by Jeremy Scott
Byrd found it politic to go along with the Navy Secretary’s suggestion to join forces with the expedition, for he had need of the promised aircraft and the Peary, but he must have had misgivings. His agreement entailed an awkward consequence for he now had to dump his eager associate Captain Bartlett from the game; he and his ship were no longer wanted. Byrd informed him of the fact. Exploration for all its heroic aura is a pragmatic business, and the desired end justifies all betrayals.
Right from the start there were problems over Byrd’s status and position in the combined operation. The matter was solved by the suggestion of the Navy Secretary: it was to be MacMillan’s expedition, McDonald would be second-in-command, the Navy group and their aeroplanes would be under Byrd’s control. His orders were to give ‘such co-operation, not interfering with the accomplishments of the mission, as may be desirable in the interests of science, or in an emergency’.
In other words the issue was fudged not solved, and the uneasy compromise over Byrd’s position would later prove ruinous, but now the joint expedition had official blessing and Byrd could proceed to select his crew and make ready the aircraft for the purpose he intended.
Keenly aware that in Amundsen he had competition in his flight to reach the Pole, Byrd worked intensively throughout that spring, and by the start of May preparations for the MacMillan– Byrd Expedition were well advanced.
The plan was for its two ships to sail from Wincasset, Maine, for the Arctic on 15 June. The three Loening flying boats would travel on board the SS Peary with Byrd and his team of pilots and mechanics. The SS Bowdain would transport Professor MacMillan and McDonald, together with their party of scientists and archaeologists. The intention was to go first to Labrador, where the MacMillan–McDonald group planned to examine the remains of early Norse settlements, then cross Davis Strait to east Greenland and continue the investigation of prehistoric ruins in an attempt to trace and date the country’s original European colonisers. From there the two ships would sail across Baffin Bay, where they would first encounter ice, then work their way through the broken pack to Etah in north Greenland. Here was where Byrd’s work would begin. With the amphibians he intended to search for a protected base further north, from which he would fly sorties to search for Crocker Land, that uncertain country whose mountains Peary had reported seeing twenty years earlier, but which no one had since located. From this base, when weather rendered the attempt possible, Byrd intended to make his dash to reach the Pole.
When US Naval involvement in the expedition had been announced many in the peacetime service saw in it an opportunity for themselves. The idea of the Arctic mission sparked the imagination, it promised a daring adventure along with employment, which was looking increasingly precarious within the Navy. A large number of letters arrived on Byrd’s desk in Washington. He interviewed the most promising applicants and picked his men, instructing them to apply immediately for leave to join the expedition. His team consisted of a Naval lieutenant and a petty officer (both of whom were experienced pilots), three master machinists, and an aviation mechanic/pilot named Floyd Bennett, a raw-boned country boy of thirty-five who would be of crucial significance to him in the weeks and years to come.
The long flights he planned into the unmapped region of the Arctic would be hazardous. Weather in the far north was unstable and could change swiftly. Precise navigation was of primary importance, for if a plane was forced down in that inaccessible area it would be all but impossible to rescue its crew. But of the several American aircraft of that time the big Loening flying boats were the best suited for the task. The plane’s fuselage, which could accommodate five people, was built upon a central float fitted with recessed wheels. It was a cumbersome ugly aircraft but it had a cruising range of one thousand miles – more if carrying additional fuel in place of passengers – and could land on grass, water, snow or ice.
If he should discover Crocker Land or other unknown territory Byrd was well equipped to record its existence. Each of his three amphibians was fitted with the latest photographic gear and mapping cameras. Communication between the aircraft and with their base was vital; these were the early days of radio and he wanted the best available – and here he ran into a difficulty. E. F. McDonald, Jnr, financier to this expedition, had amassed his recent fortune through manufacturing and selling radios, a business that was booming. He saw the venture as a promotional shop window for his own range of goods. He was providing to the expedition a complete set of transmitter/receivers operating on 20-, 40-, 80- and 180-metre bands. Byrd was accustomed to the longwave equipment used by the Navy. McDonald’s sets were unfamiliar to him and he ran stringent tests of their efficiency. The results were unsatisfactory. Determining not to use them aboard the flying boats, he ordered the latest equipment from the Navy. He informed the Naval Secretary of his reasons for doing so, but deliberately held back from mentioning the matter to his two partners in the expedition.
