WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 223, 20 June 1925, Page 6

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM

(By

T.D.H.)

AU that is needed to popularise air travel to the North Pole is to keep a couple of men up there to level off a landing place. This Security Pact seems to be an arrangement by which somebody presses a button and all Europe automatically goes to war again. Perhaps if the South Island automobile associations tried looking at the world through rose-coloured spectacles even the colour of the numberplates would seem all right. A hundred miles nearer the North. Pole than anyone except Peary and his partv who attained it, is the record achieved bv Captain Amundsen in his wonderful flight. Peary, in company with Henson of his expedition and four Eskimos reached the Pole in April, 1909, and tlie next best was Peary’s attempt in 1906. Captain Amundsen’s landing place is approximately 140 miles from the Pole, whereas Peary’s furthest north in 1906 was 195 miles distant from it. The other farthest norths of note were Cagni’s 210 miles from the Pole in 1900 and Dr. Nansen’s 260 miles in 1895. If Captain Amundsen had not been able to get his aeroplane free, and had had to walk out on foot it is interesting to note that while he would have bad a tramp of about 690 miles back to Spitzbergen, the point at which he landed was only 430 miles awav from the food depots at Cape Columbia in the extreme north of Grant Land, a frigid territory which lies just west of Greenland.

An ordinary magnetic compass is not much use in making one’s way to the Pole, for while its variations are known in each locality throughout the civilised world, they are unknown in the portions of. the Arctic over which Amundsen was to fly. To get over this difficulty Captain _ Amundsen used a solar compass of his own devising. The idea of it occurred to him a couple of years ago when at Wainwright in Alaska. To use this compass' it is necessary to have the sun shining, and in an aeroplane to have it shining in such a position that the compass in the cock-pit does not have the shadow of the wings of the machine thrown on it. The sun is up for six months in the Polar regions, but it was to obtain the conditions he wanted that Captain Amundsen started at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Starting at that time meant that for the next twelve hours no shadow would fall across the compass, as the sun would be drawing northward in front of the aeroplane all the time. The Amundsen solar compass is an arrangement by which a periscope with a clockwork arrangement throws an image of the sun on a disc in front of the pilot, who has to steer so as to keep the image on the fore-and-aft line of the machine.

When Captain Amundsen got in the fog his solar compass was naturally of no use, and to keep course he had to rely on his drift and speed indicator, by which the angle of drift across the' ice below is measured. The ice in the Polar basin is itself drifting, but its drift is so slow that, for the purpose of aeroplane observations it can be regarded as stationary. Despite all his long experience and elaborate precautions, Captain Amundsen at his landing point was about fifty miles to the westward of a direct course from his starting place to the Pole. This shows us that even .with the most up-to-date appliances it is still quite easy for even professional explorers to get temporarily lost in the Arctic when a fog comes on. Our own personally conducted aeroplane tour to the North Pole will be deferred until they get things a little more closely worked out.

The following letter reached us in yesterday’s mail:—“Sir, —Was it a fishing expedition on which ‘Alajor’ Fitzurse was engaged in his visit to the Bahamas, as stated in your issue of yesterday ? These islands, as you know, have been the resort of the riffraff of three hemispheres since prohibition was passed in the United States. As an ex-resident of the town of Port Nelson on Rum Cay, I distinctly remember a decrepit vessel named the Bacchus, which was no doubt the ‘steam yacht’ of your story. Her master was a person who went under the name of Fitzursc. Before engaging in the very lowest form of the loathsome bootlegging trade in 1919 this man had for aranv vears driven the delivery cart of a negro laundry at Port Nelson. His subsequent history after serving a twoyear term in the penitentiary at Nassau, I do not know, beyond the fact that in attempting to leave the Bahamas he was returned on five occasions, having been deemed an undesirable immigrant by the Governments of the various countries where he attempted to laud.—l am, sir, “ADOLITH’S G. HOONTZ.”

Major Fitzurse has explained to us that it was solely for a wager taken up with some leading sportsmen of the Bahamas that he drove the laundry cart at Rum Cay for a couple of years. “This fellow Hoontz,” says the Major, “was known as a person of no consequence throughout the islands, and his statements concerning myself are the usual tissue of envenomed inaccuracies emitted by him concerning everv gentleman of standing in Rum Cay,' and which were invariably ignored by everybody concerned.”

A recent writer lias pointed out that the pioneers of steeplcchasing were also the last of the dandies. At the Cheltenham meeting in 1842 Colonel Charretie backed himself to win a shooting match in the morning, the Imperial Steeplechase in the afternoon, and to play “Richard III” at the Assembly Rooms' in the evening. He did all three, and for another wager memorised the day’s issue of the “Aforning Post” and recited it from beginning to end, advertisements and all. The operation had been performed and the patient prepared for burial. “I cannot understand,” said the family doctor, soothingly, “how Ben was .able to live with such an affliction as lie had.” ‘ Ob. we have been years,” replied the so rr owing widow, “trying to persuade him to have the operation.” ON GROWING OLD. Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dving; Alv dog and I are old, too old for roving. Alan, whose voting passion sets the spindrift flying. Is soon too lame to march, too cold for loving. I take the book and gather to the fire, Turning old yellow leaves; minute bv minute The clock ticks to my heart. A withered wire, Afoves a thin ghost of music in the spinet. I cannot sail vour seas, I cannot wander Your cornland, nor you hill-land, nor vour valleys Ever again, nor share the battle vonder Where the young knight the broken squadron rallies. O-Oy sti’v quiet while mv mind remembers The beantv of fire from the beauty of embers. —John Alascfield.