CHAPTER I
NOTES FROM A JOURNAL
1928 was probably the busiest year of my life. So the journal which I had promised myself I should keep, day by day, suffered in consequence. The few hours of quiet and isolation I had, generally came after midnight, on top of an exhausting day; and these naturally found me wanting in the spirit to write; the morrow in variably brought tougher problems. Nevertheless I did occasionally find time to make entries in my journal; and from these I have been persuaded to select the following, in the belief that they may show by reason of their immediacy, some of the difficulties and hopes that attended us as we got ready to go south.
I A.M.
The Owl, en route Boston,
Sept. 28, ’ 28
The time is up. We must be getting southward. The last dollar that I can beg is raised. Four ships, with most of our equipment on board, are already on their way, headed for New Zealand. In their holds and on their cluttered decks are over 500 tons of supplies and material; there are at least 5,000 different kinds of things, ranging from thumb tacks to airplanes; and every single thing is essential, in one way or another, to our unrelieved stay in the Antarctic. I hope that everything is there. There can be no return now. We are going into the largest non-shop area in the world, more than 2000 miles from the nearest human dwellings, and for nine months out of every twelve shut off even from these by the impenetrable pack ice. So we stand or fall according to our preparations here in Manhattan, nearly 10,000 miles away from our Antarctic base. A pity if we should become vitally dependent upon some trivial, forgotten things. Through my brain runs a provoking rhyme . . . “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost . . .” I seem to have forgotten the rest, but the moral is clear anyway. No matter. We have done our best; if something is forgotten, some trifle necessary to the support of 82 men, for nearly two years, then it will have to be one of those things with which Providence bedevils humans who reach out for too much. For we have estimated, calculated and considered until heads whirled; we have divided and sub-divided to the nth degree; we have laid out our plans on a cosmic order, setting up, as it were, an ideal scheme—an expedition equipped with the most nearly perfect instruments for gathering information in the most efficient and modern way; and these' plans we have painfully contracted into the narrower, more modest limits fixed by the funds at our disposal, surrendering first of all the luxuries, the relatively least essential, until we got down at last to the hard. rock level of irreducible minima.
It has been a real fight, this battle of New York. Minor crises fell hard upon major crises. None of us has rested. Nearly all of us are exhausted. We have been stimulated by the knowledge that the battle ahead in the frozen world will be won or lost by the battle of preparation. We are not done yet—not by any means. There is still an immense debt.—I owe more money than I used to think existed.
But debt or no debt, I must have a few days at home, so I am on my way. Merely starting is relief.
Though my mood borders closely on despair there wells up a greater gratitude. My own friends and the American public have been surpassingly generous. Time and time again we felt the weight of our task carrying us sliding down the rope that leads to failure, only to find the burden lightened at the bitter end by the grace of some friendly act.
But enough of this for now. Tomorrow I breakfast at home.
At Home, Boston
Sept. 30, ’ 28
Morning.
Precious moments, these—very little time for note-making. Indeed, for the past ten years aviation, exploration, the Navy and public life have allowed me little time for anything, even home life. And now I am off again; this time on the longest errand of all.
Knowing how often during the long Antarctic winter night my mind will come back to this place, I am cramming it with impressions, snatching them like a glutton. Yet even these last moments are crowded with outside influences, and the hands of the clock seem to be racing around—ticking away seconds that will not come again.
What with long distance telephone calls, telegrams, newspaper reporters, friends, it has been impossible to keep even these last few days to ourselves. For the millionth time I have been pressed to draw my family and home life into newsprint. We do not want to do this. Marie is averse to publicity, and I must say that the reporters have been fair. However much they beg her and however provoked they may become over her steadfast refusal to be interviewed or, as one said, “humanized,” they nevertheless respect her attitude; she and the children now bear an almost charmed freedom from the camera. I have had reason on a hundred occasions to note the high sense of fairness and honor among newspaper men. Not a few of them have shared my confidence; none has yet deliberately broken it.
But here’s Dickie—he calls me. This notebook immediately becomes nothing. Dickie, only eight, but already a perfect companion.
The rascal has just surprised me with a gift of $4.35. He worked all summer, doing odd jobs, and saved his money, bit by bit. Gravely I told him that his contribution would help. “I’ll make some more, daddy, and send it,” he said.
We’re off now, Dickie and I, for our last rom p and play together—a kite, a boat and an airplane. When I get back he’ll be ten.