He was at his desk in Washington one afternoon drafting a press release when he heard the sound of raised voices in the outer office. Then the door banged open and he looked up to see a bulky middle-aged man in a crumpled seersucker suit push his way in past his secretary who was twittering in affront.
‘Byrd, I want a word with you, jerk!’ McDonald announced. He had learned about Byrd’s order for different equipment and was sore as hell. His cheeks were flushed and his small eyes bloodshot and angry. He planted his large body squarely before Byrd’s desk and hit on him hard. How dare he act as he had?
Byrd, cool in white summer uniform, attempted to reason with him, explaining that where they were headed in the far north lay in the auroral band, an area where radio reception was notoriously lousy. They would be operating there in 24-hour daylight, when radio waves invariably suffer greater interference than at night. McDonald could install whatever equipment he wished aboard the two ships, but on the aeroplanes he must have the Naval gear he knew and trusted.
Put a sock in it, McDonald told him rudely. He was having none of it. Byrd remained firm. His composure and unruffled cool irritated many people, who saw it as superiority, and it enraged McDonald. Vetoing the use of Naval equipment, he insisted that all radio equipment would be his.
The matter was unresolved and the result was a stand-off but, not for the first time, Byrd had made an enemy – and this one was determined to bring him down.
6.
TRY-OUT
The setting is Kings Bay, Spitsbergen, at the edge of the Arctic. This is a dismal prospect we are looking at, a low snow-covered escarpment raised against a bleak grey sky. The bleached-out shadowless void lacks horizon, definition or movement until a figure muffled in a hooded parka appears in sight on the crest of the ridge, pauses to scan the view and comes tramping down the slope toward us, taking large awkward steps. He is wearing snowshoes strapped to his boots, which resemble ungainly tennis racquets, and he has to swing his legs wide to prevent them knocking against his calves. To walk in them is laborious and Lincoln Ellsworth does not cut a graceful figure as he clumps his way toward us into close-up.
He’d been born a sickly child; puny and undeveloped as a boy, it made his all-achieving father impatient. In adolescence he’d set out deliberately to remake himself; through self-discipline and persistence he’d succeeded. Now as an adult he usually walked eighteen miles a day to keep fit, and when in Manhattan wrestled with a professional in a gym instead of lunch. Here at Kings Bay he’d taken to strapping on snowshoes and tramping in the surrounding mountains for several hours each morning.
Returning from his exercise this afternoon, as he came over the shoulder of land behind the settlement, he could see below him the expedition’s two ships at the jetty of the frozen bay and the tin roofs of the mining village which had been his home for the last three weeks. Set in a mountainous snow-covered landscape, the Norwegian coal-mining community had a population of fifty. It was a last outpost of civilisation, though the word hardly applies to the dismal cluster of industrial she
ds, store, administrative building and grimy slum of miners’ huts defacing the white flank of the mountain which constituted the settlement.
It was a wretched place, but despite its limitations and discomfort – indeed to a degree because of these – Ellsworth was delighted to be in Spitsbergen. This was the start point for the Pole, and very often during the last months he had believed he would not make it here. His father had done everything possible to prevent him. James W. Ellsworth Snr was one of America’s leading industrialists, who had grown mega-rich on coal. The family mansion in Chicago, where his children were brought up, contained an art gallery, which housed a Rembrandt, and a library whose many volumes numbered one bound in human skin, together with a Gutenberg Bible.
