On January 28, 1934, less than eight weeks after it had departed, the Wyatt Earp crept back to Dunedin, where the already despondent Ellsworth learned that Mary Louise and her mother had returned to America without bothering to wait for him. Ellsworth dithered, undecided about whether or not to repair the Polar Star and try again, or abandon the idea of crossing Antarctica. He was equally undecided about how to proceed with his marriage. Wilkins observed:
I think he is not really keen to get back [to the U.S.]. Mary Louise wants him to open up Lenzburg [Castle] and stay there this European spring and summer, but he does not want to do that, so he sent a message to her today that she could go to Lenzburg and he would stay on the West Coast of America, or in the Grand Canyon, roaming about with a pack horse. She replied, “What do you mean by suggesting that I should go to Europe and you stay in America? What is it all about? You must come back and see me about this.”1
Ellsworth suffered two weeks in New Zealand, before the SS Mariposa took him to San Francisco. On his arrival, Mary Louise and her mother bundled him onto a train for New York, where they all boarded another ship and sailed to Europe, where Ellsworth did, in fact, spend the next five months at Lenzburg Castle.
Wilkins was left in New Zealand to sort out the Wyatt Earp and the damaged Polar Star. “Each message from Lincoln sounds sadder and sadder and I doubt that he will make another attempt,” Wilkins wrote to his wife:
But one can never tell. He will probably say that he won’t and then at the last minute change his mind. In any case I don’t want to go on with the expedition again and will feel that if I get the boat ready, and see them start off, they can take care of themselves.2
By a stroke of good fortune a Texaco oil tanker was in port—Texaco provided petroleum products to the expedition in exchange for publicity—and was preparing to leave for California. The captain agreed to take the plane. The crew members who lived in America: Balchen, mechanic Braathen, and radio operator Lanz accompanied it. Wilkins put the Wyatt Earp into dry dock at Port Chalmers, where the hull could be examined after its encounter with the ice, and the engine could be overhauled.
Then, while he waited on Ellsworth’s decision, he began to evaluate his employer, and just what he had got himself into, writing to his wife:
[Ellsworth’s] position is really pathetic. Without initiative, ability, or power, he can’t really do anything. Fortunately, he knows it and what he wants is someone to do everything for him and see that he gets the credit. Of course, there are many people in the same position and who become famous because of other peoples’ work, but they have to at least put up a front and poor old Lincoln can’t manage to put up the front.
He is still quite a puzzle—even to himself. He told me that he tried his best not to get married, but had to give in in the end and now has to keep both his wife and her Ma. I think they both want to do what they can to make Lincoln happy but they, not any more than anyone else, know just what to do about it.3
Having summarized his thoughts on Ellsworth, Wilkins concluded his letter by adding some thoughts on Balchen:
Balchen is, I think, sincere, but he has been accustomed to having everything perfect and does not want to take a chance on anything and I am not sure that I blame him, for he knows that Lincoln can afford to keep on. Perhaps it is best that they did not take a chance and try to repair the [plane] down there. To have done it and finished the flight this year would—if Lincoln decides to go on—have saved him about $75,000, for it will cost that to continue for another year. But then it is just as well for Balchen to spend Lincoln’s money as to have Mary Louise and her mother spend it. And Lincoln anyway has no one else dependant upon him. Well that’s enough about expedition affairs.4
In Antarctica, on his second trip south, Richard Byrd wanted to winter alone, in the heart of the continent, to achieve the greatest polar coup and eclipse any explorer who had been to either polar region. It was in his chain of command that Byrd blundered badly. In order to manipulate support, Byrd was prone to making promises he later broke. As his expedition neared Antarctica, more than one crew member believed he would have the honor of being second-in-command, and therefore in charge of Little America while Byrd was heroically battling the elements in the hut on the plateau. It was a decision Byrd should have announced earlier but, as the ice came into view, he offered the position to Tom Poulter, a member of the scientific staff. At first Poulter declined the appointment because it was his first trip south. Other, more experienced men, such as Harold June, had been to Antarctica with Byrd on his previous expedition. Poulter argued that one of those men should be promoted first. In fact June, who was the senior pilot, expected the position. Byrd pointed out that June drank heavily (there had been many wild drinking bouts on Byrd’s first Antarctic expedition) and, after some persuading, Poulter agreed to accept the position. That made June openly angry and he expressed his displeasure to Byrd. June pointed out that he had been with Byrd since the Arctic in 1926. Was this, June wanted to know, how Byrd repaid loyalty?