Oct. 2, 1928
Aboard Twentieth Century Ltd.
En route San Pedro, Calif.
Home is back there now—but no, rather it is two years ahead of me. It is more pleasant to look at it in that way. For then each day must advance me to ward it, and not away from it. Yesterday was the last day. There were, of course, no goodbyes. A casual “so long” is so much better. The thing is living with me to day, and I have not the will to describe it. Of the three girls, only Bolling seems to have understood that I was going away for a long time, but whatever doubts that knowledge gave rise to were speedily swallowed up in a vaster personal disaster. She cut her finger, and ran up, crying: “Daddy, I ’m leaking. Stop me up.” Dickie was the little soldier he always is, at the end shoving shyly into my hand his most treasured toy. What a wonderful thing to have come close to the mind of a child! Here is perhaps the most exquisite intimacy, and surely the most tranquil. For Dickie takes it for granted that all fathers adore sons, and all sons adore fathers.
Tonight, as I have done on a hundred nights, I have asked myself: why are you doing this? Can it be that the joy you get out of exploring is the decisive factor in your plans, overpowering all other influences?
This is a time of heart-sinking doubt. I must go it alone for no one can decide the matter for me. My mind knows what the answers are, but there is some obscure, perhaps ancient, voice within me tonight which instinctively interposes others. What a contradictory thing “instinct” is? Half of human instinct drives away from the center, and makes for enlarging the outline of what we know. Half of it drives toward the center, seeking to confirm and make secure the goods that are there. Life is made up of both things, exploring and establishing, a double swing of the pendulum. Sometimes, as tonight, the instinct toward digging-in must have its chance to speak—not a homing instinct, for I am not far enough away for that—but a home-building instinct perhaps, trying to persuade one that happiness is identified with security, order, and steady work toward making things more perfect. But when intellect takes this instinct by the ears and compels it to listen to reason, it recognizes that security is never perfect, and therefore home-building is never finished, until we know all that is outside that charmed circle. Going away is a part of solid working at the center. And perhaps this is my particular fate, to do my building in this roundabout way. “Man wants to know,” Nansen has said, “and when he does not want to know he ceases to be a man.”
Oct. 2, ’ 28
On Train en route
San Pedro, Calif.
My suit case lies open on the opposite seat—in it, and opened, is an old newspaper with the following headlines:
Million Dollar Expedition
Has Magnificent Equipment
Costliest on Record
Between the lines the thought lay implicit:—“plutocratic backing, lavish equipment, unnecessary luxuries, and elegant ease where hardships were once considered inescapable.”
To the man who wrote the article, an attack on Antarctica with a shoestring would have been the desirable thing. There would then be more high adventure to it, more sport, more drama and so, more news value. I fear we shall pay for that impression.
In polar expeditions of given conditions, the adventure involved varies directly as preparation. There is a saying among explorers that the more the amateur the greater the adventure. Conditions in the Antarctic, however, are sufficiently hazardous to involve risk—which is to say, adventure—even to the most carefully prepared expedition. Faulty preparation must certainly bring a high degree of risk, if not tragedy, were the expedition not even to venture from its main base. Tragedy may follow even with the best possible preparation. A knowledge of what has been going on behind the scenes, as well as the literature on the Antarctic, must have softened that man’s humor.
He would then have known of an enormous debt—of creditors pressing us week after week, almost to the edge of bankruptcy, and loyal friends neglecting their own affairs to help us stave off failure.
He would have seen no flock of plutocrats buying luxuries; only a handful of impecunious men collecting necessities with painful economy.
He would have known the mere fact of costs running up into six figures does not mean luxury. If the notion was drawn from comparison with the costs of other expeditions, a moment’s analysis must have convinced him that the difference, if anything, would not be against us. The dollar’s purchasing power has diminished considerably since the first great expeditions to the Antarctic. The cost of Captain Scott’s first expedition (1901–1904) was approximately $460,000,1 of his last (1910—1913) at least $375,000,2 and of Sir Ernest Shackleton ’s second (1914–1916) about $400,000.3
Moreover, we must take not only the best in pioneering equipment, but also the most useful apparatus that modern science and industry offers. The unique nature of the expedition, in fact, demands the most expensive kind of transport thus far used in polar regions—the airplane. It requires the services of a highly-paid, well-trained personnel. The pay of the aviators alone will total $35,000, and the extra ship necessary to carry the airplanes and gasoline will cost several hundred thousand dollars to purchase and condition it for the Antarctic and for cost of operation. Ships are very costly things.
