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NO OTHER WORLDS TO CONQUER

JUNE 1928–NOVEMBER 1929

Following the death of Amundsen, Ellsworth wrote that his brief foray into polar exploration was over.

The voyage of the Norge was a far cry from my youthful vision of polar exploration—the painfully established bases, the bitter journeys with sleds and dogs, the heroic battles against the elements. The Norge and its crew were but a machine in which the explorer could sit at ease and watch unroll the panorama of the unknown . . . With the completion of the Norge flight, I thought that my days in the polar regions were over . . . There seemed to be no other worlds to conquer.¹

But commitment was such a challenge for Ellsworth he could not even commit to giving up. He remained restless and unsatisfied. He toyed with more ideas and never followed through. Nobile had criticized him for being unable to navigate, so Ellsworth decided to take lessons. His former rival, Richard Byrd, was acknowledged as the most accomplished aerial navigator of the time (and was co-inventor of the bubble sextant), so Ellsworth wrote to Byrd asking to be taught aerial navigation. He even suggested that he and Byrd mount a joint expedition to fly over the unknown areas of the Arctic, looking for land. Byrd however already had plans and explained that he was about to leave on an expedition to Antarctica.

Next, Ellsworth approached Dr. Gilbert H. Grosvenor, president of the National Geographic Society, explaining he would put up $85,000 for a flight from Greenland to Alaska to settle the Crocker Land question once and for all. He was careful to explain to Grosvenor he wanted no part in organizing the expedition—he expected the society to do that. But if Grosvenor found an expedition ship, a plane, a pilot, and crew then Ellsworth would consider coming on board, just before the expedition sailed, to assume command and be flown across the Arctic. Not surprisingly, Grosvenor declined.

With no one willing to organize an Arctic expedition for which he could take credit, Ellsworth told friends he intended to live in Africa where he would collect artifacts for the American Museum of Natural History.

Alarmed at the increasingly despondent tone of Ellsworth’s correspondence, his business advisor, Harold Clark, became concerned about his client’s state of mind. Clark had helped manage Ellsworth Sr.’s business empire and, for many years, was privy to the strained relationship between father and son. He understood the importance of finding things to interest Ellsworth to draw him out of his dark moods. Desperate to find such an interest, Clark contacted Isaiah Bowman, director of the American Geographical Society, who was aware that Ellsworth was looking to sponsor an expedition he could “lead.” The problem was finding something suitable. Bowman wrote to Ellsworth, suggesting he join an expedition to the Patagonian Andes, but Ellsworth never responded. Bowman followed up by writing, “if we are to help you, we must have communication with you.”²

Clark continued to push Bowman for suggestions, so Bowman sent Ellsworth maps of Antarctica, suggesting he could explore some of its unknown coasts, but Ellsworth asked who would organize the expeditions on his behalf. To that, Bowman had no answer. Bowman wrote to Clark after his suggestions had been rejected:

I want to stay in touch with Lincoln for I feel that he needs friendship of disinterested men who can advise him as to his best interest. He has a great stock of energy that should be turned to good account. Moreover, I find him a likeable character.³

While Ellsworth suffered another period of despair, Vice President Dawes proposed to the Smithsonian Institution that both Ellsworth and Byrd be awarded the Langley Medal, which the institution bestowed for outstanding contributions to the science of aeronautics. After reviewing the two nominees, the Smithsonian rejected the suggestion that the medal be awarded to Ellsworth. It did, however, award it to Byrd.

Since his dubious flight to the North Pole, upstaging the Norge, Byrd had been busy. In 1927, he attempted to be the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean. When he was narrowly beaten by Charles Lindbergh, he sought another aviation “first.” Diminishing opportunities in the northern hemisphere forced Byrd’s gaze south and he announced he would fly across Antarctica, via the South Pole. Such a flight would achieve many firsts. Byrd would be the first to fly in the southern continent, the first to cross it, and the first to fly to the South Pole. Polar history books would bulge with the name Byrd.

Shortly after he began planning his new expedition, Byrd realized that setting up bases on both sides of the continent would be difficult and expensive, while no plane was capable of flying across Antarctica and back without refueling. He dropped the idea of the trans-Antarctic flight and, instead, focused simply on a flight to the South Pole and back. He could, he calculated, follow the route Roald Amundsen had used in 1911–12. Byrd would take expedition ships, with airplanes, to the Bay of Whales in the Ross Ice Shelf. Then, like Amundsen, he would unload his men, equipment, and airplanes, erect a base, and wait out the winter. When the sun returned in the spring, he would fly to the South Pole and back, then pack up and return triumphantly to the United States as the first man to fly to both Poles.

Byrd’s expedition left for Antarctica in September 1928. By the end of the year, while Harold Clark and others were trying to shake Ellsworth out of his lethargy, Byrd’s base on the Ross Ice Shelf was under construction.

