The Stowaway

by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

  • • •

  Byrd arrived in Wellington, on the unusually windy southwestern tip of New Zealand’s North Island, the first week of November. By the 1920s, the country had close to one and a half million inhabitants between both main islands, and while the hilly landscape and rugged coastline seemed a little otherworldly, the adoring ladies hanging out on the docks in packs—ladies who had been reading the expedition members’ names for months now, and who were, Harry Adams would note, “not one whit less powdered or lip-sticked than their sisters in New York”—were pleasingly familiar. Everything American, fawned over in magazines and much discussed on radio, was in. When the Byrd party reached town, hitting the streets with jackets and ties that had been packed back in New York, they were surprised that on the other side of the world the architectural rage was California-style concrete bungalows with low-pitched roofs, large overhangs, and simple porches. Governor-general Sir Charles Fergusson’s wife, Lady Alice Mary Fergusson, had bobbed her hair like a Hollywood starlet. Wellington prided itself on being a modern city, changing with the times.

  Byrd disembarked from the Larsen to enormous crowds. While Kiwis were fairly inured to European explorers leaving their ports for the southernmost continent, these Americans aroused curiosity. They were from the land that had invented gramophones and silent cinema! The commander was given an official greeting by Premier Joseph G. Coates at the capital (two days later, it must be said—Byrd wasn’t quite the priority he was in the States). There he was presented with a Maori robe by, as the American papers put it, wowed by the exoticism, a “full-blooded” indigenous Maori: Sir Maui Pomare, minister of internal affairs.

  Reporters stateside took to peppering their stories with New Zealand trivia: Did readers know that Australian Gabriel Read discovered gold near Dunedin in 1861 in a gully that now bore his name, sparking the Otago gold rush? Did they know that New Zealand had more than five hundred war memorials honoring the country’s eighteen thousand soldiers, known colloquially as “diggers,” lost in the Great War?

  The Kiwi public was very much aware of all things Antarctica; the prominent men who greeted Byrd even filled him in on an Australian expedition that was just getting under way. Had he heard of it? Oh yes, Byrd let on without revealing his inner distress. Just as Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen saw one another as rivals earlier in the century, Byrd now had his very own archrival in the mechanical age: Hubert Wilkins. In a spectacular display of corporate rivalry, American William Randolph Hearst (who owned twenty-eight papers, including the New York American, the New York Evening Journal, the Chicago Herald and Examiner, and the Los Angeles Examiner), wanting to one-up the Times, had offered the forty-year-old Aussie $25,000 (big money then) to become the first man to fly over the South Pole, in what would surely be known to history as the Wilkins-Hearst Expedition. Hearst, the bully model for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, was synonymous with yellow journalism. He had already been vilified for provoking the Spanish-American War twenty years before, so a little matter like sabotaging his own country’s chances of going down in the annals of Antarctic exploration may not have weighed much on his conscience.

  Not that Hearst had acknowledged his aims publicly. Wilkins had announced that he did not plan to fly across the pole but keep to a study of Antarctica’s Graham Land: the northernmost section of the Antarctic Peninsula; the part of the continent closest to South America. Still, there had been some printed reports that Hearst had pledged $100,000 if his man beat Byrd to the South Pole. Byrd was asked if he was nervous, but he publicly cheered on his rival. Who knew the truth? In any case, Kiwi officials assured Byrd that his expedition was the one New Zealanders cared about, perhaps because he was bringing attention to their fair cities. Byrd’s flight was the one the majority of Americans cared about, too, despite William Randolph Hearst’s best efforts to ignore Byrd in his papers. Wilkins was Australian. Byrd was an American. It was a patriotic age.

  While Byrd was feted onshore, things were rougher going for the men stuck on the Bolling. Way back during the first Atlantic Ocean swells, the men had nicknamed her the “Evermore Rolling,” and 550 miles north of Dunedin—during an even more ferocious storm—she had lived up to her name once again by rolling and pitching excessively. On November 13 the Bolling crossed the international date line, and four days later, two months after leaving New York, she reached Wellington at last. Although Byrd was already in town, there was a heartwarming reception for the Bolling men at the dock, but the supply ship was quickly in and out, picking up cargo from the Larsen—which would not be making the journey to Antarctica—before continuing on her overloaded way down to Dunedin, on the South Island, from which she would leave for the icy frontier.

