Antarctic Exodus

The evening sun dimmed over Admiral Byrd's Little America camp a day last week. Most of the expedition's 42 men were in their tents. A few were outdoors strolling nervously about their ready-packed gear and baggage. A smoke of frost was on the harbor, where their bark, the City of New York, was soon to arrive, to take them away from their 13 months and 25 days of bleakness. Talk was scant.

Then, unexpectedly, almost silently, out of the harbor murk appeared the ship. The crew called across the water to those on the ice shore. The latter were too wrought up by their long isolation to say much. Radioed Reporter Russell Owen to his New York Times, with revealing simplicity: "Oh, it was good to see them, to see new faces and hear new voices! We were going home!"

All that night the ship crew and ice party loaded goods into the City of New York. The dogs went with them. But most of their heavy equipment they abandoned. The last thing Admiral Byrd did on shore was to haul down the U. S. flag. As the ship pulled away for her three weeks' trip, through the icepack of Ross Sea, to New Zealand, and as his men breakfasted or dragged their sacks of home mail to reading seclusion, he saluted two long objects which rested, dejectedly, they seemed to him, on an ice knoll. They were the Ford and Fairchild airplanes which had carried him on his surveys of 150,000 Antarctic square miles.*

Wilkins. Another glad runaway from Antarctica last week was Sir George Hubert Wilkins. He and Pilot S. A. Cheesman made a few observation flights in the neighborhood of Deception Island this season. As they approached Montevideo, Uruguay, aboard the Norwegian steamer Henrik Ibsen last week, they loosed a small seaplane and flew 125 miles to shore, to thorough baths, to city clothes and square meals.

Riiser-Larsen & Holm. The Norwegian flyers Captain Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen and Captain Lutzow Holm aboard the S. S. Norvegia last week expected to continue exploratory efforts for a time. Last December they found land between Coats and Enderby Lands (TIME, Jan. 6). Last week they found some more, to the west of the first and near the Weddell Sea.

*His third plane, a Fokker, was wrecked early last year at the Rockefeller Mountains (TIME, April 1).

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