William Gill (explorer)
[6] The following autumn, Robert Gill was appointed by the East India Company to copy the murals in the Buddhist rock-cut temples at Ajanta in the Aurangabad district, Maharashtra.
[7] This was in response to a petition by the Royal Asiatic Society to the Court of Directors of the East India Company to make copies of the frescoes before they were destroyed by decay and tourism.
Gill spent the following nine years as an officer in the Royal Engineers, mostly based in Britain but also serving 18 months in India, from September 1869 to March 1871.
Gill decided to stay in the army and use his fortune to pursue his love of travel and exploration while at the same time gathering intelligence to serve British national interests.
This proved impossible at that time, so they headed towards Tehran in Persia (now Iran), crossing the Alborz mountains via a pass more than 2 miles above sea level.
[11] In April 1874, a few months after his return from Persia, William Gill stood as a parliamentary candidate for the Conservative party in a by-election at Hackney, a safe Liberal seat.
Cooper was the first European, other than French Roman Catholic missionaries, to penetrate the mountains west of Sichuan, whereas von Richtofen was widely considered the leading western expert on China.
Gill travelled by train from Berlin to Marseille and thence by sea to Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tianjin, the main port for Beijing (Peking).
For the second half of the tour, Gill and his party proceeded parallel to the coast as far as the Luan estuary before crossing the flat country back to Tianjin and Beijing.
Passing through Litang, they reached Batang in the valley of a tributary of the Jinsha River, then regarded by Europeans as the true upper Yangtze.
They were now in known territory, as Edward Colborne Baber had already surveyed the route from Dali to the Irrawaddy while investigating the murder of Gill's schoolmate Augustus Margary.
William Gill's scientific work, including the Chinese expeditions and the resulting 42 sheets of maps, was recognised on 26 May 1879, when the Royal Geographical Society awarded him their Patron's Medal.
Early in 1878, Gill was sent with a friend to the Balkans, the pair posing as tourists in an effort to gather intelligence about the situation in Romania and Bulgaria.
[17] In the spring of 1879, Gill was sent to Istanbul (then Constantinople) as assistant boundary commissioner for the new border between Turkey and Russia, as required by the Treaty of Berlin.
France's interest in North Africa led William Gill to seek detailed knowledge of the Ottoman-controlled provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (which now form Libya) between Tunis and Egypt.
After waiting three months for a travel permit that was never issued, he and his newly recruited Syrian Christian guide, Khalîl Attîk, explored the hinterland of Tripoli without one.
[19] When William Gill arrived back in London, Thomas George Baring, Earl of Northbrook and First Lord of the Admiralty, was gathering intelligence about the Bedouin tribes in the Sinai desert.
An anti-European rebellion in Egypt was becoming increasingly likely and Baring's aim was to secure the Suez Canal by enlisting the support of the local sheikhs.
On behalf of the Admiralty, Gill visited Palmer, who volunteered to travel through the desert from Gaza to Suez to gauge the mood of the Bedouin.
On 5 August, Hoskins instructed Gill to cut the telegraph line that linked Cairo to Constantinople, thus preventing its use by the Egyptian nationalists.
They were dressed as Arabs and were accompanied by Khalîl Attîk (the guide Gill had employed in North Africa), Bâkhor Hassûn (a secretly Jewish cook), Meter abu Sofieh (who falsely claimed to be a head sheikh and was employed by Palmer as a guide), Salameh ibn Ayed (the false sheikh's nephew) and various camel-men.
The plan was that the party would split in the desert, with Palmer and Charrington heading east for Nakhl to buy camels and Gill travelling north to cut the telegraph line.
On 11 August 1882, the Bedouin executed William Gill, Edward Palmer, Henry Charrington, Khalîl Attîk and Bâkhor Hassûn.
William Gill, a member and strong supporter of the Church of England, ensured that both his Anglo-Indian half-sisters were educated and well looked after at a Roman Catholic convent in Mumbai (Bombay).
