AT BAY WITH DEATH.

Evening Star, Issue 19892, 14 June 1928, Page 6

AT BAY WITH DEATH.

When Sir John Franklin’s gallant party wore lost in the Arctic it was not till after twelve years had elapsed, and thirty-nine expeditions had been sent in search of them, that the world gained any real information of their fate. When Scott and his gallant companions met their sad end in the Antarctic it was not until tho remainder of his party had returned, months afterwards, to New Zealand that tho sufferings and sacrifices of their last heroic journey were learned from his diary. We live in a different age. As “wireless” enabled thousands of listeners-in to share the joy and the alarms of the intrepid airmen of tho Southern Cross, and even to hear the throb of their engines, riding the “long savannahs of the bine” and buffeting with storms on their long trek across the Pacific, so wireless enables us almost to see now the struggles of a more ill-fated adventure, that of General Nobile and his wrecked companions in the Arctic wastes. The messages from tho broken airship have tho deepest pathos because while the world hears them, and is enabled to picture the seven men cowering in their frail tent at the wireless post, and the three who left them, now eleven days ago, dragging through the snow (if their struggle with the rude elements has not already oeased), the world is almost totally impotent to help. Even King’s Bay, that last outpost of civilisation, is too fax distant to give more than the faintest hope of relief reaching them thence. Only aeroplanes have any chance of success, m the ice

is too thick to allow a ship through, and not sufficiently firm to bear a sledgo party. Ono airman' who made an, attempt to reach them was forced back by the unspeakable, weather. Tho seven men who were carried away with the drifting body of tho airship' we cannot even picture, because no ono knows where, or how far, they .may have blown. The leader’s description of their position seems unlikely to be more than a guess. Two of those,with General Nobile’s main party had their logs broken when tho airship split under its weight of snow, and those have had to be amputated. Tho misery of that party, exhausted by their struggles, hardly sheltered from tho weather, with food supplies for some weeks to come, but no means of increasing them and not so much as a cooking stove to provide them with tho first beginnings of comfort, appears almost too terrible to be imagined. General Nobile’s plucky adventure would have been a desperate one in any circumstances, but the dice were loaded against it when it was made too late, after the delays which the Italia experienced in crossing Europe, Its experience was ono of storms from first to last. And, despite Stefansson’s description of ‘ The| Friendly Arctic,’ only the strongest men can hope to endure exposure long in those cruel latitudes. On the day that Sir George Wilkins landed from his Jong flight tho wireless messenger at King’s Bay was frozen to death in a snowstorm, and two others badly frost-bitten. An island named Dead Man’s Island was given that name because, not many winters ago, thirteen men were marooned there and starved' to death. We can hope that aid may yet come in time to General Nobile’s party, whose wireless will soon be exhausted, but it is a slender hope.