Little America Read online

  That night saw the late Floyd Bennett and me at Spitsbergen. A few hours earlier we had completed the first flight by air to the North Pole and back; weary and glad, we had returned to our base, where we were greeted by my friends, Captain Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth, who themselves momentarily expected to fly in the Norge to Alaska, over our tracks to the Pole and then beyond. We had a splendid dinner that night. Toward the end, Amundsen and I drew together. “Well, Byrd,” he said, smiling, “what shall it be now?” Half humorously, half seriously, I replied: “The South Pole.” Amundsen’s face instantly became serious.

  “A big job,” he said, “but it can be done. You have the right idea. The older order is changing. Aircraft is the new vehicle for exploration. It is the only machine that can beat the Antarctic. Look here!” And he began to plan; he talked soberly and gravely, as if the fatigue and the buffetings of his magnificent journey1 were still on him, and naturally his advice was good. He suggested several capable Norwegian men; he offered the use of some of his equipment; he suggested the ship I was to use—the Samson1—”the best bargain for that kind of a job you can find anywhere.”

  Most earnestly he warned me to look to my men. “Men are the doubtful quantities in the Antarctic. The most thorough kind of preparation, the shrewdest plan, can be destroyed by an incompetent or worthless man.” In the same temper, but different words, the warning was repeated to me by a distinguished British explorer, an executive officer on Scott’s last expedition: “The first man who starts trouble of a disloyal nature deserves the worst death you can think of.” Another advised: “The first man who shows disloyalty should be handcuffed and kept so until the return to civilization.” A disagreeable procedure, but nevertheless the code of the Antarctic. On expeditions of this kind, a good man is priceless; a disloyal man is soon found out, and his comrades live to damn him and rue the day he was born.

  THE PREPARATION.—Actual formation of the expedition was held up until I completed the trans-Atlantic flight for which I had already made arrangements. That accomplished, the work of setting up the apparatus with which every expedition functions was begun. It was some months before we could afford to establish a headquarters. Our first headquarters consisted of a small room on the I 5th floor of the Putnam Building, 2 West 45th Street, New York. There was room in it for a desk and typewriter, a cabinet file and a couple of chairs. This was in the mid-winter of 1928. Within a few weeks the expedition had expanded so much that we were compelled to seek larger quarters, taking a suite of rooms at the Hotel Biltmore, the use of which Mr. John McEntee Bowman generously donated. A corps of staff assistants, under the direction of Brophy, whom I appointed business executive of the expedition, began scouring the world for the highly specialized equipment needed. One of my tasks was that of raising money, a beastly job, which I shouldered until toward the end, at which time I engaged Captain Railey, a former army officer and business man, to take over the job while I was south. He also acted as my personal representative. A better and more conscientious man I doubt if I could have picked.

  The thing grew and grew; by the spring of 1928 it was a highly organized business functioning at top speed. It had to be; our time was limited. August had been set as the date for the departure of the City of New York, September for the Boiling, and the second week in October as absolutely the latest date for the departure of any unit or supplies from the United States. As it was, we barely beat the deadlines.

  Transport was, as always, the first consideration and the last. The difference between good transport and bad is the measure of the difference between great success and failure in polar exploration. Our plans proposed the enlistment of three types—sea, ice surface and air. Each had to be selected with a view to its particular fitness to very demanding problems.

