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  Weight, of course, was the consideration, first, last and always. And because it was apparent, from the day I made my first calculations, there would be scant discrepancy between the total amount of load we should absolutely have to take and the total load the plane could lift, we began shaving excess poundage from the start. We saved in the construction of the plane. By use of a lighter skin, we saved 235 pounds; by using celluloid instead of glass in the cabin windows, 80 pounds; by omitting cabin trim, 155 pounds, and cabin chairs, 94 pounds. We saved 564 pounds in the structure alone.

  Two other planes were acquired, for reserve, for use of the scientists in the field, for transport—in short to provide us with a surplus of effective machines to insure the carrying out of the program of scientific inquiry if one, or even two machines were wrecked. These included a Fokker Universal monoplane,3 with a 425 h. p. Pratt and Whitney Wasp engine, and a Fairchild folding wing monoplane.4 We carried also a small plane manufactured by General Aircraft.5

  The experience we had had with the use of skis on aircraft in connection with the North Pole flight was invaluable in the preparation for the antarctic problem. Long before the expedition sailed from the United States, Floyd Bennett and Bernt Balchen flew to Canada and tested various types of skis on the snow. During the early stages of preparation, Bennett planned the aviation equipment which was used in the Antarctic. His death deprived me of a judgment, loyalty, and determination in which I always had implicit faith. Had he lived, he would have been second in command.

  Our surface transport was more in keeping with Antarctic traditions. Our dogs were mostly Greenland huskies, of the breed and blood with which some of the greatest marches in the polar regions have been made. Seventy-nine of these came from Labrador, and were donated by Frank W. Clark, of the Clark Trading Company. Sixteen dogs came from the farm of Arthur T. Walden, at Wonalancet, among them the famous “Chinook.” These were heavy draught animals, of his own breed, with a splendid record in transport.

  In addition, we proposed the usual experiment with motorized surface transport.1 The choice, in our case, was a Ford snowmobile. It had a powerful engine mounted upon caterpillar treads, which it was hoped would prove useful in towing sledges to the various depots in the preliminary unloading operations and, perhaps later, in the laying of southern depots.

  For the balance of our preparation and supplies, there is space for no more than a summary. The outfitting of the expedition was hard work; for many months all of us had to serve as jack-of-many-trades. We were alternately cartographer, dietician, purchasing agent, fund-raiser, haberdasher, aircraft expert and many other things. In each of these activities I was ably assisted, and often wholly supported, by the men whom I placed in charge of various departments. The work of Dr. Francis Dana Coman, of the surgical staff of Johns Hopkins Hospital, was especially valuable in the creation of the Commissary. Although biologist and bacteriologist by designation, this brilliant medico took over the job of dietician, and with it the responsibility of keeping the expedition healthy and strong during the stay on the ice. Commissary Steward Sydney Greason did splendid work in the procuring of our food supplies. His wife was a most enthusiastic helper and the expedition owes her much. George Tennant, who was the Chief Cook of the North Pole Expedition, helped to work up the amounts of food required. Food was selected according to its vitamin value; and the considerable advances made in the science of dietetics enabled us to formulate an excellent diet, monotonous perhaps, but wholesome, strength-giving and economical. We had the inevitable pemmican in large quantities. This was made according to Amundsen’s formula, and he, in turn, developed it from “emergency ration” prepared for the Norwegian Army.

  Pemmican is absolutely necessary on sledging journeys, because of its compressed nourishment. A man engaged in hard physical labor usually consumes between four and five pounds of food per day, of which half is water. The water content of pemmican is less than three percent; the sledging rations of the British Antarctic Expeditions, for example, were 34 ounces per man per diem. Pemmican makes an important saving in weight. The weight of ordinary meat would be prohibitive for long sledge journeys. Our pemmican was prepared for us at Copenhagen; it was one of the last things Amundsen did for me. It came to us in blocks of half a pound, wrapped in tin foil, and these blocks in turn were packed in unit boxes of 25 pounds. This uniform weight and size rendered it easy to pack and to count out. Pemmican is hardly a food for a fastidious man: it is greasy and rich; but explorers on the march, who are of necessity on reduced rations, soon come to look upon it as food fit for the gods. Nowhere in literature has food been so rapturously beatified as in Shackleton’s praise of the ever-thinning “hoosh” that sustained him and his party on their starvation-dash to within 97 miles of the Pole.

