POLAR EXPEDITION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 38, 15 February 1937, Page 7

POLAR EXPEDITION.

Wilkins to Underwrite Project Himself. 135,000 DOLLARS INVOLVED. NEW YORK, February 14. The Australian explorer. Sir Hubert Wilkins, on his return from New York to London, will underwrite his submarine Polar project himself at a cost of 135,000 dollars. "This fact is probably why Ladv Wilkins went to work at' a Xc'w York night club without telling me," Sir Hubert said. "She feels slip is helping to finance the trip, and it is perfectly all right with me. It is not as though I were in New York a great deal amfher working interfered with our home life." Lady Wilkins, who admitted that she was constantly nervous and on edge from having to practise for concerts and then render dozens of "torch songs" each evening at the cabaret, said she would accompany her husband on his proposed trip in June, 1938. ? ir Hubert said he had a five-fold object in making the journev, the principal of which Mas to loea'te the supposedly mythical Croker Land which Peary thought he saw south of the North Pole and north-cast of Ellesmere Land. The explorer will sail from Svalbard with a crew of seven men ;n addition to his wife, and will travel several thousand miles beneath the Arctic floes. He plans to stop br;eflv at the North Pole before coming to the surface somewhere along the Alaskan coast.