Explorer: The Life of Richard E. Byrd

Chapter 8 - Southward

Chapter 8 Southward n December 1927 Richard wrote an article for the journal World’s Work, amplifying his earlier comments to the New York Times about the South Polar region . “Man cannot claim mastery of the globe until he conquers the Antarctic continent . It is the last great challenge. . . . [D]own there lies the greatest adventure left in exploring and aviation.” He cast his eye on the future as well as the present, determined to remove from schoolchildren’s maps for all time “that great white blank space at the bottom of the world.” He reiterated that “the primary object of the expedition is scientific.” With his first expedition, Richard established a pattern of exploration that he would continue for the next thirty years. Constructing the first of five “Little America” bases at the Bay of Whales, he explored the “Pacific Quadrant,” the area stretching from the western edge of the Ross Ice Shelf up to the peninsula by ship, by plane, and on foot as vigorously as ice, sea, and atmospheric conditions permitted, while sending trekking parties more than four hundred miles down the broad shelf to the Queen Maud Mountains. He and his men eventually mapped vast swaths of territory from the air: glaciers, ice shelves, and mountains never before seen. At the same time they studied Antarctica’s fauna , its natural resources, its weather, its geological structure. “My old and tried shipmate, Floyd Bennett, who flew with me over the North Pole will be second in command,” Byrd wrote that December, but others, both American (“red blooded volunteers in whom the love of adventure and experience is strong”) and Norwegian “Vikings” who “know and like the cold,” would be going also. Many expedition members, such as George Noville, Pete Demas, Tom Mulroy (engineering officer aboard Chantier), and Bernt Balchen, were veterans of the MacMillan 215 Greenland expedition, the North Polar flight support group, or both. As always, safety was the prime consideration, and for that reason alone, “when we leave the States next summer it is our aim to have one of the most thoroughly planned expeditions that has ever gone into the Polar regions.”1 Byrd’s decision to form and lead such a large and chancy enterprise represented a major advance in his career. While he had briefly commanded a hundred or so men during the world war, he had been responsible for no more than a dozen as subordinates on the Greenland expedition and about fifty at Spitsbergen. Both Arctic ventures had been of short duration, and his wartime stint as head of an aviation unit had been within the context of a well-defined command structure. Now he was to lead two ships and some eighty men (forty-two of whom would winter over on the ice), together with the most advanced and elaborate machinery obtainable , for eighteen months in the most hostile and inaccessible region on earth through the grueling ordeal of a polar night, which he had never experienced. Despite industrial man’s growing ability to create more or less secure secondary environments for himself in the world’s harshest climes, Antarctica remained the supreme test of human character, of a man’s moral code and fiber, of his conduct in society. Byrd would command alone, responsible or accountable to no one, but also bereft of support beyond that which he could immediately muster once on the ice through the force or persuasiveness of his own personality. Some thought the explorer was setting himself up for utter disaster. The New York Times wrote every man’s obituary before the expedition left Norfolk.2 Byrd had obviously been reading everything he could about Antarctica, including the records of previous expeditions, and he rightly concluded that after 150 years of fitful human presence, “there has been little exploration down there.” Half the coast at most had been very roughly mapped, whereas Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen had developed two narrow lines of march to the pole from either end of the Ross Ice Shelf. Any real understanding of this vast expanse awaited an imaginative marriage of aviation and photography. Antarctica’s potential for generating and shaping the global weather system intrigued Byrd even as he pondered other pressing scientific questions. Were the Ross and Weddell Seas in fact connected under the massive ice sheet (which would suggest that Antarctica was in fact two or perhaps even more large islands)? Did the mountains at the foot of the Ross Ice Shelf directly connect in some...