Lincoln Ellsworth

Lincoln Ellsworth (born May 12, 1880, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died May 26, 1951, New York, New York) was an American explorer, engineer, and scientist who led the first trans-Arctic (1926) and trans-Antarctic (1935) air crossings.

A wealthy adventurer, Ellsworth was a surveyor and engineer in Canada for five years (1903–08), worked for three years with the U.S. Biological Survey, and served in the U.S. Army in World War I, training as an aviator. In 1924 he led the Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Maryland) trans-Andean topographic survey from the Amazon River basin over the Andes Mountains to the Pacific Ocean shores of Peru.

Fascinated with polar air exploration, Ellsworth financed and accompanied two such expeditions with the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. On the first (1925) they reached latitude 87°44′ N in two amphibian planes; an emergency landing without radio caused them to be given up for lost. With 30 days of grim effort, they carved out a takeoff field on the rough polar ice pack, after which one plane, overloaded with the total party of six, returned to Spitsbergen (in the Svalbard archipelago), off northern Norway. The following year Ellsworth and Amundsen, along with the Italian explorer Umberto Nobile, made the first traverse of the Arctic basin in the dirigible Norge—a 3,393-mile (5,463-km) journey from Spitsbergen to Alaska that won worldwide acclaim. In 1931 Ellsworth made an 800-mile (1,300-km) canoe trip through central Labrador and later that year, for the American Geographical Society, made flights over Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya—Arctic islands north of what was then the Soviet Union (now Russia).

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In late 1935, on the third of four private expeditions to Antarctica, Ellsworth and Canadian pilot Herbert Hollick-Kenyon flew across the continent from the Antarctic Peninsula to the abandoned Little America base on the Ross Ice Shelf. The two, often beset by bad weather, flew for some two weeks, and their plane ran out of fuel before they got to the base. They reached it only after a harrowing 11-day journey on foot and eventually were retrieved in mid-January 1936 by a party sent out to find them. The area they covered during the flight, including the Sentinel Range of the Ellsworth Mountains, is now named Ellsworth Land and Marie Byrd Land. In 1939 he again flew over Antarctica and named the American Highland in the Indian Ocean quadrant.