OVER VAST SPACES

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 9, 12 January 1927, Page 16

OVER VAST SPACES

EXPLORING BY AEROPLANE OLD AND NEW METHODS COMPARED SIR ALAN COBHAM EXPLAINS. „ If there is one invention that lias made exploration, almost a child's game, it is the aeroplane.. I "speak comparatively. Flying over vast expanses of barely-known land and sea will always have a certain: element —or spice—of risk about it, but never quite the sort of risk that the oldtime explorer had to face, wites Sir Alan Cobham in "John o' Lon/ n's Weekly." For one thing, an air exp? | :r can always see where he is going—uniess.be is flying in England! He has a tremendous range of vision, which he can: increase at will by merely flying a few thousand feet, or so higher, and he can pick up practically any well-known landmark within a radius of fifty miles—and sometimes at a considerably greater distance. If he is compelled to make a forced-landing, a hastily-tapped message by wireless will.tell a whole conI tinenfwhere he is. His hardships and dangers, except in ■ one or two places on earth, are almost nil. On my recent trip across Africa and back, I thought often of David Livingstone. "What Livingstone endured and achieved, of course, has been told time over and again, and is now history. But it is worth a moment's space, ■and .interesting, to dwell upon and compare his lot with modern mine. Imagine in the first place the magnitude of his preparation. The. expeditiou into Tankanyika, for example, included thirteen sepoys, ten Johanna men, nine African boys, and four boys from the. Shire region. Tacked on to these^ was a zoological outfit" comprising camels, donkeys, buffaloes, mules, and:goats. Add to this food and medical supplies, and one or two other exploring necessaries, and you Have a fair idea of Livingstone's task, even before his expedition began. And then the journey—one long .record . of perils and hardships heroically borne but increasing day by day. The goats are lost, the medical chest stolen, lever comes and. stays, hostile tribes and wild- animals constantly on the attack. In March, 1869, three years after the expedition sets out, Livingstone arrives at the first stage of- his journey, Ujiji, "a niickle of bones." . To me, as I recently crossed this continent from north to south, and returned in the comfort of a modern aeroplane, cruising smoothly through the air at some hundred miles an hour, bathed, shaved, and fed, hopping from.one landing-place to another, with more' or less ease, the hardship and peril Livingstone endured sixty year ago seemed incredible—absurd. True, there might have been another story to tell of my expedition had I been compelled to make a forced landing or two in the heart of the jungle—say, by the shores of some municipal drinking-pool

owned by the local district council of lions and tigers!—but with that fair run of luck which any careful pilot nowadays has aright to expect, I found myself practically immune from every one of Livingstone's hardships, and I covered a distance at least twice the total of all his expeditions, and accomplished it in a trifling fraction of his time.. : : '.'■'■

SEA FLYING. To turn to ■another aspect. I have, crossed a few seas in my time, and I hope to cross a few more. Sea flying, naturally, will always be more .risky than land flying. A forced landing at sea, and your troubles only begin; on the land they are finished, one way or the other. In this respect, sea flying always gives me a much clearer idea of what the old-time explorer had to face. Passing over the historical landmarks with which the world's coasts are marked, I am always reminded, anH vividly, of the resource and daring of those great men who built the British Empire. "What," I have frequently inquired of myself, "would the: size of our great Empire be if De Havillarid had lived in the reign of Queen Elizabeth?" > Drake'going West in a seaplane! The thought is entrancing. ...'.-.. . . , . Practically in every way the modern air pilot exploring over the deep is immune irom the perils that "beset the ancient seamen. The airship 834, on her first trip to the United States, saw dirty weather com-: ing. up, changed her .course, and came round behind- it/ suffering nothing, except, a loss in time. In most places,when I am. about to set out for a long distance over sea, I invariably wait for a" weather report. This usually tells me all I want to know about the weather, and I arrange accordingly. If I run into anything particularly bad, and I happen to be near land, it is child's play for me to select a nice, sheltered piece of water inland, and drop down on it until the sun comes out again. Not so with your old seaman. I

have no doubt at all that Bartholomew Diaz, the great Portuguese explorer, did not receive a single weather report from the meteorological officer at Lisbon when he set out to find the Cape of Good Hope, or that Christopher Columbus did not sail under 'the benevolent aegis of directional finding by wirelessj when he shaped his course towards the New World. 'Few old seamen ever saw sandbanks, rocks, or-coral reefs until it was too late, or saw tlie bottom of the sea until they were in such a condition as rendered their observations negligible. "But the man in the aeroplane cnioys all these privileges—and many more besides. . :\sm®fflßi

To go for a moment to extreme north and south—compare the task of an air pilot setting out for the Poles to the task of the Arctic or Antarctic explorer setting out over the land. I suppose the organisation of an Arctic expedition requires more care than any other branch of exploration. It is a_ task that must.:take at least a year, and involve a tremendous expense. - Put such a job beside Amundsen's Norge airship journey of a few.: months ago. Amundsen knows the way to the Poles by land and air, and I think he wit! admit that the air way is cheaper and simpler, and bears no comparison with the land way. ■ • Imagine what the service of one aeroplane would have meant to Captain Scott on his tragic expedition of 1910-1913. That noble document which he wrote' while; he sat dying in his tent, only eleven miles from One Ton Camp, where his supplies of food and fuel lay, tells its own story. To an airman, the terrible stretch of 700 miles to the Pole and back could have been achieved, with ease in seven hours. The Great Ice Barrier would have been as easy to cross as Piccadilly Circus, or easier. The temperature which Scott com- ! plained of would "have had no : effect on the man aloft. Electrical devices would have warmed him. The terrific snow storm which kept Scott for four days a .prisoner in his, tent could, I imagine, have been flown over by a pilot flying at a sufficient altitude. -The future Arctic explorer will not, I think, undergo such perils again. FEW PLACES LEFT./

■>It remains to be said —and :it is my justifiable lament—that there are few places for me-to go in the world to-day where somebody has not already been before. It is,__indeed, ironical that,the modern air explorer, with such wonderful means at ■ his disposal, should find that wherever he goes he is forestalled by some ancient gentleman of adventure who either arrived there in the fifteenth century in a cockle-boat with a mutinous crew, or in the nineteenth century in a litter surrounded by natives. Many of these gentlemen, too—an additional piece of irony— seemed to have had no knowledge where they, were going, and eared, apparently, less. . . ■-■.■■■.■■-. --■; .. • :

But there still, remains one vast continent', practically unexplored by white men. I refer to Australia, frdni which I have just returned. Australia is an, enormous country, inhabited by six millions of people, nearly, all of whom are concentrated round the coast. The interior of Australia is almost unknown. Of its potentialities nothing can be known! until the interior is opened up.by a wide-embracing system of transport. '■'• \ ' ■:: Transport must always he ahead of the settler. The Canadian Pacific Railway made Canada, and the aeroplane will make Australia, I think. It was incredible to me that a strategic point like Port Darwin should have been connected by only a 3ft 6in gauge of single track with Couth Australia. In Queensland a lot of the interior transport is still done with camels. These camels were imported with their Afghan owners many year* ago, and have stayed on in the north as quite a permanent feature in the district life. Australia is the only fruit of: size left to fall to the air explorer, and many (Ti-R.'it adventures and rewards will be had by him in the years immediately before us. The next type of explorer to turn up will, no doubt, have just as interesting; time comparing his sort of imploring with mine, but I think his lament of having all the gadgets and "nowhere to go" will rise to a far higher key than mine. .