Evening star., 1925-07-04
MAN IS |MPOTENT
IN ICE OF ARCTIC
Weapons of Civilization Weak
Against Nature at
Its Worst.
BY JAMES B. WHARTON.

North American Newspaper Alliance With
the Amundsen-Ellsworth Polar expedition.
OLSO. July 4.-That snow and ice
are mans relentless and uncompro-
missing foes in the Arctic is the polar
picture which the Amundsen- Ellsworth
expedition brings back with it to
CiVlllzation. The polar waste is a
cold and hostile eXpanse of frozen
water. fashioned by nature into a
never-ending phalanX of Enthusiastically
pointed weaponS-Some small like
daggers; some enormous beyond COM
parison with any weapon ever fash
Toned by the hand of man.
Our first revelation of the power of
dee came on the day the expedition
landed in Spitzbergen, now more
than two months ago. There we saw
puny man fighting the ice with dyna-
mite, in an effort to clear a way for
our ships nito Kings Bay. And it
was a long and desperate battle, in
which the ice yielded only a narrow
lane after stupendous expenditure
by man of his explosive and his in
genuity.
First Effort a Skirmish.
For more than a day we labored
strenuously to get our little ships into
the Spitzbergen harbor. All day
sawed and rammed with nervous
prows until at last a way was cleared.
But this was merely a sllirmish to the
encounter which was fought at lati-
tude S7.44 by the fiyerS-theirs was
Il hand-to-hand conflict which won
over apparently insuperable odds.
In the Arctic, man also has a feel
Ing. l think, of being imprisoned
,Amundsen put it very neatly one day
when Pnjnn6 hn nh
of inaccessibility." The miners who
live for many months, year after year,
out of touch with the world at their
lonely outpost in SpitZbergen, con-
6ess that they never lose this feeling
of being hemmed in by some over
powering force.
l remember watching the departure
of the first outgoing steamer from
Kings Bay, soon after our arrival
there to make preparations for the
flight. 1t was the first outgoing ship
of the season, and the passengers
mounted the ladder with something of
the same sensation that a prisoner
must feel as he leaves his Jail at
the end of a long sentence. The pas
sengers were mostly men, but there
were few women, all carrying cheap
suit cases across the snow and up
the ice-covered ladder, dressed almost
as New York subway crowd in
Springtime. The men wore flimsy
suits without overcoats and the
women had high heels 1t is one of
the fallacies of life that people always
dress for the parts they play; they
don't. They dress rather for the parts
they would like to play. no matter
how unsuitable the costume may be
for their surroundings. For some
strange reaSon-fOr it must bring
them much discomfort-the miners of
Spitzbergen want to dress as city
clerks, and the women as wives of
city clerks. The one discordant touch
was the snow and ice, from which
now they were making their escape.
Small Boat Is Saved.
During our stay in Spitzbergen we
welcomed one day crippled little
steamer which came limping into
port after a nine-month battle with
the icy North. She was an S0-ton
sealing ship, which had struggled all
the way back from Greenland with
only one blade left in her propeller
She could never have made Kings
Bay except for the fact that she for
tunately fell into the Farms broken
fee wake and was thus enabled to
get through the frozen harbor. But
her crew were happy to be safe again,
and they had with them a cargo of
400 seals, a very profitable catch for
SO small n boat.
The universal Northern enemy ice,
fought continuously for possession of
our airplanes as they lay in the open
during the days of preparation for
flight. Each morning icicles would
have to be brushed off the wings, and
picks and shovels would be busy
clearing the bottom of the hull
Summer Never Comes,
Summer never really comes to this
Northern land. Two days before we
reached Kings Bay, on April 13, the
harbor was open. A month later it
was covered over from shore to shore
with a layer of ice half a foot in
thickness. In mid-May, when Spring