POLAR ADVENTURE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 56, Issue 4043, 4 May 1938, Page 9

POLAR ADVENTURE

LINCOLN ELLSWORTH FOLLOWED THE STARS. This is the story of a man who followed the vision of the stars, and went in solitary places. In his pilgrimage beyond the savage frontiers of civilisation, into and across the frozen wastes of both Pole's, Lincoln Ellsworth has made of his life a grand adventure of “dreams come true.” To-day he is a living member of that small legion of explorers who have achieved great things amid the solitude of the blizzard, ice and snow. Through the courtesy of the Director of Navigation (Captain J. K. Davis), I have just read an advance copy of “Beyond Horizons” (Doubleday, Doran and Co. Inc.), which the explorer forwarded to him to mark, the association when the Australian Government co-operated in the despatch of Discovery 11. to the Antarctic to assist Ellsworth on his most recent Polar enterprise. It. is a gripping tale simply told, the autobiography of a man who found no peace in civilised places. I first met Lincoln Ellsworth when he leaned from the rail of Discovery 11. one grey March morning in 1936, and greeted The Age launch down off the Gellibrand light. Subsequently I was closely associated with him during his official engagements, and had the pleasure of meeting him informally on several occasions in the company of Captain Davis. The man as he was in Melbourne is the man in the book. One day as I drove with him through the city, his car was checked at a crowded intersection. He touched me on the arm, pointed to the crowds and said: “I like you people, but I hate cities.” That is the theme of his life story. Lincoln Ellsworth was the son of a wealthy American business magnate, heir to a fortune and a castle in Switzerland. Yet while his parent was engrossed in his commercial enterprises, Ellsworth was an unhappy youngster dreaming of distant places and world conquests. The outline of his early years betrays that urgency to do great things, and his scorn of the matter-of-fact. It is fragmentary, as if it were something that had to be done and finished with as quickly as possible.

“I must have been a rather solitary child,” he says. “My health was delicate and I suffered from constant colds. Yet when I went to the country I got strong immediately. Cities stifled me, as they do now. School was a horror to me—always the dunce of my classes, always falling behind. Yet after I had gained recognition as a Polar explorer, the headmaster of Hill school wrote a letert to a friend of my father, telling what pleasant memories the school still kept of me and reciting various virtues I was supposed to have had as a student. I’m afraid the good professor was thinking of somebody else!” In his palatial home in Chicago young Ellsworth would lie on the library floor and pore over the atlases. “In those coloured maps,” he says, “were white patches marked ‘Unknown’ or ‘Unexplored.’ ” “Why don’t people go there,” ho wondered. “What can be in those white places.” It hardly occurred to him then that he should be the one to find out. From Chicago Ellsworth went to a farm near Hudson, Ohio, and in the years that followed he fretted his way through school and university. Then he went to Canada as a mining engineer, doing exploratory work for a transcontinental railroad enterprise. In the backwoods, on the prairies and along the rivers he lived and hunted with the Indians. He touched the rim of the unknown, ami consciously began to gird himself in readiness to scale the frontiers of civilisation. He talked with men of the Arctic, and engaged in biological survey work until the outbreak of the World War. He was 37 years of age then, and life for him had not begun. Though he graduated as a pilot for war service Ellsworth was side-track-ed into a routine job, and saw little of that adventure among nations. Yet it meant everything to him, for in Paris at that time he met Ronald Amundsen. Alter the war, by dint of great persuasion, Ellsworth got his father to assist in financing a flight across the Arctic. In two German designed, Italian made seaplanes Amundsen and Ellsworth, accompanied by Riiser Larsen, Dietrichson, Feucht and Omdal, took off from King’s Bay, Spitzbergen. in May, 1925. Then followed a grim introduction to Polar exploration. Within 136 miles of the North Pole Amundsen’s plane was forced down. Ellsworth followed him. For four weeks the party of six lived in the shadow of death, grimly fighting the elements and straining every nerve to take off in one of the undamaged machines. ’The author give a simple yet graphic account of the events of those anyious days, of their ultimate escape and his unqucnched desire for further expeditions. Yet. the mystery of the north was still a mystery, and so in the following year Amundsen, Ellsworth and the Italian Noble were at King’s Bay with the airship Norge, ready for another attempt at a trans-Arctic flight. It was while they were waiting for favourable weather that Byrd came to them one night’ and made his dramatic announcement: “Gentlemen, to-morrow morning I

am taking off and flying straight to the North Pole.”

Amundsen fairly bored him with his eyes as he answered: “That is all right with us.”

Byrd and Floyd Bennett succeeded, and a few days later the occuciants of the Norge also looked down upon the Pole, crossed the Arctic, and after a deadly battle with ice and snow, made a landing on the frozen bay at Tellar, on the Asiatic side of the Bering Strait.

From then on Ellsworth played the part of the lone eagle, and headed his own expeditions. After numerous quests into the Arctic and Antarctic he conceived the plan for a trans-An-tarctic flight. In the interval of his planning he went to Switzerland, and there met Miss Ulmer, daughter of a Philadelphia banker. In a few weeks Ellsworth, at the age of 52 years, was married.

Twice the Antarctic quest was within sight of its goal, but each time the vagaries of the weather forced its abandonment. Yet the explorer persevered, and in November, 1936, with Hollick-Kenyon at the controls, Ellsworth embarked on his latest flight in the Polar Star from Dundee Island, where the base ship Wyatt Earp lay to the shores of the Bay of Whales. The story of their adventures and

their forced landing within four miles of Little America, to which Australia wrote the finale by sending airmen away to find them aboard Discovery IL, has already been told by Ellsworth in Melbourne. Of Australia’s part Ellsworth writes: “Grateful as 1 was to the Australian Government and to the Discovery committee in London for despatching their expensive vessel to me —a still ship, incidentally, and therefore one that lan a risk in butting through heavy ice—regretful as I was at having caused others all this trouble, nevertheless 1 have to state that the voyage of the Discovery 11. to the Bay of Whales was unnecessary. For my own reputation as an explorer 1 must insist that by Antarctic expedition was self-sufficient. I li\e we-xs in which to cross Antarctica. We actually reached Little America in three weeks. The Wyatt Earp was instructed to pick us up at Litle America on or after January 22, 1936. She actually arrived on the nineteenth. At no time were 1 we ‘lost’ in the sense t*hat we did not have a general idea of where we were or were unable to proceed. “In Australia I received a royal welcome. My official host was Captain Davis, director of navigation. He took me everywhere, always a little worried lest I should some day appear too stylishly dressed for democratic Australian taste. 1 think he suspected me of having a silk hat concealed somewhere in my Polar baggage. As the guest of the Government 1 couldn’t spend a red cent for anything.” And so Ellsworth leaves us, and in leaving complains that he still feels the old nostalgia, restless, unhappy in spirit, trying to grasp some settled peace wherein to be content. There is more for him to do. Who has knov’u heights and depths shall not again Know peace—not as the calm heart knows Low ivied walls, a garden close, The old enchantment of a rose. And though he tread the humble ways of men, He shall not speak the common tongue again. Who has trodden stars seeks peace no more.