THE FIRST CROSSING OF ANTARCTICA 



By Lincoln Ellsworth 



[With 9 plates] 



It is with a deep sense of the modesty of my own endeavors that I 

 appear before you tonight to tell you something about my recent 

 flight across Antarctica. It is 23 years siace I last was in London. 

 I wanted to become an explorer, so came over here to buy the necessary 

 instruments, which at that age I thought would be the necessary 

 qualification, but found that I must also take instruction, which I 

 did, under Mr. Reeves, of your Society. Strangely enough, the 

 pocket compass with which I practiced route-surveying on weekly 

 excursions about the suburbs of London I carried and used on my 

 flight across Antarctica last season. I prize it highly because, after 

 all, it remains the memento of a visit that was to decide my whole 

 future career. Had it not been for that beautiful emperor penguin 

 which I visited weekly at the London Zoo and the memorial service 

 which I attended at St, Paul's in February 1913 for Captain Scott 

 and his gallant comrades lost in the Antarctic, I should probably never 

 have chosen the polar regions as my field of endeavor. But so deeply 

 stirred was my imagination by what I had seen and heard that the 

 die was cast before I left London. 



The dreams of youth are long, long dreams; yet despite all dis- 

 appointments and setbacks that were to ensue, the purpose held, 

 until a chance meeting with Amundsen made possible an airplane 

 flight over the polar sea. My meeting with Amundsen was in 1924. 

 Our flight the following year to within 120 miles of the North Pole, 

 from Spitsbergen, was the first penetration of the polar regions by 

 means of an airplane. It proved the value of aircraft as a future 

 means of polar exploration. 



After my flight with Amundsen in the Norge from Spitsbergen in 

 1926, over the north polar basin to Alaska, restlessness and desire 

 nagged me until I was able to settle on the last great adventure of 

 south polar exploration: The crossing of Antarctica. 



A crossing of the area between the Ross Sea and the Weddell Sea 

 seemed to offer the best possibility of solving the major problem in 



• A paper read at the evening meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, November 30, 1936. Reprinted 

 by permission from the Qeographlcal Journal, vol. 89, no. 3, March 1937. 



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