Little America Read online

  The question is: can we hold up our end of the bargain? Frankly, I don’t know. The odds, in fact, are overwhelmingly against us. According to the latest radios, the City is in the doldrums and logging less then fifty miles per day. If the whales get scarce north of the pack early in the season, we are licked, for then the Larsen will risk an early passage in an attempt to reach the better fishing grounds south of the pack. But in bending effort to meet her, we have much to lose if we fail and everything to gain if we succeed.

  The problem of basing in the Antarctic turns almost entirely upon coal. The vessels used for exploration work in the ice are generally too small to allow of a safe surplus of cruising radius. A large and powerful oil-burner would be just the thing for this kind of work: but where is an indigent explorer going to get the money necessary to build one? The problem we face now almost every Antarctic explorer faced in the past. The round trip between Dunedin and the Bay of Whales is approximately 4,600 miles. The maximum amount of coal we can allow the City is 150 tons below decks and another 50 tons on the deck. Steaming all day, she uses six tons, according to Mulroy’s1 latest wireless; and as she averages under steam about 100 miles per day, she therefore has a steaming range of about 3,300 miles. Of course she can eke this out with sail; but the danger lies in the fact that power is absolutely necessary in the pack. If we encounter nasty weather in the Bay of Whales, I fear she will be steaming much of the time until the unloading is finished. We shall certainly have to keep up steam for the month we shall lie alongside the ice at the Bay of Whales.

  With the expected relay of tows, however, the City should be able to enter the Ross Sea with bunkers almost full, and a sufficient supply of coal to see her through.

  I cannot begin to describe the many ways in which Captain Nilsen has aided us. This quiet, soft-spoken and amazingly competent whaling master has what is probably the loneliest job in the world. Every August he takes the Larsen out of Norway and down and across two oceans to the Ross Sea, an 18,000 mile journey to the last retreat of the whale; and May comes round before he sees his home again. Three months of that time he has the responsibility of the safety of his valuable vessel under conditions that would quickly break the spirit of a lesser man; but he appears to be a man with strength of purpose, a resolute mind and an acquired cunning in ice lore that Nature’s violence could not bend aside. His knowledge of ice conditions is very extensive, and it is a pity it is not yet to be found in books.

  Attacking the pack is a matter no less involved from a tactical point of view than a military problem. The Continent is the objective, the pack is the enemy entrenched in front of it, and our ships are the forces with which the attack is pressed. “The White Warfare”1 of the Antarctic begins with the pack itself, when it is first met on the way south, and the outcome is always in doubt until it is traversed on the way out. Thus far man has mastered it provisionally; but though he may run its gauntlet in the summer, he must ever treat it with respect as a dangerous enemy. In the winter it reigns supreme. Probably all the navies of the world together could not batter their way through.

  The time at which a passage is attempted and the place at which the pack is entered largely determine the conditions and duration of the passage. The first man to break through it, the distinguished British navigator, Sir James Clark Ross, on January 5, at Long. 174° 34’ E. entered the pack and four days later emerged in the clear, sun-lit waters of Ross Sea. Barely eleven months later—Dec. 18, 1841—when he tackled the pack at Long. 146° W., far to the east, it took him forty-four days to struggle through 800 miles of ice.

  The first of the many dreadful blows that were finally to overwhelm Scott fell upon him in the pack. The Terra Nova entered the pack, December 9, 1910, on Long. 177° 41’ W.,1 Scott having concluded that the 178° W.2 meridian offered the best passage, only to be rewarded “by encountering worse conditions than any ship has had before.”3 December 25th, the Terra Nova was still in the pack, and Scott wrote in his diary: “We are captured. We do practically nothing under sail to push through, and could do little under steam, and at each step the possibility of advance seems to lessen…. Again the call is for patience and again patience.”4 The vessel did not get clear until December 30,5 after twenty-one days in the pack, and as a result much valuable time Scott hoped to use in preliminary exploration was lost.