  The Bolling reached Dunedin the next day, Sunday, November 18, mooring early morning within city limits at the Rattray Street Wharf, a small port happily near local homes and hotels with real baths and, above all, dames. Settled by Scots in 1848, its name Gaelic for Edinburgh, Dunedin was New Zealand’s largest city, although with all of eighty-five thousand residents, it was still a somewhat sleepy place, with a distinct architecture of bluestone bricks that would still be the pride of the city nearly a century later. The larger port in town, Port Chalmers, was the third most important in the Southern Hemisphere.

  The Sabbath was taken seriously in these parts, and despite the “modern look” girls everywhere, Sunday blue laws were strictly enforced. So while there was no official reception, hundreds of people personably welcomed the Bolling men at the piers. Conveniently for the unexpected celebrities, New Zealand had repealed its Prohibition law four days before, and in private homes, the liquor flowed legally—a celebration that continued in the pubs as soon as Monday came.

  Happy drinkers told Billy that he was already well known thanks to a front-page article that had run nationally: a cheat sheet about the most colorful Yanks arriving soon on Kiwi shores. Was this a joke? The eighteen-year-old had no idea he’d been all over New Zealand’s newspapers. Someone handed him a clipping, which he mailed home proudly: “Not the least important person on the boat is William Gavronski, whose birthplace is given as New York City. Adventure seems to be the very breath of life to this boy.” (They misspelled his name in New Zealand, too.)

  Rudy and Francesca had sent mail ahead to Dunedin’s poste restante. Opening a promisingly thick envelope, Billy pocketed some much-needed American dollars to exchange and read his father’s enclosed note: “Have you got enough money? Probably you have bought a camera, but let us know how you are. Feet and nose? Did you get shoes for yourself in New Zealand?” Rudy knew the expedition was not paying his son.

  With no spare funds in his pocket other than what he’d just been sent, Billy did not have enough for new shoes, let alone a sailor’s dance. He owed people money lent to him in Tahiti. But the stowaway soon found he could dine out on those paragraphs in the paper. Starstruck girls vied to gain the eye of the “Happiest Boy in America” and maybe even invite him home for dinner. Curious locals were all too happy to let the Americans into their homes.

  The all-star dogs were almost as popular as the men. Dunediners flocked to the Sir James Clark Ross, which had made port in October, to see Klondike legend Arthur Walden and his ninety-six specially bred Labradors. (One developed an abscess on its throat during the voyage and was thrown overboard.) The canines had arrived looking sickly, but after Dunedin’s top veterinarians fiddled with their dog formula, they soon made a remarkable recovery in the fresh air. Locals turned out in droves to be photographed with Chinook, the elder statesman of the pack dogs, and Skookun Siwash, an “Indian dog” of wolfish strain, who caught their collective fancy in popular stories on radio and in the papers. The Kiwis paid a shilling each for their visits, which added up to real money, as everyone in town, it seemed, was headed to the docks for a look. The tidy sum went toward Byrd’s diminished business account.

  Dunedin journalists, meanwhile, proudly reminded the American visitors that their town offered recreational ch
oices such as checkers, chess, baseball, amateur boxing, and quoits, a game similar to horseshoes but involving rubber rings being tossed. No one could complain of boredom, though after weeks at sea, most of the crew members found something to do with themselves in the boozy, cheery environment besides box. Several sexual relationships would have surprising longevity, with one dockside hookup resulting in an unexpected child for a Bolling oiler.

  Amidst the revelry, there were also rattled nerves. Byrd still had yet to decide which of the men he would take to the ice and which would wait out the expedition in New Zealand. Crew members could be excused for getting jittery.

