While Wilkins worried about the mounting costs, and Lake’s partner, Sloan Danenhower, recruited a reluctant crew, Hugo Eckener was in Germany preparing the Graf Zeppelin for the still-expected rendezvous at the North Pole. Eckener’s contract with Hearst was, like Wilkins’s, performance-based. If the submarine and the airship met at the North Pole, Eckener would receive $150,000. If they met somewhere in the Arctic, Eckener would only receive $30,000. If they did not meet at all, Hearst would pay nothing. When Eckener learned that work on the submarine was behind schedule, he realized the rendezvous was becoming less likely. He needed other ways to raise money. Hearing that Ellsworth was writing checks for Wilkins, but unlikely to travel on the submarine, Eckener approached him and asked if he’d care to come on the airship flight for a fee of $8,000. As a sweetener, Eckener offered him a title that would appeal to his ego. Ellsworth accepted, announcing enthusiastically:
. . . out of the clear sky came an invitation to me to join the Graf Zeppelin as Arctic navigation expert on a projected flight into the far north. I snapped at the opportunity, going, too, as explorer for the American Geographical Society.1
Ellsworth quickly switched his allegiance to the flight of the airship, and expressed his disappointment in the increasingly expensive submarine expedition to the man who had convinced him to support it, Harold Clark:
What benefit of any sort can be derived from [the submarine expedition]; what new data can be collected which can be beneficially utilized? Who cares seriously about the Arctic depths of unnavigable waters? And as for determining the set and drift of Arctic currents . . . I do not believe anything practical or useful can be obtained by diving under the ice.2
Eckener also approached the Russian government, which was planning a scientific expedition off its northern coast, and it was agreed that, for a fee, the Graf Zeppelin would carry Russian scientists and meet the Russian icebreaker Malygin, somewhere in the vicinity of Franz Josef Land.
With the modifications to the submarine falling further behind schedule, Wilkins ordered it to be moved to the Mathis Shipyard at Camden, New Jersey, where it could be completed by private contractors. Upset at being overruled, the petulant Lake, who had made a mess of it for more than a year, washed his hands of the venture and announced he would have nothing more to do with it. Wilkins was left to direct the remaining work on the submarine alone.
The O-12 finally left the Camden shipyard and was towed to New York where, on March 24, 1931, more than 800 people, including Ellsworth, gathered to witness the christening of the world’s first Arctic submarine. Wilkins named it Nautilus, claiming he was making a reality of what Jules Verne predicted in his novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, when Captain Nemo sailed amid the ice at the South Pole.1 Ten weeks later, the Wilkins-Ellsworth Trans-Arctic Submarine Expedition sailed. Ellsworth was not on hand to see the Nautilus commence its trip across the Atlantic Ocean.
Despite the fundamental components of the Nautilus having been overlooked in favor of Lake’s inventions, Wilkins believed it might still be possible to rendezvous with the Graf Zeppelin somewhere in the Arctic. But shortly after reaching open sea the diesel engines began to give them trouble. It was also discovered the hull was leaking and the electrical generators, which charged the batteries, were partly underwater. In a short time, the port engine and both generators were out of commission, which meant the batteries were dying. Radio operator Ray Meyers tapped out a faint SOS. After eighteen hours the battleship USS Wyoming, which was en route to Sweden, heard the call. It steamed to the aid of the Nautilus and towed the crippled submarine one thousand miles to Ireland. The Nautilus was then towed to England, where it spent a month being repaired and many of the crew took the opportunity to resign. Any chance of a rendezvous with the Graf Zeppelin was gone, but Wilkins still wanted to get under the Arctic ice to prove it could be done. He sailed the Nautilus from Devonport to Bergen, Norway, but on that voyage the steering gear gave them trouble and the submarine drifted helplessly while it was repaired. At Bergen, three more crew resigned.
Four days before the Nautilus left Devonport, the Graf Zeppelin, with Ellsworth on board, had lifted off from Friedrichshafen, Germany, to commence its Arctic flight. It flew to Russia, where it was refueled, and lifted off again on July 26, heading for the Barents Sea. It crossed the Arctic Circle before Eckener headed for Franz Josef Land, where visual contact was made with the icebreaker Malygin. Eckener brought the airship down until it floated gently, just above the sea. Fearing sparks from the smoke stacks of the icebreaker might ignite the hydrogen in its twelve massive gasbags, the Graf Zeppelin was settled six hundred feet away, on an inflatable skirt that surrounded the gondola.
As a rubber raft was launched, the crew saw a tender from the Malygin coming toward them, crammed with weather-beaten men clad in furs. Watching from the raft, Ellsworth remembered:
In the stern sheets was a vaguely familiar figure waving to greet me. When he came aboard the Graf Zeppelin and shook hands I had to look twice to recognize him. It was Umberto Nobile, whom I had not seen since our Norge flight in 1926. He had aged visibly since then. The Italia disaster had made a different man of him.3
The strutting Italian fascist general, who had been raised to the status of a national hero after the successful flight of the Norge, was cut down following the crash of the Italia. The Italian government, along with the Italian people, had turned savagely on Nobile. Mussolini forced him to take his family and flee to communist Russia, where he now lived in exile. Staring at the disgraced airship commander, someone from the Graf Zeppelin muttered, “My God, how the man has aged.” Ellsworth and Nobile shook hands and embraced. Any animosity between them was forgotten.
