Explorer: The Life of Richard E. Byrd

Chapter 12 - Breakdown

Chapter 12 Breakdown ittle more than an hour after soaring aloft from Little America, the admiral landed at Advance Base, bundled warmly in a fur parka. The following day dog-team drivers Stuart Paine and Finn Ronne joined Richard Black from Little America in digging supply tunnels for Byrd’s dwelling, and stretching tarpaulin over the roof. “Black doesn’t seem to be able to take it,” Paine grumped, “[and] is getting on all our nerves.” Finally, it was time to set up the admiral’s bunk and “fire up the potbellied stove.” Up to then, Paine added, “Byrd hasn’t been feeling well, but today he was out with us.” The shack assumed a “homelike character,” and Byrd turned in for a good night’s sleep. “So did some of the men,” Ronne recalled , who stretched out on the floor in their sleeping bags. But the shack was too small to accommodate everyone, and so “we dog drivers shivered in our tents on top-side as the temperature plummeted to 65 below zero.” The next morning a warm and rested admiral told Ronne, whose lips were cracked and bleeding from the cold and whose beard was covered with ice, that he had taken a midnight stroll and had found Ronne “snoring like a good Norwegian . . . so I knew you were still alive.” As the dog teams prepared to head north to Little America, Paine noted that “REB was very appreciative of what we had done + came to call me Stu before we left.”1 At last the tractor parties started for home, leaving Richard Byrd alone on the ice. Charlie Murphy had already informed Hazel McKercher up in Boston that the admiral had asked him “to act as his personal representative” while he was away. Murphy had always enjoyed Byrd’s confidence, so the message he sent to the world on March 28 surely had the admiral’s approval. In it Murphy dilated at length on his commander’s forthcoming ordeal. 343 Whatever its inner or outer implications, these things are at least apparent. It will be isolation. He will be on his own as few men have been. And all the decorations he has won, the honors he has been given, the urbane existence he has travelled in civilization, aren’t going to help him start a fire at 70° or 80° below zero; keep blizzards from overwhelming his sunken shack; keep drift from choking delicate instruments, ice from collecting in the gasoline driven generator of his radio transmitter; cook three meals a day, or mend or wash clothes; or contrive a substitute for this missing thing or that; or help him find this buried shack if a swiftly striking storm should overtake him on one of the daily walks that are his habit, no matter how cold it may be. So perhaps this isolation can scarcely be called splendid.The notion of Admiral Byrd presiding in a sort of lordly exclusiveness at the southernmost frontier of human activity can hardly be sustained. What it will probably amount to is a continuous struggle for existence, and an unrelaxing vigilance against fire, cold, and illness. Very likely this is what has drawn him. The scientific considerations, which are important, are secondary.2 Byrd’s decision to abandon his men and live in solitude throughout the austral winter of 1934 fundamentally changed the structure of his second expedition.This time he would not be present to manipulate, adjudicate, or suffer the behavior of colleagues too long cooped up in a polar winter camp with little real work to occupy them more than a few hours a day. He washed his hands of the day-to-day stress of managing fifty-odd men, choosing to winter over ostentatiously alone. Many of the men came to bitterly resent his decision. “I wonder now whether REB will make out this winter,” Stuart Paine wrote as his dog team headed back to Little America. “He isn’t a practical man at all + hasn’t the faintest idea of how to use his hands. He cooked Jello the other night + it was the first bit of cooking he has ever done. The radio he doesn’t know a thing about, not even the code. Suppose something gets out of adjustment or breaks. His communications are completely shut off.” Still, Paine rather envied his admiral’s “staying out there in a way, away from people, cares + worries. He plans to write a book on philosophy which...