  We took precautions against scurvy, which had weakened several Antarctic expeditions. The Insulin Company, at our request, undertook a series of experiments on rats and finally announced the development of a dried fruit powder, containing the vital vitamin C, which, it was promised, would prevent scurvy. We also took large quantities of lime juice, crushed orange juice and lemon powders. As I had hoped, these preventatives proved unnecessary; taking a leaf out of Peary’s book, we stocked up with fresh seal meat before winter set in, and got through without a single symptom of scurvy. I want to acknowledge here the debt we owe to those polar explorers who by their suffering and sacrifices taught us how to prepare.

  In the selection of radio equipment, the Navy Department and New York Times were especially valuable. I suppose this single department received more attention than any other, for our program called for the most elaborate system of communication ever proposed in a Continent where radio conditions are notoriously bad.21 The necessity of constantly directing the various units of the expeditions in the field—the ships at sea, the dog teams on the Barrier, the aircraft in flight—as well as maintaining communication with the rest of the world compelled us to procure the best equipment available. As we were truly pioneering in this field, there was an excellent chance of acquiring much new information about radio-magnetic conditions in the Southern Hemisphere, especially with reference to the mysterious heaviside layer which does queer things to radio.

  In spite of assistance from the Navy, the New York Times and several commercial corporations, the radio became very costly. This was another heavy expense with which former expeditions were not saddled. We took with us five radio engineers. Malcolm Hanson was assigned to the expedition by the Navy Department. He is a very capable engineer and a veteran of the North Pole expedition. Mason had built and used radio sets in the Arctic. Grenlie was another veteran of the Polar expedition. The fourth man was Carl Petersen, a splendid Norwegian with an adventurous nature. Lloyd Berkner was assigned to the expedition by the Department of Commerce. He is an able and enthusiastic radio engineer.

  When the minimum requirements for the expedition over a period of two years were finally arrived at, it immediately became necessary to increase everything by half. Upon us, as upon all previous expeditions to the Antarctic, there fell the obligation of providing for a second winter on the ice, in case the relief ships should be unable to get through in 1930. That meant preparing for three years in the field.

  As the supplies accumulated, they were assigned to the ships that were to carry them. Everything bought and stored was carefully recorded and indexed, so that the amount and its whereabouts would be determinable. The midnight oil burned over this job was considerable. The loading of the City began first. Owing to her low speed, it was necessary that she leave the United States well in advance of the Bolling; we hoped—too optimistically, it turned out—she would make the trip to New Zealand in less than three months. With 200 tons of material aboard, and a crew of 33, she put out from Hoboken, August 25th, 1928, and made for the Panama Canal. Her master was Captain Frederick Melville, a sailing man of excellent reputation who, in the face of the times, had not deserted sail. McGuinness was first mate. Frank D. Davies the physi
cist of the expedition, and Henry Harrison, a meteorologist assigned by the U. S. Weather Bureau, went as ordinary seamen—no easy berth on a bark rigged ship.

  The Bolling, under command of Captain Brown, put out from Norfolk, Virginia, exactly a month later. She carried 300 tons of supplies and a crew of 28. Aboard her were several of the scientific staff, including Dr. L. M. Gould, the geologist, William Haines of the U. S. Weather Bureau, who proved to be a godsend on the North Pole Expedition, and Captain McKinley, the distinguished aerial mapper.

  A third detachment went aboard the Norwegian whaler Sir James Clark Ross, which took on Mr. Walden, the dog-drivers, Norman Vaughan, Eddie Goodale and Fred Crockett, and ninety-four dogs at Nor folk, as well as forty tons of dog biscuits. By sending the dogs on this much faster vessel, it was possible to reduce considerably the time they must endure the tropical heat on the Pacific. They would have suffered greatly on our small crowded ships. We owe much to Magnus Konow, the Norwegian whaling director, who generously provided us with this transport. Anticipating the difficulties that the operation of unloading would involve, I wanted to take the dogs to the Antarctic in the best condition possible.

