Norwegians Plan Holidays 800 Miles From North Pole

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 40, 12 January 1949, Page 4

Norwegians Plan Holidays 800 Miles From North Pole

The Norwegians are planning pleasure cruises to within 800 miles of the North Pole next spring—to the Norwegian Spitsbergen islands. Frank Illingworth, 8.8. C. reporter, has just returned from these polar islands, and his description of what British holiday makers will see among the ice floes when the first pleasure cruise leaves for Spitzbergen was broadcast in the Home Service. “The first thing you notice about Spitzbergen is the colours,” he said. “I saw the mountains of Horne Sound—the first land you see —sparkling like jewels from a distance of 45 miles; and because the air is so clear the greens and blues of the arctic icefields are distinct from each other, like the colours of a rainbow. Where the wind has blown the snow from the ice floes the summits of the black mountains are reflected on the iee. The ice floes are brilliantly white, some of them shaped like strange, white swans, their necks curved into impossible shapes, white castles, or a fabulous duck with one white wing stretched across the water, which is often a deep black. Where the ice meets the water it is green or blue, the metallic green or blue of a tropical butterfly’s wings. Green and blue fingers of ice, perhaps 50 feet long, stretched out towards our ship, and when she touched them a sound like the rumble of drums in a vault echoed through her hull.

“We crept forward at half a knot, 'feeling our way through a labyrinth of broken floes, some of them half the size of a house. Once, when we hit a heavy floe the ship came to a jarring halt. We lay still for a few moments while the current carried the ice floes past us, so that the fabulous ice duck with one onestretched wing and the strange swan with the twisted neck sailed silently by like characters from “Alice in Wonderland.” The Arctic “loom” added to the ethereal effect. The loom is another word for the polar mirage, and it picked up ice floes the size of a house and perhaps only a hundred yards away and enlarged them into ranges of white and green mountains in the far distance. And then, suddenly, these same mountains returned .to their real size, and the loom picked up another ice floe and held it, upside down this time, against the black mountains.

“There is no tourist hotel at Spitzbergen. The tourists-who go there will live aboard the pleasure cruisers. They won’t mind it cold, even though the North Pole is only 800 miles away. It was the Spitzbergen sun and the scenery which made the greatest impression on me; once you have seen Spitzbergen ice floes you can never forget them.”

i* ■■ M ■ 2000 Families