  The task of selecting a good vessel was much simplified by the kindly offices of Amundsen. On the strength of his recommendations, I purchased the Samson by cable at Tromsoe, Norway, and ordered her sailed at once to New York. She was a stout vessel, with the spirit and tradition that Conrad might have loved. She was old, as ships’ ages are measured, but not in strength. Although built in 1882, she was nearly as strong in 1928 after we reconditioned her as the day she first put out with the sealing fleet that plies in the pack ice north of Spitsbergen. When we took her over she was a barkentine, with yards on the foremast; nondescript sails rigged on the mainmast, and a fore-and-aft rig on the mizzen. We re-rigged her, and made her into a bark by putting yards on the mainmast. She carried auxiliary steam power. So she was a bit of everything; not beautiful, as square-riggers can be, but she had the stuff. Though she was very small, the scale on which she was built was herculean. Her hull was of thick spruce and oak, of the finest growth. The ribs, which were also of oak, were so thickly set amidships that a man could not thrust his hand between them. Inside, the ribs were sheathed with a layer of heavy planking; outside them lay another layer of planking, and on top of that yet another layer of greenheart. Her sides were 34 inches thick, to withstand the direct, encircling pressure of ice; and the garboards along her keel were 41 inches thick, to give her protection against longitudinal stress in case she might be caught by ice under bow and stern and lifted smartly. She was an ice-ship, in every meaning of the words. Her designers, however, had built into her massiveness full and rounded lines to give her elusiveness in avoiding the crushing embrace of Arctic ice. Like the Fram her hull was of a form that offered no particularly vulnerable point to the ice, but would instead convert its horizontal pressure into lifting the ship. Thus she might escape the “squeeze” she could not directly oppose. And thus this tiny old wooden ship could live in ice that could sink the mightiest battleship.

  But the City had one great drawback—her low horsepower, and, therefore, low speed and small cruising radius. She could scarcely generate 200 horsepower. We were fortunate that an engine built in 1882 would run at all, for we had neither the funds nor the time to equip her with new engines. How much better off we would have been had we been able to install a Diesel engine which burns oil and gives a tremendous radius of action.

  On this windjammer, then, the burden of our long-distance transport rested. It was her job to penetrate the immense belt of ice at the gateway to the Ross Sea early in the season, and to get us through in time to have all supplies unloaded before the Bay of Whales froze over.

  One other drawback of the City was her smallness—a fact vividly impressed on me as the Leviathan, one hundred times her size, drew abreast of her the day she left New York, August 25th. Our white little ship, rolling lazily in its wake, her yards clashing, was so dwarfed by the towering black sides of the Leviathan that the contrast was painful. Even could she have spared the room, there was no space on her decks sufficiently large to accommodate the fuselage of all our aircraft. The City is rated at 515 tons, with a length of 170 feet and beam of 31 feet, and her chunky thickness made her appear even smaller.

  Moreover, with advancing age her carrying capacity had diminished considerably. Her dead-weight, for example, was greatly increased as a result of water soaking into the old hull. As a matter of fact, the Resolution, one of the ships which Cook sailed into high Southern latitudes in 1772, had a greater carrying capacity than our City.

  Without aviation we might have managed with a single ship. The second ship was the Chelsea, a freighter of 800 tons cargo capacity. She was not much larger than the City, having approximately the same length and beam. Her top speed was nine knots. We purchased her because she was cheap, available and suitable for the job we had in store; otherwise, I candidly confess, she had little to recommend her. She was put in dry dock, where she underwent extensive repairs, principally looking to strengthening the forward part of her iron hull against a fatal blow from the pack ice. The choice of the Chelsea, which we renamed the Eleanor Bolling, was significant, in that, ours, so far as I know, was the first exploration party to risk a metal hull in or south of the pack.

  I came in for much criticism when I ann
ounced my intention of taking the Bolling to the Antarctic. But I had studied the matter carefully and was convinced that it could be done. The success or failure of the expedition hung upon this point. Captain Gustav Brown would have grave responsibility.

  There was, however, prior experience to justify the choice. Steel-hulled Norwegian whalers of the type of the C. A. Larsen and the Sir James Clark Ross, had made seasonal passages through the pack to and from the Ross Sea without accident. Immense vessels, they can call upon their vast reserve of horsepower to escape from a threatening squeeze, and thus by sheer force avoid the clashing pressure which might sink either of them in a very short time. Moreover, they undertake the passage only when conditions are favorable; when the warming sun and drift of mid-summer have broken up the ice and offer a maze of open leads. Whether our little ship, with its puny engines,1 could thus play hide-and-seek with the squeeze was the question. There was this difference. The Bolling had to get through. For she was to carry the airplanes and equally indispensable supplies.

