I have never known a drearier voyage,” Ellsworth wrote of the monthlong trip from Dunedin to Deception Island, off the west coast of Graham Land. “We rolled and wallowed at seven knots across the most desolate stretch of water on Earth. During the entire twenty-six days, we did not meet one vessel. No whale’s gleaming back broke for a moment the tortured monotony of the sea.”1
Deception Island is an active volcano that, with the exception of the caldera, sits below water. The horseshoe-shaped rim forms a natural harbor, which opens to the sea through a narrow channel. In the 19th century, Norwegian whalers discovered the island offered shelter from storms and regularly sought refuge there. Frequent visits saw the island evolve into a base for the whalers’ factory ships and, by 1914, they had established shore-based facilities to boil down whale carcasses, extract the oil, and store it in steel tanks. Falling prices for whale oil, as a result of the Depression, forced the closure of the whaling station in 1931. Today the island is a popular destination for Antarctic cruise ships, bringing tourists to photograph the rusting remains of the whaling station, or to enjoy the unique experience of bathing in the warm water that bubbles up from the volcano below, while surrounded by snow fields.
Early on the morning of October 14, 1934, the most violent weather of the voyage greeted the Wyatt Earp as it approached its destination. Captain Holth, who had been to Deception Island previously, identified a landmark as Castle Rock. He continued cautiously to reach a flat slab of stone, Sail Rock, rising one hundred feet above the sea then, as Wyatt Earp pitched and rolled, he inched between the cliffs that guarded the entrance to the harbor. The ship squeezed in. Wilkins and Ellsworth eagerly scanned Whalers Bay and were disappointed. They observed only open water. Wilkins remembered that in 1920 the ice had been six feet thick. In 1928 it had been two feet thick. Now there was no harbor ice, and consequently, no runway for the Polar Star. Their thoughts turned to the snow cover ashore, hopeful that it might provide a flat area suitable for their purpose.
The Wyatt Earp tied up at the whaling jetty. Balchen donned his skis and soon located a relatively flat area, covered with snow, from which he believed he could get the fully laden Polar Star airborne. He also understood the rising summer temperature meant the snowfield would only last a few weeks. There was no time to waste if they were to get Ellsworth into the air and on his way to Little America.
But even within the protection of the volcano’s crater the winds blew with such ferocity that five frustrating days passed before the crew could unload the plane. Eventually, with the Wyatt Earp huddled beside the tiny jetty, the crew struggled to lift the Polar Star, without its wings, from the hold of the ship, then hauled it to higher ground. Again, the men went through the frozen-finger process of attaching the wings to the fuselage by means of hundreds of tiny nuts and bolts. Finally, on October 29, the propeller was ceremoniously lifted onto the engine shaft. The Polar Star was ready for a test flight and, unlike nine months earlier, this time it was safely resting on solid ground.
On the opposite side of the continent, the recovering Byrd was shrewd enough to understand that, publicly, he had to appear to be enthusiastically supporting Ellsworth’s trans-Antarctic flight. He wrote in a diary intended for publication:
We are all following, with utmost sympathy and interest, Ellsworth’s efforts to complete his transcontinental flight. We are now furnishing him with daily and sometimes twice daily weather reports. Ellsworth and Balchen face a long and difficult flight. Their probable track and what they are likely to find on the way are a lively topic of conversation here.2
Byrd instructed his meteorologist, Bill Haines, to radio weather reports to the Wyatt Earp and, on October 29, Haines reported the weather was clear at his end. All Ellsworth needed was clear weather on his side and he could fly into the history books. But that evening, after a day of sunshine, snow squalls and the inevitable frustration, set in.
To keep Ellsworth motivated, and ensure everything was in readiness, Wilkins suggested they run the engine briefly. Everyone thought that was a good idea. Without further discussion, the hand-cranked starter mechanism was slotted in beneath the engine cowling and mechanic Chris Braathen gave it a hefty turn. Rather than the engine bursting into raucous life, there was a sharp bang, like a pistol shot, and the propeller flopped lifeless after half a turn. Something was seriously amiss. The Pratt & Whitney air-cooled radial engine was hurriedly pulled down to reveal a connecting rod (con-rod) between a piston and the crankshaft had broken. To protect the engine from corrosion during the long sea voyage, the cylinders had been filled with oil, which Braathen had forgotten to drain before the hasty attempt to test the engine. And the news got worse. A search through the many boxes of parts revealed there were no spare con-rods.
A conference was held and Wilkins suggested a radio message be sent to the Pratt & Whitney factory in Connecticut, to have the necessary part flown to the southernmost port of Chile: Magallanes,1 nine hundred miles to the north. It would mean sailing the Wyatt Earp across one of the stormiest oceans in the world to pick up a package that may or may not be delivered successfully, but with no alternative it was certainly worth a try.
“I am determined to carry on until I succeed or see that there is no hope left to make the flight across Antarctica,”3 Ellsworth reported bravely to the New York Times, when the delay was explained. Two days after the disastrous attempt to start the engine, Wilkins and the crew began the voyage to Chile.