No, we are not half so well fixed as this fellow believed.
And there is the added thought that the past expeditions, as large as ours is, were usually supported wholly. or in large part, by governments, or divisions of governments; whereas responsibility for the financing of this one is centered in a single man.
What a debacle if the creditors had forced us to the wall! Yet better a thousand times, we told ourselves, to face ruin in New York than accept the dreadful responsibility of starting south lacking a single bit of equipment, no matter what the cost, necessary for the safety of the men.
The raising of money for polar expeditions is always difficult. I have never known an explorer who was not either bankrupt or close to it.
October 7, 1928
Hotel
Los Angeles.
The telephone is disconnected at last. It is quiet here, for the first time in hours. Committees have gone, good-wishers, autograph hunters who flock, like locusts, to the feast. More than five hundred telegrams, most of them wishing “bon voyage,” are stacked up on the table. There is no time nor money to answer them, and that hurts.
The devilish flu that threatened to upset everything is almost gone. Fever is down and pulse normal. In fact, I feel quite fit. This is a good omen.
Marie is best of nurses. We have seen more of each other during the past few days than in many, many months. It has made me realize more fully how very busy I have been during the past ten years. Tomorrow is our last day. Then I start south on the Larsen.1
I do hope they let us get away quietly and without too noisy a show.
October 13, '28
A board S.S. C. A. Larsen
En route New Zealand.
Headed southward at last. After years of anticipation and months of preparation.
The moon on the water; the breezes whispering adventure ahead; then the storm, the water boiling; and above the wind the calm sound of the ship’s bell striking on the hour, voicing man’s indifference to the nature about him that can no longer shape him to its end; the wind slackens again to a whisper and the barely audible chug-chug of the engines feeding man’s deep yearning for mobility, carrying us to a new place, where wealth and fame and power count for nothing, and where men will not strut because there are no women about.
October 16
These last few days, I have simply rested and recalled. What struck me most, as the events of the past few years passed through my mind, was the difference between these last three expeditions and the first two. That is, the difference in the magnitude of operations, the methods of financing, and the distribution of responsibility.
In the projected trans-Atlantic flight of 1919 and the MacMillan Arctic Expedition of 1925, of which I commanded the naval aerial unit, the powerful bureaus of the Navy Department shouldered most of the work and most of the responsibility for the hazards of the flying. On the North Pole flight and this Antarctic expedition, the responsibility has been entirely mine. Responsibility for debts, mistakes, plans, execution of work and what is vastly more important—responsibility for the safety of the men involved—has fallen wholly upon a single pair of shoulders; whereas, in the case of a naval or governmental undertaking of the kind, such cares and responsibilities are distributed among I 20,000,000 persons. There are more than four score men on this expedition, ran gin g in age from 18 years to 68, from seam en to scientists. For every one of them I have a deep sense of responsibility. I shall have it with me, without relief, for nearly two years.
This expedition brought me trying problem s from the start. Of these, the problem of financing was perhaps the most difficult. The extensive scientific inquiry planned for the Antarctic, which alone could justify our going, required competent supporting forces. The cash necessary for creating the expedition, and keeping it in the field for the necessary period, was estimated, in the Spring of 1928, as approximately $750,000. We had begun to raise this money in the fall of 1927, through public subscription and private contributions; by mid-summer approximately $500,000 had been raised. I knew that mean while we had run into unforeseen expenses, the extent of which I did not learn until the last week m September. I was in New York at the time. In seven days I hoped to leave for Boston.
Hilton1 met meat the office, after a night with his reports. Hilton had been put in charge of raising funds for the expedition. When he spoke, he did not hold his punch.
“I have a final statement to make on our debts,” he said. “We have a deficit of $300,000.”
I had n o t expected it to be half as much. The reasons for this were soon forthcoming. The cost and outfitting of the City of New York and the Eleanor Bolling had amounted to a small fortune—$165,000 for the first, $125,000 for the second. To build new ships would have approximately cost three times what I put into them. There could be no cutting corners in the matter of strengthening the ships for the struggle in the ice: this expenditure was absolutely necessary. I owed a fortune. And here I was, at the bitter end of my resources, dead tired, sustained during the last crowded days by the hope I should have the last few days at home. Well, I had to get that money; though where, God only knew.
While I sat pondering over this cruel turn of affairs, Hilton came at me again. “I have also learned this: an article is being written for a powerful syndicate of newspapers attacking the expedition for lavish equipment.”
