Before 1924, Lincoln Ellsworth gave no indication he intended to be a polar explorer. To the contrary, he didn’t like the cold and was susceptible to pneumonia. He detested discomfort and deprivation and, whenever possible, he avoided physical work. He had difficulty focusing on any subject for even a brief period and, when confronted with a challenge, he usually surrendered to apathy and sought an easier path. In short, if one were to list the personal attributes necessary for polar exploration in the first half of the 20th century, it would be difficult to recognize even a few of them in Lincoln Ellsworth. But at the age of forty-four, Ellsworth stumbled upon an opportunity to become an explorer and seized it, hoping the overt display of manliness might finally gain the respect of his domineering, emotionally cold father.
Lincoln Ellsworth was born on May 10, 1880, in a stately mansion on Ellis Avenue on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. His only sibling was a sister, Clare, born five years later. Ellsworth was a sickly child, and a family friend later told him he was “too fragile to support the hard studies and hard games of other boys.” The friend, writing a decade before J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit explained to Ellsworth, “one feared you were an Elf Child,”1 and observed the condition was a great concern to Ellsworth’s father.1
Ellsworth’s mother, Eva, doted on her frail son until he was eight, when she died of pneumonia. The upbringing of Lincoln and Clare became the responsibility of their father, James W. Ellsworth, a powerful, overbearing businessman who had amassed a fortune mining coal to supply the insatiable needs of America’s growing railway network. James W. Ellsworth was a God-fearing man who believed in hard work, discipline, and thrift. He once wrote that nothing is, “accomplished in our country but has begun with a puritanical spirit.”2 Ellsworth Senior sought to indoctrinate young men with his values by funding the Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, Ohio, and a former master at the academy said of him:
There was no middle relationship possible. Either one fought him or served him; hated him or loved him. But even if one loved him, there was no intimacy. The unsmiling, forceful presence, tall, ramrod straight, impeccably groomed, held people at a distance.3
At the time Eva Ellsworth died, American railroads were rapidly expanding and coal production was trying to keep pace. The newly widowed James W. Ellsworth did not want to be distracted from his financial empire. He sent eight-year-old Lincoln and three-year-old Clare to be raised by nannies on the family farm in Hudson. What might have been, for many children, an idyllic upbringing of privilege and playful adventures, was hell for young Lincoln. He failed miserably at the local elementary school and recalled only ridicule. He readily admitted, “School was a horror. I couldn’t do anything with school—always the dunce of my classes, always falling behind. It was to be this way throughout my school and college days.”4 Years later Ellsworth would realize he was not intellectually dull, but that he needed something to interest him before he could absorb information. School never interested him, and he developed what he described as “the trait of indifference.”5 Ellsworth was shy, sensitive, and artistic. He read, wrote poetry, and tried to comprehend why he could never gain his father’s approval. His one playmate was his younger sister, and he remembered scampering to hide under her bed whenever he felt frightened.
Ellsworth had barely reached his teens when he was dragged from the security of the farm at Hudson and packed off to boarding school. Lincoln’s father selected the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, as the appropriate institution through which Lincoln would continue his journey to manhood. The school’s headmaster, John Meigs, believed the love, charity, and forgiveness of the Christian God was best instilled in young men using rigid discipline and physical punishment. Meigs, who a student once described as, “terrible as an avenging angel,” wrote, “the religion of a boy means learning what duty is and caring much and always for it. All else is accessory; this is essence.”6
For Ellsworth, the hell of his formal education continued. “At the time it seemed a sort of nightmare,”7 he recalled. At the Hill School, his nickname was “Nelly,”2 and Ellsworth’s pale skin and soft features had him dress for the female roles in the glee club dramas. He spent his early teen years escaping to the world of books. In his loneliness, he constantly wrote to his father, pleading with him to visit the boarding school, or asking to be understood.3
Ellsworth finally graduated from the Hill School, two years later than most other young men his age. In 1900, his father’s influence gained him entry into Yale University, where his continued inability to apply himself to academic study meant he survived less than a year before being asked to leave.
