Polar Pilgrims

Wine ran in Norway. Bells pealed in Rome. Headlines screamed across the broad U. S. Bright bunting shone forth in grim Alaska, where searchlights had pierced the skies during the three-hour nights. Then, slowly, mankind settled back to review and evaluate what had seemed at the moment its most spectacular feat.

Seventeen fur-bundled men and a fox terrier had passed in an airship completely up and over the Earth's icy pate, parting that wilderness as a comb might part the unexplored thatch of a wild man from Borneo. From Spitzbergen in Barent's Sea via the North Pole and the Pole of Inaccessibility, to Point Barrow, Alaska, they had peered out of their gondola for new lands, and in a strip of white waste 2,000 miles long by 10 to 100 wide, had spied none. They had seen seals, roaming polar bears, their own flags (Italian, Norwegian, U. S.) sticking up at the top of the world on iron-pointed staves dropped into the ice-- but not so much as a rocky islet had arisen out of the vast Polar Sea. Disappointed yet jubilant they had flown past Point Barrow, on down the Alaskan coast for 700 miles, and alighted.

The Flight. Thus flew Roald Amundsen of Norway, Lincoln Ellsworth of the U. S., Umberto Nobile of Italy, Lieutenants Hjalmar Rueser-Larsen, Emil Horgan, Oscal Omdal and Gustav Amundsen (nephew) of the Norwegian navy, Mechanician Natale Cecioni of Italy, Meteorologist Fenn Malmgren of Sweden, their eight aides and dog Titina, in the semirigid dirigible Norge.

They moved out of Kings Bay one dazzling polar morning, their silver ship soaring over an ocean of crystal glare. Their northward course was slightly west of the line taken by Flyer Byrd two days previously (TIME, May 17). The day was to be Ellsworth's birthday and he wondered whether fortune would bring him the present he longed for-- new land, Ellsworth Land.

In 17 1/2 hours their instruments told them they were at the Pole. They bared their heads, dropped their flags, and after circling for 2 1/2 hours, set their rudder to follow the 160th meridian of West Longitude down the opposite curve of the world.

After 8 1/2 hours more, they "shook hands warmly and all wore bright smiles." They were over the hardest place to reach on earth, some 400 miles south of the North Pole, the center of the Arctic ice cap.

The evening of the second day they sighted land through the cloud rack, Point Barrow. The last 850 miles had been through fog banks and snow. Ice had been forming on the Norge's rigging and gondola, thence the engine vibration shook it loose in big pieces. The pieces were dropping on the whizzing propellers, to be batted viciously into the gas bag. As a hog will cut its throat swimming, the soaring Norge was perforating her own belly. The crew swarmed everywhere applying patches.

Fearing to fly overland, for the crags of Alaska were obscured, they skirted southwest all the third day, ducking below and nosing above the clouds to get a glimpse of the sun and steer for Bering Straits. The wind increased. Glue for patching the ice-torn bag was exhausted. Conditions seemed critical. Static muffled Nome's radio signals as the Norge fumbled in her bearings over Bering Sea. The helmsman, ordered to steer ashore, at last brought the Norge into the fishing and reindeer settlement of Teller, about 60 miles northwest of expectant Nome. The pilgrims clambered to earth 2,700 miles from their starting point, after 71 hours in the air. Slightly damaged by her rough Alaskan landing, the Norge was dismantled for shipment. Meanwhile Captain Amundsen and his chief assistants after sledging across 14 miles of ice pack boarded the three-ton launch Pippin and proceeded down the Alaskan coast to the mouth of the Snake River which is the harbor of Nome.

It had not been the longest dirigible flight on record.* Weather conditions had not been specially arduous; worse weather might have been encountered over the northwestern U. S. No new continent had come to light. It was, primarily, a great flight of the human imagination translated into gasses, metals and men. The successful evasion of the ice floe peril was a tremendous buttress to man's confidence in airships. Comments of experts and officials suggested practical results to come:

Vilhjalmur Stefansson, explorer: "My own work in trying to retain Wrangel Island in the British Empire where it belonged was based on the theory of the development of transpolar navigation."

Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, U. S. Navy aeronautics chief: "The large airship will be utilized in the future when advantage is taken commercially of the Arctic route for transport between Europe and the Far East."

Anton Heinan, transatlantic pilot of the Los Angeles: "The Los Angeles, now being perfected at Lakehurst, could make the trip every week without special hazard."

Instruments. Quite as notable as the mechanical triumphs of the Norge and of Flyer Byrd's dependable blue Fokker monoplane, the Josephine Ford, during the eventful fortnight, was the functioning of new navigating instruments. The Norge found her way to the Pole largely by use of her radio direction-finder and a sun compass evolved for the Arctic by Albert H. Bumstead, chief cartographer of the National Geographic Society --a simple sundial marked for 24 hours, adjustable so that the sun's shadow constantly marks the course. For ascertaining arrival at the Pole, a sextant giving an artificial horizon on a bubble of mercury, the invention of Flyer Byrd, was used. Wind drift was calculated by new "earth induction" compasses.

Byrd. While U. S. Congressmen were preparing to make him a rear-admiral and give him a medal and while his grandmother, Mrs. J. Rivers Byrd of Baltimore, was recounting how, having circled the globe at the age of ten, he had now fulfilled a prophecy by his great-great-grandmother that some day a Byrd would find the North Pole, Lieutenant Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd wrote the story of his unique round-trip for U. S. newspapers:

"I was again back at the incessant navigating with Bennett at the wheel. I could not let up for a single minute. I was putting every ounce of my mind, energy and knowledge into making our course so straight that we could not deviate half a mile from the imaginary line. ... I was sighting so constantly on the bright, sun-lighted snow beneath us that my right eye began to show the first symptoms of snow blindness. . . .

"I took several drinks of the steaming tea forward to Bennett and I could see how very much he enjoyed it. Good old Floyd! He had flown 3,000 miles with me in the Arctic last year and here he was again risking his life without turning a hair. Without him last year I doubt if I would have got much over 300 miles. . . .

"We went for another hour . . . when I suddenly saw what I thought was a bad oil leak in his right-hand motor. I took the wheel and asked Bennett to give me his opinion of the seriousness of the leak. He jotted down that it was very bad. ... It was one of the big moments. . . . We throttled the starboard motor . . . could make a little more than 60 miles an hour on the other two motors. Great! . . .

"At the end of the hour I took my calculations and found that we were at the Pole! . . .

"Bennett and I shook hands simply, and then I went back into the cabin, stood at attention and saluted for Admiral Peary. The Navy had reached the Pole again, the blessed old Navy. . . .

"One thought more than compensated me for all we had gone through-- namely, that if we could fly to the top of the world, business need no longer hesitate to take up aviation with a bang. ..."

When Commander Byrd learned the Norge was safe, he began preparations for his own trip to London.

Wilkins. The week's news of the earliest, most handicapped but most dogged polar pilgrim of them all, was: "Commander Wilkins waiting with the Detroiter at Point Barrow for fair weather."

* The longest non-stop flight by a rigid dirigible is 5,066 mi., from Friederickshafen, Germany, to Lakehurst, N.J., by the Zeppelin ZR3 (now the Los Angeles), in 1924.

The Norge's Spitzbergen to Teller flight of 2,700 mi. is the longest successful nonstop flight for nonrigid dirigibles. The French Dixmade had covered over 5,000 mi. and weathered an African hurricane, when she was lost with all hands in the Mediterranean in 1923.

The longest continuous flight, with fuel stops, by any dirigible still belongs to the late Shenandoah, which traveled in 1924 from Lakehurst to the Pacific and back, entering Canada and Mexico -- 9,317 mi. compared with the Norge's 6,280 mi. from Rome to Teller.

The two transatlantic flights of the British R34 in 1919 were 3,600 and 3,450 mi., both nonstop. The first really long dirigible flight was made in 1917 by the German L-59, from Jamoli, Bulgaria, via Smyrna, the Mediterranean and the Libyan desert into East Africa and return -- about 4,500 mi. without a stop