“Great,” I told him. “Now let’s have some more good news. I need it.”
Only five days—Monday to Friday night—in which to raise that amount of money. It was distressing to be forced to give up those seven days at home. They were more than just spilt milk, not to be cried over.
I am in no proper frame of mind, even at this distant date, to record that struggle here. From early morning until late at night, I was at the most disagreeable job in the world, money-raising, begging it really is. I was fortunate. The debt was reduced to $184,000. The job, I confess, could not have been done alone. Loyal friends went to the bat for me, not once but many times. And to them I give undying gratitude—small recompense indeed for what they have done. They made it possible to go ahead and saved me from abysm al bankruptcy.
The day we sailed, in fact, yet another encouraging gift came. It was embodied in a telegram, which I have at hand:
Replying to your request through Edsel Ford, Fisher Brothers are glad to contribute $50,000 to the fund of the great research expedition you are making. Kindly advise where and how funds should be deposited. Best wishes and success to you all in your great undertaking.
L. P. FISHER,
Detroit, Mich.
And so to you, Lawrence Fisher, and your brothers, I also extend my deepest thanks. You cannot possibly know how much your gift has encouraged us.
Still a debt in excess of $100,000. Ahead of us expenses of routine operation that will certainly amount to that much more. In the treasury hardly half enough funds with which to meet them.
Unless we can raise the money, we shall have, then, the humiliation of debts and creditors in a foreign land.
I had determined at the outset not to leave the United States if a large deficit had accumulated. This decision had to be abandoned; the expedition gathered such momentum that it could not be stopped; for another month's delay here must of necessity mean another year's delay,1 and considerably greater expenditures in the end. But having set my course I shall go ahead with keen pleasure, for these difficulties are part of the problem and they will be met somehow.
The situation nevertheless calls for determination and cooperation on the part of all members of the expedition; and from Nature the most favorable of circumstances. If, for example, we should fail to get our winter base established on the Barrier there can be but one miserable ending—bankruptcy and disgrace. In expeditions of this kind success and failure are not nearly as far apart as the antithetical meanings of the words themselves would indicate. Failure of the pack ice to break up at a seasonable date, thus holding us back too long for the complete basing of supplies, or the presence of a speck of dirt in the airplane engines in flight—matters remotely beyond human control—may well bring disaster at the beginning.
The problem of using aircraft to the utmost advantage in the Antarctic has been discussed at length both at home and aboard ship. The use of aircraft in the Antarctic is experimental, and its success unpredictable. Mawson,1 as early as 1911, proposed to use an airplane in the field, an R.E.P. monoplane, built by Vickers, with a special detachable sledge-runner under-carriage. It came to grief, however, in a test flight at Adelaide, Australia, nearly killing its pilot, and Mawson therefore abandoned the idea of attempting to fly in the Antarctic.2 The fuselage was converted into a tractor for hauling sledges, in which humbler capacity it also failed.3As a matter of fact, pioneering with heavier-than-air craft in polar regions could not have had more distressing circumstances attending it than Mawson found at Adelie Land. Had not the excessively roughened character of the terrain at Cape Denison, on Commonwealth Bay, where he established his main base, been sufficient to preclude the possibility of a take-off, save under the most hazardous circumstances, the ferocity of the winds must have kept his craft permanently under cover. For he discovered the windiest country in the world—”an accursed country.”4 The average wind velocity for the year was placed at 50 miles per hour; for hours on end blizzards persisted at velocities greatly in excess of the maximum on the Beaufort Scale,5 reaching the phenomenal velocity of 116 miles per hour, July 5, 1913,1 and maintaining an average of 107 miles per hour for eight hours, jarring even the tightly bolted timbers of their hut. Gusts approaching 200 miles per hour were reported on the anemometer.2 Such conditions must beggar the mightiest flying efforts of man.
