Show Me a Hero

by Jeremy Scott

  The Bear arrived at the end of January. Both ships were unloaded and during the weeks that followed 400 tons of equipment and supplies were dragged up Misery Trail to Little America. The snowmobiles broke down, both Citroën tractors caught fire, the sledge dogs proved an unruly nightmare. It was very very disagreeable work in the ever-shortening days as the season advanced toward winter.

  At last the weary job of transporting stores from the shore to Little America was done. The four aircraft from the ships were flown up from the bay to join the two already there, and bedded down in the snow. The Bear and Jacob Ruppert departed through the thickening ice for New Zealand with their crews, and fifty-five men, a pack of savage dogs and a small herd of cows settled down, happily and less so, to the four-month winter night of Antarctica.

  Fifty-five men, the reader will note, not fifty-six, the total number of the party. For the curious fact was that Admiral Richard Byrd, their leader, was now no longer with them.

  A part of Byrd’s scientific programme in the Antarctic involved setting up a meteorological station deep in the heart of the frozen continent to record weather conditions throughout the winter, here where temperatures were lower than anywhere else.

  In the nineteenth century scientists believed the world’s weather originated at the equator. By the early twentienth it was thought that air currents moved across the surface of the globe from North and South Poles to the equator, where they ascended and returned at much higher altitude to the Poles. Weather therefore originated at the Poles. Observers monitoring met. data at the centre of the Antarctic continent could forecast the coming weather throughout the entire southern hemisphere. That at least was the theory.

  Byrd’s plan was to set up a met. station far south of Little America in the form of a living module sunk for its own protection below the surface, where a team of three scientists would exist for a period of six to seven months, emerging at set intervals each day to read the range of instruments planted in the snow above their home. This scheme was confidential; apart from himself only two knew of it. The plan and its details are fully documented in the several accounts Byrd wrote later about his achievements, but nowhere does he mention why he kept this plan a secret. It is left to the reader and your author to speculate on his motivation, along with other questions relating to the weather station which are now imminent.

  The only people who knew of the plan were Dr Poulter, second-in-command of the expedition, and the cabinet-maker in Boston who built the living module, then broke it down for shipment to Antarctica, but both had been sworn to secrecy.

  The plan to set up Bolling Advance Weather Base was not revealed to those at Little America until shortly before winter night set in, when a party of men and dog teams, accompanying the big Clectrac and Citroën tractors (representing 13 tons of machinery), started out on their journey to install the base. The living module they were carrying weighed 2 tons; the rest of their load was made up of supplies, tools and a complete range of instruments obtained from the US Weather Bureau. As with all Arctic expeditions of the period – and most later ones – the mechanical transport proved useless, unable to withstand the extreme conditions. The snowmobiles packed in early, the Citroën tractors were unreliable, the tank-sized Clectrac broke down conclusively. It was left to dogs and men to haul the necessarily reduced loads. The site was reached, the prefabricated module was assembled and sunk into its hole – but there was not enough food remaining to provision three men through the winter.

  There was enough for two however… Byrd vetoed the idea. The reason he gives for doing so – which we should examine – is that two men living together in such close confinement and discomfort, cut off from the rest of the world for months of darkness, risked going mad or killing each other. Instead Byrd announced that he himself would crew the station alone throughout the winter. That an officer trained at Annapolis in the rules, discipline and responsibilities of leadership should choose to abandon his fifty-five men and six valuable aircraft camped on a slab of ice which might at any moment snap from its parent body and float away with his entire army into the Polar Sea, in order that he might pursue a private whim, is something that struck people at the time and since as curious.

  We can however trace the origin of Byrd’s singular agenda, perhaps even make a guess at his reasoning. Four years earlier than these events, in 1930–31, the young English explorer Gino Watkins led an expedition to survey an air-route across the Greenland ice cap and inaugurate the first Europe–America passenger service. A metereological station was established on the ice cap deep in the country’s interior. Bad weather prevented relieving the station and a single man, Courtauld, was left to winter there alone through five months of solitude (he had no radio), for the last six weeks sealed in beneath the ice, in the dark and unable to reach the surface. The first party sent out in spring to find him failed to do so, and returned to base with its leader a broken man. The second, led by Watkins, sledged 160 miles to discover the remains of a tattered Union Jack and six inches of ventilating tube poking above the snow with Courtauld entombed below – alive and, even more remarkably, still sane. The story of Courtauld’s ordeal excited a great deal of attention in the press at the time. As Byrd well knew.*

  At Bolling Advance Weather Base, the party completed the construction of the living module, setting up the met. instruments in the snow above. They unloaded the last of the stores from their sledges and carried them down into the cluttered interior. The job was finished. At midnight on 28 March they started on their return journey to Little America, leaving Byrd alone. He would not see another human being for 200 days.

  Byrd’s ‘living module’ was an oblong shack of insulated plywood containing a bunk and a table. A shelf supported the radio receiver and transmitter with its morse key. A wall studded with nails was hung with his clothes; below it a victrola stood on an upended packing case. In the corner was an oil stove, vented by a tin pipe. Outside the shack was a vestibule dug out of the snow, with two blind tunnels leading from it, which were used for stores, and to house the generator powering the radio. Egress from the shack was a trap-door in the roof, reached by a ladder.