Byrd responded to this confrontation by making an unforgivable mistake, especially for a naval officer indoctrinated in the importance of discipline and clear lines of command. Having appointed Poulter second-in-command, Byrd then appointed June the “head of expedition staff.” According to Byrd, June could, with a two-thirds majority vote of expedition members, overrule any order of any officer at Little America. That meant that if the men didn’t like what they were being told to do, they could simply have a discussion and decide not to do it. It was a potentially unworkable arrangement from the outset.
To compound this folly, Byrd then put many men offside by leaving them to do the exhausting work of hauling the supplies across the ice to Little America (a route the men called Misery Trail), while he sailed east in the Bear to explore the coast. The men felt they were being left to do the heavy lifting while the star of the show went on a cruise. Nevertheless, from January to March 1934, Little America underwent a substantial redevelopment as Byrd’s crew laboriously unloaded equipment and prepared for the winter ahead. New buildings were erected beside the ones that had been vacated four years earlier. Hangars, machine shops, a medical facility, bunkhouses, and a barn for the cows were built. Little America more than doubled in size.
The discontent among the men was alleviated by the fact they had stocked up on alcohol in New Zealand. During Byrd’s cruise aboard the Bear, Poulter watched the men, led by June, smuggle their supplies into the abandoned buildings of the first Little America. The potential for alcohol abuse was increased by the expedition’s physician, Dr. Guy Shirley, himself an alcoholic, who had brought huge quantities of whisky for “medicinal purposes.” When Byrd returned from his brief trip to explore the coast, he witnessed Shirley being continually drunk and ordered him back to New Zealand on the Bear.1 Fortunately for June and his cronies, Shirley donated his considerable supply of alcohol to them before he left.
By the middle of March, Byrd was sending parties south to lay supply depots for his Advance Base hut. But it was already late in the summer season and traveling, either with dogs or tractors, was becoming increasingly difficult. Byrd’s stop at New Zealand, and his attempts to make a transcontinental flight from the Pacific Quadrant, had seriously delayed the rebuilding of Little America. That delay forced him to modify his plans.
Originally Byrd had wanted to winter high on the Antarctic Plateau. As he came to realize it was too late to transport the hut and supplies that far, he decided to set up Advance Base at the foot of the Queen Maud Mountains, six hundred miles away. But by March even that was out of the question. Byrd’s Advance Base would ultimately be established just 123 miles south of Little America on the ice shelf. From a scientific point of view—taking weather observations and the like—there was no point. But Advance Base was not about science; it was all about Byrd, who freely admitted:
. . . I had no important purpose. There was nothing of that sort. Nothing whatever, except one man’s desire to know that kind of experience to the full, to be by himself for a while and to taste peace and quiet and solitude long enough to find out how good they really are.5
Byrd left Little America on March 22, and was flown to Advance Base. The lateness of the season and the difficulty in transporting the prefabricated hut over the ice meant the men had erected it hurriedly. It had been designed so the roof should sit flush with the surface of the ice, allowing snowdrifts to blow across it unhindered. But it had not been dug in deep enough and the roof protruded twelve inches, causing snowdrifts to accumulate and block the chimney and the trapdoor entrance. Another problem was that the hut leaked air through the hastily constructed joints. It was much colder inside than anticipated, making it difficult for the small kerosene-burning stove to warm the interior.
After Byrd had spent a week at Advance Base, the men who had erected it sledded back to Little America, leaving him alone. His adventure had begun.
In New Zealand, Captain Holth and the Norwegian crew members of the Wyatt Earp were instructed to stay with the ship and wait until they received word as to if, or when, Ellsworth’s next expedition might take place. The Norwegians soon learned there were small expatriate Norwegian communities in New Zealand, mainly consisting of ex-whalers. Embraced by these communities and receiving their wages from Ellsworth, they relaxed and enjoyed themselves.