Of course we shall have no problem at our base in the Bay of Whales; although preeminently a windy continent, Antarctica has places of calm, and Amundsen assures me that, if we are eternally vigilant, our planes can be kept safely in flight and on the ice. The principal risks, as we see them, will arise from storms or from the impossible conditions of visibility met unexpectedly in flight, in landings away from the base, upon unknown ice terrain, and from the difficulty in properly securing the ship against the wind in connection with such landings. All three present food for serious thought; the third is perhaps our most difficult problem. A wind velocity of 60 miles per hour is sufficient to give a stationary airplane a true flying speed; at 100 miles per hour a terrific lift; at that speed the wind exerts a pressure of 23 lbs. per square foot, and unless securely anchored, a plane would be instantly hurled aloft and destroyed. Balchen3 and Smith4 are particularly concerned with this problem; and they are now working out a system of anchor lines and ice anchors. I have great faith in these splendid pilots. Both have superb records:—Smith, a pioneer pilot in the mail service, one of the four survivors, I am told, of the thirty-two pilots who opened the mail line between New York and Cleveland; he is now only 31 years old. I have yet to learn to know Smith, but I believe in him. When I met his mother I knew that he must have good stuff in him. Bernt Balchen and I have been through much together. He has never failed to meet whatever test has come. Bernt is splendid.
What uncertainty of the future I share centers principally about the matter of attempting landings away from the main base. Our program demands several such landings in connection with the laying of depots for the main polar flight, and for reconnaissance expeditions of the scientists. Each of these landings must be attended with great risk, for conditions of visibility in the Antarctic are notoriously bad, ice surfaces are extremely difficult to judge from the air and there will be the constant threat of unseen crevasses. Even less attractive is the possibility of a forced landing.
All of which gives us much to think about, even on the tranquil Pacific. We plan and discuss matters from early morning until late at night. At luncheon today we discussed merits of seal meat and pemmican as a constant diet. I detected in Parker,1 who comes from Mississippi, the beginnings of a strong distaste for such food. There is a vast amount of work yet to be done—hundreds of letters and telegrams carried unanswered from the states, and much routine planning for the expedition from New Zealand on. Duties must be allocated continuously, the program for the scientists finally drafted in detail, the plan of the wintering party prepared, and so on, seemingly without end. Lofgren's typewriter seems rarely still. Good old Charlie. He is always an anchor to windward.
I really am not greatly exercised either by our financial problems or by the task ahead. But wherever it can be done, my plan is always to substitute anticipation and preparation for worry. It is the unexpected that messes the plans of an expedition of this kind.
October 27
Aboard S.S. Larsen
Today we reached a most important decision. The original plan to send the Bolling and the City through the pack together we may now abandon. On the condition we do not delay his own passage, Captain Nilsen has agreed to take the City in tow through the pack, and as a result the Bolling need not risk her thin metal sides until later in the season, when ice conditions will be less hazardous. The new plan is to have the Bolling tow the City to the edge of the pack, where the Larsen will pick her up and give her a much needed boost to the Ross Sea. Thus many tons of precious coal will be saved. I have refused to consider the coal situation impossible and here is the solution if it works out. After giving us all the coal we can handle the Bolling will return to New Zealand, take on cargo and follow through, probably three weeks later. What excellent luck! We had scarcely dared to hope for this chance! However, there is danger of counting our tows before they are made. Everything now depends upon the speed with which we can get the two ships to New Zealand, loaded and then to the pack. Captain Nilsen expects to enter the pack late in November, and he insists he cannot afford to delay passage on our account: the loss of a day's fishing means a loss of about $30,000 worth of oil.
The question is: can we hold up our end of the bargain? Frankly, I don't know. The odds, in fact, are overwhelmingly against us. According to the latest radios, the City is in the doldrums and logging less then fifty miles per day. If the whales get scarce north of the pack early in the season, we are licked, for then the Larsen will risk an early passage in an attempt to reach the better fishing grounds south of the pack. But in bending effort to meet her, we have much to lose if we fail and everything to gain if we succeed.
The problem of basing in the Antarctic turns almost entirely upon coal. The vessels used for exploration work in the ice are generally too small to allow of a safe surplus of cruising radius. A large and powerful oil-burner would be just the thing for this kind of work: but where is an indigent explorer going to get the money necessary to build one? The problem we face now almost every Antarctic explorer faced in the past. The round trip between Dunedin and the Bay of Whales is approximately 4,600 miles. The maximum amount of coal we can allow the City is 150 tons below decks and another 50 tons on the deck. Steaming all day, she uses six tons, according to Mulroy's1 latest wireless; and as she averages under steam about 100 miles per day, she therefore has a steaming range of about 3,300 miles. Of course she can eke this out with sail; but the danger lies in the fact that power is absolutely necessary in the pack. If we encounter nasty weather in the Bay of Whales, I fear she will be steaming much of the time until the unloading is finished. We shall certainly have to keep up steam for the month we shall lie alongside the ice at the Bay of Whales.
