The Stowaway

by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

  There were two new crew members on the New York, one of them Lyle Womack, a former electronics salesman married to silent- film actress and aviatrix Ruth Elder, who for a time held the long-distance record for a flight by a woman. Heartbroken that the “Miss America of Aviation” refused to kiss him when she returned to New York for a tickertape parade after her nearly completed transatlantic flight (an oil leak forced an emergency landing), Womack had fled, lovelorn, to the Canal Zone, where until the Byrd crew came to town, he had been doing odd jobs for his father, a whisky manufacturer. Womack filed for divorce on September 6, 1928, in Balboa. Elder did not contest it.

  Three new passengers were also added to the Bolling: six-week-old mutt puppies Jack and Col, and Rex, a waterfront bulldog who took to Chief Engineer Frank “Mac” McPherson and followed the Scottish sailor up the plank and into the boiler room, where the dog was renamed Bum. Billy missed his own dog, Tootsie, something terrible and was glad to have more animals aboard.

  • • •

  The City of New York was the first of the two ships to leave Cristóbal, heading westward through the canal to the Pacific Ocean port of Balboa. (Reports claimed the departure was delayed because of Panama Canal levies that Byrd had forgotten to pay, with the necessary funds eventually secured from Montgomery Ward heir George Thorne, who fronted the expedition hundreds of dollars he pulled from his pocket.) The eight-hour passage was a safe stretch, though the journey through the fabled Panama Canal was thrilling to the novice adventurers among the thirty-two men on board. The prior weekend, the whaler Sir James Clark Ross, with its ninety-seven sledge huskies and malamutes, had taken its turn.

  As the New York reached Balboa, word arrived that Byrd had come to a decision about Bob Lanier, the black stowaway. From the day he set sail, Bob had faced bigotry from the New York’s crew. Several men, some of whom would go on to don blackface for entertainment, were open about their displeasure that a “darkie” was along for the journey, sharing their glory. They had Captain Melville’s ear, and the cantankerous Melville informed Byrd that the man who had once crossed the country alone had no “sea legs.”

  Byrd contacted executives at United Fruit Company, which had supplied the ships with bananas for publicity; many of the men on board would for decades associate their polar journey with the noxious sweetness of overripe bananas. Bob Lanier was sent back eastward to Cristóbal, where he was shipped off to New York on the United Fruit liner SS Ulua. For Byrd, a top officer’s loyalty was more important than letting Lanier make black history.

  A reporter at the influential black paper the New York Age tracked down Lanier upon his return, publishing a sympathetic article in which Lanier attested that he had been treated unfairly and would probably appeal his dismissal to New Jersey’s governor, A. Harry Moore. He had signed on to the ship at a salary of one cent per month—the same pay as most of the crew—and with his name still on the rolls, he remained legally a member of the expedition.

  Though Byrd’s ships were leaving the Americas, they were far from out of the American public’s mind. Coverage back home was still going strong; sure, there were not as many front-page headlines, but newspaper readers were still offered almost daily reports, especially by Byrd’s sponsor the New York Times. And while Billy didn’t know it until he received a wire from his parents, New York’s many papers now ran semiregular bulletins on the local hero’s progress, typified by one printed in the Flushing Journal on October 6:

  BAYSIDE BOY WITH BYRD TELEGRAPHS FATHER HERE

  Mr. Rudolf Gawronski received this first telegram at 40-21 First Street, Bayside:

  Nearly through the Panama Canal now. Wish I could be with you, Dad. But it’s the South Pole or Bust.

  The stopover in Cristóbal seemed to have considerably improved the boy’s mood.

  • • •

  Captain Brown’s supply ship arrived in Balboa the next day under an overcast sky. After being held for three days over unpaid levies, the Bolling’s lines were cast off, and the ship, with Billy in his new and physically exhausting job in the coal room, left port once again just before three o’clock in the afternoon, piled high with six hundred tons of coal. The next stop was not for another 4,300 miles: Tahiti.

