In December 1929, while Byrd and Wilkins were in Antarctica, Ellsworth returned to New York, still without a clear idea of what he wanted to do. Noticing Ellsworth’s despondency, Gertrude Gavin, the daughter of railway magnate James J. Hill and a friend of the Ellsworth family, proposed a canoeing trip in remote Labrador, Canada. Even better, Gavin suggested her godson, Beekman Pool, a young Harvard student, was willing to go along as company. Ellsworth responded to Gavin’s offer with his usual vacillation:
I should like to go on that Labrador trip and may yet, but that submarine trip looms big with me. I want to go back to the Arctic just once more. Wilkins returns from the Antarctic [on] April 1st and then it is yes or no. Until then I must remain undecided.1
While he was making up his mind, Ellsworth traveled to the Grand Canyon and collected more fossils. However, he took with him a copy of Dillon Wallace’s bestseller, The Lure of the Labrador Wild, and returned eager to go on the canoeing trip. After informing Clark, “my future plans must remain dark until autumn,”2 Ellsworth traveled to Canada to meet Beekman Pool, who would later become his biographer.
“I first set eyes on [Ellsworth] when we met in Quebec City,” wrote Pool, the young man plucked from his penultimate year at university to accompany Ellsworth on a trip to Labrador:
There flowed from him the same spirit of enthusiasm he had expressed in his letters. Of slight build, he had a friendly smile, graying crew-cut hair and very blue eyes with crinkles at the corners. His nose was slightly crooked—the result, I later learned, of tumbling from a high-wheel bicycle when he was a youngster. He was dressed in an old-fashioned belted jacket with matching trousers. He had always wanted to see Labrador, he told me.3
Pool and Ellsworth spent two months on a journey that was, according to Ellsworth, “as uncomfortable but in some ways as interesting as any I have made.”41 Pool would later observe:
[Ellsworth] found himself at middle age with vast amounts of money and noble aspirations, yet with every dream seemingly thwarted or somehow turned into disappointment. After an unhappy childhood and a disastrous relationship with his father, he yearned to gain inward solace through accomplishment, as well as public recognition for some significant achievement entirely his own.5
In early 1930, at the completion of their respective Antarctic expeditions, Wilkins and Byrd returned to a different America. They had left during the Roaring Twenties. They returned, in early 1930, to the Great Depression. Factories were closing, not only across America, but around the world. One in four American workers was without a job. Never again would two hundred thousand people line the streets to wave as aviators drove by in a ticker tape parade. Never again would companies offer big money to sponsor aviation or polar firsts. The bubble had burst and people had more serious issues to deal with.
Hearst bought the idea of a rendezvous between the Graf Zeppelin and a submarine, and agreed to a performance-based contract, which meant Wilkins would receive $175,000 if he reached the North Pole and exchanged passengers with the airship. For a rendezvous near the Pole, or no rendezvous at all, lesser amounts would be paid. Needing more money, Wilkins asked Isaiah Bowman if there had been any word from Ellsworth about accompanying the expedition, or increasing his sponsorship. Bowman replied that Ellsworth was canoeing in Labrador and it would be weeks, possibly months, before he could be contacted.
Hoping that the money would eventually be forthcoming, Wilkins turned to the man he had entrusted to modify a submarine for an under-ice voyage, Simon Lake.
Erratic submarine designer Simon Lake was born in Pleasantville, New Jersey, on September 4, 1866, and had begun experimenting with submarines while still in his teens. His first “underwater boat” was constructed from canvas and wood, and propelled by hand. It had wheels, because Lake believed it would be possible to drive along the seabed, in the same manner that cars drive along a highway. In 1894 Lake considered the trials of the boat, and the associated publicity, to be so successful he set about building a bigger version: the thirty-six-foot-long Argonaut, which was powered by a gas engine. When it was underwater, the Argonaut used a tube to the surface to draw in fresh air. It also had wooden wheels, so that it could roll along the ocean floor. Lake tried to interest the U.S. Navy in his invention but the Navy ignored him, so Lake resorted to taking celebrities and journalists for short rides underwater. His third submarine, which he named Protector, was larger still. The U.S. Navy was still unimpressed, so Lake sold it to Russia, which was at war with Japan at the time. Lake continued to compete for U.S. Navy contracts, but was usually beaten by his competitor, John Holland, who built more practical undersea craft.
