ANTARCTICA: Frozen Pie

Ever since Captain James Cook circumnavigated the Antarctic in 1772 explorers have struggled on foot, by dog sled and by plane across this highest, windiest, iciest, most desolate of the seven continents. Against hardships which conquered the weakest and the unluckiest they won fame for themselves, large chunks of the frozen desert for their flags. Last week Chile found an easier way to share in the Antarctic Circle pie, cut itself a large slice by Government decree.

Chile is the nearest country to the Antarctic. According to Government reasoning, the area claimed was a logical extension of Chile proper and of its Andes Mountains, which disappear in Drake Strait, reappear in the Antarctic. What Chile hoped to gain from the new colony was less explainable. Though deposits of minerals, principally coal, have been reported in the frozen Antarctic mountains, none of commercially profitable quality has ever been found. As a control point on the southern seaway between the Atlantic and Pacific, as a possible refueling base for a South America-Australia air route, the Antarctic presented only hazy possibilities. Its principal wealth lies in the $15,000,000 annual whaling business, in which Chile does not participate.

What Chile did accomplish was to complicate further the overlapping claims already crowding each other around the frosty pie. Chile’s segment includes part of the U. S.-explored lands on the west, overflows the Argentine-British claims on the east. Since 1908 this has been the most contested portion of the Antarctic.

In that year Britain began driving official stakes. Applying the rule-of-thumb used in the Arctic, Britain drew a narrowing wedge to the Pole from the boundaries of its Falkland Islands possessions, declared it under the Union Jack. This gained a semblance of international recognition when Britain was able to slap a tax on all whales tried out in British Antarctic bases, enforce it until floating factories were introduced. Thus encouraged, Britain claimed a similar wedge for New Zealand in the Ross Sea area, to reinforce the hazy, unofficial claims of its hero explorers, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton and Admiral Sir James Clark Ross. Then Australia claimed a slice of its own to the west.

But Argentina never recognized Britain’s rights to the Falklands, still insists they belong to Argentina and that the Falklands’ slice of the Antarctic is also Argentine. As further evidence of ownership Argentina has maintained a meteorological observatory in the South Orkneys for 36 years, is the only nation to make good its claims by permanent occupation.

Norway was late in joining the squabble. Until last year it had only an unofficial 110-mile ring around the Pole, plotted out by Captain Roald Amundsen when he reached the bottom of the world in 1911. But in January, King Haakon VII brought the coast between the disputed Falkland quadrant and the Australian section under the Norwegian flag, to clinch a twelve-year mapping job backed by Norwegian Whale Tycoon Lars Christensen. Last month impatient Little Führer Vidkun Quisling made up for all lost time by announcing outright Norwegian ownership of the whole Antarctic.

Meanwhile Germany had declared a portion of the Norwegian slice inadequately surveyed. Three months after King Haakon’s proclamation a Göring-sponsored expedition sent its planes over the icy tundra, fenced off a whaling base for fat-hungry Nazis by dropping swastika markers.

Of all claimants, France alone has kept out of the bickering over the ice-clad Antarctic frontiers. In 1840 a French explorer named Jules Sébastien César Dumont D’Urville discovered Adélie Land, planted the French flag there. When Australia cut out its mouth-filling portion 73 years later, it magnanimously allowed the French sliver to split it without dispute.

Most extensive explorations in the Antarctic have been carried on by the U. S. First mariner of any nation to sight the continent itself—not its outlying islands—was 21-year-old Nathaniel Brown Palmer, a sealer out of Stonington, Conn., who discovered Palmer Land in 1820. Within the last 14 years Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd and Lincoln Ellsworth have charted big slices of the Antarctic, have brought new complications into the tangle. Little America and J. W. Ellsworth Land overlap British claims to the west, Chilean-Argentine-British claims to the east. The American Highland, staked out from the air by Ellsworth last year, is plunk in the middle of the Australian area. Byrd’s present East Base is in the heart of the much claimed Falklands area.

But the U. S. has never taken official action on the lands staked out by its citizens, has considered its explorers merely scientists. This gave U. S. Ambassador to Chile Claude G. Bowers a chance for a pretty gesture last week. Said Good Neighbor Bowers of Chile’s new Lebensraum: “That will make us neighbors.”