With the expected relay of tows, however, the City should be able to enter the Ross Sea with bunkers almost full, and a sufficient supply of coal to see her through.
I cannot begin to describe the many ways in which Captain Nilsen has aided us. This quiet, soft-spoken and amazingly competent whaling master has what is probably the loneliest job in the world. Every August he takes the Larsen out of Norway and down and across two oceans to the Ross Sea, an 18,000 mile journey to the last retreat of the whale; and May comes round before he sees his home again. Three months of that time he has the responsibility of the safety of his valuable vessel under conditions that would quickly break the spirit of a lesser man; but he appears to be a man with strength of purpose, a resolute mind and an acquired cunning in ice lore that Nature's violence could not bend aside. His knowledge of ice conditions is very extensive, and it is a pity it is not yet to be found in books.
Attacking the pack is a matter no less involved from a tactical point of view than a military problem. The Continent is the objective, the pack is the enemy entrenched in front of it, and our ships are the forces with which the attack is pressed. “The White Warfare”1 of the Antarctic begins with the pack itself, when it is first met on the way south, and the outcome is always in doubt until it is traversed on the way out. Thus far man has mastered it provisionally; but though he may run its gauntlet in the summer, he must ever treat it with respect as a dangerous enemy. In the winter it reigns supreme. Probably all the navies of the world together could not batter their way through.
The time at which a passage is attempted and the place at which the pack is entered largely determine the conditions and duration of the passage. The first man to break through it, the distinguished British navigator, Sir James Clark Ross, on January 5, at Long. 174° 34' E. entered the pack and four days later emerged in the clear, sun-lit waters of Ross Sea. Barely eleven months later—Dec. 18, 1841—when he tackled the pack at Long. 146° W., far to the east, it took him forty-four days to struggle through 800 miles of ice.
The first of the many dreadful blows that were finally to overwhelm Scott fell upon him in the pack. The Terra Nova entered the pack, December 9, 1910, on Long. 177° 41' W.,1 Scott having concluded that the 178° W.2 meridian offered the best passage, only to be rewarded “by encountering worse conditions than any ship has had before.”3 December 25th, the Terra Nova was still in the pack, and Scott wrote in his diary: “We are captured. We do practically nothing under sail to push through, and could do little under steam, and at each step the possibility of advance seems to lessen…. Again the call is for patience and again patience.”4 The vessel did not get clear until December 30,5 after twenty-one days in the pack, and as a result much valuable time Scott hoped to use in preliminary exploration was lost.
This is the record from its gloomier side. The pack is often more amenable. Less than a month after Scott's ill-favored entrance, Amundsen's Fram reached the pack on Long. 176° E., and four days later was in open water in the Ross Sea—”a four day pleasure trip,” Amundsen described it.6 Shackleton's Nimrod entering the pack on January 15, 1908, at 179° W., gained open water in thirty hours. The only thing about the pack I have been able to learn with certainty is its changeable nature. The danger of the pack is in getting beset and drifted to the Westward into the impossible ice that churns about the Balleny Islands. This is what we will have to watch and prevent.
The sum of the written evidence as I had studied it, indicates quite clearly that the 178° east meridian offers on the whole, the easier passage through the Ross Sea, to the east and the west, apparently, the pack is denser and more tenacious. So, if we fail to make connections with the Larsen, we can be fairly certain of getting through the pack unaided toward the middle or the last part of January. Such a delay might very well mean the failure of our program. If the ice has not by then gone out of the Bay of Whales, we shall have a difficult task to unload our stores. There will be no time for flying. Both ships must be sent North before March. If they should become frozen in the pack, we should run great risk of losing the City and most certainly the Bolling. If the worst comes, I must face the possibility of freezing the City in for the winter, a notion neither to my plan or liking.
Captain Nilsen is decidedly pessimistic about our chances of keeping the rendezvous. Generally by the third week in November, both the Larsen and the Ross are prowling about the edge of the pack, ready to seize the first promising lead southward. If conditions warrant it, he said, both ships will enter the pack at once. Although past experience is overwhelmingly against finding similar conditions, one of the large steel whaling ships forced a passage as early as the middle of November, several years ago, after unusually heavy winds, storms and currents had broken up the pack.
At the risk of being ungrateful to our Norwegian friends, we are hoping that such will not be the case this year. The advantages accruing to the boost the Larsen can give us are immeasurable—the saving in coal, the gain in time may well mean the difference between large and mediocre accomplishments. If the pack holds firm until as late as the first week in December, we have an excellent chance.
