MacMillan

As a man seeking eagles' eggs will pause to secure his foothold in the last dizzy crotch beneath the eyrie, Commander MacMillan and his fellow polar pilgrims (TIME, June 22 et seq.) last week dropped anchor at their boatbase, Etah, Greenland, unloaded their three Navy seaplanes from the stout ship Peary, and set about clearing and leveling the one steep little beach their harbor offered for a takeoff. Five Eskimo families were found in the "village," the men of which assisted in the arduous task of building skidways and tumbling large rocks aside.

The arrival at Etah was strictly on schedule, desipte two nerve-racking days when the Bowdoin and Peary lay helpless in the ominous, muttering ice-floes of Melville Bay. While the ships were jammed, their crews ventured overside for snow-fights on the floes; for long walks, two miles over the groaning pan ice to the nearest open water. Animal life abounded on the frozen bay--flocks of little auks, eider duck, sportive seals and an occasional roving polar bear. One 800-lb. female bear swung up alongside the Bowdoin, was received with a bullet by MacMillan. Doctors of the party cut out the poisonous liver and brain, the empty stomach, for study.

MacMillan's radio communication with the U. S. continued uninterrupted, the short-wave (40-metre) set being used. In addition to code reports, by MacMillan and Flight-Commander Richard E. Byrd, to the National Geographic Society and the Navy Department, U. S. operators even picked up, indistinctly, a musical program by the Peary's rough and ready orchestra, a speech by MacMillan, weird chants that the Bowdoin's operator explained were Eskimos singing.

Four days the Argonauts gave themselves to prepare. Then they were to start reconnaissance flights toward Cape Columbia on Grant Land, where an advance air-base would be made for flights toward the Pole and into the unmapped region westward where "Crocker Land" may lie.