INVITATION TO EXPLORERS

Evening Star, Issue 19776, 28 January 1928, Page 6

INVITATION TO EXPLORERS

The Otago Harbor Board has done well in giving an invitation to Commander Byrd to make Dunedin the final port of call for the American expedition which ho will lead to the Antarctic this year. The first invitation received may often be decisive where such a venture is concerned. We shall be glad to welcome the American airman, who has already the conquest of the North Pole and the Atlantic to his credit, and who may be judged to be, from the little that he has written about himself, an engagingly modest, as well as a most intrepid, representative of his countrymen. Commander Byrd has been a good deal of an inventor as well as an airman. His flight over the North Pole just anticipated that of Amundsen, as Captain Amundsen anticipated Scott in his great sledge journey to the South Pole. The expedition which he is now preparing, and for which, it was announced some weeks ago, all the finances required have already been assured, will bo entirely scientific. Commander Byrd is coming to Now Zealand, first of all, in a ship, the Sampson, specially built to resist the ice. He expects to leave New York on September 10, establish his final base on the shores of the ice-bound Boss Sea before midsummer, and to return to New Zealand by March, 1929, being back again in America by the following June. This he described in an early interview as a “preliminary, expedition.” There would be another one to follow it at no distant period. The complement on his first trip will be about fifty men, including about ten “’ologists.” Six Eskimos from Greenland. including two women, arc also to be taken, with the expectation that they will remain and form a colony in the frozen South. We predict that, when he sees Antarctica, Commander Byrd will give up this part of his plan. To form a colony there, in a country which has almost no animal life of its own to. afford means of subsistence, would bo a much more desperate undertaking, even for Eskimos, than were the first attempts of Sir Walter Raleigh to form a settlement in the commander’s natal State of Virginia. Three aeroplanes will be taken, with which it is hoped to lay down bases 100 miles apart to the edge of the unexplored fastnesses, and it is hoped that one of these may reach the Pole. If its plans should go agley, the expedition will be prepared to stay for at least a year in the frozen South. It has been suggested that Colonel Lindbergh, another transpacific aviator, may be a member of the party. The Scotland Shackleton Antarctic expeditions both made their New Zealand base at Lyttelton. If Dunedin should bo chosen on this occasion a most hospitable welcome will certainly be given to the American explorers, and they should find this a most convenient place for completing their stores.