During World War I, when the U.S. Navy was desperate for submarines, Lake was finally commissioned to build three “L,” four “N,” and three “O” Class boats to Navy specifications. Lake’s Navy contracts ended with the hostilities and, by 1924, the Lake Torpedo Boat Company had closed its doors. Finding himself at loose ends Lake started refurbishing a submarine he had built in 1906; the Lake XV, which still had wooden wheels. He renamed it Defender, and intended to take tourists for rides at Coney Island. But before the Defender could be employed competing with the Ferris wheels of New York’s beachside playground, Sir Hubert Wilkins had flown over the Arctic and announced he wanted to reach the North Pole by traveling under the Arctic ice. Lake contacted him and suggested the Defender was the ideal submarine for the voyage. Wilkins unwisely expressed interest.
When Wilkins returned to America early in 1930, after his second unsuccessful attempt to beat Byrd to the South Pole, Lake had reconsidered. Perhaps the antiquated Defender was not the ideal submarine to take to the North Pole, he informed Wilkins. Lake had learned that the U.S. Navy was scrapping several World War I submarines, and two O-class boats he had built were among them. In Wilkins’s absence, he had convinced the Navy to loan the expedition the O-12 for the nominal sum of $1. Wilkins followed Lake to the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard where, seeing his vision for the future of mankind expressed in grease and corroding steel, he was appalled. Nevertheless, Wilkins reluctantly agreed to accept the O-12 and Lake began converting it for an Arctic voyage.
Simon Lake had spent his life trying to introduce unusual designs to submarines: wheels for rolling along the sea floor, drop weights for lowering the boat underwater, telescopic conning towers, and many other ideas that submarine development had shown were unnecessary or unworkable. At the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, Lake was in charge, so no one could question the contraptions he dreamed up. Rather than concentrating on the vital components of a submarine—the hull, engines, and ballast tanks—Lake perched before his drawing board and contrived a host of impractical ideas.
For under-ice travel he decided the ideal thing would be a wooden superstructure on top of the O-12 in the form of a large upside-down sled. The O-12 would not submerge using negative buoyancy. Instead it would force its way down by sliding on the underside of the ice. It was a harebrained idea, without foundation in fact or experience. It was, regrettably, the first of many. Added to the upside-down sled, Lake designed a long hydraulic arm that could be raised and lowered, and at the end of the arm he placed a wheel. Supposedly, the arm could be raised, pushing the O-12 deeper, while the wheel rolled along the underside of the ice. He also wanted collapsible drills for making holes in the ice to get fresh air, a hydraulic battering ram at the bow for punching a path through the ice, as well as a “jack-knife periscope.” Eventually Lake cooked up thirty-two “special features,” along with more than seventy modifications to the O-12. The majority were superfluous.
While Wilkins was promoting his submarine expedition, and Lake was overseeing the modifications to O-12, Ellsworth returned from his trip to Labrador, seemingly having lost interest in the upcoming submarine voyage. “I am unspeakably weary of basking in the limelight of someone else’s notoriety and long for the solace that the Great West always gives me until I can start something of my own,”6 he wrote to Harold Clark. Then he traveled to Death Valley, later explaining:
My affection for the West had gradually centred upon two objects: the Grand Canyon and Death Valley; but if anything I loved Death Valley the better. Deserts had grown upon me with the years. I was always discovering new beauties in them. I never tired of the gaudy sunrises and sunsets of Death Valley or of studying its inconspicuous but teeming life, each species a triumph of adaptation.7
While Ellsworth was in Death Valley, the work at the Naval Shipyard became hopelessly bogged down in red tape and confusion. When the O-12 had been rented from the U.S. Navy, Lake had estimated that the conditioning and outfitting would cost $50,000. Wilkins believed he could successfully raise that amount through sponsorship and publishing rights. But Lake was soon firing off telegrams to Wilkins explaining the job was going over budget. (Modifying the O-12 would eventually cost $187,351.)
