¶ Soon after, another team of aviators, Alcock and Brown, took off from the same soil, and sixteen hours from Newfoundland, they were circling over Clifden, on the west coast of Ireland. Many a son of Erin’s Sabbath peace was rudely shattered as this great Vickers-Vimy bomber came droning out of the sky to bury its nose deep in an Irish bog. The “Daily Mail” prize of ten thousand pounds was theirs, and an appropriate trophy, commemorating this feat, was also presented to Alcock and Brown.
¶ Others still followed the path of the North Atlantic, even though the incentive of the prize money had been removed. Admiral Sir Mark Kerr, Captain Boyd, Chamberlain and Levine, and De Pinedo were but a few of those who followed in the wake of the triumphant Alcock.
¶ All these pioneering flights, with their attendant narratives of death and danger, are recorded on the air mail stamps of Newfoundland. The ’planes they used, and the routes the fliers followed are pictured for all time on these mute bits of postal paper.
¶ After Lindbergh had made his Atlantic voyage, he hopped off on his famous Pan-American tour. And as he flew from country to country, he left behind a trail of philatelic mementos of this venture. Costa Rica, Panama, and Cuba, to mention but a few countries, issued special stamps to honor his visits.
¶ Exploration, too, has been immeasurably aided by the airplane and one case in point is the Amundsen-Ellsworth expedition of 1925, a polar trip which has been chronicled by a Norwegian set of air mail stamps.
¶ Their journey started on the afternoon of May 21, 1925, when two Dornier-Wal flying-boats rose from the waters of Kings Bay, Spitzbergen, and headed for the North Pole. With motors roaring in unison, the flight got under way auspiciously.
¶ After traversing six hundred miles, the navigators calculated that their position should be directly above the North Pole, but a strong wind had been blowing, which had driven them unawares over a hundred miles off their course.
¶ In landing their ships, however, through the jagged fissures of open ice, both ’planes were damaged. Amundsen, Ellsworth and the crew realized that their only hope of salvation lay in repairing at least one of the ships. A couple of weeks passed before this task was accomplished, and only completed in that length of time through almost superhuman endeavor.
¶ To effect a take-off, a smooth plateau of ice had to be found and small scouting parties discovered a large floe for this purpose, but it was a half mile from their ’plane. And between that broad field of ice and the Dornier-Wal, there rose a high ridge, and a bit further on, a deep chasm gouged across the trail.
¶ But to this handful of men, necessity was a taskmaster that bade them conquer all the hazards that an angry Arctic hurled against them. With nothing but primitive tools, Amundsen’s party hacked a passage through the fifteen-foot thickness of the ice-ridge, a passage wide enough to accommodate the great wing-span of their craft.