NO SIGN OF AMUNDSEN

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 409, 18 July 1928, Page 1

NO SIGN OF AMUNDSEN

MARIANO SERIOUSLY ILL KRASSIN AT KINGS BAY (Australian and N.Z. Press Association.) (United Service) LONDON, Tuesday. Advices from Kings Bay, Spitzbergen, state that the Russian ice-breaker Krassin is expected there. She will not be able to enter the harbour owing to her deep draught. Her captain has therefore asked for a doctor from the Citta di Milano to go on board in the roadstead to attend Commandant Mariano, who is seriously ill through gangrene having attacked his frost-bitten leg. The two airmen, Captain Riiser Larsen and Lieutenant Holm, returned to Kings Bay on the steamer Hobby. They searched East Greenland, but found no trace of Captain Roald Amundsen and Major Guilbaud, pilot of the missing French seaplane. The Spitzbergen correspondent of the Rome “Tribuna” says that after the Italia crashed on May 24 General Nobile and his party cut up a bear, which the late Professor Malmgren shot. They were astonished to find in the animal’s stomach fragments of a newspaper printed in Italian, and bits of material which it had evidently torn off the airship’s envelope.

A message from Moscow says Dr. Behounek, a Czech professor who was rescued from the Italia, says that after the gondola broke away he saw smoke, but heard no explosion. He was convinced that the members of the crew, with Signor Allesendri, who were carried away, are still alive. Captain Robert Falcon Scott left England on hi 3 last Polar expedition in 1910, finally sailing from New Zealand on November 29 of that year, in the whaler Terra Nova. The great southern tramp to the Pole was started in October, 1911. The last supporting party bade good-bye to Scott on January 3, 1912. The final march was made by Scott, Wilson, Oates, Bowers and Evans, who continued over the great polar plateau until they reached the South Pole on January 18, 1912, only to find that they had been forestalled by Roald Amundsen, who had reached the Pole only a month before. After this bitter disappointment Scott’s party was overwhelmed in a blizzard on the return journey, and all perished. It was a heroic struggle. Scott and his men gave their lives for science; Oates gave his life for his friends, for, not wishing to be a burden to them, he walked out into the blizzard, to his death. The explorer, Captain Peter Freuchen, who was mentioned, was indirectly concerned in Sir Philip Gibbs’s exposure in 1909 of the false claim by Dr. Cook, the American, that he had discovered the North Pole. It was Freuchen who translated for Gibbs a letter by Knud Rasmussen, the famous explorer, denouncing Cook as a liar. And it was the “Politiken,” also mentioned in the message, that attacked Glibbs for doubting Cook’s story.