THE POLAR FLIGHT.

Hokitika Guardian, 28 May 1925, Page 3

THE POLAR FLIGHT.

['Reuters Telegrams. I NOTHING To REPORT. (Received tliis dav at 12 HO p.m.) LONDON. .May 27. A copyright wireless from the Tram on Wednesday afternoon states that there is nothing to report, except that the good weather at Spitzhergen mid the Polar Basin is maintained. It seems certain that the low pressure centred on Russia has been deflected eastward. THE NORTH POLE. (Christchurch “Press” of Wednesday.) After live days there is still no news of ( aptain Amundsen, and no possibility of obtaining news if be himself is not able to supply it. When ho “ took of ” on Thursday he know that he had no more than a hope of seeing home and civilisation again, and as ho went without wireless in order to lighten his load no one in the world can say' how big that hope is now. let it is not a case for lamentation. If Amundsen has reached the Pole, and comes hack, it will be with a distinction that no one in recorded history has ever before enjoyed. If he is never again heard of it is far more than likely that such a distinction belongs to him even if the world does not know. So far as it is possible to judge from the very bald accounts lie lias given of himself, Captain Amundsen is not an impulsive man, and not even like Nansen poetically or philosophically imaginative. But wc must not forgot that he is fifty-three, almost too old lor further adventures, and that to die at the Pole would mean exchanging a few years of dull retirement for a glorious hour and immortal fame. And if he has died, he is no! the tirst man, nor is his party' the first party, to lie swallowed up by the Polar mists. Most people to-day have forgotten Dr. Andreo, but when Captain Amundsen was still little more than a boy it bad occurred to that Swedish engineer that the easiest wav to reach the Pole was to lie carried there by the winds. On the afternoon of July 11th. 1597, he went iti> in a baloon from an island not very far from. Amundsen’s present base, and limited off with two assistants •into space —never to lie seen or heard of again, except for one brief confident message dropped at 10 p.m., from that tlnv to tliis. It was, of course, a totally different flight that the Norwegian party began hist week. A\ ith the knowledge we possess now we can see that it was just a certain drift'to death to float off from Siptzbergen in a balloon, while Amundsen's (fight was at least as safe as putting to sea in a row-boat. Science lias advanced so far in thirty years that we are still justified in expecting Hie expedition s return, though one of the remote possibilities of the ease, a possibility that everyone would deplore, is that Amundsen set off prematurely in order that it might not happen to him as it happened to Scott—that lie should be outdistanced and outrun by a younger and more reckless rival. It is an interesting fact that the race between Norway and Britain for the South Pole lias been resumed, or at least repeated, by the same two nations in the North. Though it does not seem possible that Norway can be overtaken, it is the ease that somewhere in the North there is a British hoy of twenty-four equipped like the Norwegian with wings, and with something besides that Amundsen can never again have—the gay abandon of youth.

It nuist, however, he conceded that the Norwegians could lose the North Pole and still have a record in exploration that the world will take a Ion" time to beat, t'or the South Pole is theirs beyond dispute or recall, while it was Northmen, if not precisely Nor-way-men, who showed the way to the “North-West Passage.” It was after all only in the sixteenth century that liritain began searching for a sea-way to the Indies—hundreds of years after Lief the I nicky and Erie the Red had reached Greenland and pushed on to “Vineland.” And when the Passage was at last discovered it was no Englishman, but Ronald Amundsen himself, who was the discoverer. What the world had been unable to find in four centuries he found for it about twenty years ago, and what he sot out on F ridav to locate from the air he had five times attempted to locate Irom the land or the sea. Everyone will wish that his last and strongest ambit ion has now been realised, that wherever he is today he was at the Pole five days ago, and that if Norway has lost him she will he consoled hv the fact that he alone of all the sous of men has reached the ends of the earth.