  On the same date, October 10, Byrd, after a few days’ delay ridding himself of a nasty cold and an alarming temperature of 102, left San Pedro aboard the extraordinarily large whaling steamship C. A. Larsen. Thousands of spectators crowded round as ten thousand tons of cargo were loaded on the ship, including seventy-five sheep for meat and a dozen milch cows, joining seven breeding pigs, six bleating goats, and a grunting boar. While one report had the livestock headed to Antarctica, the animals were more likely destined for another land after the expedition disembarked in New Zealand. In either case, it was surely loud in the animal hold.

  Bernt Balchen, Harold June, Dean C. Smith, and Alton Parker—the dazzling flyboys who would soon share Byrd’s fame for their polar exploits—joined the commander on the whaler. The pilots had it easy; Byrd wanted them rested. Also aboard were the remaining aircraft and the eldest member of the crew: sixty-seven-year-old Martin Ronne, the Norwegian sail master who had wintered over with Amundsen back in the heroic age, sewing the tent he would leave behind at the Pole.

  The expedition was sprouting stowaways now. Two days after leaving California, two boys, encouraged by Billy’s widely reported success, were found aboard the Larsen four hundred miles out to sea. The total count of stowaways who boarded was now five—six if you counted Sunshine. Captain Oscar Nilsen, a soft-spoken Norwegian-born veteran of the sea, was unfazed; as reported to papers, he chortled over the matter with the commander. Once he reached New Zealand, Nilsen gently let the boys go into American consulate hands; they did not impress Byrd enough for him to keep them on past the city of Wellington.

  The stretch between the Panama Canal and the coaling stop at Tahiti was nearly a month, an arduous and dull chunk of time at sea. Partly to kill time, Billy sent Radiograms to his parents; he had been promoted again from lowly coal passer to second fireman (fire stoker). Although he no longer had to be at everyone’s beck and call—supplying coal to the firemen or wiping the engine room decks—he was still down there in the steaming heat, tending to the fire, shoveling coal, and watching water levels. It was tough manual labor, and he bragged it was making him hard as nuts. He always ended the Radiograms by asking Rudy and Francesca to send Babcia his love. Billy also found time to wire his neighborhood firemen at Bayside’s Hook and Ladder 152, the ones he used to pester.

  As news from abroad trickled back to Bayside, the Flushing Journal continued to report on the new Patron Saint of Plucky Kids, even tracking down Rudy in his home for a parent’s take: “Father predicted he would be dropped off in New Zealand if not applying himself. He took turns at heaving ash and clove clinkers—everyone admired him.” It was probably best that the other men on board didn’t know the media was playing favorites. They teased Billy enough, even if he was growing less of a greenhorn by the day, toughing it out without complaint.

  By the sixteenth, the Times had the position of the Bolling by wireless: 270 miles northwest of the Galápagos Islands, latitude 2 degress 35 minutes north, longitude 95.5 west. She crossed the equator two days later, just before noon on a breezy, sunshiny day with a surprisingly low temperature of 71 degrees Fahrenheit. Passing the equator came with rites of passage for first-timers, and fifteen men were initiated into the whimsical Order of Neptune that day. The inductees included eminent geologist Professor Laurence Gould, third in command on the expedition; strikingly handsome aerial surveyor Ash McKinley, often photographed in aviation goggles and buttery-brown aviator jacket; Clair “Alec” Alexander, the edgy supply officer nobody dared mess with; and Harvard class of ’25 Times auxiliary correspondent and former coal passer Joe de Ganahl, who had long before been promoted to second mate.

  At one thirty in the afternoon, a whistle sounded on deck, and there emerged, in great nautical tradition, King Neptun
e and his queen, portrayed by two Swedish seamen: third mate William Erickson and a good-natured and wiry fireman named George Sjogren. Lieutenant Harry Adams, assigned as the scribe, read to the gathered: “In the name of Rex Neptune, Supreme Ruler of the seas within the polar boundaries of the North and the Great Antarctic of the South, I greet you and command your attention.”

  But two would-be inductees were missing: William Gawronski and his coal passer pal Kess, who had been with Byrd to the North Pole but had never passed this far south. Billy had shinnied high up the aftermast (the mast nearest the stern) and was ordered down by Captain Brown, who joked he would otherwise shoot the boy with one of the rifles on board. Kess was found ten minutes later, hanging over the ship’s stern. He was given “the works”: head shave, getting dunked in a barrel, and being pelted with mustard pies and roast squid George Tennant had prepared for the ceremony.

