ARCTIC MYSTERY

Hokitika Guardian, 19 June 1928, Page 1

ARCTIC MYSTERY

BRITISH EXPEDITION’S QUEST. VANCOUVER, May IG. .The British schooner Effie M. Morrissey, commanded by Captain Bartlett. master of the Roosevelt which carried Admiral Peary on his successful exploration of the North Pole in 1809, left Prince Rupert last week for the distant reaches.of the Far North on the eternal quest of science. The party is officially known as {lie StollMcCraeken Siberian Arctic Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History. The expedition will travel for the next six months through the Alaskan islands, and then to Northern Siberia, in search of cave-sheltered mummies, believed to be the bodies of prehistoric men who. traversed the Aleutian islands, from Asia as the first settlers of North America. Captain Bartlett is recognised as oncof the greatest Arctic navigators of ail time. He is a third generation membei of a . British family engaged in Polar exploits- since iSGi). He remarked in New York, on the eve of departure from there, early in February, that lie had never considered himself in danger of losing his life in the Arctic. “ The taxi drivers of New York menace human life more than all the ’bergs, blizzards, and predatory animals of the Far North,” lie-observed. The iniirrimies sought are on islands which for centuries have been avoided by the natives from superstitious awe. Tliev are supposed to be the bodies ol the Toltees, antecedents of the Aztecs, and are believed to have known a high standard of .culture. Tt is said that they are buried in caves, decked with gorgeous trappings. . _ , . Captain Bartlett remarked that a secondary purpose of the expedition was t o bring hack rare Northern animals, suck, as tHq v _sea_ fitter, ribbon | seal and V& Pacific walrus.

NEED OF A “FQREST SENSE.” Sir W. Beach Thomas, writing in the “Spectator” says that if the people of the Empire possessed a “forest sense,” even-to the degree tne New Zealanders possess it the Empire could easily make itself self-supporting in timber, even . before Scandinavia and Canada and the United States cease to export from their 'surpus, as they must within a generation. “I have been looking at slices of trees felled in different parts of the world. The section that most filled the eye was cut from a Pinus insignis. We have many fine specimens in England, especially in the Isle of Wight; hut this came from near Rotorua, in tile North Island of New Zealand. After the few more crowded inner rings, marking the early years ol the tree, the rings were often considerably more than an inch in breadth —a marvellous thing to behold, representing a scarcely credible rate of growth. Doubtless the specimen was exceptional, but trees grow at very different rates in different soils and climates and it i.s a well-established fact that they gallop in one particular district in New Zealand. They grow there perhaps twice as fast as in New Newfoundland or North Shropshire, hath good spruce districts. The soil, a sort of pumice, is ideal for pines, but useless for agriculture. and it is good to know the. New Zealand Government is doing much what our Forestry Commission is doing ait Thetford, and steadily afforesting. But economy forbids more than a petty scale. Forests vanish ten—even twenty —times' as fast as they are renewed.”