At the beginning of 1929, a second death dealt Ellsworth a severe personal blow and heightened the concern of his friends for his emotional well-being. On February 22, Ellsworth’s sister Clare died of pneumonia. Ellsworth considered Clare “the staunchest friend I had in the world.”⁴ She had been his one companion throughout a desperately lonely childhood. Furthermore, she had stood up to their father when Ellsworth had wanted to join Amundsen in 1925. Following Clare’s death, people close to Ellsworth feared he might commit suicide. Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History, wrote to Harold Clark expressing his concerns and saying, “It seems more important than ever that [Lincoln] should be able to have some definite scientific occupation in addition to his business affairs.”⁵ But the problem, as always, was to find an expedition that someone else would plan and organize, yet allow Ellsworth to assume the role of leader.

A few months after the death of his sister, while his friends and business associates tried to find a solution, Ellsworth decided to inspect the Swiss castle he had inherited from his father.

Lenzburg Castle evolved from fortifications built atop a hill in the 11th century. The German monarch Friedrich Barbarossa owned it briefly in the 12th century. It expanded and changed hands many times until 1911, when James W. Ellsworth came calling. Lincoln’s father had heard there was a table in the castle dating from the period of Barbarossa and he wanted to buy it. The owner wouldn’t separate the table from the castle in which it had sat for eight hundred years, so Ellsworth Sr. bought the castle and used it as a repository for the European art he collected.

Lincoln had owned Lenzburg Castle for four years before he decided to pay his first visit in June 1929. In typical Ellsworth fashion he didn’t announce his impending arrival. He wandered the streets of Lenzburg alone, before shuffling up the hill to the castle’s gate and ringing the bell. When one of the staff answered he said simply, “I’m Mr. Ellsworth.”⁶

In his gloomy castle, the gloomier Ellsworth pondered his future. Everyone he cared for—everyone whose respect he had hoped to attract—was dead. What was left for him to do? What great thing could he accomplish that would finally lift him from mediocrity to the lofty heights of greatness and have him stand shoulder to shoulder in the history books with Amundsen, Scott, and Peary? More important, who could he find to organize the logistics of such an expedition, and still let him take all the credit? To Ellsworth, the future appeared hopeless. “I lost my father and I lost Amundsen—two men who looked at things with the same eyes as mine—so I guess I shall have to travel it mostly alone through the rest of my life,”⁷ he confided to Harold Clark, a week after arriving at Lenzburg.

But in June 1929, Isaiah Bowman had a new proposition. He had just learned that Australian explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins, was recently back from Antarctica, and trying to mount an expedition to travel in a submarine under the Arctic ice to the North Pole. Wilkins was not only seeking sponsors, but people to travel with him. Perhaps this, Bowman informed Clark, might appeal to Ellsworth. Clark was only too pleased to relay the suggestion to Ellsworth, who agreed to meet Wilkins, should he care to come to Switzerland.

George Hubert Wilkins was born on October 31, 1888, in a remote farming community in South Australia. During childhood, he observed his strict Methodist parents put their faith in God and prayer to bring much-needed rain to their crops. Their faith was not rewarded and, in 1903, after a particularly devastating drought, his aging parents surrendered their farm and took the teenage Wilkins to Adelaide to learn a trade. Wilkins studied electrical engineering before becoming interested in cinematography. In 1911, he carried his movie camera to England, where he was employed filming newsreels for Gaumont. In 1912, when war again broke out in the Balkans, Gaumont despatched Wilkins to Constantinople (now Istanbul) to film the conflict from the Turkish side. Wilkins later described his first experience of war, when he rode with a cavalry charge into a Turkish village:

We went down that slope like rolling thunder, every one of us mad with exultation. We didn’t know what we were charging into. We didn’t care. All we wanted was to kill. We charged into the rabble of Turks—foot soldiers and peasants. The Turkish cavalry charged into their own people and cut them down. Cut them to pieces—men, women, and children. The very horses were screaming with blood lust. It was all I could do to keep from pulling my revolver and killing everything in sight. The madness of that charge got all of us.⁸

Wilkins had witnessed war and was horrified by it, but he was also horrified by something he had seen within himself: a lust to kill when swept up in the madness and rush of a mob. It both frightened and fascinated him. How could so-called civilized men hack women and children to death? How could he, an educated, caring person with a strong Christian upbringing, descend so easily to barbarism? If civilization was so fragile—so easily trampled under boot and hoof—what hope was there for Man’s future?

