Billy would say later that these terrifying runs to Murmansk were the defining experiences of his life, even more than his adventures in Antarctica. He considered himself lucky; he never broke down from the memories, like other survivors he knew. But Billy would never talk much about those days. Some adventures are best left unexamined.
• • •
Billy had occasional home leave, but his home life back in Bayside, near his parents, was far from peaceful. By the summer of 1942, after less than a year of marriage, he was determined to divorce. There was nonstop fighting; at times he found Goldy downright mean. She mimicked his parents’ accents and mocked his love of Polish food. She threw dishes against the wall and broke precious antiques he had picked out—souvenirs from cherished journeys around the world. He knew he had made a dreadful mistake and told Goldy it was over. But his young wife had news for him: she was pregnant.
On February 20, 1943, Goldy Gawronski gave birth to the unhappy couple’s first of two sons, William Gregory Gawronski, always called Billy Jr. The new father looked for a landlubber assignment so he could stay close to his growing family. A younger Billy might have run, shipping off across the globe to escape unpleasantness at home. But war had taught him responsibility. Still, there was a dearth of qualified sailing masters, which weighed on him, too. Wasn’t it his obligation and his honor to serve his country, especially in this time of war?
When Billy Jr. was barely two months old, his father, at the extraordinarily young age of thirty-two, was offered his own Liberty ship. She would be built for him in Wilmington, North Carolina, by Cape Fear Shipping Company at Custom House Brokers and Steamship Agents on 713 Nutt Street. A letter arrived with her name: he read it to Goldy at their home. If Billy said yes, he would be the master of the SS Jose Bonifacio, transporting men and cargo to all theaters of war: Atlantic, Pacific, and Mediterranean. The ship, he later found out, was named for “the patriarch of Brazilian independence,” José Bonifácio.
He called the Cape Fear Shipping offices at tel 2-3892 and got a checklist of what had to be done. And then, in the privacy of his room, Billy wept. He said yes. The stowaway would become captain of his own ship.
• • •
Billy was one of the youngest captains in World War II. He ordered a silver bracelet etched with “Captain William G. Gawronski,” the type worn by American Merchant Marines in war zones, and settled on a captain’s hat made by Wallachs, of Fifth Avenue, treated with Gravanette (patent pending) to repel water in the almost inevitable storms. Word was the Bonifacio would load out of Charleston, South Carolina, off to India for at least a six-month trip.
But first a letter to his parents was in order before he left South Carolina. He signed it with:
“All my love, and regards to all, Captain Bill Gawronski.”
His signature was big and proud and underlined.
EPILOGUE
William Gawronski never returned to Antarctica. He was missing from the fourth and final Byrd expedition, code-named Operation Highjump, which immediately followed World War II. In many respects, it was a military operation to protect America’s position as the most powerful country on the global stage. Admiral Byrd, now head of the US Navy’s Antarctic Developments Program, had a significant detachment at his disposal: thirteen navy support ships, six helicopters, six flying boats, two seaplane tenders, and fifteen other aircraft, as well as four thousand personnel. The expedition, by far the largest to date, explored the eastern coastline of Antarctica by air, an area roughly half the size of the United States. They charted ten new mountain ranges.
Billy was not invited to take part in this expedition for the same reason he had not been invited on Byrd’s second or third. It was not, as Billy had feared for years, in anger and confusion, because he had somehow failed to prove his worth. No. It was because of concern.
Billy knew his mother had written to Byrd at least once following the first expedition, but he would never know that Francesca Gawronski had secretly written the admiral more than a dozen times between 1931 and 1933. She knew how her son longed to return to the South Pole—how eagerly he would drop his studies at Columbia for two more years on ice and on sea—and she knew, too, should he do so, how unlikely it was that he would ever finish his degree. She would support her son becoming an adventurer, but not a mess boy or a coal passer to the end of his days. So in the summer of 1932, as rumors of a second expedition swirled, she penned a desperate letter to Byrd, begging him not to take her son away. “It is our desire to see Bill attain something better and higher in life,” she wrote, speaking for her husband as well as herself. “He is our only son, and we see in him an ideal.”
