RICH CONTINENT?

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 October 1939, Page 9

RICH CONTINENT?

COLONISING ANTARCTIC BYRD’S EXPLORATION. CLAIMS OF VARIOUS NATIONS. The last great colonial partition of a major unconquered part of the earth's crust is under way —relatively unnoticed, slates Saville R. Daves, writing in an exchange. Restless ana pent-up nations are in sober earnest about the Antarctic tiiis time. Soon expeditions will be pouring southward as the great cars of Boer and British Colonial trekked with their plunging oxen into the African Veldt; as the swift American buckboard drove westward or straining dog teams mushed into the Yukon and the Klondike. The object in the Antarctic this time is to claim and to hold.

The north polar region was all seas of floe ice and glory for the explorer, but the plateau of the Antarctic is land! There are no natives to be cruelly forced out, none except those in feathers and fur; no sovereign power to be dislodged by aggression, except for the empire of perpetual snows and ice. Were it not for one man, the United States would be well behind instead of well to the fore in this race. This is a matter of simple fact, although there is a gallant list of men who went south before Rear-Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd. But that was before the time when national imaginations kindled to the prospects in that world apart. No one had stopped to think that nature provided a continent of ready-made air bases; there was then no frantic search for the ores of rare metals which now have taken the place of gold as the lode star of the times.

Nowadays he who actually occupies land has an edge on the others, and it was Admiral Byrd who virtually colonised a portion of the Antarctic. Nowadays it takes equipment and experience and a band of trained and hardened men to swing into action when isolated exploring suddenly becomes a colonial race; and it was Byrd who had the equipment and the men. Nowadays, also, it takes a powerful lot of explaining and persuading to prod a big and comfortable democracy like the United States into action. And here again it was Byrd who kept a staff labouring over plans; who was going ahead with what the Government ought to do, in case the Government didn't see the need. And it was the logic of Byrd’s analysis of the coming struggle over the Antarctic which finally prevailed in the right quarters in Washington; which served as a focal point and rallied enough support to stir Uncle Sam to the point where he is now gladly taking over. Hence this is not a personal expedition which will set forth, probably, with three polar ships some time near or after the middle of October. The Admiral is the first to insist that forces larger than persons have come into play. This is to be strictly a national expedition to accomplish national purposes, and its accountability is to the President and to a resolution of Congress. There is solid reasoning behind such a statement. The presence of millions of Ford cars on the roads of the world is a social fact far transcending the personality of one Henry Ford. The Antarctic possession, which the United States now hopes to have organised and prospected and operating under the Department of the Interior, will bulk larger than the man whose forethought and fore-action made them possible. There has been some controversy over the matter, and it is well io keep these basic facts clear. Nevertheless, the onlooker is permitted to speculate somewhat on the right which the pioneer has to solid satisfaction in a job being well done. They' called Alaska “Seward's Folly” once, and if there are those who would ignore the nation’s interest in the Antarctic and would be so rash as to refer to the western parts of it as Byrd’s Folly, the Admiral would have reason to be proud of the phrase. For, to come down to cases, the Antarctic is under siege by no less than seven nations at the moment. Their claims duplicate and overlap. Much depends on how these are consolidated in the years immediately ahead. Three governments only have made official claims—-those of tile British, Franch. and Norwegians. The rest have as yet only an unofficial stake arising from the claims of private expeditions, and among these is the United States. It is to validate the American claims and broaden them that President Roosevelt is now sending an official expedition southward. ■

Also in the same unofficial class with the United States is Germany, who significantly provided a now wrinkle in polar exploration during the past year. It took some months to track down the information, but finally it came out that not merely an airplane or two, but a fully-equipped airplanecarrier went down there for some very fancy blanketing of territory from the air. And now the Gorman explorers say they have a valid right to some 230.000 square miles in an area claimed by Norway. It is not easy to say how these claims —and those others of Australia, New Zealand, and France —will be settled. Many of them arc made by the so-called sector method. An explorer covers a portion of land along the fringe of the continent and claims all the land extending back in pie-shaped sector to the Pole itself. The British claims in the Western Hemisphere are of that sort, and these are the only ones directly at variance at present with the aims of the United States. But the United States has never recognised this method of annexation. From the American point of view, in order to take out a claim you virtually have to nound in the slakes. This leaves in doubt the question of what weight is to be given to airplane flights, from which the land can be studied and photographed and flags dropped. But the Admiral doesn't propose to leave anything in doubt, so far as is possible. The expedition therefore is really going to make contact with the land. Furthermore, it is going to send a small army of cartographers, geologists, meteorologists and the like to strategic points in order to take the measure of this land which is yet an unknown quantity. Present plans, subject of course to change, will establish two major basesone to the east of Little America, over where the land protrudes and where the investigators will be nearer to their prospecting work. For that matter. Little America may have vanished out into the bay for al! anyone now knows. The second base would be in the vi-

cinity of what the United States calls Graham Land. Io be laid down when and if the more complex ice conditions in that area make it possible. A third base, lighter and more mobile but still of substantial size, would form the point of a triangle or flying wedge—to be located where prospecting and

courage and weather will permit. From these points of vantage, the expedition will deploy in network fashion as a research expedition would naturally do. The object is to see where the United States can dig in and really use this land as well as claim it. How far across the continent will the expedition’s planes and sleds and tractors go? There is an almost humorous slant to this issue. Nobody thinks in terms of east and west when the Antarctic is mentioned. Few would know where one begins and the other ends. But there is a little document known as the Monroe Doctrine, and ihas to do with the United States’ prior interest in affairs of the Western Hemisphere. So you may draw on the map a fan-shaped area 120 degrees broad, covering the portion of Antarctica which is in the West: and within those limits you may expect the expedition to drive its stakes. What is this new continent? Riches or just dreams of riches and fools’ gold? There you have a question. Talk with the experts of syncline and anticline who went with the earlier Byrd treks, and they will say frankly that no one knows.