Historical Note: Hubert Wilkins was an Australian whose career would be best summed up as “adventurer”. He was, at various points of his life, a war correspondent, naturalist, geographer, climatologist, aviator, author, balloonist, war hero, reporter, secret agent, submariner and navigator, but he is best known as a polar explorer. In 1913 he was appointed the second in command of Vilhjalmur Stefansson's expedition to the Canadian Arctic. He earned a spot in the Aviator's Hall of Fame, as well as the Patrons Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, the Morse Medal of the American Geographical Society, and a knighthood, for his trips to the Arctic from 1925 to 1928. (He was accompanied by Ben Eielson, an Alaskan bush pilot, on these journeys.) The culmination of these trips was a journey of 20 hours and 20 minutes over 2,500 mostly uncharted miles that took them from Point Barrow , Alaska to Spitzbergen , Norway . After those trips, Wilkins tackled the South Pole. Backed financially by American publisher William Randolph Hearst, the expedition left New York on September 22, 1928 . On this trip Wilkins made an official British territorial claim to the Falkland Islands , an act that would later set off a war between Argentina and Britain . Wilkins planned to explore along the peninsula, and his ultimate dream was to fly across the continent to the site of Amundsen's camp from 1911. Eielson took the first flight in Antarctica during the expedition. He and Wilkins set out to explore Antarctica by air on December 20, 1928 . They documented the flight with both handheld and movie cameras, naming land features for corporate sponsors and friends as they went ( Hearst Land , Mobiloil Bay , Scripps Island , Lockheed Mountains and Cape Northrop ). Wilkins made a second trip to Antarctica in 1929. On both of these trips, Wilkins claimed Antarctica on behalf of the British. In this photograph, Wilkins' plane is stopped in Regina on the way to the Canadian Arctic to rescue some wayward Russian polar flyers.