  This is the record from its gloomier side. The pack is often more amenable. Less than a month after Scott’s ill-favored entrance, Amundsen’s Fram reached the pack on Long. 176° E., and four days later was in open water in the Ross Sea—”a four day pleasure trip,” Amundsen described it.6 Shackleton’s Nimrod entering the pack on January 15, 1908, at 179° W., gained open water in thirty hours. The only thing about the pack I have been able to learn with certainty is its changeable nature. The danger of the pack is in getting beset and drifted to the Westward into the impossible ice that churns about the Balleny Islands. This is what we will have to watch and prevent.

  The sum of the written evidence as I had studied it, indicates quite clearly that the 178° east meridian offers on the whole, the easier passage through the Ross Sea, to the east and the west, apparently, the pack is denser and more tenacious. So, if we fail to make connections with the Larsen, we can be fairly certain of getting through the pack unaided toward the middle or the last part of January. Such a delay might very well mean the failure of our program. If the ice has not by then gone out of the Bay of Whales, we shall have a difficult task to unload our stores. There will be no time for flying. Both ships must be sent North before March. If they should become frozen in the pack, we should run great risk of losing the City and most certainly the Bolling. If the worst comes, I must face the possibility of freezing the City in for the winter, a notion neither to my plan or liking.

  Captain Nilsen is decidedly pessimistic about our chances of keeping the rendezvous. Generally by the third week in November, both the Larsen and the Ross are prowling about the edge of the pack, ready to seize the first promising lead southward. If conditions warrant it, he said, both ships will enter the pack at once. Although past experience is overwhelmingly against finding similar conditions, one of the large steel whaling ships forced a passage as early as the middle of November, several years ago, after unusually heavy winds, storms and currents had broken up the pack.

  At the risk of being ungrateful to our Norwegian friends, we are hoping that such will not be the case this year. The advantages accruing to the boost the Larsen can give us are immeasurable—the saving in coal, the gain in time may well mean the difference between large and mediocre accomplishments. If the pack holds firm until as late as the first week in December, we have an excellent chance.

  Aboard the S.S. Larsen

  October 30th

  It is trying to have the expedition scattered all over the Pacific, in four ships separated by hundreds of miles of sea. This is past helping now. How much better it would be if we could have afforded to build a single ship large enough to do the job. Every man would then have a sense of being part of a whole organization, would come to know the other men with whom he must work during the next year and a half, and, more important, might gain thereby a proper valuation of the job itself. With the exception of the scientists and several of the aviators, I doubt whether a dozen men on this expedition have any idea of the difficulties that face us. It is only natural that they should not. Very few know anything about this new world we shall enter into. A good many of them appear to think it is no more than an heroic journey, with opportunities galore for valorous deeds, high adventure and the like. They will have a rude awakening: heroism and coal shovels are not yet identified in common in their minds, but in the Antarctic it is only by prodigious use of the latter and of allied implements, such as the snow shovel, that attainment of the former state is possible.

  The thought has occurred to me repeatedly that we are strangers. Scarcely a score know each other except by name and reputation. Drawn together by the common wish to participate in the
expedition, these eighty odd men have been shoved, with scarcely a pause for introduction, into this lengthy journey, some of them on two highly odoriferous whalers, the rest of them on our own ships, one of them ancient, the other uncomfortable, and both of them small. The differences that separate us have been marked even in the group aboard the Larsen. Of the fourteen men with me, only one, Russell Owen,1 calls me by my first name. It has already been necessary to rebuke one man, an officer in the military, for high-hatting one of the men who happens to be in the enlisted ranks. This officer is not to blame. He hasn’t had time to learn that special privileges will not obtain on this expedition. An expedition allows of no social differences. “It is the man that counts, here as everywhere,”2 as Nansen says; but especially here.