Byrd replied, with a parent’s understanding, for he had been a surrogate father to the boy for two years: “I will do exactly as you wish me to in regard to your son. I will promise you not to take him even if he stows away.”
• • •
Although Billy never saw Antarctica again, his two years with the Byrd expedition altered the course of his life. The expedition provided an escape from the dreary future in his father’s upholstery business that had seemed so unavoidable at seventeen. It introduced him to a world of danger and discovery that had existed only in his scrapbooks and library loans, and gave him the basic seaman’s training with which he made a career.
After two years as the master of the SS Bonifacio—and with many treacherous runs, including the dreaded North Atlantic, that he was lucky to survive—Billy returned home to a country at peace. But he could not stay. War had cured him of his reckless thrill seeking, but not his love for the sea.
He would spend the next decades in the Merchant Marines, traveling to every continent but the one he’d visited first. Every port he landed in, he would alight and explore. Once, in Bombay, India, he was led down tiny streets to an antique trader’s shop and left to find his way back to the docks on foot, hiding his precious buys among his clothes. Sailing to Taipei, Taiwan, he sipped tea in an alleyway before he was trusted enough to bring carved jade antiquities back to the ship. In the Italian port of Gioia Tauro, he was invited to dine in a local home, the captain’s privilege, and was served octopus so hard that he discreetly slipped the tentacles in his pockets before being asked to dance.
These later journeys certainly weren’t as glamorous as his first—no newsies clamoring for a scoop, no tickertape parades on his return—yet he found them more satisfying. Often Billy was saving lives in communities suffering from famine or drought. When the Vietnam War raged in the 1960s and early 1970s, he answered his country’s call once again, carrying cargo for the US Military Sealift Command.
Billy had poems all over his ships, memorized every sailor’s name on day one, and never drank at sea—though he did smoke like a chimney, a habit picked up from the free Chesterfield cigarettes offered on the Bolling. In later years, he would tack his favorite poem—“Dreams of the Sea,” written by William Henry Davies in 1913—on the bulletin boards of many of the ships he commanded, for all crew to read:
I know now why I yearn for thee again
To sail once more upon thy fickle flood
I’ll hear thy waves under my death bed
Thy salt is lodged forever in my blood.
It was his hero, Richard Byrd, who had lodged that salt in his blood the September day he let Billy stay aboard the Eleanor Bolling after his third attempt to stow away, Byrd who had enabled the decades of adventure that were to come. For that, Billy would always be grateful.
And yet for all his grand adventures, the stowaway found himself longing for home.
• • •
Billy met the young antiques shop manager Gizela Trawicka while abroad in Gdan´sk, Poland, in 1958. He popped into a curio shop while his ship was at dock and happened upon the love of his life. On their first date, she laughed as he told her about himself; she had learned about Admiral Byrd’s Polish stowaway in her history class. Billy was divorced by this time (yes, his split with Goldy was inevitable), and after
a passionate courtship—a few blissful days of art and theater and restaurants, an introduction to Gizela’s widowed mother—followed by a year of tender letters to “my Gizeluchna,” he returned to Poland to marry Gizela in a small church ceremony. It would take another year for the US government to grant permission for Gizela to emigrate to New York State.
Billy, by then fifty, cried as she stepped off her ship in September 1960 onto a pier jutting into the same Hudson River from which he had set off on his own adventure so long ago. He was ashamed to bring her home to an old house on a sandy, horseshoe-shaped patch of land, once part of an estate belonging to the shipbuilding Lilly family, in Northport, Long Island’s heyday. He’d snatched up the acres on the cheap in the postwar years, and it was now the last ramshackle parcel he had been able to hold on to after the divorce. Gizela assured him that they would fix it up together and turn it into a home.
