Paris Express

"The Phantom Fleet of the North Pole"

SEATTLE – The sailing of Capt. Roald Amundsen, famous Arctic explorer and discoverer of the South Pole, for a long drift in the frozen seas of the north in his ship Maud has revived here the old story of the "phantom fleet of the pole."

Some believe it: most people do not.

Anyway, as Capt. Amundsen drifts slowly across the cheerless expanse of the polar basin he will search the white waste about him for signs of the "phantom fleet" – the frozen company of lost ships that the Eskimos claim swing around the north pole year in and year out, gripped in the floes.

Whether the fleet is legendary or really exists is one of the problems that has haunted the minds of arctic explorers for many years.

Vessels have disappeared strangely in the unexplored polar basin since the beginning of arctic navigation. In one fell swoop the hungry ice pack in 1876 carried off thirty whaling ships from the waters north of the American continent. Most of the men fled to the ice and escaped to Point Barrow and other points or the arctic coast, but seventy refused to desert the ships.

The slow but ceaseless movement of the ice carried them into the mysterious uncharted north region that comprises 1,000,000 square miles.

Eskimos who have escaped from the ice pack after being carried into unknown wastes have returned with stories of ghostly ships frozen in the ice, white with frost and manned by frozen crews.

Old-time arctic navigators have always placed a certain amount of credence in the reports. They hold that once within the maw of the ice pack the ships would rest secure in their foundation, and that from then on the chief destruction would be wrought by the great blizzards that sweep the arctic seas.