  Where is there another organization knit together as this one? Outwardly it appears to lack the factors that make for stability and cooperation in civilization. There can be no promotion for work well done—no increase in pay. In fact, money scarcely enters into it. Many of the men are either volunteers or else receive only what is necessary to support their families during their absence. None of them could be paid for the service he will render. Nor can there be any lawful punishment for a misdeed or failure. There is no brig, with bread and water diet. There can be no court-martial for disrespect, or over-staying liberty, or desertion. There is only one thing holding us together, disciplining us, identifying us from any other collection of persons on the high seas. It is the fact of loyalty. Loyalty not only to a common purpose; but loyalty according to the various ideals we live by: loyalty to family, to country, to men, even to self, and to God. In this affinity I place my hope. There is no other bond on earth save this that will see men through an Antarctic winter night and the other experiences that lie ahead of us.

  As a group, the men represent all that I had hoped for. Choosing men for a trip like this is a ghastly responsibility. I know now what Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen and Mawson went through; if I fare as well as they, I shall be lucky. Men are at once the strongest and the weakest links in the chain. The performance of machinery in the face of given conditions can be anticipated with accuracy; but what men will do is past prophecy. The man who Scott thought would outlast all others was the first to collapse.

  The idea of selecting men according to their faces alone is one of the most fantastic notions yet swallowed by the race. Whoever claims to be able to judge his fellow men by their faces is an optimist. The face shows certain things, it is true, but you must live with a man for a long time, see him as he stands and thinks in relation to rapidly altering conditions; and even then you have no certainty: only the probability that he will act in the future as he did in the past. I have taken but one man on his face—Captain McKinley,1 and in his case a very splendid record in the U. S. Air Service more than bore out the first impression. His is the one case in ten thousand where nobility shows unmistakably in his face.

  The rest of the men, save for the handful who served me on other expeditions, were taken according to their records and abilities. They come from everywhere, and appear to have done nearly everything. Dr. Laurence M. Gould is a full-fledged professor, with two summer Arctic expeditions in his biography. Dr. Coman was a staff surgeon at Johns Hopkins. During the World War he served four years with the French Army. McGuinness, a citizen of Ireland, the mate on the City, is an adventurer of the vanishing type. He seems to have taken a very impartial part in the war, having fought both in the English and German armies. When the mood is on him, he talks of occasional anti-social activities such as gun-running. He is hard, courageous and resourceful, able to do a great many things well. He was a General in Ireland and has commanded blockade running ships. Vaughan, Crockett and Goodale—already labelled the Three Musketeers—were at Harvard, when they decided to go south: more than a year ago, they resigned and spent the winter in New Hampshire hills learning to be dog-drivers. At least two young men are the sons of millionaires. The oldest and most experienced man on the party is Martin Ronne, a Norwegian 68 years old, whom I can see from my desk as I write: he is a veteran of several of Amundsen’s expeditions. It was a silken tent he made, left behind by Amundsen, that Scott found at the South Pole; and of him Amundsen wrote: “he was one of those men whose ambition it is to get as much work as possible done in the shortest possible time.”1 I have begun to understand why Amundsen recommended him. I doubt if I will ever come across again another man like Ronne where work is concerned. He goes at it with concentration all day long for fear he may waste time by a false move. He is probably the greatest craftsman in polar clothing to be found anywhere. I hope the rest of his countrymen shape up as well as he does. There are seven of them, all splendid men, it seems to me. They are to act as dog-drivers, instructors in skiing, mates and as ice pilots.