Ellsworth’s mother had died when he was eight and his sister Clare five. Their father was constantly away in New York, Montreal or Europe; when in Chicago business occupied his day. ‘If I did not have for him the warm affection a son feels toward a less austere and preoccupied father, I at least had an immense respect for him, and a great admiration,’ Ellsworth wrote later in his memoirs.
Distinctive in its luxury, the Chicago mansion was a pocket of refinement and culture unusual in the Midwest. When at home, Ellsworth’s father entertained widely. Illustrious visitors came to the house, among them architects, artists and poets. Paderewski was an occasional guest, and played for the company after dinner. Ellsworth admits he was a little bored by the music. He was hopeless at school, was dropped from Yale, then by his own choice dropped out of Columbia. To his father he appeared a dunce, but when later engineering and surveying became important to him, he picked up these skills quickly. Ellsworth was raised in an ambience of the arts, culture and European travel – and it did not ‘take’. He chose as a role model not Paderewski but Wyatt Earp.
From their earliest childish manifestations, Ellsworth’s father had tried to discourage his son’s taste for adventure, but the lengths he went to in order to prevent him from joining Amundsen in an attempt to fly to the Pole were outrageous. The promise to subscribe $85,000 to the expedition had been wrung out of him, and when next day the contract was set before him he could not bring himself to sign it. For years he’d been trying to prevent this and now he insisted on a condition. ‘Lincoln,’ he said, ‘If I give you this money will you promise never to touch tobacco again?’
Hardly was the ink dry before he was trying to back out of the commitment. First he sent his lawyer to try sentiment: James Ellsworth was seventy-five, he needed his son by him in the sunset of his life. When that approach failed he ordered the attorney to investigate and discredit Amundsen. That too was unsuccessful, for Ellsworth already knew the worst. His father then sought out Matt Henson, the negro who had accompanied Peary to the Pole, to enquire if a flight there was feasible. ‘Absolutely not,’ Henson informed him, ‘The ice is piled up high like mountains.’ Ellsworth’s answer to this was to repeat Peary’s own prediction that the future of Arctic exploration lay with the aeroplane. His father’s next move was to call the State Department, instructing them to cancel his son’s passport and restrain him by force.
These were some of the difficulties Ellsworth had to deal with throughout the previous winter while Amundsen was staying at the Waldorf. He had visited him there frequently to discuss their plans; more than once during their meetings he’d heard the rustle of a sheet of paper slid beneath the door: another court summons for Amundsen. They had been anxious weeks and not the best mental preparation for an expedition. In the end it was only the intervention of Clare, Ellsworth’s sister, that induced their father to back off. But he did so with bad grace, threatening both his children with disinheritance and refusing to see his son off when finally he sailed from New York to join Amundsen in Norway. Clare did come to wish him goodbye but could not keep from weeping. Choked with tears, she was convinced this was the last time she would see him. It was a dismal parting.
But Ellsworth’s sadness did not endure. As the liner was shunted from the pier and moved down river, he realised he was at last free, and we have his own words recording the shift in mood that took place within him.
Then my depression dropped from me like a cloak. It was a mild March day – the first hint of spring. Spring would soon touch the Arctic too, and there lay my destiny. With a buoyant step I walked forward to watch the passage of the Narrows, lighting a cigarette as I went…
The Amundsen–Ellsworth Expedition (as it was now publicly known) sailed from Norway to Spitsbergen in two ships, neither of them well suited for the stormy 500-mile voyage or the job in hand. The Hobby transported the expedition’s materiel and supplies, her decks stacked high with huge crates containing the two dismantled flying boats; the ship was top heavy and dangerously overloaded. The Farm was the King’s yacht, a fragile wooden vessel built for summer pleasure cruising, which had been lent to Amundsen by His Majesty.
Spitsbergen was still in the iron grip of winter. They arrived to find Kings Bay blocked by ice. Not until 16 April could they unload the Hobby at the jetty, and manhandle the aeroplane crates over snow and ice up the slope to the settlement’s machine shop. There in the open, in unrelenting bad weather, fierce wind and frequent snowstorms, the work of assembling the two Dorniers began.
