British Explorers To Attempt To Cross South Polar Icecap

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 22872, 16 February 1949, Page 5

British Explorers To Attempt To Cross South Polar Icecap

SANTIAGO, Feb. 14. A British party will attempt to cross the South Pole icecap during 1950, according to reports that reached Santiago today from the Chilean Antarctic expedition. The reports came from the ships Covadonga and Lautaro, which called last week at the British base on Deception Island before resuming attempts to get through Branfield Strait to the Chilean base on O’Higgins Land, Palmer Peninsula. The reports said that a party headed by Major Pierce Butler, commander of the British Antarctic operations, would attempt to take special winterised vehicles across the frozen continent from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea. The direct route between the (wo seas would pass north of the South Pole, and it was not certain that the British party would attempt a detour to the pole itself. Relations between the British and Chilean parties were not clouded by the high-level dispute between Chile and Britain over the ownership of Deception Island. When the Chilean flotilla arrived Major Butler and other British officials went aboard to confer with Captain Leopoldo Fontaine, commodore of the Chilean flotilla, about the adverse weather conditions which had blocked his efforts to pass through the strait- Members of the Chilean and British crews associated freely, playing soccer and sharing the island’s limited recreation facilities. Before the Covadonga and the Lautaro sailed Major Butler made the Chileans a present of five Arctic sled dogs, to be used by the men at the O’Higgins Land base.