Ellsworth was twenty-one and, having struggled through a confused puberty, wanted little more from the world than to be left alone. In recalling his early life, he often described it as “horrific” and “hell,” and explained it was so traumatic he could remember little of what happened before the age of thirteen. He never publicly admitted his depressive nature. That he suffered from depression can be ascertained by his actions and the writings of others who, in their correspondence, feared for Ellsworth’s mental state and sometimes suggested he was suicidal. Neither did Ellsworth ever write about his sexuality. That he was gay or bisexual can, again, only be determined by his actions or what others wrote about him.
Shortly after being asked to leave Yale, sympathetic former classmates invited Ellsworth on a camping trip in Yellowstone National Park. “That brief trip did more for me than all the schools and teachers I had known, for on it I found myself at last,” Ellsworth remembered and he, “brought back from Yellowstone Park a head full of daydreams of adventure in the wild and untrodden parts of the continent.”8
After the trauma of his youth and formal education, the highly sensitive Ellsworth discovered refuge in the American outdoors. In particular, he came to love the silence and beauty of the North American deserts, writing:
The grandeur of desert mountains and the glory of color that wraps the burning sands at their feet are beyond words to describe. To the seeing eye the desert is always revealing new beauties and wonders. To its lover it becomes an eternal fascination.9
As automobiles, airplanes, telephones, radios, and other inventions civilized America at the beginning of the 20th century, Ellsworth longed for the frontier way of life that was disappearing. He wanted to live in a world before his father—and men like his father—built roads, railways, and skyscrapers, or rounded up cowboys to herd them into factories. His favorite book was Theodore Roosevelt’s Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail:
The whole book filled me with a passion for the West. I devoured that book like a man starved for reading, sitting until the small hours, night after night with it, rereading favorite chapters again and again . . . [such as] the one in which Theodore Roosevelt tells how, as a frontier sheriff, he walked into a saloon filled with desperadoes, held them up, and cowed them with his gun, and herded them all into jail.10
As the world became increasingly crowded and noisy, Ellsworth dreamt of escaping to some untamed frontier where he could be a rough rider of the plains, whom Roosevelt described as, “brave, hospitable, hardy, and adventurous . . . he prepares the way for the civilization, from before whose face he must himself disappear.”11
During his twenties, Ellsworth would interrupt his wanderings to make brief attempts to work for his father. He chose outdoor work, learning surveying and engineering, but never stayed at anything long enough to secure formal qualifications. Each enforced stay in one of Ellsworth Sr.’s businesses lasted, at most, six months, and Lincoln would find an excuse to go hiking and camping again, traveling as far as Canada or South America.
Much of the tension between father and son, created by each man having different ambitions, was relieved in 1907, when Lincoln was twenty-seven. Realizing his only son would never follow in his footsteps, or take the helm of the empire he had built, James Ellsworth sold his businesses and, at age fifty-eight, devoted his energy and wealth to acquiring art. He remarried, bought a castle in Switzerland and a villa in Italy, and traveled around Europe with his second wife, purchasing whatever caught his fancy.4
Lincoln was finally free of his father’s expectations. He could daydream and wander the world. During his twenties and thirties Ellsworth legitimized his love for the outdoors by collecting fossils or relics from the Grand Canyon or the deserts, which he would donate to the American Museum of Natural History. The museum had little use for the repetitious trinkets, but as they were often accompanied by a generous check signed by Ellsworth Sr., the trustees had the good sense to accept them. Ellsworth also fancied himself a scientist, but never committed to any field long enough to do more than read a few books on the subject.
When, in 1917, the United States entered World War I, Ellsworth enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private second class and traveled to France hoping to be trained as a pilot. In Paris, he was informed he was too old to be a pilot and, instead, was assigned to clerical work before a bout of influenza caused him to be sent home. He resumed his wanderings in America while the war ground to a conclusion.
Thus life meandered on for Lincoln Ellsworth until October 1924, when he was in New York, having just returned from a camping trip, and an item in the newspaper caught his attention. The famous Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was in town, trying to raise funds for a flight to the North Pole.