The expedition’s technical crew and support party – which had been housed out with considerable inconvenience and discomfort around the village’s primitive buildings – was made up of the two pilots and two mechanics who would fly the planes, a doctor, a pharmacist, a meteorologist, an engineer from Rolls Royce, two newspaper reporters and a movie cameraman/photographer; plus the officers and crew of the two ships which had brought them all here. As Ellsworth trudged down the mountain into the settlement that afternoon of 4 May he saw most of the members of this disparate group gathered around Amundsen outside the machine shop. Beyond them stood the two Dornier Wal amphibians in their cradles, resembling long punts with raised wings on which was set the gross bulk of the fore and aft motor. Their shape was extraordinarily graceless and the impression of Heath Robinson improvisation was reinforced if you knew that part of the standard emergency gear stored in the hull was a mast and sail.
The men outside the machine shop glanced at Ellsworth as he halted beside them. The Norwegians were a taciturn bunch but he sensed something in the air, a tension. Amundsen held up a piece of paper to Ellsworth, a met. report. Weather was breaking up, he announced. Spring was on its way and skies toward the Pole were clearing. They must prepare for take-off.
The Dornier flying boats N24 and N25 were dismounted from their cradles and rested on launching ramps on shore, from which they could slide down onto the ice covering the fjord. Equipment and supplies were already being loaded on board after being carefully weighed. It was evident that each aircraft would be carrying a load some thousand pounds above its rated capacity. ‘Rated capacity’ meant capacity to lift out of water, but they would be taking off instead from smooth ice. ‘No problem,’ said Riiser-Larsen, the chief pilot, and the second pilot Dietrichson agreed.
As Ellsworth looked from the window on the morning of the 21 May 1925 he saw the pale Arctic sky was cloudless. Gulls wheeled in the mild air above the frozen fjord, bright-lit by the sun which sparkled iridescent on the glacier at its head. He needed no meteorologist to tell him this was the day. The morning stayed fine, met. reports coming in remained good. At 4 p.m. the two flying boats were slid down onto the ice; it was easy to manhandle them on its slick surface. Both were aligned precisely due north on the course they would be flying and their sun compasses oriented and set in clockwork motion. Mechanics swung the propellers to start the engines, which coughed into life then turned over slowly to warm up.
Amundsen, Ellsworth and the four who would fly with them finished a late lunch in the ‘salon’ – the settlement’s sail repair shop which the expedition had taken over as a mess – and dressed in their heavy flying clothes, over which they put on Arctic parkas and fur hats. Carrying their sunglasses and bulky gloves, the
y trod clumsily as astronauts down the icy path to the shore.
The crew from the two ships and the whole village was there to watch their departure, gathered in a straggling crowd, the men black and filthy from the mine with a few hooded and cloaked women sheltering behind them, ragged children clinging to their legs. The newsreel cameraman was busy filming the scene as the flyers were helped to buckle on their parachutes. A round of handshakes, then they were hoisted up like stuffed dummies into the open cockpits of the amphibians. Ellsworth writes:
I don’t know how any of the other five felt at that moment,’ ‘But in me there was not the slightest trace of fear. I know that in that silent throng there were men who never expected to see us again. In New York and Oslo were plenty of people who regarded our flight as stark suicide… Yet if my own pulse quickened then, it was only with elation that at last I had accomplished the ambition of my life.’
The pilots revved their engines to quarter-power and the flying boats glissaded slowly across the ice toward the mouth of the bay. Once on the starting point both planes turned to point up the length of the fjord into the light breeze. Then on the N25 Riiser-Larsen thrust open the twin throttles. With a roar the amphibian skidded away in a blast of snow and splintered ice. Dietrichson allowed a quarter-mile before storming after him in another roar. Halfway down the fjord one then the other aircraft lifted off, clawing their way above the glacier into clear blue sky. The sun flared on their slanted wings as, still climbing, they banked in unison to take their course toward the Pole.
