THE ANTARCTIC

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20962, 16 September 1933, Page 12

THE ANTARCTIC

STEADY PROGRESS OF

DISCOVERY AMBITIOUS EXPEDITIONS THIS "VEAR (SI ECIALLT WRITTEN TOR THE TRESS.) [By K. K. PALMER.] ] In the days when there were still great unknown lands in the world, when a bold sailor with a stout ship might still play havoc with the maps, substituting the firm line of a charted coast for a chain of dots, or hills and valleys for "here are dragons," writers of imagination were accustomed to tell of a great temperate continent at the bottom of the earth stretching upwards from its centre, the South Pole, into the tropics. Drake was the first of the succession of seamen who spoiled the dreams, when he joined the Pacific and the Atlantic by sailing round the Horn. Then Captain James Cook, between 1772 and 1775, pushed his way across the Antarctic Circle in the Resolution and Endeavour, and found only pack-ice. The tropical section of the continent had to be abandoned. Sealers put the coast line further back. James Weddell, in 1523, sailed further into the sea that has been named after him than the ice has let anyone else go since. John Biscoe, sent by the British sealing firm of Enderby Brothers, [ sailed round the world within the i Antarctic Circle and, 102 years ago, [found the first "Antarctic land. Enderby Land and Graham Land were named by him.

Exploration proper began almost, at once. D'Urville and Ross both reached the edge of the continent about 1840. Adelie Land and the Adelie penguin commemorate the Frenchman. The Ross Sea, the Admiralty Range, Victoria Land, the Barrier, stand on the maps to show that Ross, though unable to reach the South Magnetic Pole, which he had been sent to find, took good note of the land and ice that blocked him. The Heroic Period. j From the middle of last century almost to the beginning of this the Antarctic was given a respite. Then Mr C. E. Borchgrevink, an Australian, conceived the idea of wintering on the Continent, and carried it through. The heroic period of Antarctic exploration began. Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, and Mawson all visited the continent, and all left their marks on it, all added a great. deal to the world's knowledge of Antarctica and of what men can do and endure. Great as their journeys were, however, and valuable as were their discoveries, the slowness of sledge travelling and the almost complete failure of motortransport on the wind-distorted snow and ice surfaces made it seem unlikely that the whole of the continent could be explored for decades or centuries.

That has been changed by the aeroplane. Three of the men who are going south this year—Ellsworth, Byrd, and Wilkins—were all busy in the middle 1920's in the North Polar regions, showing that aviation, even under the trying conditions imposed by Arctic weather and by' the difficulty of establishing well-equipped- bases, could revolutionise exploration. Mr Lincoln Ellsworth co-operated with Captain Roald Amundsen, and in 1925 their two flying-boats reached C 8 degrees north. The next year Amundsen, Ellsworth, and Nobile flew the dirigible Norge over the North Pole, just after Admiral Byrd had seen it from his aeroplane on a flight from Spitzbergen. That was not Byrd's first venture in the north, for in 1925, with his base at Etah, in the north-west corner of Greenland, his three Loening amphibians had carried his pilots over 30,000 square miles of the Arctic, much of which had never before been seen. Those flights of Byrd, and that of the Amundsen-Ellsworth expedition, had proved the value of the aeroplane in polar exploration.