Explorer: The Life of Richard E. Byrd

Chapter 1 - “Danger Was All That Thrilled Him”

Chapter 1 “Danger Was All That Thrilled Him” hey left him alone in fifty-degrees-below-zero temperature, 123 miles beyond the last outpost of civilization. It was March 28, 1934, and all around his solitary little hut dug painstakingly into the South Polar snow, the Ross Ice Barrier stretched “flat as the Kansas Plains,” rolling on “forever to meet the sky in a round of unbroken horizon.” The collection of tractors, dogs, and men who had finished setting the scene of his coming ordeal were “just a pinprick in infinity,” anxious to be off home to the comparative warmth, safety, and limited society of Little America base camp. Paul Siple and Bud Waite, two of his most trusted lieutenants , lingered for a moment behind their jaunty little red-hooded Citroen snow tractor, wanting to say a last word, but someone snapped out an impatient, “For Christ’s sake, get going,” and first Siple and then Waite, after mumbling something unintelligible, hurried off. The tractor party had intended to drive back the previous day, but four miles out a radiator in one of the two vehicles froze, and Pete Demas, in unscrewing the cap, had badly burned both hands. The men had returned to spend the night crammed in the warmth of the tiny dwelling. Now, as they hurriedly drove away against a huge noon sun burning up the northern sky so close to the horizon that it might have been a sunset, Richard Evelyn Byrd, selfstyled Virginia gentleman, naval officer, and explorer who had crowded a lifetime of adventure into the previous decade, suddenly felt “utterly at loose ends” for the first time in his life. Ahead, he hoped, lay six months of creative solitude. As the sun slipped away and the long polar night clamped down on the vast shelf of ice, he would man the world’s most remote weather station, making careful daily ob7 servations of wind, temperature, and moisture. Some snickered that he had been put out to pasture by his fellow explorers who could not stand his ways, or that he had gone to do “some serious drinking.” Whatever the case, Dick Byrd, a slim but robust forty-five year old with a gift for self-promotion and the visionary’s driving desire to do good in the world, had set himself a daunting task. It began badly. Unable to tear his eyes away from his departing comrades clattering away across the purple and orange ice scape, Byrd waited “until the receding specks had dropped for good behind a roll” on the barrier. “Only the vanishing exhalations” of their vapor trail remained. Turning reluctantly to the little hut carefully set in a deep depression in the ice, Byrd slid down the ladder, only to discover that the shoulder he had wrenched helping the tractor men stow the sledges suddenly “hurt like the devil.”1 Few men or women can sustain the kind of pace Dick Byrd had set by the time of his self-imposed isolation at “Advance Base.” Fatally susceptible to hubris and to overreach, America’s last explorer began a devastating ordeal that frigid polar day seventy-odd years ago that would leave him more broken in body and wounded in spirit than he would ever admit. He was born into a late-nineteenth-century Virginia family avid to regain lost status. Mother Eleanor was “the beautiful and accomplished daughter” of Joel W. Flood of Appomattox Court House, Virginia, and granddaughter of the late Charles J. Faulkner of West Virginia. Both men had enjoyed long political careers in the Virginia and West Virginia legislatures; Charles had been appointed minister to France by President Buchanan. Eleanor’s maternal uncle Charles James Faulkner Jr. had been a member of the U.S. Senate from West Virginia, and her brother Henry Delaware Flood was starting a brilliant political career that would take him from the Virginia Senate to a twenty-year career in Congress, crowned by chairmanship of the House Foreign Affairs Committee during World War I.2 Father Richard carried the name of one of the most distinguished “First Families of Virginia.” The first Byrd to enter Virginia had been William Byrd, later known as William the First, who came to the “wild and thriving” James River country in the late seventeenth century to claim his maternal uncle’s modest estate , including slaves.3 Young Byrd “came of an old stock of quiet, well-to-do English gentry, who, so far as is known...