NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15504, 10 January 1914, Page 6

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THE BEST EXPLORERS.

Thb leader of one of the forthcoming expeditions to the Antarctic, Mr. J. Foster Stackhouse, found time recently in London, to give expression to his views on the composition of exploring parties. " The best man for Polar work," said - Mr. Stackhouse, "' is the man with an unlimited capacity for making the best of things, and it is all the better if he is something of a humorist. The man who goes up with the rocket and down with the stick is useless. An equable temperament is essential. There is a tendency for Polar explorers to get melancholia. The utter isolation, the monotonous whiteness of everything, the oppressive silence will soon get on a man's nerves unless he is the right type. The long winter night is a very severe test, too. No one who has not known what it is like to live for five months without a glimpse of daylight or the sun can have any conception of the nervous strain of the Antarctic winter. Only men of exactly the right temperament can stand it. The tendency is to go mad. Many men with the wrong temperament would go mad. Imagine what it is like to go out into the darkness day after day and to hear no sound except, perhaps, the ticking of your watch. The silence is uncanny. There is no other silence like it. In the most desolate country you may hear the cries of birds or animals. But in the Antarctic winter there is nothing. It ia this appall-

ing silence that has made several Polar workers give way to melancholia." Anyone who reads Captain Scott's diaries will notice how careful he was in selecting bis Polar party, and how grateful he was to them for being " unendingly cheerful " in the most desperate positions. They joked when they were starving and knew they had no chance to get through. '' That is just the type of man you want," added Mr. Stackhouse the man who will make a joke when there is no fuel left and only one biscuit each, and the next depot is 30 miles away. The habitual humorist who cannot help seeing the bright and amusing side of things is invaluable in Polar work, he pessimist is worse than useless. When things go wrong you must have men who will laugh and put them right, not men who will accept the situation, and do nothing. One of the finest feats in Scott's expedition was Crean'a walk of 35 miles to get help for Commander Evans. He walked along all those miles alone at a stretch, though ten miles of such a walk would have sent hundreds of men clean out of their minds. But Crean is an Irishman, with an incorrigible sense of humour, and it was this that carried him through. There should be an Irishman in every expedition. Perhaps the best mixture is English, Scotch, and Irish in about equal proportions. Everything depends on the right selection of men. You must have men who will never despair, never quarrel, never get tired of each other for two or three years, and never be anything but cheerful. No other men are of the slightest use." EMPIRE MAIL ROUTES. Questions put to witnesses before the Dominions Royal Commission suggest (says the London Daily Telegraph) that the mail routes of the Empire may be to some extent in the melting-pot. India, as we know is agitating for two mails per week instead of one, and should India get what she wants it is quite possible that Australia would in the long run be benefited. As Mr. Crabb, Second Secretary of the Post Office, points out, there is already a certain interdependence between the Indian and Australian mails. I'or this reason he seems disinclined to accept the suggestion that the additional 700 miles to the Commonwealth by way of the Cape could be got over by the use of faster boats, although the mails for Boutn Africa might then be linked up with those for Australia. It may be remembered that in the past there was some talk of a joint Australian-African homeward mail service, but nothing came of it. From the steamship companies' point of view, the attraction of the Suez route is that it allows sundry porte to be tapped on the way from London to Colombo, while overland transit of the mails via Brindisi or Taranto neutralises the time spent by the ship in the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean. No such advan- I taee with regard to ports of call is pos- 1 sessed by the Panama route, which offers a short cut, but no seaboard of prime importance. Still, it is always a possibility that the mails to New Zealand may go through the Panama Canal one day, instead of via the Cape or via San Francisco. The most important mail development of late has, of course, been the settine up of extended services to Canada, direct and a lessened reliance on the route to the Dominion via United States ports.