Aboard the S.S. Larsen
October 30th
It is trying to have the expedition scattered all over the Pacific, in four ships separated by hundreds of miles of sea. This is past helping now. How much better it would be if we could have afforded to build a single ship large enough to do the job. Every man would then have a sense of being part of a whole organization, would come to know the other men with whom he must work during the next year and a half, and, more important, might gain thereby a proper valuation of the job itself. With the exception of the scientists and several of the aviators, I doubt whether a dozen men on this expedition have any idea of the difficulties that face us. It is only natural that they should not. Very few know anything about this new world we shall enter into. A good many of them appear to think it is no more than an heroic journey, with opportunities galore for valorous deeds, high adventure and the like. They will have a rude awakening: heroism and coal shovels are not yet identified in common in their minds, but in the Antarctic it is only by prodigious use of the latter and of allied implements, such as the snow shovel, that attainment of the former state is possible.
The thought has occurred to me repeatedly that we are strangers. Scarcely a score know each other except by name and reputation. Drawn together by the common wish to participate in the expedition, these eighty odd men have been shoved, with scarcely a pause for introduction, into this lengthy journey, some of them on two highly odoriferous whalers, the rest of them on our own ships, one of them ancient, the other uncomfortable, and both of them small. The differences that separate us have been marked even in the group aboard the Larsen. Of the fourteen men with me, only one, Russell Owen,1 calls me by my first name. It has already been necessary to rebuke one man, an officer in the military, for high-hatting one of the men who happens to be in the enlisted ranks. This officer is not to blame. He hasn't had time to learn that special privileges will not obtain on this expedition. An expedition allows of no social differences. “It is the man that counts, here as everywhere,''2 as Nansen says; but especially here.
Where is there another organization knit together as this one? Outwardly it appears to lack the factors that make for stability and cooperation in civilization. There can be no promotion for work well done—no increase in pay. In fact, money scarcely enters into it. Many of the men are either volunteers or else receive only what is necessary to support their families during their absence. None of them could be paid for the service he will render. Nor can there be any lawful punishment for a misdeed or failure. There is no brig, with bread and water diet. There can be no court-martial for disrespect, or over-staying liberty, or desertion. There is only one thing holding us together, disciplining us, identifying us from any other collection of persons on the high seas. It is the fact of loyalty. Loyalty not only to a common purpose; but loyalty according to the various ideals we live by: loyalty to family, to country, to men, even to self, and to God. In this affinity I place my hope. There is no other bond on earth save this that will see men through an Antarctic winter night and the other experiences that lie ahead of us.
As a group, the men represent all that I had hoped for. Choosing men for a trip like this is a ghastly responsibility. I know now what Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen and Mawson went through; if I fare as well as they, I shall be lucky. Men are at once the strongest and the weakest links in the chain. The performance of machinery in the face of given conditions can be anticipated with accuracy; but what men will do is past prophecy. The man who Scott thought would outlast all others was the first to collapse.
The idea of selecting men according to their faces alone is one of the most fantastic notions yet swallowed by the race. Whoever claims to be able to judge his fellow men by their faces is an optimist. The face shows certain things, it is true, but you must live with a man for a long time, see him as he stands and thinks in relation to rapidly altering conditions; and even then you have no certainty: only the probability that he will act in the future as he did in the past. I have taken but one man on his face—Captain McKinley,1 and in his case a very splendid record in the U. S. Air Service more than bore out the first impression. His is the one case in ten thousand where nobility shows unmistakably in his face.
The rest of the men, save for the handful who served me on other expeditions, were taken according to their records and abilities. They come from everywhere, and appear to have done nearly everything. Dr. Laurence M. Gould is a full-fledged professor, with two summer Arctic expeditions in his biography. Dr. Coman was a staff surgeon at Johns Hopkins. During the World War he served four years with the French Army. McGuinness, a citizen of Ireland, the mate on the City, is an adventurer of the vanishing type. He seems to have taken a very impartial part in the war, having fought both in the English and German armies. When the mood is on him, he talks of occasional anti-social activities such as gun-running. He is hard, courageous and resourceful, able to do a great many things well. He was a General in Ireland and has commanded blockade running ships. Vaughan, Crockett and Goodale—already labelled the Three Musketeers—were at Harvard, when they decided to go south: more than a year ago, they resigned and spent the winter in New Hampshire hills learning to be dog-drivers. At least two young men are the sons of millionaires. The oldest and most experienced man on the party is Martin Ronne, a Norwegian 68 years old, whom I can see from my desk as I write: he is a veteran of several of Amundsen's expeditions. It was a silken tent he made, left behind by Amundsen, that Scott found at the South Pole; and of him Amundsen wrote: “he was one of those men whose ambition it is to get as much work as possible done in the shortest possible time.”1 I have begun to understand why Amundsen recommended him. I doubt if I will ever come across again another man like Ronne where work is concerned. He goes at it with concentration all day long for fear he may waste time by a false move. He is probably the greatest craftsman in polar clothing to be found anywhere. I hope the rest of his countrymen shape up as well as he does. There are seven of them, all splendid men, it seems to me. They are to act as dog-drivers, instructors in skiing, mates and as ice pilots.