In the midst of that self-examination, Wilkins turned to the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche who, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, suggested that Man was continuing to evolve intellectually and would eventually become Übermensch or “supermen.” Having declared that God was dead, or at least that Man’s need for gods was no longer necessary, Nietzsche had proposed that people could leave superstition behind and, through science, continue the process of mental evolution that began millions of years ago, to reach a new state of understanding and enlightenment. The next step in that journey of human self-discovery was increased scientific understanding. As he pondered the future of human civilization, the Nietzsche-reading Wilkins began to envision his purpose in life.

In the decade following his experience in the Balkan War, Wilkins spent three years in the Arctic, two years at the Western Front in World War I, joined an expedition to Antarctica in 1920, and again in 1921, then lived with indigenous Australians for two years in northern Australia. The experiences helped him further define his role in the ongoing progress of civilization. If, Wilkins concluded, manned stations could be established in the Arctic and the Antarctic, scientists would be able to better understand and forecast the weather. That would allow farmers and primary producers to plan ahead, avoid droughts, and exploit times of plenty. By producing more food, the world’s population would be relieved of the need to fight for survival, wars could be avoided and therefore:

. . . if we are able to establish freedom from anxiety as to future physical welfare . . . I am sure that we would soon experience a more rapid cultural and spiritual development and take steps toward a better civilization.⁹

By the beginning of 1926, Wilkins’s efforts to improve civilization had turned to the Arctic and he was committed to finding land close to the North Pole suitable for his proposed weather stations. At the same time the Norge was flying from Kings Bay to Teller, with Ellsworth, Amundsen, and Nobile on board, Wilkins managed to make short flights out over the Arctic ice, from Barrow, Alaska. The following year, Wilkins and pilot Carl “Ben” Eielson flew 150 miles north from Barrow and landed on the ice. They took depth soundings and were astonished to discover the water beneath the ice was 18,000 feet deep. That would mean the Arctic was a deep ocean and that islands suitable for weather stations were unlikely to exist, at least in that area.

Wilkins returned to the Arctic in early 1928. On April 15 (while Nobile was preparing his new airship, Italia, at Kings Bay), Wilkins and Eielson took off from Barrow in their tiny Lockheed Vega single-engine plane and flew nonstop for twenty hours to land on a small island near Spitsbergen. They discovered no new land.

Unlike Ellsworth, Wilkins had no trouble being honored for his flight across the Arctic. In June 1928, he was knighted by George V of England and chose to be known as Sir Hubert, rather than Sir George. But even with the knighthood, and accolades that came from around the world, Wilkins remained focused on his mission to raise humanity to a higher state of civilization by establishing weather stations in the polar regions. Having discovered the area surrounding the North Pole was a deep ocean, he wrote:

This brought me to the conclusion that we would eventually have to use an island of our own construction, a mobile one in the form of a submarine, in order to set up an Arctic floating station. It would be useless to fly a party out to the spot and land [scientists] on the ice . . . [because] we know the ice is continually drifting. No base on the ice would remain stationary long enough to be of service in our meteorological plan.

But since water is water, no matter where it is, a submarine could operate in water under the Arctic ice just as well as under water in the Atlantic. And so it could be used to reach the spot to be occupied by the scientists.¹⁰

Wilkins declared his next goal was to explore the Arctic by submarine.

Almost immediately, he was presented with an opportunity to raise the money for an Arctic submarine expedition. Byrd (in mid-1928) was preparing to leave for Antarctica so he could fly to the South Pole. Importantly, Byrd was sponsored by the New York Times, which was paying for exclusive reports from the expedition.

Publisher William Randolph Hearst, who owned the rival New York Journal, was looking for someone to hurry down to Antarctica and fly to the South Pole before Byrd. Wilkins had flown across the top of the world and landed in the middle of a newspaper war. A Hearst representative approached the now-famous Australian and explained that if he could fly to the South Pole before Byrd, then Hearst would pay $50,000. Naturally all the publicity rights would go to Hearst’s papers.

Wilkins quickly formulated a plan. He and pilot Ben Eielson would hitch a ride south with the whalers, who traveled to Antarctica each summer. The whalers could take them to Deception Island, which was on the opposite side of Antarctica from Byrd’s proposed base on the Ross Ice Shelf. From Deception Island, Wilkins and Eielson would fly across Antarctica, via the Pole, to Byrd’s base. The distance was twenty-two hundred miles, the same as their Arctic flight. At the completion of the flight, Wilkins and Eielson could simply drop in on the Americans, who would be setting up their base, then hitch another ride to New Zealand on one of Byrd’s supply ships. Simple, efficient, and Wilkins would not only be the first person to fly to the South Pole, but the first to cross the continent as well. And he could be back to America to arrange his submarine expedition while Byrd was still preparing to wait out the winter.

