Evening Star Newspaper, June 8, 1930, Page 79

THE SUNDAY STAR, N a few days Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, jr., will have landed again on United States soil, returning after an ab- sence of 20 months on the greatest adventure of his life. Admiral Byrd is confronted by the saddest fate of any mod- ern gentleman adventurer. At the youthful age of 41 he realizes he has lived several lives, accomplished more than he could ever have hoped and that now he has few places to go. Admiral Byrd's friends are seriously asking each other the rhetorical question, “Where on earth—or in heaven—can Dick Byrd go now?” They expect no answer, for many of them believe there is none. The public is fickle; expeditions are appallingly expensive; there are left no spots on the map of sufficient dramatic impor- tance to attract the funds necessary for further exploring on a wholesale scale. Each year a score of obscure expeditions take the field, to labor months and even years in re- mote corners of the earth; they endure unbelievable hard- ships and spread a record of fine scientific accom- plishments. But Admiral Byrd eannot ncw under- take a program of obscure and slow geograph- ical explora- tion. That point has al- ready been made clear by several distin- guished members of the Explorers’ Club. It would appear to the public an anti- climax to his spectacular deeds of the past. All airplane exploration flights are looked on In some quarters as fruitless. The airplane moves so fast that careful observations are well nigh impossible, and that fact cannot be recon- ciled with the fact that every science is ad- vanced by means of slow, painstakingly assem- bled details. 'HIS cannot be done by airplane, but it can be helped by airplane. Scientists spend months voyaging lonely seas, and then still more months trekking to remote interiors be- fore their work can begin. By air they can be landed with speed and ease within a few hours, left to carry on their researches, and at the close of their investigations they can be re- turned to civilization Admiral Byrd, having carried Capt. Ashley C. McKinley with him on his flights to the South Pole and over Marie Byrd Land and the Rockefeller Mountains, now has a thorough appreciation of the arplane’s map-making pos- sibilities. Byrd and McKinley in flight took a continu- ‘ous series of pictures. These will be carefully fitted together to make a pictorial map of the country over which they flew. There are countless areas over the world, not only in the Sahara and Central Asia, but in the United States, which still need mapping. Such work, however, calls for a concerted and sys- tematic program of work, with the co-operation of many men over long periods of years. Could Admiral Byrd finance such a program without publicity of the highest order? It is doubtful. Byrd would have to choose something spec- tacular under the cloak of which to carry on his scientific program. BACK in 1926, when Byrd sailed to London from Spitzbergen after his successful flight over the North Pole, he announced that he intended to devote the next 10 years to explora- tion. He said that he contemplated further explorations in the polar basin, for he feels certain there is land above Etah, Greenland, south of the route pursued by Amundsen in the Norge. A year later he stood in Paris, fresh from his successful crossing of the North Atlantic by air, and again he spoke of his hopes and ambitions. First he should like, he said, to make a flight over the South Pole. Then he hoped for an aerial voyage over the wide and trackless for- ests of Brazil. Then, perhaps, a good-will flight around South America, to be followed by an expedition into Arabia. The airplane has helped Byrd achieve his ambitions. At the same time, however, the air- plane has been impartially helping other men to fly in remote regions. Byrd would not be the first to fly over the Brazilian jungles. A number of brave men have soared above the ‘“green inferno,” as the natives call it. There Walter Hinton made his reputation. Then came the gallant Italian, Col. Prancesco de Pinedo, in his aerial voyage that reached six continents. And yet in the Brazilian jungles Byrd might find some scientifically important and yet sur- prisingly dramatic problems. A few Brazilian expeditions have fought their way along the few land and water trails through the jungles of Amazonas and Matto Grosso. But no man will know the wonders hidden by those monstrous forests until scientists have circled like hawks in the air, seeking with tele- scopic eye their prey below, charted their ine tere 12 finds and planned from their lofty vantage the easiest way through the tangled vegetation of the jungle fitself. WASHINGTON, D. G, JUNE & :1930: Where Commander Byrd Will Fly Next Up the Amazon, Across the Sahara or Over Unscaled Mt. Everest May Go the Young Admiral Who Has Conquered Both Poles and the Atlantic as the First Achievements in His Ten-Year Program /-\\ of Aerial Exploration George Finlay Simmons. (Explorer and Scientist.) Though he was madg a rear admiral dum ing his 20-month stay in the Antarctic wastes, Byrd returns spick-and-span in the proper new