensive mapping of the Old City (the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem)".

He was also ordered to parade small detachment of British soldiers in traditional red tunics, to boost morale of the defenders, but not to leave any of them in Khartoum.

After Stewart was mortally wounded just before the Battle of Abu Kru, Wilson, an intelligence officer with little combat experience, suddenly found himself in command of the whole Desert Column, about 1,400 men.

After making necessary preparations for the safety of Desert Column left at Metemma, Wilson and his party of 28 British soldiers and officers (and some 150 natives) boarded two of Gordon's steamers, Talahawiyeh and Bordein, and started for Khartoum on 24 January.

[9] The public in England also blamed Prime Minister William Gladstone for not having taken steps to relieve the siege of Khartoum and some historians have held Major-General Gordon responsible, because he had refused the order to evacuate while that was still possible.

In the book, he gave encyclopedic information about the societies in Anatolia, Kurdistan, Transcaucasia, Syria, Mesopotamia and Iran and many settlements in this geography.

[12] A subsequent biography on Wilson, by Sir Charles Moore Watson, said that he "probably did more than any other man to increase the knowledge of the geography and archeology of Asia Minor, Palestine and the adjacent countries".