On January 18, 1931, Wilkins wrote to Isaiah Bowman, asking if there had been any word from Ellsworth who, by that time, had tired of Death Valley and was back in Switzerland. Bowman contacted Ellsworth and passed on his vague response: “He definitely declines to join this year, but talks of submitting alternative proposal for next year.”8
At that point, perhaps again fearing the suicidal tendencies of Ellsworth, Harold Clark stepped in. On January 29, Clark wrote a five-page letter to Ellsworth urging him to become involved in Wilkins’s submarine expedition. Clark, more than anyone, knew how to motivate Ellsworth. The letter was a masterpiece of flattery and persuasion. Ellsworth’s name, according to Clark, would be “carried through the centuries” along with those of Scott and Amundsen. His father’s money had made possible the flights of 1925 and 1926, so Ellsworth had a duty to continue the work this great legacy had started. Wilkins needed $50,000 to save his expedition from collapse and to Ellsworth that amount was a “mere bagatelle.” More than just an expedition of exploration, it was a chance to do something for the good of mankind. The opportunity to become involved in such a bold venture was similar to Ellsworth contacting Amundsen when Amundsen was broke and holed up in the Waldorf Astoria hotel in 1924. It was, Clark implied, Ellsworth’s destiny. And so it went on until Clark concluded, “Fifty thousand dollars, or several times that sum if needed, would mean nothing to you, and would bring the happiness that comes from having a stake in something that is filled with vitality and romance.”9
Ellsworth was persuaded. A day after receiving the letter, he signed a second check, this time for $50,000, and Wilkins changed the name of the expedition to the “Wilkins-Ellsworth Trans-Arctic Submarine Expedition.” At the top of the new stationery, Ellsworth’s name sat below Wilkins’s, who was listed as “Commander.” Ellsworth was listed as “Director of Research.” The New York Times summarized the official press release:
The association of Lincoln Ellsworth, the American explorer who was co-leader with Roald Amundsen and Umberto Nobile in the transpolar flight in the dirigible Norge in 1926, with Captain Sir Hubert Wilkins in organizing and possibly accompanying the latter on his projected submarine voyage under the North Pole next summer, was announced yesterday.
Mr. Ellsworth said: “I like Wilkins because he is of that virile pioneer type of the old American West that I have always so admired—men of great faith, courage, and simplicity, who said little and did much. That is why I like him and have joined forces with him.”
[Wilkins] said: “It seems indeed fitting that the man who first carried the American flag over the North Pole in an airship should also be the first to carry it under the North Pole in a submarine.”10
Ellsworth had a new friend. And while he didn’t worship him in the manner he’d worshipped Amundsen, at least he enthused over the association. He wrote in response to a letter of thanks from Wilkins:
Probably it all gave me just as much pleasure as it did you. I do feel though that the honor of association is weighted more in my direction than it is in yours. It is an honor indeed to be associated with you. Just to have our names together. Why? Because for sheer audacity in the attainment of one’s ideals, I know of none your equal, unless possibly it was Nansen’s Farthest North.
. . . from boyhood I have dreamed of manly effort in the far lands of the North, and in whatever way I can aid I am well repaid for any effort I may expend, therefore thank you many times over for the opportunity to be of service.11
Ellsworth, as he often did, then sought to ratify the friendship by possessing some personal item that belonged to Wilkins:
Can I have something of yours that you have carried in your travels—such as a pocket knife, any old thing in fact that will stand wear and that I can carry in my pocket—even those gold studs you wore the other evening, if you haven’t the other . . . I have an old pipe and pocket knife, besides a match box of Amundsen’s that went to the South Pole, and I treasure them beyond all value. I should like something of yours to carry on my own journey.12
Ellsworth also revealed that he was still considering the idea they had discussed eighteen months earlier. “There is nothing I would rather do than make that flight from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea,” he wrote, but at the same time conceded his inability to organize an expedition himself, or do any of the logistical work:
. . . but it doesn’t look promising at the moment. Chartering ships and going into the supply business in order to reach the base does not seem commensurate to the objective in view because it places too much reliance on someone else who is but vaguely interested in the thing itself.13
While Ellsworth hoped an expedition to cross Antarctica might magically materialize before him, Wilkins was relieved to have another $50,000 to top up his budget, because Simon Lake was still improvising at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. When crew wages and equipment were added to the cost of modifying the submarine, the budget ballooned to $250,000. A month after Ellsworth had committed his money, Wilkins was forced to ask him for a further $30,000. Ellsworth wrote back:
I wish to impress upon you the sacrifice I really must make in order to contribute further to the submarine expedition. But as I said, if it must be done, it must. I cannot see why Leeds is not willing to contribute and if [Harold] Clark is so interested, why doesn’t he also?14
Ellsworth paid another $30,000, taking his sponsorship to $100,000, but his tone revealed the honeymoon had been short and he was losing interest in the expedition that bore his name.