HIS CAPITAL GONE

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Volume 58, Issue 142, 18 July 1929, Page 5

HIS CAPITAL GONE

Australian Press Association

ANTARCTIC LEADER'S SAD PLIGHT. Working As Barman In Zululand*

LONDON, July 16. The Daily News' J ohannesburg correspondent reports that Commander^Frank Wild, a member oi the bcott, _ Shackleton and Mawson Antarctic expeditions, spent the past rour yearn m an unsuccessiul cotton growing enterprise and his capital is gone. now a barman at the village or Goller, the northernmost point Tn Zululand, earning four pounds per month. Drought ruined most of his fellow farmers, and Wild Was the last to give up. & Commander Frank Wild, R.N., has one of the most outstanding records in Antarctic exploration of any man alive. -As a young man he accompanied Gaptain Scott in the Discovery m 1901-4 and was with Shackleton in 1907-09. No sooner had he returned fco civilisation than the white wastes of the south called him again attd he went back in an executive capacity with Sir Douglas, then Dr. Mawson, tn 1911-13. On return from this trip he immediately joined up with the Imperial TranS-Antarctic ExpeditiOn in 1914 and on_ return from this trip found England in the grip of the war. For the period of the great struggle, ho joined up with the Royal Navy and saw service in the North Sea, but at the termihation of hostilities the great white south called again more insistently and in 1921 h© left Tilbury for Antnrtica again, as second in comjliand of Sir Ernest Sbackleton's final ill-fated essay, which terminated when the great leader passed into the beyond from influenza and pneumonia off the coast of South Georgia. Wild fchen brought the Quest back to England and after a hrief lecturing tour departed for Africa, on the venture that has proved so disastrous.