  Byrd writes that he looked forward with ‘keen anticipation’ to the winter night. He had plenty to do: sorting the stores, monitoring the instruments, going topside several times a day to read the thermometers and to observe the sky. Additionally he set himself another early task before he needed it, he began to dig an escape tunnel in case his hatch should become sealed like Courtauld’s. Excavating one foot per day, together with isometrics, constituted his physical exercise. At 10 a.m. on alternate mornings he made radio contact with Little America, talking with Dr Poulter and Charles Murphy, the journalist attached to the expedition (who had flown with Balchen and Floyd Bennett to the rescue of the Bremen). These exchanges were stilted, for though Byrd could hear their voices in his headphones, he could reply only in Morse code.

  Until late April the sun showed briefly above the horizon in ‘days’ whose length was measured in ever fewer minutes. When he climbed the ladder from his burrow to read the instruments outside, often the landscape was obscured by fog or storms but on the rare clear day he saw around him a vast sheet of ice, not flat but smoothed out in giant undulations, stretching as far as the eye could reach in every direction. The half-disc of the sun poked above the world’s rim to cast a path of flame across the ice, aimed directly at him; he was dazzled by its light. But from the middle of May there were no more such moments of epiphany, the night clanged shut on him.

  He had purpose and occupation: maintaining the met. instruments and their records kept him busy, along with the chore of preparing his food. In the evening he played the phonograph (Strauss, Mozart, light opera) or read (Travels of Marco Polo, Life of Alexander, Somerset Maugham). He climbed out to observe the sky and light shows of the aurora streaming colour across the night. He returned below to meditate on the cosmos and to write, he wrote a lot… His observation of the universe conv
inced him that it was ruled by order and a divine intelligence, and from that he extrapolated a design. Man is part of that design. The goal of the individual is a state of harmony with the whole. Cosmic laws govern nature but also the psychology of the individual. The concepts of right and wrong are fundamental to that law, God-given polarities. To follow right makes for harmony, to follow wrong leads to discord. Harmony is peace and freedom, but for Man – unlike Nature – it is not a natural condition; an individual must fight to achieve it and it must be won through struggle and determination.

  Four years earlier Courtauld in his tent buried on the ice cap had similarly brooded on cosmic matters, though to a different conclusion. Both he and Byrd were as isolated from mankind and the human commonwealth as it is possible to be, but Byrd’s separation was not absolute, for he had a radio. Three times per week for an hour, sometimes longer, he talked with Little America.

  While engaged in one of these lengthy exchanges around the end of May, he heard the generator powering the radio stutter. Asking the operator at Little America to hold on, he went to investigate. The tunnel housing the machine was thick with fumes. He bent over it to examine the motor… and passed out cold. He came to sometime later, lying on the floor and aware there was something he must do. He crawled into the shack on hands and knees and over to the radio. He could not fumble the earphones over his head so reached for the morse key and shakily tapped out, ‘See you Sunday’. He crept onto his bunk and lay there, feeling weak and ill. He realised he was suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning. He could still hear the stutter of the generator and knew that if he continued to lie there he would die. Rolling to the floor, he crawled to the tunnel, then lay flat to slither his way beneath the layer of fumes to the motor and shut it off. He crawled back to his bunk and passed out. When he awoke hours later he recognised that he was seriously ill. His heartbeat was erratic and his whole body prickled with shooting pains. Although he felt nauseous he knew that he must eat, it was thirty-six hours since he’d had a meal. The stove was out and the shack was cold. Slowly, laboriously, he managed to light the fire and warm some milk mixed with sugar. He threw up at once, but later tried again and nibbled a biscuit. Faint and weak, he forced himself to scrawl a letter to his wife and instructions to his second-in-command. He believed that he was dying.

  For a week he lay on his bunk in the unheated hut, forcing himself at times to light the stove and eat something. By a great effort of the will he resumed his radio schedule. His communications, tapped out with frozen fingers, were brief. He did not tell Little America he was sick. He lay inert in the cold, unable to read. He had no wish to listen to music, even if he’d had the energy to wind the phonograph. The pallid yellow light of the oil lamp cast a dull gleam across the squalid room. The endless night pressed down on him in his hole beneath the ice. In the silence he had nothing to do but think.

  In solitude, cut off from the stimulation and distractions of normal life, the mind is obliged to brood upon its contents; the individual has no choice but to embark upon a journey into him or herself. Solitude and isolation has been the path chosen by hermits and mystics throughout history, which, accompanied by mental purification and physical mortification (fasting, discomfort, pain and degrading tasks) can lead to illumination. The goal of this journey – known as The Way – is to break through into another level of reality, a higher plane of consciousness, a knowledge of Truth.

