The daily worker., 1926-05-22

This Is enough. Here Is the urge.
Not until every square foot has been
seen will the urge subside.
But these days It is different; no
more wearying sledging in the insuffer-
able cold over jagged ice-foes; no
more ships crunched like egg-shells by
the frigid, giant finger of the Arctic
sea. Now you fly thru the air, warmed
by the heat Of whirrlng motor, guild
ed by instruments that can't go wrong.
Byrd Second w HEN Commander
at the Pole. w Byrd few twtce
around a silent spot in
the ice OF the Arctic that his instru-
ments told him was the northern end
Of the earth's axis he performed feat
that of itself was not very marvellous.
On the 9th Of April, 1909, another COM
mander of the U. s. Navy, Robt. E.
Peary, with a Negro named Henson
and four Eskfmos, had reached the elu-
sive spot by dog-team. This was the
crowning achievement Of centuries of
exploration. Byrd was only the first
to reach the pole by air. In but few
hours his great Fokker plane trav-
ersed the journey from Kings Bay,
Spitzbergen, to the Pole, and return
a distance of 1000 miles.
Publicity TT would have been far
for Navy. 1 more fitting had Roald
Amundsen, in his lighter
than-air craft, the Norge, gotten there
first. This great explorer has given
the best part Of his life to delving into
the unknown regions of not only the
North but the South-the perilous
Antarctic-as well. But the United
States Navy is an Unsuitable publicity
glutton, and so Byrd beat him to it.
Amundsen a A MUNDSEN'S ex-
Veteran Explorer. Apeditio will
prove more valua-
BILE. He was not so interested in
merely reaching the pole. Amundsen
has done more than any other man to
make complete the scientific lore of
the two ends of the earth. The OBJ
servations, photographic, magnetic,
astronomic and meteorological, that he
made on his fight from Spitzbergen
to Alaska will prove far more valuable
than the mere glory of Byrd's hasty
dash for the navy. What is more,
Amundsen flew his vessel over a re-
gion-between the pole and Point Bar
row, Alaska-hitherto undiscovered.
Travelling by air, but a few years
will need to elapse before the whole
Arctic and Antarctic regions will be
mapped like the state of New York
But behind the easy cartography of
these convenient days what hardships,
what suffering, how many deaths we're
the companions of even the most mea-
ger advances into the land of the mid
night sun!
First Northern THE father of
Explorer Greek. l. them all was a
Greek. Pythias
started from what is now Marseilles,
France, then known as Marsallia, in
825 B. G. He visited England, Scot
land, the northern coast Of Germany,
and pushed on well up along the Nor
wegian fiords. Nothing more is heard
Of northern journeys until S25, when
Irish monks found what they called
Thule, our Iceland. Icelandic Sagas
tell us the monks were there before
the Norsemen. A century later Eric,
the Red, outlawed for murder, fed
from Iceland and found Greenland to
the west,
During the sixteenth and seven
teenth centuries many famous naviga-
tors, among them Sebastian Cabot,
Hendrick Hudson and William Barents
sent out by merchant companies and
governments of Europe, threaded their
perilous way among the labrynthian
straits and innumerable islands north
OF Labrador and west OF Greenland
They sought new road to India.
They were convinced there must be
l.