Lincoln Ellsworth's Polar Star

摘要

It all started with a penguin. In 1913, Lincoln Ellsworth, the son of a wealthy Chicago businessman, was in London, taking a course in geographical surveying at the Royal Geographic Society. Each week he visited the London Zoo to watch the emperor penguin that Ernest Shackleton had brought back from the Antarctic in 1909. "I used to watch the strange dignified bird for hours," Ellsworth would later write. "Had it not been for that beautiful emperor penguin...I should probably never have chosen the polar regions as my field of endeavor."