How odd it was for both of them to feel happy after all these years! She had lost part of one arm to World War II shrapnel, and had spent the days since then in hunger and in grief, and the nights sleeping on a couch at the back of her antiques store. For him, there were bitter memories of a first marriage that no amount of adventure could make him forget.
Like anyone in love, Billy wanted to show his bride his history. They shopped for peppery kielbasa in the remaining Polish delis of the Lower East Side—so many had moved away, and now there were turtle-necked beatniks everywhere. He took Gizela to the Seamen’s Institute and explained how the men there had helped him ride out the roughest days of the Depression, and about the day he unexpectedly ate Thanksgiving dinner with so many of his old friends.
The two were perfect for each other, each marveling at the other’s kindness. They spent happy evenings preparing favorite Polish recipes and eating by candlelight in their kitchen that Billy had sketched to look like a ship’s galley and then manifested into reality through his own woodworking skills. They shared a love of antiques and visited museums to take in art exhibits. They joined a Polish church.
The couple never had children; Gizela did not want to bring youngsters into a world where there was war.
In bed one night, Billy asked Gizela to share her secret dreams for her future. She admitted that she had wanted to be an artist but never had the opportunity to pursue this in Gdan´sk. Soon she was taking the Long Island Railroad into Manhattan once a week to study Oriental art under artist and collector Warren E. Cox, a longtime arts editor for Encyclopædia Britannica and author of the most respected books in the field.
Gizela didn’t mind Billy’s voyages; they gave her time alone to paint. But after each two-month-long stint at sea, she would meet him at the wharves, arms outstretched. How funny that something that had played no part in his adolescent dreams now seemed to be precisely what made life so worth living.
He and Gizela opened a nursery with a roadside stand and a greenhouse that Billy had bought at auction and restored himself. The newly christened Buttonwood Farms specialized in broadleaf evergreens, shrubs, ground cover, rock and dwarf plants, and other rare botanicals Billy loved to research, channeling the scientists on his long-ago Antarctica trip. At the Eighteenth Annual Northport Veterans Fall Flower and Vegetable Show in 1964, Buttonwood Farms won the gold medal in three categories, which Billy said to his wife felt almost as good as getting another Congressional Medal of Honor. Before long, the plants were moved out of the greenhouse so they could expanded the business, now rechristened Buttonwood Antiques.
In 1972, while on assignment to reactivate an old steel trawler for commercial fishing in Portland, Maine, Billy fell in love with the area: the lighthouses, the exquisite light. The following year, he and Gizela retired to a fixer-upper in the nearby community of Cape Elizabeth. And so the stowaway found himself living out his days not on the windswept, desolate Ross Ice Barrier but happily toiling away in his own verdant backyard. The orange California poppies everywhere were his pride, an unexpected burst of joy for strangers passing by. There, amidst the poppies, purple veronica, mountain pinks, Siberian irises, and thyme, Billy the stowaway rediscovered each day the joys of being home.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although the story of Billy Gawronski reads like that of some character sprung from the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson or Mark Twain and plunked down in twentieth-century New York City—between world wars, at the height of the Jazz Age—it is a work of nonfiction. After stumbling upon his name while researching a possible article on Manhattan’s St. Stanislaus Parish on East Seventh Street, the oldest Polish Catholic church in America, I became obsessed with the Polish kid stowaway. I was desperate for more source material. I didn’t know yet that the 1920s newspaper article I’d read had misspelled his last name “Gavronski,” with a v, but I had a hunch that back then reporters often struggled with long foreign names. Trying phonetic variations, I found another mention, and then yet another and another, and, at last, a larger story emerged. Gawronski had been, as I hoped, all over the news!
