THE SIEGE OF THE POLE.
sn.ri-.ssKs and failures. lIWOKUS OK TIIK t'AST. Antarctic conditions differ from those of the Arctic, hut the dangers and dillienlties that (lie explorer ha-, to face are not less than I hose that hamper his movements in the north. The Antarctic winter is. perhaps, a little less eold than that of the Arctic .(though a. man who lias experienced Slid eg. of frost in the South would not be seriously troubled, surely, by ii'ioflier ."ideg. at the other end of the world), and the summer a little colder. 'I here is a snow-plain of great extent that affords smooth travelling when once the (ircat Ice Harrier that guards the South I'ole has bean passed, instead of the rough ice-hmn-liioeks that impede flic northern traveller; but beyond it are mountains. NO LIFK IN Till: SOUTH. The. South, 100. has no life -no bears or wolves to afford occa-ioiial I'n sh meat to the explorer so that c vcrvthiug that is required for food mu-t be carried. Sir Knient Shnekletou knows better than anybody else what a handicap this is; for he would, with scarcely a doubt, have reached the I'ole, probably on January 15 or Hi, I'.IUII. had he and his three companions had with them another few ponmU of food apiece. So greaf. in fact, are the diHiciill.ies of Antarctic < xploration (hat if, was not until 177,'! that the Antarctic Circle was first crossed; il was not until IS2I that land was first seen within, that circle, no human foot ever touched (he Antarctic mainland until Captain Chri-tensen, Carstcno Borchgrevink. and two companions landed near Gape Adair on January 2:1, 1895; and Tiorrhgrevink and the members of his' Southern Cross expedition in 18!)!) were the first men to spend a winter on the Antarctic continent.
I Antarctic exploration, in its. early days, was casual and erratic, and often merely incidental to the business of scaling, and the wonder is that, in the circumstances, it was. on the whole, well and accurately done. The old theory that (here was a great "South land" or •'Third world'' lived well into the seventeenth century; hut until 1750 no navigator even came, into contact with the southern ice unless hy accident, as the result of beinjf driven out of his course 'by the fierce gales during certain periods of the year. By far the greater part of the work that has actually been done in the Far South, in fact, has been the result of the pluck and determination of British navigators and scientists. Captain James Cook, with the Resolution and the Adventure, was the first man to cross the Antarctic circlfc, and he managed to pass the 71st degree—the, southernmost limit that had been reach-1 ed up to the end of the eighteenth century. He first made it absolutely clear i that there was no habitable southern continent, and aftei his return the Ant- j arctic was left to British and American ] sealers for many years. It was by them that most of the archipelagoes lying far south of Cape Horn were discovered; though it was a Russian, Bellingshausen, who did valuable work in command of an expedition sent out by the Tsar, Alexander 1., who first sighted Antarctic land —a little island on the South American side of the circle, that he called Peter T. Island—in 1821; and he followed this by the discovery of Alexander I. Land a week later. James Weddell and Captain Henry Foster carried on the work, and then for a long period a London firm, who owned a fleet of whalers and sealers —Enderby Brother's—took the lead in directing and encouraging AntarcI tie exploration. Their captains were I directed to take, advantage of every op- ; portunity for discovery that came to them, and so John Briscoe, Kemp, Ballon v and Freeman were enabled to add much to the geographer's knowledge of the southern regions.