  Everything more or less turns upon the men. To expect that all of them will come through, nearly two years hence, with untarnished records would be silly; the law of averages alone would argue to the contrary. I can only hope that the man whose misfortune it is to fail will have the manhood to hold himself to blame. Dissatisfaction spread by a single man can infect an expedition as a stone, cast into water, soon disturbs its whole surface. I know a little about every man on the expedition; there will not be many slackers among them, even when the going is hardest. The Antarctic is like war in one respect, as Cherry-Garrard has said, “There is no getting out of it with honor as long as you can put one foot before the other.”1

  Thus, the journal, which was thereafter, I confess, too neglected for, and I too busy to give it, more than random impressions jotted down in haste. A sentence often had to do for a day’s complicated details; a paragraph for a week’s vicissitudes. But now, in the leisurely quiet of the New Hampshire hills, I have had time to go back, to pick up the threads of the narrative; to see things steadily and to see them whole, with all things done and all hopes and fears having run out their sand. From this point of vantage it is possible to see the two years more clearly, with less prejudice and more sureness, through the first planning, then the preparations and, finally, the field work itself.

  Footnotes

  1 “The Voyage of the Discovery,” i, p. 30.

  2 Hayes, “Antarctica,” p. 365.

  3 Ibid., p. 265.

  1 The Norwegian whaler C. A. Larsen.

  1 Captain Hilton Howell Railey, manager of expedition affairs in New York City, and personal representative and friend of Admiral Byrd.

  1 Time is the principal factor controlling the safety and quickness of passages through the pack ice which lies between the Antarctic Continent and New Zealand. From Dec. 20th on, when the pack begins to break up and drift, a passage through to the Ross Sea can be generally found. Latei-than the first of March, however. the transit craft faces the probability of being “frozen in” if it can penetrate the pack at all.

  1 Sir Douglas Mawson, perhaps the greatest living authority on the Antarctic, leader of the Australasian Expedition (1911–1914) and the Mawson Antarctic Expedition (1929–1930).

  2 Mawson, “The Home of the Blizzard,” i, p. 24.

  3 Ibid., ii, p. 10.

  4 Ibid., i, p. 134.

  5 The Beaufort Scale is graduated from zero—a dead calm—up to 12—a hurricane of 75 m.p.h. or more. The remarkable thing is that the wind pressure increases much more rapidly than the velocity. At 100 m.p.h. the pressure is almost double that at 70 m.p.h.

  1 Mawson, “The Home of the Blizzard,” ii, p. 149.

  2 Ibid., i, p. 133.

  3 Bernt Balchen, former Lieutenant in the Royal Norwegian Naval Air Force, veteran of two Amundsen-Ellsworth aerial expeditions in the Arctic; the trans-Atlantic flight of the “America” and the Bremen Relief flight.

  4 Dean C. Smith.

  1 Captain Alton Parker, Marine Corps, a member of the North Pole Expedition and a very competent pilot.

  1 Chief Engineer Thomas B. Mulroy who was also Chief Engineer of the North Pole expedition ship, The Chantier. He acted also. fuel engineer
of the Antarctic expedition.

  1 Shackleton’s “South,” preface.

  1 “Scott’s Last Expedition,” i, p. 15.

  2 Ibid., etc. i, p. 26.

  3 Ibid., etc. I, p. 26.

  4 Ibid., i, p. 37.

  5 Ibid., i, p. 69.

  6 “South Pole,“ i, p. 166.

  1 Mr. Russell Owen, correspondent of the New York Times.

  2 Amundsen, “The South Pole” introduction.

  1 Ashley C. McKinley, aerial surveyor.

  1 “The South Pole,” i, 135.

  1 Cherry-Garrard, “Worst Journey in the World,” introduction.

  CHAPTER II

  THE PLAN, THE PREPARATION AND THE PROBLEM

  THE PLAN.—My interest in the South Polar regions dates far back and seems always to have been synonymous with the names of Scott and Peary, of whom I had heard a great deal in my youth. The notion that I should like to go there recurred to mind with greater frequency, in later years, and, as I became connected with aviation, with increasing enthusiasm. But the plan, which I had secretly worked out, was not spoken of until the night of May 10th, 1926. It is a date not likely to fade from memory; for the two men who shared it with me are dead, having later sacrificed their lives in an attempt to aid fellow pioneers.