The plan was implemented and the Wilkins-Hearst Antarctic Expedition reached Deception Island on November 7, 1928, where things began to unravel. When Wilkins had first visited Deception Island in 1920, the harbor had been frozen and he had observed it would make an ideal runway. But in 1928, unseasonably warm weather meant the harbor was not frozen, so there was no long flat runway from which to get airborne with a full load of fuel. Undeterred, a rough runway was hewed out of the rocky surrounding land and Wilkins and Eielson managed to get a plane aloft for some short flights: the first ever made in the Antarctic. On December 20, they even managed to get airborne with half a load of fuel to fly along the coast of Graham Land and Palmer Land to where a huge, previously unseen landmass spread out before them. Having consumed half his fuel, Wilkins named the area Hearst Land, before he and Eielson returned to Deception Island.

With only the short rocky runway available, the flight across Antarctica was considered impossible. A disappointed Wilkins returned north, reaching New York in March 1929. Hearst paid him $10,000 toward his expenses, but not the $50,000 bonus for the South Pole flight.

Still needing sponsors for his Arctic submarine venture, Wilkins approached Isaiah Bowman who had the ideal candidate. Lincoln Ellsworth was looking for an expedition he could sponsor and, more importantly, lead.

After an exchange of telegrams, Wilkins sailed to Europe and met Ellsworth at Lenzburg Castle where, spreading his maps across Barbarossa’s table, he explained his vision for a series of polar weather stations. The first step, he explained, was to prove Arctic submarine travel was possible. Wilkins offered Ellsworth a place on his proposed submarine expedition. Ellsworth was impressed by the audacity of the idea:

As he outlined the scheme to me, I grew enthusiastic for it, but was even more struck by Wilkins himself. He was a man, I discovered, exactly to my taste. I have often told him since that had he lived in our West during the pioneer days he would most certainly have been a frontier marshal two-gunning some wild district into law and order.¹¹

Ellsworth was enthusiastic enough to sign a check for $20,000 on the spot, but explained it was unlikely he would accompany the expedition because, “I had firmly resolved never to go again into the polar regions except as the head of my own expedition.”¹²

The two men did, however, discuss Antarctica and Wilkins’s recent attempt to fly across the southern continent. The discussion planted a seed in Ellsworth’s mind. He later admitted, “I had not yet thought seriously about the Antarctic, knowing little about it.” But after listening to Wilkins, “[I] gained the impression that if I ever cared to organize an Antarctic expedition, Wilkins would be willing to enlist as my adviser.”¹³

With Ellsworth’s check for $20,000 safely in his pocket, Wilkins returned to America to seek more financial backers for his submarine. Again, his timing was fortunate. William Randolph Hearst was sponsoring German Hugo Eckener, who was planning to fly the Graf Zeppelin airship around the world. Hearst suggested Wilkins go along and report on the technical aspects of the flight. Sensing there was still money to be had from such a wealthy sponsor, Wilkins agreed to participate.

Sometime during the twenty-one-day round-the-world flight, which commenced on August 8, 1929, Wilkins and Eckener discussed their respective ambitions. Wilkins explained he wanted to mount a submarine expedition in the Arctic. Eckener explained his vision of a German airship service that could transport passengers worldwide. Airships, he understood, were perceived as fair-weather vessels. He and Wilkins would have discussed the crash of Nobile’s Italia the year before, and how the tragedy had left people with the impression that airships were dangerous in polar regions.

During their discussions, Eckener and Wilkins came up with a bold plan that would serve both their aspirations. Eckener could fly the Graf Zeppelin to the North Pole and rendezvous with Wilkins’s submarine. They could exchange mail and passengers and create a sensation that would make all previous polar expeditions pale by comparison. It would prove that submarines were the ideal way to explore the Arctic, while showing that airship travel was safe and comfortable anywhere in the world. Wilkins and Eckener agreed to pitch their idea to Hearst.

At the completion of the Graf Zeppelin round-the-world flight, Wilkins made a second attempt to collect the $50,000 bonus for a flight across Antarctica. Learning that Byrd had not yet managed to fly to the South Pole, Wilkins returned to Deception Island with the whalers in October 1929, only to find the harbor was still not frozen over. On the second trip, he took a small tractor with him, hoping to bulldoze a smoother runway on the rocky ground at Deception Island, but the tough volcanic rock proved obstinate and Wilkins was not able to get his plane airborne with a full tank of fuel.

On the other side of the continent, Byrd had successfully established a base, which he called Little America, and waited out the winter. On November 28, 1929, while Wilkins was trying to bulldoze a runway on Deception Island, Byrd flew to the South Pole with Bernt Balchen¹ as his pilot.

Another polar first had been accomplished.

1 After assisting Byrd with his skis at Kings Bay in May 1926, Balchen had traveled to America, so that he could fly the latest airplanes. Recognizing Balchen’s skill as a pilot in polar conditions, Byrd had invited him on his expedition to Antarctica.