uniforms. They were sent to New Zealand and were waiting when he emerged from the iceland. HAT is there to seek? What might the Brazilian forests possibly hide? Admiral Byrd might locate some vast vole canic plug comparable to Conan Doyle's Lost World. He might sight isolated South American mountains, rising from the level lands of the forest like the Kivu Volcanoes of Central Africa, the only place in the world where man may still find the monstrous woolly gorilla. Byrd has heard the legends of lost races of men in the interior of Brazil. The South American Indians told the first Portuguese and . Spaniards who landed in the New World thag§ once men with white skins had cities of gold in the jungles. The Aztecs of Mexico told Core tez of the “white god” with the long golden beard that no Indian can grow. Marsh, who brought several white Indians from Panama, has sought a lost race in Venezuela, Colombia and the Guianas. Perhaps Byrd might sight a village of survivors, cut off from the world by vast reaches of rubber trees, mahogany, trea ferns and lianas hitherto impassable. A similar condition exists in ancient Arabia, Admiral Byrd could not be the first to fly across those burning sands. During the last seven years many British flyers have passed there, bound for Persia, India, Siam and Aus- tralia. CARCELY 100 miles south of Jerusalem ia the lost city of Petra, to which explorers have gone by camel caravan. Petra lies inside a hidden canycn, reached through a crack in the rock mountain. Petra is a page in the ancient history of the world. Other pages tell of ancient abandoned cities in the vast deserts of Southern Arabia, over which no airplanes have flown. Vast expeditions have worked for two decades and more in Yucatan, uncovering and recon- structing Maya ruins. A fleeting trip by air, a few hours over untrod jungles, and the Lind- bergh-Kidder-Rickertson party located many new ruins, each of which may prove another marvelous city like Chichen-Itza. Similar flights of reconnaissance over South- ern Arabia may bring to light such ruins in the Old World of even more importance to the archeologist. Byrd may even consider remote Burma or Tibet or the unknown interior of China. He may co-operate with Dr. Roy Chap- man Andrews and help locate beds of fossil dinosaurs and extinct mammals in the Gobi Desert. . As far as spectacular flights are concerned, their day of first importance has passed. The United States Army flyers made it around the world in 1924, following the land masses of the north, proving the endurance of motors and planes and the accuracy of navigating instru- ments. Maj. H. A. Dargue and seven other United States Army flyers have already circled South America on a good-will tour. The French have circled Europe; the British, Africa and Aus- tralia. Asia has been crossed in the north and south. Capt. Charles Kingsford-Smith and his crew flew from the United States to Australia. Maitland and Hegenberger of the United States Army made a non-stop flight in 1927 frgm California to Honolulu, and four others successfully repeated the feat during the tragic Dole air races. Two airplane expeditions have even pene« trated into the last mysterious wild country, the interior of New Guinea. One was led by Dr. M. W. Stirling of the United States National Museum, the other by Dr. D. W. Brandes, United States Department of Agriculture. But there still remains a huge unexplored area in Antarctica larger than the whole United States. Antarctica itself is mapped on guess< work, for it may consist of several pieces. Thou= sands of miles of its shore line have never been seen, and hence require mapping. Also, there is still possible land in the Arctic, and Admiral Byrd has expressed a wish to res turn there and search north of Greenland and northwest of Alaska. But with regular airmail routes spreading like spider webs over the maps of North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Ause tralia, it is indeed a sad outlook for the aviatore explorer who seeks thrillsy, who wishes t0 be first on new land. BEFORE the polar veteran Capt. Roald Amundsen made his transpolar dirigible flight he was asked if there would be any more thrills left him after he had successfully conquered both poles. “None, probably, but marriage,” said the gray-haired Viking. Two years later Amundsen went to his death a hero, in an effort to rescue Gen. Nobile and the crew of the dirigible Italia. He was stil a bachelor, and had been denied the one greag thrill that remained to him. Admiral Byrd, having also conquered both poles, has had that third thrill for 15 years. In 1915 he married the beautiful Marie D. Ames of Winchester, Va., and Boston. She was his childhood playmate, and it was in personal tribute to her bravery and high sportsmanship that he named Marie Byrd Land in Antarctica, Mrs. Byrd and the four children are hoping the admiral will find no more lands worth ex- ploring, at least for a while. He is a great fel low to have for a father, and they miss him. Incidentally, Admiral Byrd has announced that after six weeks of engagements, of payitrg his respects to: President Hoover, the War anl “Continued' on Twenty-first Page