Polar Pilgrims

Wilkins. After 13 ominous days without word from Captain Wilkins and Pilot Ben Eielson, the supporting party of the Detroit Arctic Expedition, at Fairbanks, finally picked up faint radio signals. It was Operator Waskey of the expedition's overland sledging party, calling from Point Barrow, which he had just reached by forced marches. Wilkins and Eielson were--the signals were very faint--were there, safe, in a fur-trader's comfortable cabin. They had reached Point Barrow the day of their last departure from Fairbanks, after a hairbreadth escape in the cloud-hung Endicott Mountains. Heavy-laden, the monoplane Alaskan had not been able to soar over the 10,000-foot peaks this time. Wilkins, his right arm fractured, had sat grimly by in the cockpit while Eielson felt his way between peaks at 9,000 feet. Once, a mountainside had rushed out of the fog so close in front that the plane's right landing wheel missed a snow bank by inches. At Barrow, clouds and a split propeller had frustrated three attempted return flights. Wilkins advised Major Lanphier, his second-in-command, to bide at Fairbanks for good weather before going to join him in their big biplane, the Detroiter. The Barrow base was nearly complete for flights over the Arctic Sea to terra incognita.

Byrd. Off the frozen coast of Spitzbergen, with a blizzard raging, came Commander Richard E. Byrd with his U. S. comrades and airplanes aboard the Chantier. They were blocked from Kings Bay's one pier by the Norwegian gunboat Heimdal (she was coaling), and had to cast anchor half a mile offshore. Making a raft out of heavy planking and four lifeboats, they labored all one night at the ticklish task of hoisting from the hold delicate wings and fuselages and towing them in on the raft. The Hobby, Amundsen's 1925 baseship chartered this year by Byrd, put in an appearance and was at once set to work plowing a lane through the jagged ice from the Chantier to the beach.

"If anything slips," said Byrd, eyeing a wing that dangled from the derrick,"the expedition comes to an end right now!" But all was accomplished without accident.

Amundsen. The Norwegian and U. S. commanders of the Amundsen-Ellsworth-Nobile expedition finished unloading equipment from the gunboat Heimdal at Kings Bay, Spitzbergen, and settled themselves to await the arrival of their Italian colleague in their dirigible Norge, long overdue from Leningrad. The first days of all-night sunshine found them skiing on the slopes of Mount Zeppelin*, eating seal-steak at Sailmaker Roenne's house, putting finishing touches to the dirigible's mooring mast and hangar.

*Named for Count Zeppelin after his visit to see whether his airships might not use Spitzbergren as a northern base.