Wilkins tried to make sense of his life and plan what he should do next. He had no money and was living on the small salary that Ellsworth was paying him to take care of the Wyatt Earp. He felt that his debt—moral or financial—had been repaid. He had organized the expedition and got everything successfully to the Ross Ice Shelf, until circumstances beyond his control had brought the whole affair to a premature end. He was alone and lonely; famous for a failed submarine expedition to the North Pole, while living in hotels at the bottom of the world, touring country towns and showing his films for a little extra cash. And waiting for the wealthy Ellsworth to make up his mind about what he wanted to do.
On the personal front, Wilkins had not seen his wife in two years and was conscious that she was dating other men. He had married Suzanne Bennett, an Australian-born chorus girl working in New York, shortly after he was knighted. It was a whirlwind romance, consummated at a heady time in Wilkins’s life. It was soon apparent to Wilkins that Suzanne’s main motivation in attaching herself to the famous explorer was to gain the title Lady Wilkins, then put it to use to elevate her career from chorus girl to movie star. (A strategy that was spectacularly unsuccessful.) Wilkins constantly wrote Suzanne long letters expressing his love, but she rarely replied, and when she did it was usually only to taunt him about his lack of success, his age, or the fact he was going bald.
In Dunedin, in early 1934, exhausted and undecided about his future, he sought guidance from, and refuge in, the metaphysical world. On February 15, after visiting a spiritualist show, he wrote excitedly to Suzanne:
. . . there was a woman on the stage answering questions. She . . . told me the name on a visiting card in my pocket—I being in the second row of the stalls and she being on the stage and blindfolded. The card was not mine, but that of Captain Nelson of the ship Discovery[II].2 He had slipped the card into my pocket that morning and even I did not know the full name on it before the thought reader told me.6
For a person supposedly dedicated to promoting the scientific study of the powers of the mind, Wilkins ignored the obvious explanation that a card, so easily slipped into his pocket, could just as easily be lifted and read by a pickpocket working the lobby of the theater, then the information passed to the “thought reader.”
But Wilkins did not have to spend long trying to ascertain his future from spiritualists because, in April, Ellsworth decided it for him by announcing he would make another attempt to cross Antarctica. Perhaps his decision was influenced by the knowledge that Byrd’s hut was little more than one hundred miles south of Little America and therefore not providing an extraordinary show or unlocking the secrets of the interior of Antarctica as Byrd had originally hoped. Or perhaps it was the sense of stifling helplessness Ellsworth felt in the castle now being run by his wife and mother-in-law. Whatever the reason, or combinations thereof, Ellsworth instructed Wilkins to organize another trans-Antarctic flight for him.
Wilkins responded, saying that he would, at least, prepare the Wyatt Earp. Then he immediately sailed to London in the hope of convincing the British to give him a submarine to explore the Arctic. A legitimate opportunity to go north was an excuse to avoid going south, Wilkins reasoned. But the Royal Navy had no submarines available and no money to offer him, so Wilkins sailed back to New Zealand, stopping at Australia on the way. By August he was back in Dunedin, still hoping to meet his obligation to Ellsworth by simply arranging the ship and crew, but not going south himself. He would ensure everything was loaded on the Wyatt Earp, then wave it off. As he explained to Ellsworth by telegram:
Gladly supervise preparation but think after departure you, Balchen, Holth could manage everything including writing [press releases]. I prefer not go south. Should supervise building submarine but if you insist would not lecture [or] write [about] your expedition.7
Ellsworth never bothered to respond and Wilkins, waiting in Dunedin with the Wyatt Earp, turned again to a local spiritualist church to seek guidance as to what to do. He explained another mystical encounter to the indifferent Suzanne.
The medium said she could see a sparkling cross above my head and a blazing square about me. Many spirits were standing near, all willing and eager to help . . . urging me to go ahead more firmly with my work and plans and assuring me of tremendous success, which the medium said would be sure to be mine.
She also described one man, more or less like [Ben] Eielson,3 whom she said placed his hand on my shoulder and encouraged me to go on . . . my mother, she said, was also there, and said that while [my mother] knew I was not following the work she planned—she wanted me to be a minister—she realized that I could do more good if I went earnestly ahead and did what I was trying to do.8
Wilkins was forever convincing himself to go forward with his vision for the future of mankind. But while the spirits in the metaphysical world were urging him to continue with his efforts to take a submarine under the ice in the north, economic factors in the physical world were conspiring to keep him in the south.
Meanwhile, in Antarctica, Richard Byrd was close to death.