Byrd Attacked

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 837, 4 December 1929, Page 9

Byrd Attacked

DANISH EXPLORER HITS OUT

“Speculation in Sensations”

NORWAY'S CLAIM TO ANTARCTICA United P.A.—By Telegraph—Copyright

LONDON. Tuesday. AFTER the way in which the Americans are acting in the far South, polar explorer’ is no longer an honourable name. Only money, and not scientific qualities or year long preparations, is required to become an explorer.”

Major Tryggve Gran, explorer and j airman, and a member of Captain Scott's Expedition, 1910, and also of the party that found Captain Scott's I body, makes the above startling; attack on Commander Richard E.

Byrd’s south polar expedition, in ail arcticle in the Copenhagen daily paper, “Ekstrbladet.V says the ‘ Daily Mail.** Major Gran asserts that Commander Byrd’s whole expedition appears to be a speculation in sensations. He says: “The terrible mountains which Byrd describes are a fantasy. The land is

on the whole a plain over which, except for clefts and ravines which must be crossed or got round, the trip might ho accomplished on a motor-cycle.”

Major Gran says he does not doubt that Bj r rd flew over the Pole, but says

it is curious that after 17 years he observed traces of Amundsen's and Scott's camps, whose huts, being snow-built, would crumble away. Byrd's report of polar mountains seemed to be mistaken. Ranges existed 250 miles from the Pole, pos-

sibly further south, between Scott’s and Amundsen’s routes, but no further south than SS degrees. The Major says Norway must be considered in any claim for suzerainty at the South Pole. A Norwegian first planted his national flag there. All the territory, from Shackleton’s southernmost point

to the Pole itself, was christened Haakon the Seventh Land by Amundsen. It was. therefore, Norwegian. If a second country had a claim to

a portion of Antarctica it should be Britain, in view of Scott's enterprise.