  Was this Byrd’s purpose in choosing – perhaps from the very start planning – to remain alone at the weather station through the winter? The reasons he cites for doing so – that it was brought about by necessity, and that two men left together might go mad or kill each other – are unconvincing. Two men would have been safer, and also more reliable in recording the continuous met. readings, which was the purpose of the mission. No, it is evident Byrd wanted to stay there alone, and early notes in his journal suggest that his motive was indeed very similar to the mystic’s high-toned quest to achieve a spiritual wisdom denied to most of us. And at some point – perhaps a considerable while before – he’d resolved that he would pass on this Truth to the world, he would write a book about his experience and the revelation it led to. Perhaps by then he’d already decided upon his title: Alone. The gist of the Truth Byrd was working towards has been indicated above. He’d confided these illuminations to his journal during the early months of his isolation while he was in good health and spirits, but since his accident with the generator this had not been the case. Now he is seriously ill and demoralised, cold, sick, poisoned and unable to keep down food. As noted earlier, he has nothing to do but think.

  What are his thoughts? In his book Alone, published three years later, Byrd recounts his physical symptoms and his difficulties in feeding the stove, preparing food and making sporadic radio contact with Base. He worries about his wife and children, he is anxious about the safety and well-being of the men he is responsible for at Little America… but beyond that he is strikingly economical with the larger truth. Doubtless these anxieties recur often, but where else does his mind go in the long dark spaces of the polar night that lie between? Where indeed? The present reader and the author may speculate.

  The inner voyage of the solitary mystic is well documented, and directed toward an exalted liberation, a union with God. Yet surely Byrd’s journey was leading him to a very different destination and a place where he did not want to go?

  He must have reflected on his childhood – we all do when alone – thought about his parents and his privileged upbringing, of Naval College and the accident that handicapped his career. Inevitably he meditated on the progress of his life – and there’s the rub. It has been an epic voyage, beset with perils and with challenge. He has battled to overcome his physical disability, contended with opponents, with the Navy, with the elements. He has embarked on great adventures at the head of his band of men, carried the flag for America, claimed lands for his country, named territory and mountain ranges after his family and patrons. He’s been honoured by his President and become the hero and inspiration to his nation. And all of it is based upon a fraud.

  He has lived with the lie for nine years. His lectures, appearances, writing, his gratifying intimacy with the great and good, and busy activity organising new and larger expeditions have perhaps veiled the thought from the forefront of his mind, though it has always crouched there, a dormant tumour lodged deep within his brain. With time he has come almost to ignore it for nothing has occurred to remind him of its presence and no one questioned his achievement or his fame. The tumour was obscured by the public figure he had become. Now in his sickness, weakness, and the cold of the long night, the tumour declares itself and grows within him. There is nowhere else for his mind to travel and he is obliged to face it. His life, his distinguished career, his public persona rest upon a fraud.

  And that fraud – forced upon him in mid-air by the realisation that, without it, he and his family were doomed to bankruptcy – was no one-off. It instigated a subsequent career of deception in which he has bilked not just his sponsors but the people of America. In the depth of the Depression, at the worst of times, the average Joe and his harried wife had gone without to send him a ten, a five, or a single dollar bill to buy into the American Dream, personified by himself. And he is a phony.

  He’d swindled them, swindled everybody. The knowledge is inescapable. In the dim light of his icy lair Byrd must confront the truth, and no distraction is available, no solace and no confessor. Does he feel guilt? Shame? Who knows what rationalisations he may attempt on guilt and shame, but certainly he feels fear. Exposure – that is the terror. Exposure of his deception means ruin and disgrace, a shame spreading to his family and children, and to America. But exposure can only come from one who knows the secret. The man who did know it because he’d been there was Floyd Bennett. But before Bennett died had he passed it on? Byrd’s mind narrows down inexorably on the object of his dread…

  Byrd’s memoir Alone provides an account of a
man steadfastly enduring a horrible ordeal. The reader’s reaction is respect and bewildered awe, for how would one have handled it oneself? But the text’s principal interest lies in what its author chooses to omit. He is reticent on the subject of his own thoughts and feelings, so guarded it suggests concealment. Somewhere Byrd says, ‘I was brought up to believe a gentleman does not give way to his feelings.’ And most certainly he does not do so when reconstructing those thoughts and feelings for posterity a year later while seated in the comfort and security of his study at home in Boston.

  In his book Byrd confesses to nothing of significance; except between the lines there is little personal information to be found there. But it so happens that we have access to the testimony of another solitary adventurer whose experience was very similar to Byrd’s. The twin accounts he kept of it, the true and the false, have both survived and are available to us.

  In 1968 the Sunday Times set up the Golden Globe race, a contest to sail around the world alone, non-stop. There were nine contestants, one of them an Englishman, Donald Crowhurst (thirty-six), married with a young family. Middle-class, he had been brought up in humiliatingly reduced circumstances, unable to complete his education. His hobby was the new science of electronics, in which he showed considerable flair. Alone in his workshop, he invented a radio direction-finding device, to be used on ships. He named it a Navicator (There is an odd parallel with Richard Byrd’s early inventions in the same field.) This inspired Crowhurst to set up his own company manufacturing the instrument. This did not do well; sales were poor and soon his backer, Stanley Best, wanted his £1,000 loan back.