Eckener wanted to waste no time dangerously floating amid the ice floes. As soon as the mailbags were exchanged, the order was given to lift off. The tender from the Malygin returned to the ship. Ellsworth was moved by his reunion with Nobile, and wrote, “As he left in the bobbing boat of the Malygin—waving goodbye as he stood unsteadily in the stern—the scene had an element of pathos that I can never forget.”42
The Graf Zeppelin was soon aloft and the next day it was over Severnaya Zemlya (Northern Land) of which only a small section of the east coast had been mapped. For six hours Eckener flew the airship at four thousand feet, discovering that the land consisted of two islands, not one as previously thought. On board, while the passengers dined lavishly and listened to music, Ellsworth wrote proudly, “This was real exploring, despite the luxury.”5
By July 30 they were back at Leningrad. A day later the Graf Zeppelin returned to Friedrichshafen, having flown over eight thousand miles.
Wilkins was still stuck in Bergen. He had hoped to reach Spitsbergen by May 15, but after continual setbacks he finally arrived there, three months behind schedule, on August 15. The submarine was barely operable, most of the unnecessary equipment designed by Lake did not work, and Danenhower, along with the crew, wanted to call the whole thing off. But Wilkins refused to give up. Two days after arriving at Spitsbergen, with the Nautilus refueled, he headed north.
During the afternoon of August 19, the submarine reached the edge of the ice pack. When the crew prepared for diving Wilkins’s final hopes of a voyage under the Arctic ice were dashed. The horizontal stern diving rudders were missing. Originally the Nautilus had horizontal diving rudders at the bow and stern, designed to steer the submarine up or down, in the same way that vertical rudders steer a boat left or right. The bow rudders had been removed at the naval dockyard because Lake believed the Nautilus would travel under the ice by sliding on its smooth wooden superstructure. The stern diving rudders, however, had been left in place. (No explanation of what happened to the rudders has ever been given. Wilkins later accused the crew of sabotaging the submarine at Bergen to avoid continuing.) Wilkins called a meeting and discovered, without exception, everyone wanted to abort the expedition, but Wilkins needed to salvage something from the expensive disaster. A week went by before the sea was calm enough to flood the forward ballast tanks and partially raise the stern. Wilkins gave the order to drive the submarine at the ice, in an attempt to slide under it. But without diving rudders to relieve the pressure on the bottom of the floe, and with the projecting ice drill and other deck obstructions gouging their way through the ice, the Nautilus was almost impossible to maneuver. Wilkins ended the brief incursion beneath the ice and ordered the Nautilus back to Spitsbergen, where it arrived on September 7.
A rumor spread among the crew that the expedition was broke and various members confronted Wilkins to demand their money. He drew on all his savings and came up with almost $22,000, which was still not enough to meet his obligations. He had no choice but to radio Ellsworth asking for extra cash. Ellsworth, according to the balance sheet, “loaned” the expedition $20,000, while Harold Clark, who had encouraged Ellsworth’s participation in the first place, felt compelled to loan it $5,000. The crew was guaranteed their money and the Nautilus returned to Bergen.
Wilkins’s original agreement was that the submarine should be returned to the U.S. Navy at the end of the expedition, but getting it back across the Atlantic would be difficult and expensive, so Wilkins asked if it could be scuttled off Norway. The Navy replied that it could, as long as it was in international waters, at least 1,200 feet deep.
It took a month to find an area off Bergen where the water was sufficiently deep. Finally, on November 20, 1931, the Nautilus, followed by a flotilla of onlookers, was towed to sea and its valves opened. Wilkins was not on hand to see the vessel, which was intended to help mankind reached a more advanced state of civilization, slowly turn on end and slip beneath the waves. He was already back in New York. His proposed lecture tour was canceled and the media attention that followed his departure had evaporated before his return. Wilkins’s noble ambition had left him shattered and broke.
And the third Arctic expedition to carry Ellsworth’s name had ended in failure.
Meanwhile, Ellsworth was back in his castle, after the Graf Zeppelin flight, with renewed enthusiasm for exploration. “The sight of the Arctic ice and unknown lands had fired me with a zeal for exploration such as had not burned within me since my first meetings with Amundsen,”6 he wrote. But what could he do? What great polar achievement remained to be obtained? To Ellsworth, it became increasingly clear. There was, fortunately, still a polar first to be claimed. As yet, no one had managed to cross Antarctica from one side to the other. His biographer Beekman Pool would later write:
[Ellsworth] was fifty-one years old. For almost two decades, on the threshold of greatness, he had endured the frustration of seeking personal fulfilment in a world of exploration that no longer existed. But the lure of fame still drew him like a magnet, and his path was clear. The Antarctic area over which he planned to fly was the last major portion of the entire Earth that remained unknown—a vast empty white area on the map. Whoever was first in revealing its secrets would earn a permanent place on the roster of great explorers.7
Ellsworth looked to Antarctica but, as he had done all his life, he procrastinated, trapped by his inability to lift himself from his lethargy. If he was to leave his seclusion, he needed someone to inspire him and lead him. Amundsen had done it, but Amundsen was dead. Ellsworth needed a new hero.