Thomas Long (captain)

Thomas W. Long was an American whaling ship master.[1][2]

Among his commands was the barque Nile.[3] In 1867, as captain of Nile during a whaling voyage in the North Pacific Ocean, Long entered the Chukchi Sea and sighted Wrangel Island. He described its southern shores, deeming it was a bigger landmass. Long named it "Wrangel Land" after Russian Navy seaman Ferdinand Wrangel (1797 - 1870).[4] He also named Cape Hawaii and Cape Thomas on the same island.[5]

...sailed to the eastward along the land during the fifteenth and part of the sixteenth (August 1867), and in some places approached it as near as fifteen miles. I have named this northern land Wrangell Land as an appropriate tribute to the memory of a man who spent three consecutive years north of latitude 68°, and demonstrated the problem of this open polar sea forty-five years ago, although others of much later date have endeavored to claim the merit of this discovery. The west cape of this land I have named Cape Thomas, after the man who first reported the land from the masthead of my ship, and the southeastern cape I have named after the largest island in this group (Hawaii).[6]

Thomas Long died at Tiksi Bay, then known as "Gorely Bay", by the Laptev Sea. There is a cross there marking the site where he perished.[7]