Explorer: The Life of Richard E. Byrd

Chapter 4 - Triumph

Chapter 4 Triumph n the last day of January 1926, Richard Byrd announced he was returning to the Arctic as soon as spring arrived in an “independent attempt to explore the North Polar regions from the air.”1 In his statement, Byrd said that his experience in the Arctic the previous summer had “convinced me of the entire practicability of exploration by aircraft in this section of the world which has hitherto been inaccessible.” He added that “we are now trying to reach a decision as to whether an airship or a specially designed plane gives the best assurance of a successful outcome of the venture.” He had spent most of his time since the close of the Mitchell hearings on the lecture circuit, inaugurating what would be a lifetime of speaking tours. “It is astonishing ,” he wrote to a sponsor, “the interest people take in Polar things.”2 At the beginning he stumbled badly over the very technologies he relied on to connect with the public. His chief aerographer, who had been responsible for the photographic activities of the aviation unit, warned that both the still and the motion pictures from Greenland were not much good. The strength of the light north of the Arctic Circle was greatly affected by filtering through high clouds, even though the actual light remained strong enough to cast shadows on the ground. Since MacMillan had deemed it “imperative” to capture operations as they occurred, often at midnight or in the midst of sudden snow squalls, “a great many” exposures of both still and movie film were not of the highest quality. Richard also proved to be a less than dynamic speaker; his chief failing was an inability to synchronize his talk with the motion picture images that were quietly flickering and spooling at his side. After his first set of lectures, he wrote one sponsor, “I am, as you know, 101 not used to talking to movies.” He promised to improve “100%.” Shortly thereafter , he told Gilbert Grosvenor that in future lectures he would provide more narrative , synchronize his talk more precisely with the movies he was showing, cut out a bit of the ice scenes, and “tell briefly of the scientific work accomplished by the National Geographic.” He used these early contacts with the public to determine not only his persona but also what people wanted to know and to see—and what they wanted to see and know was not only the drama of exploration but the value of science as well. Always the apple polisher, he also informed Grosvenor that part of the improvement would be to “include you in the movies.” Nonetheless, the public was clearly enthralled with Richard Byrd and his dim, flickering films of the Far North. When he showed his movies in Winchester for the first time, “a quarter of the city turned out.” By the end of November, invitations to lecture and to dinners in his honor began to roll into his office at the Navy Department, and in late January 1926 he told a correspondent that “I have been traveling all over the country.”3 He rented a house in Washington for the winter, but clearly Marie and the children did not see him much. In February the New York Times formally anointed both him and brother Harry as public figures with a short article in its prestigious Sunday feature section. Both men could only have been pleased with the title: “Virginia Byrds Again to Fore.” Although the bulk of the article was given over to a history of the family, with heavy accent on its colonial origins, the unknown writer began by reminding his readers that just two weeks previously, Richard had announced plans “to lead an aircraft expedition to the Arctic regions,” while Harry had been inaugurated as governor of Virginia the previous day.4 If Arctic flight remained Richard’s obsession, it was for others as well. Following the Amundsen and MacMillan expeditions, the idea fired the imaginations of explorers and scientists everywhere. Roald Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth announced their intention to make another attempt to reach the pole, using the newly designed Italian airship Norge, sold to them by Mussolini. The two obtained financial backing from the Aero Club of Norway and also through an exclusive contract with the New York Times. (The Times would later back one of Ellsworth’s expeditions to Antarctica, prompting Byrd to label the journal as “my enemy paper in New York.”) The French were...