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Introduction
- University of Missouri Press
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Introduction There are no heroes now. Our cynical, mistrustful age has no use for them, nor for adventuring, which all too often seems contrived and, in the case of amateurs on Everest, foolhardy as well. The world’s last legitimate explorers, NASA’s lunar astronauts, might have been the high priests of the Right Stuff, but they were also Spam in a can. As long as they performed for the space agency, their free spirits were subordinated and sanitized to conform to an image of bloodless competence. They played not many roles but just one: interchangeable cogs in a drama that exalted technology above humanity. Not even the Challenger and Columbia disasters could efface the image or change the reality. But in the years between the world wars, when the twentieth century was still young and the Western public grasped at the last fragile tendrils of belief and hope left from the physical and moral wreckage of the western front, great men performing valiant deeds in far-off, exotic places could still set popular pulses pounding . For many years, Richard Evelyn Byrd stood above all the rest—even Lindbergh . In the drab Depression years of the midthirties, a newspaper editor gushed, “‘Dickey’ Byrd is going south again! What romance is wrapped in those few words!” What a relief for readers and radio listeners, tired of the deadly squabbles between Europe’s dictators and democrats and ground down by the daily effort to make or find a living in the midst of constant privation, to imaginatively follow the admiral back down to that remote, frozen land at the bottom of the earth where courageous men accomplished great things in the bleak polar wastes. “Romance again! As in the days of Lindbergh,” when a lone eagle had winged his way across a vast, stormy ocean to Paris and into the hearts of the world. Byrd himself, “with several companions,” had followed Lucky Lindy across the Atlantic “and made history by such daring.” But where Lindbergh had retreated into a stubborn privacy, then fled the country following the kidnap-murder of his infant son, Byrd kept himself before the public with a series of adventures that comprised “the whole1 some things of modern days which lifts the spirit out of the rut of depression and puts us once again into the realms of romantic life.”1 There has been no one quite like him in American life. Born a little less than a quarter century after the Civil War in a quiet agricultural corner of a defeated southern state, Byrd left Dixie to become in the 1920s and ’30s a Boston gentleman and the emblem of American industrial enterprise on the far frontiers of global exploration. He became a decisive figure whose achievements helped shape the last hundred years into the American century. Few men live their dreams. Richard Byrd did. And he tasted all the joys, triumphs, disappointments, animosities, and loneliness that the experience inevitably conveys. At the beginning of World War II, journalist and publicist Charlie Murphy, who probably knew Byrd as well as anyone, observed that despite its continued dash and glamour, exploring was not only a “backward profession” but a dying one. Personal, derring-do exploration had become a way of life in the nineteenth century as eager Europeans pushed into darkest Africa, the remotest mountain and desert areas of Asia, and the Far North, seeking river sources, maritime passages, exotic flora and fauna, and hitherto unknown peoples and tribes, all in the name and service of Knowledge. After 1900 the polar regions had become the world’s last frontier, and epic races to reach the top and bottom of the earth had thrilled publics from Moscow to Manchester to Modesto. Newspapers and book publishers paid lavishly for exclusive rights to tales of discoveries on the far fringes of the known world. But with much of the globe apparently known and sketched in by 1918, the professional explorer became “an anachronistic fragment, caught like the kangaroo, behind the evolutionary eight ball,” his innate romanticism “suspect in a materialistic world.” The enormous sums paid to the greatest twentieth-century adventurers fell far short of their needs, and most lived and perished on the edge of penury. Wealthy dilettantes such as Lincoln Ellsworth or “museum explorers” dedicated to writing monographs or filling specimen cases might justify their escapist motives. But the old-time professional explorer who determinedly plied his trade was “doomed by a shrinking geography to comb comparatively worthless vacancies...