THIRTY YEARS AFTER

Evening Star, Issue 22974, 3 June 1938, Page 11

THIRTY YEARS AFTER

THE LEAK IN THE ROOF It will be recalled that Nordenskyold led a Swedish expedition to the Antarctic which fled for their lives in November, 1903, 1 visited Nordenskyold’s hut on Snow Hill Island, facing James Ross Island across the narrow Admiralty Strait, during the course of my Antarctic expedition, writes Lincoln Ellsworth, in ' Beyond Horizons.’ The evidences of the hurried departure of the party were as plain as though the thing had happened yesterday. The mummies of three white sledge dogs lay in front, just where they had fallen when shot. Near them was a

pair of rusty ice skates and a pair of, shoe trees, dropped in flight. Filed against the cabin were several cases of canned sardines, pepper, and mustard, and cakes of chocolate. The chocolate tasted as good as new, but none of us quite had the stomach to try vintage fish. Nordenskyold’s sledge was also beside the hut, which was strongly , guyed with wire at the four corners to hold it against the hurricanes. Inside, clothing, boots, and other equipment were scattered over the floor. On a table at a window stood an oldstyle gramophone with about a dozen cylindrical wax records. A stove was set up, cooking pots hung on nails, eat- | ing utensils and dishes were on tho shelves. , Everything was excellently preserved. But the most curious object of all in the hut was a cone-shaped block of blue hard ice partially filling the room, the origin of which not one member of my expedition could suggest.

The following sipring a Swedish (exchange professor at Yale looked me up in New York after all this story had been published. He had been the botanist with Baron Nordenskyold and was curious to hear the story of their abandoned camp 31 years later from my own lips. I told him all I could think of, while he kept nodding in remembrance. He remembered the shooting of the dogs and everything else. For a souvenir I gave him an old-fashioned Den wiper 1 found in the hut. On it were embroidered the crossed flags of Norway and Sweden, the two countries having been united under a single crown I in” 1903 Just before we parted 1 told him about the mysterious dome of ice in the hut • “ We always did mean to inoirl that leak in the roof,” he told me. There was tho explanation. The crystal block represented 31 years of thawing and dripping.