  The cost of outfitting these two ships, including the original price, was approximately $285,000. This work was done at cost, as an act of friendship, by Mr. William Todd at the Todd Ship Yard. This represented a considerable saving. The distinguished naval constructor, Captain Gatewood, offered to superintend the refitting, and he and Mr. Todd’s son, Herbert, and engineer, Bill Smith, rendered us invaluable services.

  When she arrived at New York, the City was in woeful condition. I never believed a ship could be so run down. It was necessary to make new sails, her entire rigging had to be renewed, a new boiler installed, rotted planks in her hull replaced, and the whole ship, from stem to stern, refitted and strengthened. This preparation was costly, but of course it was necessary.

  No doubt it would have been better in every way had we seen our way clear to build new vessels, constructed especially with the Antarctic navigation problem in view; but new ships are very expensive, and such advantages are luxuries denied all but a few expeditions. To have constructed new ships for the same purpose to which our second-hand craft were turned would have cost at least half a million dollars, an expenditure which was obviously out of the question.

  I confess both ships gave me several distressing nights, even before the expedition really got underway. The stouthearted City came very near ending her days on the Atlantic. Her skipper was Captain Dietrichsen, a seagoing man of the old school, with a love for sail that he appears to have for no other thing. Skipper Isaak Isaaksen sailed the City from Tromsoe, her home port, to Oslo. From there Dietrichsen brought her across the Atlantic. She was then under sail and steam; and so long as her screw turned the chief engineer had considerable to do with the running of the ship—more than the skipper cared for.

  A few hundred miles off the English coast, the City ran into dirty weather; and while straining against heavy seas, her boiler buckled. Why it didn’t burst, no one will ever know. If it had the explosion would have sent her to the bottom. Power gone, she came around by the head; seas washed over her incessantly and she seemed ready to succumb to the next wave. A less imaginative man than Dietrichsen might have accepted it as the beginning of a disaster; but he, instead, accepted it as the ordained severance of a disagreeable arrangement. By heroic measures, he fought out the storm and then continued westward—under sail. The engineer had become a supernumerary. The trip consumed nearly three months; having no wireless, Dietrichsen could not report the accident; she was long overdue, and as each day passed without word from her, we began to fear she had been lost. She was finally sighted off Newfoundland, becalmed, and the skipper was replenishing his much depleted larder with fish caught on a hand-made hook.

  Dietrichsen’s description of his emotions at the time of the accident is worthy of all the traditions of sailing masters. “Worried? Damn, I was so glad those stinkin’ engines were stopped I could have brought her back alone. You can’t mix sail and steam.”

  The Bolling had a spectacular run from Brooklyn to Norfolk, Va. She put out from the former port Sept. I 6, and off Cape May was boarded by a coast guardsman, as a rum-running suspect, an experience that made us feel more than ever for her dowdy lines. The day she left, I took a train to Norfolk, intending to meet her there and superintend the loading of stores assembled there. Most of the crew were volunteers—green men, few of whom had ever been to sea—and I was anxious to see how they would stand up under the trip. She was due at Norfolk the next day, Monday, in the afternoon.

  Monday came and went, and she failed to appear, nor was there any radio from her. This was most surprising, as Malcolm Hanson and. Howard Mason, expert radio engineers, had assured me they would get messages through.

  Tuesday morning—still no word from her. I became alarmed.

  About ten o’clock A.M. I was called to the telephone. The caller identified himself as an amateur radio operator. He said he had picked up the Bolling and she reported she had a very urgent message for me. Communication, however, broke down, and he was unable to raise her again. He gathered the message was in the nature of an S. 0. S.

  As if the situation was not already grave enough, a hurricane of great force, one of the worst in years, was reported to have struck the Gulf of Mexico, and was working its way northward up the Atlantic Coast. Tuesday afternoon, it struck our coast with prostrating force. There was no word from the Bolling.