THE FIRST LANDING. Ft was in 1840 that the first definite attempt was made to reach the South Magnetic Pole, by a French expedition under D'Urville;' but neither this nor the American expediton under Wilkes that was in the South at the same time did more than fill in a few blank spaces on the outer edge of the Antarctic map. Simultaneous with them, though, was a British expedition that made the first great advance,in the journey towards the Pole—that of James Chirk Eoss, with the Erebus and the Terror. Boss managed to get through the ice-pack into open water beyond; and he found and named Cape Adair, and. on Possession Tsland, formally "annexed" the Antarctic continent. He discovered the twin volcanoes, and called them after his two ships; and Ms was the first expedition to sight the Great, Ice Harrier that stopped its further progress in 1841. For the next thirty years, almost, the Polar regions were left undisturbed; ITut then the steamship came to assist the explorer in his endeavors, and H.M.I*!. Challenger' was ordered South, and was the first vessel of her kind to cross the Antarctic Circle, in 1874. The expedition that she carried was more concerned with oceanography than with exploration, though; and the next notable success was the voyage of the Antarctic, a Norwegian whaler, that enabled Christensen ami Borehgrcviuk. in 1804. to make the first landing on the mainland. In 189S the Belgica expedition, among the members of which Boald Amundsen, Scott's rival, and Dr. Cook, the discredited "discoverer" of the North Pole, were included, went out; drifted with the icepack for a year; and was compelled to return without making any notable discovery. Borchgrevink and the Southern Cross' expedition went southward next, and did good service; and here the latest and probably the final phase in the long task of Polar explorations begins. SCOTT AND THE DISCOVEKY.
Tn the autumn of 1901 Commander Hubert Falcon Scott. R.N.. went south in the Discovery, with Lieutenant Ernest Sliackleton as' one of his officers, and fortv men. almost all of them drawn from the Royal Navy, for his crew. He confirmed a discovery that Borchgrevink had made that the Great Tec Barrier lay thirty miles nearer the Pole than it did when Ross discovered it—and found and named King Edward Land, which Ross had "sighted," hut nothing more. He tried a captive balloon as a sort of_ observation tower, but found it of little use: and he established himself in winter quarters, and, at the beginning _of the Antarctic summer, made a sledge journey with Sliackleton and Dr. E. A. Wilson
over the snow-plain that lies beyond the Barrier, until the mountains of the Queen Alexandra range came in sight, lie found the surface of the ice much erevassei! .and was impeded by frequent snow blizzards, so that ho had to take the sledges forward by relays, walking three miles for every mile of progress that he made. His dogs failed, one after the other, and many had to be killed; lint he found and named Mount Markham. 15,000 ft high, and Mount Longstaff, 0700 ft high, and advanced 3SO miles towards the Pole in fifty-nine days, over a country that human foot bad never touched before, in which everything that lay before him was quite unknown—a magnificent achievement. His ship, which he had kept at his winter quarters, was so firmly frozen in that his relief ship, the Morning, when she went back to him I at the beginning of 1004. accompanied by
tin- Term Nova, ul' tin- present expedition, took him orders from the Admiralty to abandon lier; but when he was on the point of returning the Discovery broke out of the ice. and he had the satisfaction of bringing her home uninjured.
SHACKLETON'S DASH.
Then came Shacklcton's dash. Shackleton had previously made a journey to establish depots along the route that he hoped to follow to the Pole. He took three companions with him, four ponies, and four 11-foot sledges; and in order to avoid the crevasses that had troubled Scott four years earlier, they kept about forty miles to the east of his route. Three weeks after the start a pony broke down, and had to be shot; and the meat was left in a depot for use on the return journey. Excellent progress was made—-fifteen miles a day—and in twenty-eight days Scott's ' "farthest south" was left behind. New mountains were fryind, beyond Markup and Longstaff. that Scott had scon; and the range that they formed was found to riiii ; ■ io-s the direct path to the Pole. A second pony had to be shot on the thirtieth day; and the. party went on with only two sledges. On 'the thirtythird day another pony had to be sacrificed; and the men hauled one sledge while the surviving pony drew the other.
