The Daily Worker Newspaper, May 22, 1926, Page 9

"] i ban rush for the Arctic is on again. There is still unexplored territory im the great frozen top of the world, This is enough. Here ts the urge. Not until every square foot has been seen will the urge subside. But these days it is different; no more wearying sledging in the insuffer- able cold over jagged ice-floes; no more ships crunched like egg-shells by the frigid, giant finger of the Arctic sea, Now you fly thru the air, warmed by the heat of a whirring motor, guid- ed by instruments that can’t go wrong. Byrd Second HEN Commander at the Pole. Byrd flew twice around a silent spot in ’ the fce of the Arctic that his instru- ments told him was the northern end of the earth’s axis he performed a feat that of itself was not very marvelous. On the 6th of April, 1909, another com- mander of the U. S. Navy, Robt. E. Peary, with a Negro named Henson and four Eskimos, had reached the elu- sive spot by dog-team. This was the crowning achievement of centuries of exploration. Byrd was only the first to reach the pole by air. In but a few hours his great Fokker plane tray- ersed the journey from King’s Bay, Spitzbergen, to the Pole, and return— a distance of 1,600 miles. Publicity for Navy. T would have been far Amundsen, in his lighter- than-air craft, the Norge, gotten there first. This great explorer has given the best part of his life to delving into the unknown regions of not only the North but the South—the perilous Antarcti well. But the United States Navy is an insatiable publicity glutton, and so Byrd beat him to it. MUNDSEN’S ex- pedition will prove more valua- ble. He was mot so interested in merely reaching the pole. Amundsen has done more than any other man to make complete the scientific lore of the two ends of the earth. The ob- servations, physiographic, magnetic, astronomic and meteorological, that he made on his flight from Spitzbergen to Alaska will prove far more valuable than the mere glory of Byrd’s hasty dash for the navy. What is more, Amundsen flew his vessel over a re- gion—between the pole and Point Bar- row, Alaska—hitherto undiscovered. Traveling by air, but a few years will need to elapse before the whole Arctic and Antarctic regions will be mapped like the state of New York. But behind the easy cartography of these convenient days what hardships, what suffering, how many deaths were the companions of even the most mea- ger advances into the land of the mid- night sun! First Northern Explorer a Greek. Amundsen a Veteran Explorer, father of them all was a Greek. Pythias started from what is now Marseilles, France, then known as Marsallia, in $25 B. C. He visited England, Scot- land, the northern coast of Germany, and pushed on well up along the Nor- wegian fjords, Nothing more is heard of northern journeys until 825, when Irish monks found what they called Thule, our Iceland, Icelandic Sagas tell us the monks were there before the Norsemen, A century later Eric, the Red, outlawed for murder, fled from Iceland and found Greenland to the west, j During the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries many famous naviga- tors, among them Sebastian Cabot, Hendrick Hudson and William Barents sent out by merchant companies and governments of Europe, threaded their perilous way among the labrynthian straits and innumerable islands north of Labrador and west of Greenland. They sought a new road to India, They were convinced there must be some way to get around the northern end of the newly-found continent. Wrecked ships and many frozen, life- more fitting had Roald | The Diminishing Empire of Ice and Snow Byrd’s Navy Publicity Stunt.—The History of Polar Exploration—Who Owns the Arctic? — How’s the Weather at the North Pole? BY THURBER LEWIS Here Is a map of the Arctic. The flight of the Norge is graphically detalled as Is also the route taken by Byrd and the trail followed to the Pole and back by Peary in 1909. Since Amundsen’s flight over the shaded area, known as the “Blind Spot,” very little of the Arctic now remains unexplored and unmapped. How soon aerial transportation will make it possible to exploit valuable ores and minerals certain to be found under the Ice of this region will depend upon the rapidity with which technique develops, less bodies were paid for countless ef- forts to find the new route. But the Northwest Passage was not found wn- til 1906. The man who ultimately made the journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the first inter-ocean sea voyage north of Magellan, was none other but the hardy Norskman, Roald Amundsen. His little ship-battled the ice for three years before it pointed its battered nose into Bering Straits. The Fatal Franklin ERHAPS the most ex- Expedition, tensive interest in Arctic exploration oc- curred following the ill-fated expedi- tion of Sir John Franklin, an English- man, in 1845. With no word from Franklin for three years, anxiety be- gan to be felt and ship after ship was sent in search of the baronet and his