  The things I could do at Norfolk were painfully circumscribed. There was no way of determining the whereabouts of the Bolling; she might have been anywhere along 300 miles of coastline. I ordered an airplane sent south from New York, to survey the coast down to Norfolk; but bad weather turned it back. I stood by the radio for thirty-six hours without a break. I was in constant touch with the Navy Department and the Coast Guard Headquarters at Washington. Neither of them had had word.

  Seven o’clock Tuesday night, the captain of a seagoing Navy tug reported that he had caught a glimpse of the Bolling in Hampton Roads. She was laboring heavily, he said, but apparently anchored. But whether she was out of commission; whether she was dragging anchor and headed for shoal water, he was unable to say. Thick weather allowed him only a fleeting glimpse. The seas were rough. We could tell that at Norfolk. Water filled the main streets, having been blown up by the storm, and traffic had stopped.

  In this crisis, I appealed to Admiral Burrage, Commandant of the Naval District, and within a few hours he had dispatched a tug to the Boiling’s assistance. They found her in Hampton Roads. She had dragged her anchor some, but otherwise was safe. The next morning she came into Norfolk under her own power. The report of her skipper, Captain Brown, was terse. After passing Cape May, a 70 miles-per-hour hurricane bore down upon her; and in the sliding, whirling, spinning fireroom the greenhorns assigned to stoke the fires either fell violently ill or useless. Despite the efforts of Chief Engineer McPherson, and his assistant engineers, Leland Barter, Elbert Thawley, and John Cody, steam fell rapidly, headway was lost and the force of the wind drove the ship landward. McPherson himself shoveled coal during this time with the strength of a Samson. A great many times this loyal chief was destined to shovel alongside his own firemen. In the crisis, two of the scientific staff, Captain McKinley and Dr. Haldor Barnes, the assistant medical officer, volunteered to take the places of the stricken firemen. Neither had ever handled a coal shovel before; but with great courage and determination they managed to keep the fires going. At this point the breakdown of the generating plant made the radio apparatus effective only for reception. Hanson could pick up my messages, but not reply to them. Making barely five knots, with steam low, the Bolling passed Hog Island, made her way to Cape Henry and finally gained the shelter of the Roads. All in all, they were very trying days; and our two “white collar” scientists were very exhausted men.

  Affairs like these made our work of preparation in the United States anything but monotonous.

  Months of thought and experiment were expended in the building up of our air forces. Our largest plane was a For
d tri-motored all metal monoplane. My selection of a three engined plane for the major transport and investigative operations in the Antarctic was governed wholly by reasons I have repeatedly made public in the past—an ability to maintain flight in the event of failure of one engine, and a lengthened gliding angle if two should fail, conditions of load and wind being favorable. Although such a plane, by reason of an aerodynamic law too complicated to explain here, is scarcely 65 percent as efficient as a single-engined plane of equal horsepower, the added factor of safety, plus the necessity of carrying on every important flight a heavy load of scientific equipment and emergency gear, made this type the essential vehicle. The latter factor was even more important than the former.

  It has been our first intention to power this plane with three Whirlwinds;1 but my friend, Charles L. Lawrance, president of the Wright Company, had developed the more powerful Cyclone engine, which is rated at 525 horsepower. We mounted a 525 horsepower Cyclone in the nose, using two Whirlwinds outboard—that is, under the wings. This gave us a total horsepower of nearly 1,000—200 horsepower more than the stock plane, a top speed of 122 miles per hour, a cruising speed of from 110 to 116 miles per hour, an easy load capacity of 15,000 pounds.

  More power was necessary to enable us to meet the problem of hurling this plane, on the main polar flight, over the passes through the enormous mountains1 buttressing the polar plateau. Having decided that the aerial gateway to the Pole would be found approximately in the vicinity of the point where Amundsen made his ascent, we knew in advance, from his reports, the approximate nature and dimensions of the conditions with which we must contend. The Ford, accordingly, was carefully redesigned2 to meet them.