After thirty-six days . the explorers reached the foot of a great glacier—-"the Heardmore Clacier -- formed between great dill's of granite that rose to a height, of a couple of thousand feet. For manv days they toiled painfully up this "lacier, until the. last ■pony—it was to I have been shot that night.'as the rough [ ice destroyed its usefulness—fell into a crevasse, and was. lost, happily without dragging its sledge after it. ' And the loss -of thifi amount of !i,eat—a whole pony! as it happened, prevented Shaekleton from reaching the Pole. The journey on the glacier proved to be more than a hundred miles long; and the travellers had been on their way fifty-seven days before they reached the plateau beyond, at a height of 9. r >oo!t above sealevel. Then, but for the blizzards, they had easy ''going," and, finally, after climbing small crevasses and rising, still further, to a height of 12,200 ft, they came to a smooth plain of snow. After seventy-two days—on January 9, 1009— they abandoned their sledge, and wertt forward, unhampered, as far as they could. They had gone as far as ,it was safe to go with their small store of provisions. What food remained to them was barely enough to enable them to 'return to their headquarters—as it was they reached depot after depot emptyhanded and hungry. With success almost within their grasp, therefore, they were compelled to abandon their journey. They hoisted a Union Jack in 88deg. 2$ min. S. and 162deg. E.—only ninety-seven.' miles from the Pole—at nine o'clock in the morning, and then turned nprthwurd again.
AMUNDSEN'S DASH. The following account of Amundsen's trip from his base to the Pole was published last year:—
"Spring came in earnest in the middle of October (1011), and ; a party of five, with four sledges, fifty-two dogs, and four months' provisions, started south, erecting cairns at intervals to serve as guides on the return. / ''The Polar party reached the 82nd degree on November a, when the dogs got their last full meal. We covered 50 kilometres daily, establishing depots at, each degree. We reached the 83rd degree on the 9th, and investigated the Ross Barrier there, We arrived at the 85th on the 17th. Since leaving we had marched due south. Reaching the place whpre the land and the barrier are connected, a few big crevasses indicated the limits of the barrier. Here wc esi taWished the head depot,, with sixty days' provisions. i "We commenced the ascent of the BarI rier Coast range, which has most imposing summits,, ranging from 1500 ft to 2000 ft. The. ground, however, rose by easy slopes, and the dogs negotiated it without difficulty. We encountered a few ; steep glaciers, where the going was hard, and were forced to make some detours owing to big crevasses. The first day we climbed 2000 ft and camped,.the second day we climbed to 4500 ft. We descended on the third day by a glacier' dividing the coast mountains from the mountains further south. Then the' longest asceut commenced up a glacier much broken where it was narrowed between two mountains, each of 15,000 ft.
"On the fourth day from the Barrier we reached a vast plateau, and camped! at an altitude of 10,600 ft. Here .we were compelled to kill twenty-four dogs, retaining eighteen for the dash southi Bad weather delayed the departure for four days. AVe started again on the 25th, and encountered a furious blizzard, driving dense snow drifts in our faces, which were badly frozen. Gradually descending, we passed the. 86th degree, and momentarily saw a. mighty mountain through the snow drift. The weather moderated on the 20tli. and the sun shone. We established a depot at the foot of the Devil's Glacier. Many towering peaks were beautifully illuminated by a bright sun. The Devil's Glacier. was negotiated in three days. We quitted it on December 3. Onward from there the ice plateau resembled a frozen sea. The. greatest altitude reached was 10,750 ft, on December 6. in 87.40 degrees. From 88.25 degrees the plateau gradually sloped downwards, and gave five days of easy travelling. < "The goal was reached on the afternoon of December 14, a beautiful day, with a light south-east breeze, temperature minus 23 C., ground perfect. At three o'clock all gathered round a silken (lag on the vast plain, alike in all directions mile after mile. During the night we circled the camp in a radius of 18 kilometres (11 milea), and for three days took a series of careful observations and fixed the position of the Pole, as close as was humanly possible, with a sextant and artificial horizon. We erected a little tent on the precise spot, and surmounted it with the Norwegian flag and the Fram's pennant, and named the place Polheim. The rt'lnrn was accomplished under favorable conditions, and the, base was reached on January 25. with two sledges, and eleven dogs. The distance from the metres (870 miles)." Pole to the winter camp is 1400 kilo-
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Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 235, 22 February 1913, Page 5
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2,299THE SIEGE OF THE POLE. Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 235, 22 February 1913, Page 5
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