Searching online cemetery listings, I found a William Gawronski with a birth year that matched his age. This William Gawronski died in Maine. I had been cold-calling Gawronskis up and down the East Coast to laughable results, but now I tried a woman in Maine, possibly a descendant. The elderly lady who answered had an accent, and was clearly not a daughter or granddaughter. I apologized for the morning intrusion, explaining that in 1928 a boy had swum the Hudson to stow away to Antarctica; I hoped there might be a family connection. The woman said, “That boy was my husband. My name is Gizela Gawronski.”
Billy had died in 1981. By choice, Gizela had never remarried; nor had she gotten rid of her deceased husband’s many mementoes—including his childhood scrapbook and notebooks devoted to the exploits of Commander Richard Byrd. She also held on to souvenirs from the expedition, such as a paper cup decorated with icebergs and huskies and a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes; only later did I grasp their significance.
The first Byrd expedition to Antarctica was in its time a major event in American history. But as the years passed, people forgot the then household names of the sixty-odd men on the journey: the ship captains, the first mates, and the stowaway. Then, for the most part, they even forgot Admiral Byrd.
Gizela had hoped there would be a way to put these saved materials to good use before it was too late for her as well. She had spent many a day and night discussing her husband’s astounding past with him and kindly invited me into her home. I was there within the week. Over several visits in her kitchen, we went through the old family scrapbooks and his notebooks, and hundreds of photos of Billy and his family: in a sailor suit at three; with his first love from high school; as a dashing young Merchant Marine. Gizela allowed me to photocopy her archives at her local packing store. In addition to hours of recorded in-person discussions, we spoke dozens of times between visits. To date, she still has never tried email.
A few months later, a Google Alert for “William Gawronski” went off, and I was baffled by a mugshot that looked like the kid stowaway as an older man. (I held a photocopy from Gizela’s house next to the screen.) Billy’s wife believed that her two troubled but bright stepsons had been dead for many years after getting caught up in 1960s drug culture and then lives of crime. George, the younger son, was dead, but William, the elder, was facing a thirty-year sentence in northern Florida for a drug-related crime. His photo had been published online because he was fighting for parole. (He lost. It’s hard to overturn a stiff Florida jail term even with years of exemplary behavior and advanced age.) After many letters and phone calls, and after reassuring his defense attorneys and wardens that I would stick to questions about American polar history, I was granted permission to visit a high-security prison deep in orange-grove territory. According to one warden, Billy Jr. had been startled to hear from me and was eager to meet. I was his first visitor in years.
In his orange jumpsuit, Billy Jr. told me he had tremendous guilt about his past. He welcomed the opportunity to answer my ques
tions, and I soon found he had an astonishing memory, just like Billy Sr. Over the visits and letters and phone calls, Billy Jr. offered new details about his father, his grandparents, and even his tiny great-grandmother, who showed him her amulets and crystal ball that, according to her, had predicted his father’s future. Gizela had never met her husband’s in-laws or his beloved grandmother, but Billy Jr. knew them all well. I later fact-checked the two accounts against each other and was relieved to find no conflicts, although each had salty details the other lacked. Billy Jr. also offered me particulars about World War II that his father had shared with him as a young boy that surprised experts in the field but turned out to hold weight. I’ve never had reason to doubt his important contributions to my research.
It is easier to write about the beauty of Antarctica’s Ross Ice Barrier when you have reached it yourself after a violent storm and have watched great chunks break off and float out to sea. And it is easier to write about early flight over the iciest yet most startlingly polychromatic continent when you have flown above it in a helicopter yourself. So despite my considerable fear of seasickness, I traveled by ship for a monthlong visit to what is still the most mysterious continent. I hope I have imbued the thrill of that once-in-a-lifetime experience into this story of a brave boy that was, until now, lost to history.
Laurie Gwen Shapiro, New York, 2017
1 After a trip to Europe to visit family when he was three, Billy refused to take off his sailing suit. When anyone asked the little boy what he wanted to be when he grew up, his mother answered for him: “He wants to be a sailor.”
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