From Cape Columbia to Spitzbergen, it is 900 miles, to Franz Josef Land less than 1000 miles, and to Point Barrow about 1400 miles.
The present average speed of aeroplanes is about 100 miles per hour. By the time this meets the reader’s eye continuous flights of 1000 miles or more will be a matter of record. In the near future, continuous flights of 2000 miles will be made.
A squadron of aeroplanes with base at Cape Columbia, flying in pairs and making simultaneous trips could with good fortune make the reconnaissance indicated above in two weeks, then return to Bowdoin or McCormick Bays and take their ship home.
From the base in Bowdoin or McCormick Bays a week of successive flights northeast, east and southeast, would clear up all the interior features of the great island continent of Greenland.
In the South Polar regions with a base at McMurdo Sound in Ross Sea, south of New Zealand,—the favorite base of Scott and Shackleton,—a flight of 1800 miles across and over the South Pole would reach the known portion of Weddel Sea on the opposite side, and flights of 2000 miles would command the entire Antarctic continent.
In the very near future the biting air above both poles will be stirred by whirring aeroplane propellers, and when that time comes the inner polar regions will quickly yield their last secrets.
Looking forward to this certain materialization, it is a source of satisfaction that the two last great physical adventures, the winning of the North Pole and the South Pole,—the feats which clinched and made complete man’s conquest of the globe,—were accomplished without the aid of such modern devices and inventions.
It seems entirely fitting that these tests of brute physical soundness and endurance which have engaged the attention of the world for several centuries, should have been won by brute physical soundness and endurance, by the oldest and most perfect of all machines—the animal machine—man and the Eskimo dog.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The sixth of the month is a date of rather special interest to the writer. To begin with, it is his birthday. Then it is the day on which the Roosevelt steamed north on the successful quest for the pole; the day on which the pole was reached, and the day on which the wireless message of success was flashed over the world from the bleak Labrador station. Later it was the day on which the writer was made grand officier of the Legion of Honor by the President of France, the day on which he began his efforts for air preparedness for this country, and the day (ninth anniversary of discovery of the pole) on which this country, by the President’s signature, formally entered the greatest of all wars.