Off Barrow

On Alaska's uppermost tip, Point Barrow, Captain George Hubert Wilkins, blackbearded Australian soldier of fortune, searcher by air for an undiscovered continent, warmed up the Wright Whirlwind motor of a Stinson plane by leaving an oil heater in the hangar all night. The thermometer was at 50 below 0. Buckets of hot oil poured into the motor next morning sped the getaway. With an offshore wind under tail, Captain Wilkins and his pilot, hardbitten Carl Ben Eielson, steered 25DEG west of north, and vanished out over the Arctic Ocean. The plan was to fly thus for six hours, then turn southwest, fly two hours, then turn back to Point Barrow. The territory thus circumscribed, 50,000 square miles lying polewards of Wrangel and Whitney islands had never been viewed by man.-- It might contain land. . . . But Captain Wilkins did not return to Barrow as scheduled. After 82 hours his comrades at the base camp caught a radio flash: "Engine trouble." He and Pilot Eielson had been forced down 100 miles from shore, not west, but east of Barrow's longitude. A blizzard raged. The distress signals ceased. The crew on shore waited for weather before flying out in a reserve plane to see how their chief fared among floes and hummocks which split, sometimes, with thunderous reports into leads of open water; which close again, sometimes, crushing whatever may have fallen in them like flies in a glacier. --

--The farthest flight northwest of Barrow, made last year by Captain Wilkins (TIME, April 19), was 100 miles. The area seen by Explorers Amundsen, Ellsworth and Nobile from the Norge was a zone varying between 10 and 100 miles in width, due north of Barrow.