FRANCE IN ANTARCTICA

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23018, 21 April 1938, Page 10

FRANCE IN ANTARCTICA

The French Government is claiming a large tract of territory within the Antarctic Circle, with a view to the possibility of establishing air bases there in the future. Incidentally, this purpose, described as akin to that of other nations with reference to certain Pacific Islands, is without real precedent in the region, notwithstanding the use of aircraft there in exploration. But the claim itself is worth consideration with reference to the wider question of national rights in the Frozen South. "Antarctica is big enough for all of us" was Rear-Admiral Byrd's genial way of dismissing the idea of rivalries there, and it may seem true ; but there must come a greater measure of international understanding than now exists about territorial possessions. Some of these are satisfactorily definite, yet in the areas wholly or partly unexplored competing claims are not likely to be adjusted without difficulty. The tract named by the French decree is unexplored for the most part, but its inclusion of Adelie Land, on the edge of the southern continent, raises the question of Australian rights in that sector. . Dumont D'Urville's discovery and naming of Adelie Land in 1840, on the voyage that brought him memorably into New Zealand waters, did not definitively make it French. It seems that he was sent on an errand little related to territorial expansion. About five years earlier, the idea of obtaining magnetic observations in the far south, and the scientific interest generally aroused in that remote part of the world, led Britain, France and the United States to plan expeditions thither. D'Urville's ships Astrolabe and Zelee were first in the quest, but he had slender success in working south and did not reach oven the Antarctic Circle until he returned towards it after two years of ethnological research in the Pacific, which was his main .task ; and then he skirted the ice-barrier, seeing the heights of Adelie Land from a distance and merely conjecturing that the ice-: edge was a coast. As a discovery, this was hardly convincing. Moreover, the meridian boundaries named in the decree include more of Wilkes Land and King George the Fifth Land than of Adelie Land as usually placed by cartographers. It will require close discussion to elucidate the facts and solve the problem.