Everything more or less turns upon the men. To expect that all of them will come through, nearly two years hence, with untarnished records would be silly; the law of averages alone would argue to the contrary. I can only hope that the man whose misfortune it is to fail will have the manhood to hold himself to blame. Dissatisfaction spread by a single man can infect an expedition as a stone, cast into water, soon disturbs its whole surface. I know a little about every man on the expedition; there will not be many slackers among them, even when the going is hardest. The Antarctic is like war in one respect, as Cherry-Garrard has said, “There is no getting out of it with honor as long as you can put one foot before the other.”1
Thus, the journal, which was thereafter, I confess, too neglected for, and I too busy to give it, more than random impressions jotted down in haste. A sentence often had to do for a day's complicated details; a paragraph for a week's vicissitudes. But now, in the leisurely quiet of the New Hampshire hills, I have had time to go back, to pick up the threads of the narrative; to see things steadily and to see them whole, with all things done and all hopes and fears having run out their sand. From this point of vantage it is possible to see the two years more clearly, with less prejudice and more sureness, through the first planning, then the preparations and, finally, the field work itself.
Footnotes
1 “The Voyage of the Discovery,” i, p. 30.
2 Hayes, “Antarctica,” p. 365.
3 Ibid., p. 265.
1 The Norwegian whaler C. A. Larsen.
1 Captain Hilton Howell Railey, manager of expedition affairs in New York City, and personal representative and friend of Admiral Byrd.
1 Time is the principal factor controlling the safety and quickness of passages through the pack ice which lies between the Antarctic Continent and New Zealand. From Dec. 20th on, when the pack begins to break up and drift, a passage through to the Ross Sea can be generally found. Latei-than the first of March, however. the transit craft faces the probability of being “frozen in” if it can penetrate the pack at all.
1 Sir Douglas Mawson, perhaps the greatest living authority on the Antarctic, leader of the Australasian Expedition (1911–1914) and the Mawson Antarctic Expedition (1929–1930).
2 Mawson, “The Home of the Blizzard,” i, p. 24.
3 Ibid., ii, p. 10.
4 Ibid., i, p. 134.
5 The Beaufort Scale is graduated from zero—a dead calm—up to 12—a hurricane of 75 m.p.h. or more. The remarkable thing is that the wind pressure increases much more rapidly than the velocity. At 100 m.p.h. the pressure is almost double that at 70 m.p.h.
1 Mawson, “The Home of the Blizzard,” ii, p. 149.
2 Ibid., i, p. 133.
3 Bernt Balchen, former Lieutenant in the Royal Norwegian Naval Air Force, veteran of two Amundsen-Ellsworth aerial expeditions in the Arctic; the trans-Atlantic flight of the “America” and the Bremen Relief flight.
4 Dean C. Smith.
1 Captain Alton Parker, Marine Corps, a member of the North Pole Expedition and a very competent pilot.
1 Chief Engineer Thomas B. Mulroy who was also Chief Engineer of the North Pole expedition ship, The Chantier. He acted also. fuel engineer of the Antarctic expedition.
1 Shackleton’s “South,” preface.
1 “Scott’s Last Expedition,” i, p. 15.
2 Ibid., etc. i, p. 26.
3 Ibid., etc. I, p. 26.
4 Ibid., i, p. 37.
5 Ibid., i, p. 69.
6 “South Pole,“ i, p. 166.
1 Mr. Russell Owen, correspondent of the New York Times.
2 Amundsen, “The South Pole” introduction.
1 Ashley C. McKinley, aerial surveyor.
1 “The South Pole,” i, 135.
1 Cherry-Garrard, “Worst Journey in the World,” introduction.