party. While no trace of Franklin and his crew save the crushed remains of one of his two ships was ever found, the searching parties, sailing the Arc- tic for years, added 7,000 miles of coast line to the map of the polar region. : Only a few of the many famous ex- peditions following this can be men- tioned here. In 1879 Lieutenant De Long of the United States Navy com- manded the “Jeannette” as it sailed into Bering Strait to cut its way thru to Norway. The craft was wrecked in the ice off the coast of Siberia. In attempting to make back to civiliza- tion in small boats De Long and two of his crew perished, the rest being saved. But the expedition was inval- uable, not because of what it found, but because of what happened later. Years afterward the wreckage of the “Jeannette” was found off the coast of Greenland—proving that the Atlantic and the Pacific exchanged currents across the top of the globe. The “Vega” OFESSOR NOR- and the “Fram.” DENSKJOLD left Norway in 1876 in his ship “Vega,” bound round the north of Europe and Sfberia, For four years he and his crew struggled with the ice until finally in 1879 the lit- tle vessel steamed into Yokohama. This was the first time the “Northeast Passage” had been traversed, Another famous “drift” was that of Fridtjof Nansen in the “Fram” in 1897, eT flow and drifted for three years. The little vessel was carried by the ice right over the top of the earth, pass- ing near the pole and finally break- ing out of the ice off Spitzbergen after having described something of a half- jcircle around the Arctic. | \No Place to... . FQUT it was not until |Go But South, Peary made his daring run by dog- sled from Cape Columbia, northern most Greenland, to the Pole and back, that the great feat was accomplished. |For the first time man stood on the spot where there is no latitude, no longitude, and where all directions are south, Equally epochal were the many at- tempts to reach the South Pole. The quest started centuries later than the search of the North and the hardships of Antarctic travel are even- worse than in the Arctic. Mountainous islands, great glaciers, treacherous open lanes and yawning crevasses make Antarctic exploration much more difficult. Roald Amundsen was the first to conquer the bottom of the world. A year later Capt. Robert Scott also reached the South Pole. A fa- mous explorer, Shackleton, who had made several remarkable trips into the Antarctic interior, made his last in 1921, expiring with his men from lack of provisions and exhaustion, Alr Attempt AST year Roald Last Year, Amundsen and his é to the North Pole. They were to a landing with their two and it was not until after 20 i unclaimed lands of Arctic have now been brought under the sovereignty of one state or another. In the 1917 treaty Convinced of the existence ofa current|with the United States on the occa- across the Arctic circle, as evidenced by the wreckage of the “Jeanette,” sion of the transfer of her West Indian Islands to this country, Denmark is Dr, Nansen built a craft, specially de-| accorded the right of complete eco signed to be lifted aloft by the con- tracting ice-floes instead of crushed, with which to essay the pertlous nomic and political domain over the whole of Greenland, Just after the outbreak of the world war Russia laid journey, With a crew of eleven men | claim to all islands lying notrh of Rus- he set out, became perched on an ice | sia and Siberia. In 1919 the Supreme Economic Council of the Soviets ceded the islands of the Spitzbergen group and Bear Island to Norway. Canada lays claim to all islands in the North American Arctic archipelago. Whatever land may be discovered in the region north of Alaska, unex plored by Amundsen, will probably be claimed by the United States.” (Amund- son, however, found no land.) “For the present most of these lands are un- exploitable aad practically worthless. But with the development of air trans- port and a special technique for deal- ing with Arctic conditions, they may in the future prove to be very val- table. Spitzbergen, for example, work- able only six months a year, proves a ‘good source of supply for coal to Norway. | Not So Cold at the Pole. HERE are many mis- conceptions current about Arctic climate. While in most sections of the far north it is, of course, bitterly cold in ithe long dayless winter, in the sum- mer, when for six months there is no | night, considerable heat is distributed, |making a climate quite as warm at times as in Atlantic City. What is jmore, contrary to popular belief, the |pole igs not the coldest place in the ‘north. The long summer, the rare at- | mosphere, and the existence under the six or eight-foot ice pack of compara- tively warm water from the Atlantic and Pacific causes the thermometer at the very pole to approach at times 32 degrees above zero. The coldest place in the world is at the little exile village of Verkhoyansk fm northern Siberia, where in winter the mercury drops to 90 below. Many at the very pole itself. ROALD AMUNDSEN,