LIFE OF ADVENTURE ENDS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23037, 14 May 1938, Page 9 (Supplement)

LIFE OF ADVENTURE ENDS

TN his eventful 78 years Major " Frederick George Jackson warmed both hands at the fire of life in exploration and adventure. ' Now the great adventure ends quietly on a barge a little way from Charing Cross on the Old Father Thames, London. There the explorer passed peaceful days by the river, his face and voice well known to skippers of sailing barges and others who have business on the Thames highway. At the last liis body rested in the cabin of his own sailingbarge home, covered with the Union Jack he took with him when he went to explore Franz Josef Land in the Arctic. That was the adventure which brought him most to the ears of the world, and that because at the end of it his name was linked with that of a greater Arctic explorer, Fridtjof Nansen. •,

As a young man, Jackson, after travel in desert Australia, was seized, like many another, with the lure of the Arctic. He went to Greenland to win experience, and bearing of Nansen's projected drift in the Fram across the Polar ocean, offered his services. They were not accepted, and Jackson went instead on a trip of his

own to the Kara Sea, and across Lapland, and afterwards secured the aid of Alfred Harmsworth for an expedition to Spitsbergen and beyond. Nansen's voyage in the Fram had then long been begun; and Nansen himself had left the ship in command of Sverdrup, while he set out with his companion Johanssen to cross the Polar ice in the endeavour to reach Spitsbergen. This daring, perilous attempt all but ended in disaster; but when the two were almost at the end of their endurance they were sighted by Jackson and rescued.