  The Times coverage made no mention of additional punishment doled out to Billy. Only later, with the publication of Harry Adams’s memoir, would the more scandalous details of initiation day be revealed: Billy was ordered to pull down his pants to check if the man with the Polish name was a Jew and not, as he claimed, a Catholic. Many New York hospitals at the time encouraged circumcision for health reasons, and despite Babcia’s Virgin Mary around the boy’s neck, he was found guilty. Billy was secretly horrified but played along.

  For weeks now, there’d been ribbing galore over on the City of New York for the real Jew of the Byrd expedition: airplane mechanic Bennie Roth, one of the shortest crew members at five foot three. By one sailor’s account, no one on the flagship went ten minutes without telling a Jewish joke at Roth’s expense. Like most victims of prejudice in this era, Roth tried to laugh it off. There was no record of his punishment by the City of New York’s scribe of the Ancient Order of Neptune, Russell Owen, when the flagship passed the equator. (Hopefully, he too didn’t have to pull his pants down to show his “crime” of circumcision.)

  The giant Larsen passed the equator three days after the Bolling, and since this was Commander Byrd’s first crossing, he was not spared the maritime ritual. Perhaps because Captain Nilsen’s wife was aboard—sharing her husband’s cabin and helping with the logbooks, as many whaling-ship wives did—things did not get as uninhibited. Still, Byrd was dunked in a tank constructed on the upper forecastle deck. The commander, so careful to control his narrative, was not going to let anyone say in print that he wasn’t a team player.

  After a day of festivities, it was back to weeks of monotonous open sea. Fortunately, Byrd had prearranged for lectures to alleviate the welter of sameness. On the City of New York, Captain Melville was photographed teaching astronomy. On the Bolling, Billy learned about classical music, finally understanding his father’s pride in Chopin’s contributions to Romanticism. (After the trip, he would start to build a classical collection of his own.) Ukulele Dick was, as promised, good for daily entertainment, and those who could sing sang. All distractions were welcome.

  Some took to playing cards in the midship saloon. During one poker game with Gould, Tennant, and budding gambler Billy at the table, a large flying fish eleven inches long and twelve across soared through a porthole ten feet above the waterline. The twitching fish struck one of the players on the shoulder and flopped onto the center of the table. Billy laughed his head off—it would become a favorite story from the expedition—and Tennant quipped, “It will be served for breakfast tomorrow.” It was the first of several fish to fly into the saloon.

  Several classes were set up to prepare the men for the Antarctic mission. One course on radiotelegraphy was cotaught by former North Pole stowaway Malcolm Hanson, the chief radio engineer, and Howard Mason, another operator. Together they would attempt the longest-distanced radio signals to date (communicating with a station in Norway) and, most important, keep track of Byrd on his flight over the South Pole. The commander, Hanson reminded all, was a stickler for safety who required every last sailor to know radio code; Billy dutifully attended the radiotelegraphy classes twice a week. In between lessons, he read books recommended by Laurence Gould and the other eminent scientists on board, including one on Darwin, which, he remembered later, changed some of the views his pious father had drummed into him. Even the less educated sailors found themselves reading scientific texts and fine literature.

  Despite his first hoorahs reciting poetry back in Polish school on the Lower East Side, Billy was embarrassed not to know which one was Yeats and which one was Keats. He resolved to remedy this hole in his education when he returned to America.

  The days dragged on. A lot of nothing goes on between ports, and back in New York at expedition headquarters, press maven Hilton Railey realized that Billy came in handy now. A stowaway maturing into a fine young sailor was a good story with which to snag short attention spans. He made sure Billy’s telegrams to his parents were published in all the region’s papers, even the most innocuous stuff: “Overjoyed with your message back. I shall expect them often . . . I will send you a long one from Tahiti! Your loving son.” Mass plays and niche plays: Byrd was mass, and the Gawronski kid was niche. To his surprise, Railey found there was national interest in how the novelty stowaway was faring, and his people started asking Captain Brown for anecdotes about how the loveable scoundrel was shaping up at sea. Railey fed stowaway stories to the New Zealand papers, too—a wise move, as goodwill would be needed there soon. Miles away, from Auckland to Christchurch, Billy Gawronski was becoming a household name.

