Polar Polliwog

The converted Navy submarine with which Explorer Sir George Hubert Wil- kins expects to prowl like a polliwog under the Arctic ice next summer, cruised last week from its shipyard at Camden, N. J. to New York Harbor. Sir Hubert, with a fresh medal in his kit,* walked the gangplank to a Brooklyn dock and stood by while the curious eyed his beard and submarine.

The beard, dark brown, soft and short, was originally a protection against Polar cold in the Arctic and Antarctic. Now the beard is an insignium of popular science. As a correspondent-explorer for William Randolph Hearst, Sir Hubert is distinguished in appearance as well as achievements.

The submarine is a utilitarian thing painted red and grey (for visibility against ice), 175 ft. long. Arched across its deck from stern to bow are two braced beams. They resemble sled runners. They really are runners, to enable the vessel to skid against the under side of polar ice. From the blunt, concrete-reinforced bow projects a long tubular feeler like the solitary tusk of the male narwhal. If under the dark ice the ship strikes an object (whale, rock, island, berg) which its great sub- aqueous searchlights do not disclose, the projecting feeler will ram back against compressed air and so absorb most of the shock. Since the boat will cruise at 3 knots during the 3,000 mi. under ice course of its Arctic journey, the danger of concussions is slight.

On the ship's deck is a hinged periscope which will yield if struck by a cake of ice. Close by is a flexible trolley to indicate the undersurface irregularities of the ice. Much more important are other outside devices: a conning tower surmounted by a circular saw capable of cutting through 13 ft. of ice; and two thin tubes which, in case the boat is frozen under deep ice, can drill upward 100 ft. to air. Simon Lake, submarine inventor of Stratford, Conn, designed all these devices.

Sir Hubert, financed chiefly by Lincoln Ellsworth who flew across the North Pole with Umberto Nobile and the late Roald Amundsen in the dirigible Norge and who may be a passenger in the submarine, plans to try his craft out under April ice off Halifax. Then he will proceed by way of London, Bergen and Tromso to Spitsbergen, whence he hopes to proceed mostly under water to Bering Sea. (In 1928 he flew an opposite course between those two regions.)

His purposes are to explore the Arctic Ocean floor, to study Arctic currents, temperatures, flora & fauna, to make meteorological observations, to search for an island or stationary ice floe where a weather station might be built, and to thrill Hearstpaper readers. He has radio receiving and sending equipment in the ship, will steadily report the minutiae of his progress, just as the world cruise of Dr. Hugo Eckener's* Graf Zeppelin were reported by him. Lady Grace Drummond Hay and Karl von Wiegand.

The project has roused much skepticism. Most doleful thought: the sub- marine will be fouled bv ice formed on its rudders and hydroplanes, will be unable to maneuver, will be frozen into any hole she makes in the ice. Warrant for the trip's success lies in Explorer Wilkins' caution, courage, foresight and ability, proved repeatedly through his explorations by sled, ship and plane. Scientific approbation of the proposed submarine excursion comes from the American Geographical Society, the Carnegie Institution, the Norwegian Geographical Insti- tution, the Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Early Hearstian thrills became evident while the ship moored at Brooklyn. To hook the projected trip up with some-thing everyone knows, Jean Jules Verne, a staid public prosecutor of Rouen, France, imported for the occasion, was to christen Sir Hubert's submarine the Nautilus after the fantastic craft which ''Captain Nemo" sailed Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea in Prosecutor Verne's famed grandfather's imagination. Readers were allowed to believe that it was from Jules Verne's book that Sir Hubert got his undersea idea. Matter of fact it was from his exploring friend Vilhjalmur Stefansson that he derived the thought, while the two were on the Canadian Arctic expedition of 1913-18. Were Sir Hubert a charlatan he might aver that the idea popped from an inherited cell of his brain. In 1642 appeared an English book Mathematical Magick in which a "submarine" was intelligently described, its operation suggested with fair sense, and the indication hinted that it could be. used in the "ice and cold-blocked north." Author of Mathematical Magick was John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, ancestor of Sir Hubert.

*Presented last week by the Geographical Society of Philadelphia. So numerous are his medals that he lumps them thus: Patron's Medal, 1928, by Royal Geographical Society, for work in Polar regions, culminating in (1928) flight from Point Barrow to Spitsbergen; awarded gold medals by American, Belgian, Danish, Cuban Geographical Societies (the Cuban society last week gave a medal to Georges Claude, French scientist who experimentally generates electricity from the heat differences between the surface and bottom waters of Matanzas Bay); silver medals by German Geographical Society and City of Berlin; gold medal by Norwegian and French Aeronautical Societies and Inter- national League of Aviators.

*Dr. Eckener was in Washington last week discussing U. S. mail contracts for the trans-atlantic dirigible service which is perhaps to go into operation year after next.

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