  One man’s behavior, however, was downright strange. Dick Brophy, the expedition’s second in command and Byrd’s business manager, had begun acting oddly on the voyage through the Pacific, firing off incoherent telegrams to crew members’ wives and sweethearts and causing a disturbance with his garbled speech and paranoiac ramblings. The straitjackets that Byrd had theatrically put on board each boat to be “prepared as a Boy Scout” suddenly didn’t seem so laughable. The commander now ordered Brophy to remain in New Zealand at a desk job, replacing him with well-liked geologist Laurence Gould, a safer bet. Brophy would ultimately wheedle his way into going to the ice, although his erratic behavior would cause him to be quickly sent back to New Zealand, where he would be arrested as a public nuisance and offered a stay in a sanitarium or a one-way ticket home, which he would take. In New York, he would check into the infamous Bellevue Medical Hospital for the insane. Most officially sanctioned books on the expedition skip over this drama, saying only that Brophy stayed on in New Zealand because he was overwhelmed with paperwork. There was considerable whitewashing of unpleasant facts for fear of crossing Byrd.

  To the great surprise of all, the expedition added a last-minute member: volunteer Vaclav Vojtech, a gifted Czech geologist. Although the man spoke little English, he had traveled to New Zealand at his own cost in hopes of talking his way on board. And Vojtech was in luck: with Gould taking over as second in command, Byrd had suddenly found himself down one geologist. In a Czech newspaper interview printed after he was miraculously accepted onto the crew, Vojtech mentioned getting on well with a talky stowaway named Billy. “The sea gave him a good school,” he said, “and I believe that the kid became a man.”

  Billy certainly tried to be a good son, making up for his past sins. Reminded frequently that he was all his parents and grandmother had to live for, he dutifully sent letters home from Oceania, slipping in clean-living details about a visit to a Polish home in town—no word on whether the Polish home housed an attractive Polish daughter—and historical notes on the Poles who’d come to New Zealand in the 1870s to drain swamps, fell trees, and build a railway system for the new colony. Many went on to own their own farms, especially on the South Island.

  After a quick jaunt to Wellington to load up on food and fuel, the Bolling returned to Dunedin to meet up with the men of the newly arrived City of New York. It was the last chance for outings. Suave pilot Dean Smith told a local reporter that he’d spent the greatest day fishing, even if the residents who took him out on their boat were disappointed. Six-pounders were tossed back! In this part of the world, his hosts had told him, fifteen trout a day up to twelve pounds each was the norm.

  While the men enjoyed their last pleasant days of civilization, the massive whaler Ross, hired only for the Pacific journey, shoved off on a profitable whaling expedition. By 1928, this had become a highly mechanized operation that used ammunition to blow up trapped animals, hardly the romantic harpooning Billy had read about in Moby-Dick. The technological “advances” of the early twentieth century made it all too easy to kill, and forty thousand whales in the Antarctic were converted to oil annually.

  Byrd, meanwhile, was still stuck in Wellington, ensnarled by official duties. With all the press that Hilton Railey had arranged, the explorer was now almost as well known there as he was back home. He did have genuine enthusiasm for his November 20 meeting with Sir Douglas Mawson, a legendary heroic age explorer and British-born Australian who’d turned down a spot on Robert Scott’s iconic expedition aboard the ship Terra Nova in order to lead his own adventure in 1912. Mawson was the sole survivor of a dramatic sledging outing with huskies over ice, walking frostbitten to his rescue. Byrd claimed he was giddy to meet his idol, and that the aging explorer’s 1915 book The Home of the Blizzard was the Antarctica Bible as far as he was concerned. Afterward, Byrd had a packed Rotary Club to attend to, bringing howdys from his fellow American Rotarians. At the meeting’s end, the exhausted commander joined in for a rousing round of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” to close out the evening.

  On the same night, against all odds, twenty-year-old former stowaway Bob Lanier set sail across the Pacific toward Auckland, having talked his way onto the freighter Golden State, as a mess boy. It had been a crazy five-week journey to San Francisco, much of it made by foot, with occasional lifts from drivers willing (astonishingly, in a Jim Crow era) to take him a few hours closer to California. Bob prayed he would get to New Zealand in time to plead his case with Byrd. He could wash dishes during the wintering over, maybe even see the South Pole. Who could deny his perseverance? He had almost lost his life twice on the way to San Francisco, once in a blizzard in Wyoming and then in the heat of the Nevada desert. South Pole or bust.