  The fourth detachment of the expedition was on the Larsen. At Norfolk she took aboard the four airplanes, the aviation gas and oil, about 100 tons of supplies and the aviation personnel. The task of clearing up ultimate details as well as reducing the deficit left me no alternative save to remain in New York upto the last minute. Brophy, Russell Owen, Ralph Shropshire, assistant to the scientific staff, Sergeant Benjamin Roth, assigned by the U. S. Army, Willard Van der Veer and Lofgren, who accompanied me across the Continent, boarded the Larsen at San Pedro. October 10th, she put out to sea.

  So the second week of October saw all four units on the Pacific, widely scattered, but all hurrying southwestward as fast as their varied speeds would allow, toward the concentration points at New Zealand. I was reminded of a naval force converging for a distant action. The entry in my journal of October 14th, the fourth day out on the Larsen, shows that on that day the City reported its noon position as halfway between Panama and Pitcairn Island, far to the southeast; still farther south was the Ross, making excellent speed; and the Boiling had the Galápagos Islands abeam.

  THE PROBLEM. Any discussion of the Antarctic problem, except perhaps in scientific circles, soon comes up hard on the question: “… but what’s the use of it? What’s the value of snow and ice so many miles away?” It is sometimes difficult to answer what earthly purpose the great white continent serves. It is not that the answer is necessarily lacking in logic or conviction; more often it is that the asking mind has not turned its thought in that direction; for the most unpracticed student in polar history must soon sense its great significance. We lack, most of us, the universal, philosophical point of view. As is natural in our own crowded affairs, we see things narrowly, especially in a matter such as this, in trite, personal and commercial terms of worth. Antarctica, “a vast wonderland laid out on a giant scale, in which littleness has no place,” cannot be judged, or appraised, according to limited values. Vainly did I try to impress this fact upon a well-known American business man. “But where’s the money in it? Where’s the profit?” he demanded.

  Candidly, at this moment the Antarctic is sleeping, so far as we can calculate its value to modern civilization. But no one, except God, can tell how long it will remain sleeping. Cook, over a hundred years ago, returning from his magnificent journeys in high southern latitudes, exclaimed that if a southern continent was ever found, it must remain a continent without a future. “Countries condemned to everlasting rigidity by Nature, never to yield to the warmth of the sun, for whose wild and desolate aspect I find no words; such are the countries we have discovered; what then may those resemble which lie still further to the South? … Should anyone possess the resolution and the fortitude to elucidate this point by pushing yet further south than I have done, I shall not envy him the fame of his discovery, but I make bold to declare that the world will derive no benefit from it.”1 But now, in summertime, its waters swarm with Norwegian whalers who annually harvest a revenue of $15,000,000 from their catch. Immense beds of coal were hinted at by Shackleton’s discoveries,2 Scott found copper,3 there was iron in the “red mountain” that Shackleton climbed in search of a highway leading to the Pole.4 Economic minerals were found by Mawson’s party at Adelie Land,5 and Scott’s Northern Party, under command of Prof. T. Edgeworth David, found titanium on Depot Island,1 a place he described as “truly a most wonderful place geologically, and a perfect elysium for the mineralogist.” These, to be sure, are remote possibilities. There is a much richer ore to be mined immediately in terra incognita.

  Dr. Mawson has said: “The polar regions, like any other part of the globe, may be said to be paved with facts, the essence of which it is necessary to acquire before knowledge of the special zone can be brought even to provisional exactitude. On the face of it, polar research may be said to be specific and discriminating, but it must be remembered that an advance in any one of the departments into which, for convenience, science is artificially divided, conduces to the advantage of the whole. If we ignore the facts contained in one part of the world, surely we are hampering scientific advance.”2

