ARCTIC EXPLORER

Grey River Argus, 10 December 1938, Page 12

ARCTIC EXPLORER

57-YEAR-OLD PAPERS. The diary left by Lieut. Comdr. George Washington De Long on Henrietta Island in the Arctic Circle 57 years ago, before the American explorer and most of his party perished has been brought to Moscow by L. F. Mukhanoff, head of the Soviet scientific party that discovered it last June. The diary was in the copper cylinder in which Lieutenant George W. Melville, a member of the De Long group, placed it under a rock cairn before he continued to Siberia, where he was rescued by natives. It will be taken to Leningrad, where experts of the Arctic Institute will attempt to decipher it. Melville apparently failed to seal the cylinder perfectly, and water entered and reduced the diary to pulp. Mr Mukhanoff said, however, at the headquarters of the Northern Sea Route Administration that he believed it would be possible to make out much if not all of the diary (says the “New York Tinus”). He did not attempt to open it for fear of damaging it, he said, but he could see characters in Commander De Long’s hand showing in reverse through the thin paper on which the diary was inscribed. The cylinder was found by accident by a biologist of the Soviet expedition who was hunting lichens. It was in a cleft in a rock 250 feet above the sea. Near by the expedition found a flagstaff that Commander De Long had left flying the American flag. The staff also was brought to Moscow. No trace of the flag was left, but bits of its ropes were found some distance away, whither birds had evidently carried the rope stands as material for building nests. The Soviet party also brought back three empty shotgun shells left by the American expedition. Lieutenant’ Melville in his account of the tragic adventure told of leaving the cylinder under a cairn. The Soviet expedition hunted in vain for this cairn—and when they stumbled on the cylinder they found it partly crushed and scarred by the toothmarks of a polar bear. They believed the curious bear destroyed the cairn and chewed at the cylinder. Lieutenant Melville also told of leaving a zinc box but this was not found. The cylinder is about eighteen inches long and five inches in diameter. The diary was closely folded and inserted in it. It is impossible to estimate how many pages it contains, but it seems to be quite a bulky document. Lieutenant Melville had said the expedition was unable to attain a higher point than that on which the flag and cairn were placed because of the rugged nature of the rocks. Mr Mukhanoff told with a smile how his expedition had taken this up as a challenge and had succeeded in reaching a point more than a thousand feet high, where atop a glacier they had to build a meteorological station during the polar night. Mr Mukhanoff brought all his seven-man expedition ' back to Moscow except a radio operator, who remainder on Henrietta Island with three other scientists. The Mukhanoff party left- Henrietta Island August 17 aboard the Soviet ice-breaker Okhotsk and arrived at Valdivostok via the Bering Strait after fifty-five days at sea. They completed the journey by the Trans-Siberian railroad.