In the Arctic

The Arctic Circle kept its secret a fourth week. With Explorer Roald Amundsen of Norway, and his air pilot, Lincoln Ellsworth of Manhattan, still missing somewhere up towards the Pole (TIME, June 1 et seq.) the Norwegian steamer Ingcrtrc, sent to rescue them, dropped anchor in a Spitzbergen fjord. A party of aviators aboard her unlashed their two seaplanes and waited for Amundsen's base ship, the Fram, to come back from the icefloes with a weather report before taking off for a flight to inspect horizons further north.

In more livable portions of the globe, conjecture on Amundsen's fate continued.

Governor J. Daugaard Jensen of Greenland: "I believe he used so much petrol that he was unable to return to his starting place and therefore flew as far as possible toward Cape Columbia [Ellesmere Land, about 250 miles nearer the Pole than Spitzbergen]."

Explorer Donald B. MacMillan was ci the same opinion. In the midst of final preparations for his own flight to the Pole and to fabulous Crocker Land, MacMillan outlined the rescue work he proposed to carry out before any explorations. After making a base at Etah, Greenland, early in August, he would, he said, take two planes to Cape Columbia to see if Amundsen had reached there. If he had not, the planes would then fly on the line from Cape Columbia to the

Pole, Amundsen's direct line of retreat, circling south and east on their way back. The success of this search would rest largely on whether or not Amundsen had got marooned on drift ice, which would carry him southeast, around the tip of Greenland at the 'rate of about 10 miles a day. MacMillan's third plane would wait at Etah or Cape Columbia in case the rescuers needed rescuing.

The MacMillan expedition, commissioned by the National Geographic Society, is equipped, as Amundsen was not, with radio instruments. The Loening amphibian seaplanes lent by the U. S. Navy are smaller than the cumbersome Durnier-Wahls taken by Amundsen, easier to handle in difficult landing and taking-off places. Their base will be so much farther north that they will be able to reconnoitre slowly and widely before making any such dashes as Amundsen's. On every flight it takes, each machine will carry twice the quantity of gas and oil needed for the distance planned.

Last week, MacMillan's planes, under Lieut. Commander Richard E. Byrd, flew from Philadelphia via the Delaware River, foggy Montauk Point, L. I., and the Cape Cod Canal, to Boston, where Mayor Curley gave a luncheon for the fliers. MacMillan also attended this ceremonial meal, then returned to Southport, Me., where he had just taken his schooner Bozvdoin to have her sails bent on. His own ship, the Peary, waited at Wiscasset, Me., where the dismantled planes were to be loaded aboard and the start made on Bunker Hill Day (June 17). Governor Brewster of Maine planned the event as a state function with speeches, brass bands and official godspeed.

Bowdoin College remembers Donald MacMillan as the member of '98 who shinnied up the lightning rod on King's Chapel spire to tear clown a flag that had been hoisted in derision of his class. Adventurous, athletic, he loved the sea where his Scotch grandfathers had sailed, where his father was lost when Donald was 9. He would talk of going some day to the North Pole and made a collection of books on the Arctic during the years when he was successively principal of a Maine preparatory school, a classics instructor near Philadelphia and a physical director at Worcester (Mass.) Academy. In 1908, he had his chance and went with Peary on the first expedition ever to come to "the top of the world." He has done much ethnological study among the Labrador Esquimaux, has taught Anthropology at Bowdoin. In 1920, he commanded his own expedition to Baffin Land, his most important discovery being the presence of vast coal beds in the far north. It was partly because of such deposits, partly because of the possible commercial value of airplane depots, that MacMillan, last week, asked the U. S. State Department to inform him what attitude the Government might take toward any unmapped territory he might discover north and west of Ellesmere Land.

Johnson Expedition. Besides the Amundsen rescue parties, the schooner Zodiac, 130-foot yacht of Johnson & Johnson (Robert W. and J. Steward), manufacturers of surgical supplies at New Brunswick, N. J., was soon to nose into the north with both Johnson brothers aboard. Their destination was to be Newfoundland, where they would search the ice-bitten shores for traces of the 40-ft. sloop Leif Ericsson which sailed out of Reykjavik, Iceland, last August under an amateut Norwegian skipper with a party of artists to "follow the trail of the Vikings" to Nova Scotia. Last winter, the U. S. cruiser Trenton scoured Northern waters for these missing mariners, found nothing.