The Antarctic.

Progress, Volume VI, Issue 1, 1 November 1910, Page 439

The Antarctic.

The Race for the South Pole. The rival expeditions, Peary's and Scott's, are referred to by popular consent as a race as imaginative spirits speak of the event as a dash for the Pole. One pictures a runner, lightly clad, doing a sprint, or a light horse cavalier with a squadron mounted on thoroughbred horses making a raid into space at a gallop and coming back with the secrets of the unknown on the points of their spurs. But the records of Scott, Shackleton, and a hundred other explorers of the frozen parts of the world make us realise that .the pace is often, less than a mile a day, sometimes confined to the inside of a small tent for days together, and always laborious exceedingly and indescribably. Of these "dashes," the most notable in all history was undoubtedly that of Shack]«ion, who holds the record for Antarctic travel. It was Scott who, by hi 3 labours, made Shackleton's achievement possible, and now it is going to be tried whether Shackleton's labours will n °t make Scott's final conquest of the Polo an accomplished fact.

Scott has already arrived in New Zealand, and his ship, of which we give a drawing showing the interior arrangements, is loaded at the present moment with food enough for several years, and which is now in southern waters. The dogs for the sledge work have arrived at Lyttelton, the Australian Government has granted a subsidy, and everything is in readiness. Presently the ship will sail with her crew and her men of science for McMurdo Sound, at the foot of Mt. Erebus, where Scott and Shackleton wintered during their previous expeditions. From there the science men will make trips right and left for various explorative and scientific purposes among the rest, the investigation of the question of the presence of radium in commercially practical form and quantity. While they are at work the commander will make his "dash" for the Pole. He has with him a motor on the "caterpillar" principle, illustrated and described twice in Progress last year. In this type the wheels on each side revolve a tread, which makes the machine independent of all surface vicissitudes. The speed is estimated at a certain four miles an hour. The journey presents only one difficulty, if we are informed aright, to this type of motor. The sea ice is fairly good to the foot of the mountain plateau, and once on the plateauthe highest plateau land in the world, 12,000 to 14,000 feet in heightthe going is easy enough for such a vehicle. But the ascent to this plateau is by glaciers. That which Shackleton negotiated is 100 miles long by several broad, and furnished with the usual complement of crevasses. Down one of these he lost one of his ponies, it will be remembered, and, indeed, but for that loss he might have reached the Pole. How the motor is to be taken up that glacier with safety is a problem one , would rather leave to Captain Scott than face one's self.

The winter will be spent in a hut, of which we furnish an illustration. Those who have read the very complete narratives of Scott and Shackleton will be easily able to construct pictures for themselves of the line in that hut and on board the stout old '' Terra Nova,'' whose interior we also give to-day. Peary, of the American Navy, has induced the club bearing his name and the National Geographic Society of America to finance an expedition for the attack on the Pole from the opposite quarter of the Antarctic. It is to go in the "Koosevelt," Peary's ship, described as the most powerful ice ship in the world, and has a year's stores Where it will call, what sort of base it is to have, along what route—these are questions which have all to be determined by the explorers on the spot. All we can do to throw light on the expedition is to print the geographical details of the Antarctic, with inof the two rival expeditions. There is talk of an American expedition going out under the orders of the Navy Department to locate and explore Wilks' Land. This was called by its discoverer an American Naval Office*, "the Antarctic Continent," half a. century ago. Since then the existence of .the American Continent has been proved beyond a doubt by the explorations of Scott and Shackleton. It follows, then, that. Wilks was the discoverer, of the Antarctic Continent. Hence it is right that the part he saw first should be named Wilks' Land, and also right that the expedition of his countrymen should make it their base for

their dash on the Pole. The British, on their side, start from an equally appropriate site. This is the eastern corner of the great Ice Barrier, discovered by Cook in the second half of

the eighteenth century, defined by Ross in the middle of the nineteenth, and fully explored and physically determined by Scott and Shackleton in the beginning of the twentieth.