  Meanwhile, the other boy wonder, Paul Siple, was having a miserable time over on the City of New York, where curmudgeon Captain Melville had no patience for such nonsense as a Boy Scout on his ship. Melville seemed to take pleasure in making life wretched for Siple, always finding him extra demeaning tasks. (Paul Siple, as an older man, recalled Melville inexplicably raging when someone on board opened a can of powdered milk called Klim; his crew members promptly nicknamed him Captain Klim.)

  • • •

  On October 28 the Bolling crew saw land again as the ship passed five miles to the south of the Disappointment Islands. On deck and straining hard for a sight of any of the supposed two hundred natives, they were sorely disappointed indeed.

  Tahiti! The Bolling arrived on November 1, with the City of New York pulling into the Tahitian capital of Papeete, an exotic French-speaking city of three thousand residents, only hours behind. A few of the men were old friends and climbed the rails to greet one another, slapping backs. While Captains Melville and Brown could exchange the occasional message via wire service or Morse code, their crews were not always privy to their plans. With the City of New York scheduled to refuel in Pago Pago, American Samoa, the men had not expected to meet up until New Zealand.

  The residents of Tahiti had enjoyed a considerable amount of contact with sailors on American ships since the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914; the nation had become a regular refueling spot for commercial vessels and tourist boats. The government had recently extended Papeete’s wharf to permit two large ships to dock side by side, and it actively wooed US dollars and trade.

  Certainly the members of the Byrd expedition were wooed, and in a far more forward fashion. By one sailor’s account, native ladies dropped their brightly colored cotton dresses and swam naked to the ships. Billy was smitten. “I had quite a hectic day in Papeete,” he wrote his father, asking him to use discretion when quoting from his letter to others. “I am ashamed to say but it was due to the girls.”

  That evening, an expatriate living in Papeete, one Mrs. Miller, gave a party against the wishes of the American consul, for she was damned if the US government was going to extend Prohibition to French Polynesia. By Harry Adams’s account, she was aided by a “south seas princess in silk pajamas.” Other native beauties poured champagne donated by the French crew of the Chicopee cruise line, which was also invited to the party.

  Billy fell in with some locals who wanted to show him the town. Just a skip from the waterfront were fiftee
n saloons with dance floors, automatic player pianos, and drinks aplenty: beer and French champagne. And the dancing! As Billy surreptitiously wrote his father: “Oh! I just felt happy . . . I danced with one of the fair beauties to holy hell, and the local people were amazed to see an American boy keeping time with experienced dancers.” He gave no indication whether the dancing was modern or traditional, but it was clearly uninhibited.

  Not that all the expedition members enjoyed themselves among the local population. Paul Siple wrote in his journals that he was disappointed the local women were “flabby and flat-faced”—words that could never have flowed from urbanite Billy’s pen. Siple preferred the local wildlife, with journal entries on spiny sea urchins and “hundreds of rainbow-colored fish, the size of a pet goldfish.”

  The following night—far too soon—the Bolling left the raucous island at eleven fifteen, headed now for New Zealand. The City of New York set sail the next evening. Both ships took with them coconuts, which the cooks would use for favorite American desserts such as coconut cream pie and custards; there was also a replenished stock of bananas as those donated by United Fruit back in Panama were long ago eaten.

  According to a wired account from Billy’s stokehold friend Kess, an unofficial race to New Zealand began when the Bolling zipped past the City of New York en route from Tahiti. The contest made for a chunky New York Times story but cannot have been constructed purely for the public, as many men aboard both ships mentioned it excitedly in their journals.

  As the crew of the Bolling left the tropical seas, temperatures dropped to the 30s. There would be no more equatorial sunshine for nearly two years—at least not for the lucky men picked to winter over. Billy hoped he was still in consideration for that honor. Byrd had yet to make clear exactly how many men would make the cut, but certainly a stowaway was not a high priority. How could he prove his worth?