  The following week, the Dunedin crowds cheered Byrd at the train station when he arrived from Wellington’s pomp and ceremony, done with his North Island duties and ready to focus on his coming months on ice. He transferred his snowshoes and fur coat to the City of New York. Two days later, he announced to the crew that no one would be left behind in New Zealand. Everyone would go to Antarctica and work hard to set up the first village on ice; only then would he select the wintering-over party to stay for the next eighteen months.

  Behind the scenes, the seamen built alliances. They understood keenly that there would be fame for anyone who wintered over with Byrd. Of course, the top officers and scientists would be asked to stay. But who else? Billy desperately wanted to overwinter, but so did Byrd’s “orderly”: the winning Boy Scout, de facto competition in the “one for the kids” slot. Billy and Paul Siple knew they couldn’t both stay over, as neither was especially useful, although either choice would make for great publicity. As least Siple had Byrd’s ear until they got to the Ross Ice Barrier: he was now assigned to the same ship as Byrd, the New York, while Billy was slated to remain on the Bolling.

  All would be decided, Byrd promised as they prepared to raise anchor on New Zealand’s shores, the crews saying their good-byes to lovers and drinking buddies. Early on the morning of December 2, the Eleanor Bolling and the City of New York left Dunedin together. To Antarctica!

  SIX

  FIRST ICE

  Word was radioed to the Bolling that a New Zealander stowaway had been found aboard the City of New York right out of the harbor: a silver-haired senior who had been to Antarctica before and whose spirit of polar adventure was reawakened, inspired in part by Billy’s stowaway success. This seventh stowaway of the trip was placed aboard a tug and returned to Dunedin’s Port Chalmers. Billy was heavily ribbed: look what he did now, inspiring grandpas!

  So close to their destination, Byrd had no patience for detours. He instructed the captains at his command to head straight to the barrier, bypassing the famous Mount Erebus, an active volcano, and the penguin rookery at Cape Adare on the mouth of the Ross Sea; the west coast of the Ross Ice Shelf was too out of the way. Even by the most direct route of 2,350 miles, their voyage could take several days with bad weather conditions. Some adventure nuts, particularly the well-read scientists, were sorely disappointed to miss the volcano that had figured so prominently in Shackleton’s and Scott’s journeys. And Cape Adare was the site of historic huts built for Norwegian explorer Carsten Borchgrevink, whose 1899 expedition under the British flag launched the heroic age. Borchgrevink and his crew were the first to overwinter on the continent, with nin
ety Siberian dogs huddled outside the crew’s small shed. Captain Brown determined privately to swing by the site if he ever had a chance.

  The crew was squished in for this stage of the passage, its ships overstuffed with freight and extra men from the Ross and the Larsen. There were twenty-nine men now on the Bolling and fifty-four on the New York, with more than a hundred dogs divided between the two. (Fifteen more had been purchased in New Zealand, for around £400 a head, when the original dogs had taken ill.) In such cramped quarters, the ship’s complement quickly gave up any notion of personal space, even if there were fewer duties now with extras on board.

  After a gentle start, the weather turned. Day by day, the temperature dropped. Times reporter Russell Owen was seasick—small wonder, with twenty- to twenty-five-foot-high waves tearing down on the ships. Being above deck meant walking around wet and freezing cold; their polar parkas were hardly waterproof. Water leaked down to lower levels, often drenching precious letters. The ship reeked of wet dogs and too many men and occasional vomit. Billy, miraculously not too ill, wondered what it would take for them to capsize.

  Owen sent word of his plight to the Times’s headquarters by the secret simple letter substation code he had worked out with his editors for all his messages; Byrd was a notorious control freak. Byrd, too, wrote in code to prevent potential saboteurs, leaving a master deciphering sheet with his publicity department in New York. Little did Owen know he was being written about in Byrd’s cryptic dispatches: the commander carped that the star reporter was not writing what he ought to—namely, glowing stories about Byrd. As the ships inched toward Antarctica, a worrisome coded message came back from expedition headquarters: PR man Hilton Railey was out for a few days with a bad case of herpes. The note added, “Not to worry.”

  And still the ships hardly moved. In a new plan, the New York’s hawser, a thick rope used for mooring, was fastened to the Bolling’s stern. Tied together, the boats could now make seven knots, or roughly eight miles per hour. “A sailing ship in tow of a steamship!” Owen managed to exclaim in a short note printed back in New York.