Roald Amundsen had devoted his life to polar exploration, and by 1924 it had left him bankrupt and bitter. Born in Norway in 1872, Amundsen had, during his teen years, resolved to unlock the secrets of the Arctic. In his youth he designed polar clothing, made his own equipment, and trained himself for his calling by regularly skiing cross-country in the depths of winter. After a trip to Antarctica on a Belgian research ship, then successfully negotiating the Northwest Passage in a small boat, Amundsen set his sights on the biggest prize in polar exploration—the North Pole. He borrowed a ship, the Fram, recruited a crew, purchased plenty of sled dogs, and was preparing to depart when, in September 1909, two men, Frederick A. Cook and Robert E. Peary, emerged from the Arctic claiming they had each reached the Pole.
Knowing he could not be first to the North Pole, Amundsen decided to make use of his fully provisioned ship and become the first person to reach the South Pole. That entered him in a race against Robert Falcon Scott, who was leading a British expedition to Antarctica with the express purpose of reaching the South Pole. At the end of 1910, Amundsen set up a base at what he called Framheim (home of the Fram) at the eastern end of the Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica, where he waited out the winter. Scott set up his base at the western end of the shelf and did the same.
After the sun reappeared to light the high southern latitudes, Amundsen left Framheim with four companions and forty-eight dogs, and sledded across the shelf, up the Axel Heiberg Glacier to the Antarctic Plateau, and then to the Pole, which he reached on December 14. Scott and four companions reached the Pole on January 17, 1912, where they found a tent and letter left by Amundsen. Having been beaten to the Pole, Scott’s party turned for home and the five men died on the return journey because of (depending on one’s opinion of Scott) mismanagement, bad luck, unseasonably bad weather, or some combination of those factors.
Meanwhile, the Fram, with Amundsen on board, reached Hobart, Tasmania, on March 7. The world soon learned that he had reached the South Pole, but people had to wait almost a year for a relief ship to bring news of Scott. When it was revealed that Scott had perished, British people were particularly bitter toward Amundsen and his victory. His critics said he was a “professional explorer” and therefore not a “gentleman”; he had been underhanded in stating publicly that he was going to the North Pole, and then sneaking down to the South; he had not collected scientific data; and he had survived by eating his dogs. In truth, Amundsen’s biggest mistake was that he had won. A small team of hardy and hardened men from Norway, with experience and careful planning, had upstaged the ambitions of the proud and mighty British Empire and the Empire did not like it.
Burdened by debt, made weightier by accusations of cheating, Amundsen again sought refuge on the ice, but his plans were interrupted by World War I. After the war, he made an attempt to sail the Northeast Passage, before deciding his future was in the sky. He gained a pilot’s license and resolved to fly to the North Pole and across the Arctic Ocean. He took an obsolete plane to Wainwright, Canada, but crashed it landing on rough ground. Amundsen reasoned that what he really needed was a plane that could take off and land on water or ice: a flying boat. The best available at the time were the Italian-built Dornier Wal flying boats. But how to pay for them? Amundsen was forced to turn to the only way he knew to raise money: touring and lecturing. The money was in America, so that’s where he went.
Thus, in October 1924, Roald Amundsen was holed up in New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, refusing to accept visitors lest they be creditors and “nearer to black despair than ever before,” on a tour that, “was practically a financial failure”:
My newspaper articles had produced but little revenue. As I sat in my room in the Waldorf Astoria, it seemed to me as if the future had closed solidly against me, and that my career as an explorer had come to an inglorious end. Courage, will power, indomitable faith—these qualities had carried me through many dangers and to many achievements. Now even their merits seemed of no avail.12
Then Lincoln Ellsworth returned to New York to read that the “Conqueror of the South Pole” was in town trying to raise money for a flight to the North Pole. Ellsworth saw an opportunity for adventure and telephoned the famous explorer, saying, “I am an amateur interested in polar exploration, and I might be able to supply some money for another expedition.”13