NORWEGIAN EXPLORER
QUESTIONS BYRD’S STORY
[United Press Association—By Electric Telegraph.—Copyright.]
COPENHAGEN, December 3.
Major Tryggvo Gran, the explorer and airman, and who was a member olf Scott’s expedition in 1910, and also of the party that found Scott’s body declares: “ Norway must lie considered in any claim for sovereignty at the South Pole. It was a Norwegian who first planted a national flag there, and all of the territory from Shacldeton’s southernmost point to the Pole itself was ehistened “ Haakon the Seventh Land ”by Amundsen. It was therefore Norwegian territory. If a second country claimed a portion of Antarctica, it should be Britain, in view of Scott’s enterprise.
Major Gran does not doubt that Commander Byrd flew over the Pole, but he says: “It is curious that, after seventeen years, he observed traces of Amundsen’s and Scott’s camps. Their huts, being snow built, would crumble away.”
He says Byrd’s report of Pomr mountains seemed mistaken. Ranges existed 250 miles from the Pole, and possibly further south, between Scott’s and Amundsen’s routes; but not further south than eighty-eight degrees. Gran asserts that Byrd’s whole expedition appears to be a speculation in sensations.
Major Gran adds: —“After the way in which the Americans are acting, the Polar explorer will no longer have any honourable name—only money; not scientific qualities, nor. the year-long preparations now required to .become an explorer. The terrible mountains which Byrd describes are a fantasy. The land is, on the whole, a plain on which —except for clefts and ravines which must be crossed and got round—the trip might be accomplished on a motorcycle.”
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Hokitika Guardian, 4 December 1929, Page 6
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265NORWEGIAN EXPLORER Hokitika Guardian, 4 December 1929, Page 6
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