  The fascinating fact about the great southern continent, whose area has been estimated at five million square miles, is that its existence was definitely proved only ninety years ago, and it has been under intensive investigation for only thirty years. “Even now the Antarctic is to the rest of the earth as the Abode of the Gods was to the ancient Chaldees, a precipitous and mammoth land lying far beyond the seas which encircled man’s habitation, and nothing is more striking about the exploration of the Southern Polar region than its absence, for when King Alfred reigned in England the Vikings were navigating the ice-fields of the North; yet when Wellington fought the battle of Waterloo there was still an undiscovered continent in the South.”3

  From the Greeks comes the name—anti and arktos, meaning “opposite the bear,” or polar region; and as the Greeks knew the earth was round, it is possible they used the word Antarctic,4 to describe a continent balancing a north polar region of which they knew and thus give symmetry to their conception of a spherical earth. But for hundreds of years the Antarctic problem was no more than a philosophical conception. From the middle ages on, however, the notion of a vast southern continent, Terra Australis Incognita, laid hold of the imaginations and ambitions of cartographers and explorers alike, and maps of the period show it in grotesque shapes and connections. It was assumed to be inhabited by millions of people, fertile, rich in gold and silver, temperate, and possessing the other qualities which the empire-searching seafarers of the Mediterranean always hoped to find.

  They pressed southward, one after another, in their cockleshell ships, ever believing that with the lifting of a new parallel of latitude the mysterious southern continent would come into view. Diaz, pushing toward the southern coast of Africa in 1487, found a living people, a temperate climate, and gave impetus to the quest. But da Gama, rounding the Cape of Good Hope (1497), found to his sorrow an illimitable sea to the south. Drake pressed through the Strait of Magellan (1 578); and after being repelled by storm, sailed about Tierra del Fuego with a boundless ocean on his right hand, thus stripping the imaginary southern continent from any connection with America.

  One by one the great navigators felt out Australia and New Zealand, New Guinea and Tasmania, and found always the ocean beating on the southern coasts. But hope died hard. “The most celebrated and modern sovereign will be he who gives his name to the southern world,” De Brosses, president of the Parlement de Dijon, wrote in 1756. So, as the space it was hoped the continent occupied steadily contracted, and the oceans guarding its approaches were seen to become more fierce, belief in its actual existence began to wane. It remained for the distinguished British navigator, Captain Cook, to hint at its reality and its terrifying nature.

  Cook, in circling the globe in h
igh southern latitudes, removed the notion of a circumpolar continent from the realm of fiction and proved that if it existed at all, it must be well south of the 6oth parallel. In 1772, Cook sailed from England with two ships, the Resolution, of 462 tons, and the Adventure, of 336. Cook based at New Zealand. Sunday, Jan. 17, 1773, he crossed the Antarctic Circle at Long. 39° 35’ E., the first such crossing ever made. For a month he cruised an open sea, meeting icebergs and drifting pack, until stopped at last by an impenetrable pack. Lest he be beset, he retreated north, returning south again the following December. Twice he traversed the Antarctic Circle, seeking a channel through the pack; but each thrust came up hard upon vast stretches of ice. Captain Cook wrote:

  “I will not say that it was impossible anywhere to get farther to the south; but the attempting it would have been a rash and dangerous enterprise and what, I believe, no man in my situation would have thought of. It was, indeed, my opinion, as well as the opinion of most on board, that this ice extended quite to the Pole, perhaps joined some land … but if there is, it can afford no better retreat for birds, or any other animals, than the ice itself. I, who had ambition not only to go farther than any one had been before, but as far as it was possible for man to go, was not sorry at meeting this interruption… . ”1

  The next half century witnessed efforts of a different character. No longer seeking rich empires, but, instead, the more immediate wealth of fur-bearing seals, Yankee and British sealers, fighting for new and virgin fishing grounds, pressed farther and farther south through the ice in ramshackle and scurvy-ridden ships. The Falklands, South Georgia and South Shetlands were discovered. In this inhospitable vicinity, one misty morning in 1821, the Russian circumnavigator, Admiral Bellingshausen, in search of a continent, came upon the sail of the worthy Captain Palmer of Stonington, Conn., and found, to his surprise, the Yankee master well acquainted with this little known part of the world.