Ellsworth and Balchen, along with Braathen, meteorologist Jorgen Holmboe, and Dr. Dana Coman,2 chose to wait at Deception Island. During their enforced time together, Ellsworth had the opportunity to get to know the man he expected to pilot the Polar Star. “Balchen was moody and temperamental . . . subject to sudden fits of temper,” he wrote. “Once, just as we were sitting down at table, Dr. Coman let one of the cats3 into the dining room of the whaling station cottage. Balchen picked up the animal and threw it against the wall.”4
The Wyatt Earp reached Magallanes on November 9, where Wilkins immediately hired a car and drove twelve hours to the Argentinean city of Rio de Gallegos. He enjoyed a hot bath, ate a hearty meal, wrote a letter to his wife, and collected the con-rods, which had already arrived. Twenty-four hours later he was back on board and the ship was plying its way south again. The Wyatt Earp returned to Deception Island after a sixteen-day round trip. It was still early enough in the season to make the flight.
Byrd, meanwhile, had ground parties with dog teams fanning out from Little America to scout for the best possible landing areas. The teams were instructed to stay out on the ice, listen via radio for the flight, and be prepared to lay bright orange sheets on the ground to form patterns, such as “T” (suitable for landing), “Y” (fair landing field), or “+” (unsuitable for landing), along with various other signals for indicating the direction of Little America. Byrd also radioed:
I suggest that you advise me the width of your skis so that if any landing has to be made over sastrugi it can be levelled off to ski width. When you are ready for weather reports from field parties let me know.5
Ellsworth just needed the right weather.
During the period the Wyatt Earp was absent fetching the con-rods, Balchen, in turn, had the opportunity to assess Ellsworth’s capabilities. He had come to the conclusion that Ellsworth was incompetent in most things. In particular, Balchen harbored serious doubts about Ellsworth’s ability to navigate. Balchen’s uncle, Leif Dietrichson, may have told him this previously. (Dietrichson had been Ellsworth’s pilot in the Dornier Wal flying boats in 1925 and had later refused to share navigating responsibilities with him on the airship Norge.) In any case, after the return of the Wyatt Earp, Balchen argued that they needed to carry a third man in the Polar Star. He wanted someone who could navigate. It would be difficult and uncomfortable for the third man to squeeze in the narrow, two-seater plane, but Balchen insisted. Ellsworth, naturally, was totally opposed to the idea, later writing:
A third man could only be taken at the sacrifice of fuel or of camp and travel equipment on which our lives might depend, if the plane was damaged in landing. This proposal was so violently at variance with my whole scheme and theory of the crossing that I could not believe that Balchen really meant it.6
Balchen’s reluctance to trust Ellsworth wasn’t the only issue. The delay in getting airborne, caused by the broken con-rod, meant the nearby snow had begun to melt. Patches of black volcanic rock dotted Balchen’s proposed runway, and with each passing day the ground revealed more black and less white. It took ten days to repair the engine and, by that time, the snow had melted sufficiently to ensure the plan to take off from Deception Island had to be abandoned.
Wilkins faced the same problem he had faced previously on the two Wilkins-Hearst Antarctic Expeditions: Where could he find a suitable flat runway from which to get a fully fueled plane airborne? Previously, he had tried grading a runway from the rocky ground at Deception Island, but the basalt had stubbornly resisted that idea. He had explored the west side of Graham Land and not found a flat island. There was only one area left to consider: the notorious Weddell Sea.
Today we know that on each side of Antarctica there is a huge bight. On the side facing the Pacific Ocean it is the Ross Sea, while facing the Atlantic Ocean it is the Weddell Sea. Currents, which are driven forcibly from the oceans to the north, flow into these great bights to scoop up millions of tons of ice that have descended from the Antarctic Plateau and, in a swirling clockwise motion, sweep it out to sea. In the Ross Sea where, at the western extremity Victoria Land does not extend north, the piled pack ice easily reaches open water. At the western end of the Weddell Sea, however, the Antarctic Peninsula extends north. Here the ice cannot escape so freely. Trapped, it becomes deadly as it is caught, crushed, jumbled, and tumbled over itself. And small rocky islands jut from the water and conspire with the ice to crush any ship foolish enough to venture into the area. The northwest corner of the Weddell Sea is the most dangerous coastal area in the Antarctic.
In February 1902, Swedish explorer Otto Nordenskjöld and a small party were landed on Snow Hill Island at the edge of the Weddell Sea. Returning in December, their relief ship found it impossible to reach them and had to move away from shore. Returning again in February 1903, the ship was caught and smashed by the ice, marooning the relief party on nearby Paulet Island. Nordenskjöld’s group, which had already built a hut, spent a second winter in Antarctica, while the relief group survived in a small stone shelter, before all the men were eventually rescued. Nordenskjöld claimed the area had “a desolation and wildness, which perhaps no other place on earth could show.”7
Another person to risk entering the Weddell Sea was Sir Ernest Shackleton, who ignored the advice of the whalers and based his decision on his two trips to the more benign Ross Sea. When he attempted to unload the team that planned to walk across Antarctica, his ship Endurance was famously caught and crushed. In the twenty years since the Endurance, no one had tried to navigate the Weddell Sea. In fact, in more than thirty years, no one had returned to visit Nordenskjöld’s hut.
But Wilkins’s previous experience told him there was no other possibility of finding a flat runway. Venturing into the infamous Weddell Sea was their only hope.
The Wyatt Earp left Deception Island and, after a short trip north, nosed its way through the Antarctic Sound, where the expedition members stared in awe at the sheer ice walls of glaciers that towered three hundred feet over their ship. Once through, they were greeted by a labyrinth of tiny islands. Cockburn Island “proved to be only an incongruous reddish brown mountain rising abruptly 2,000 feet.”8 It was kept ice-free by volcanic warming. Seymour Island reminded Ellsworth of the Badlands of the Dakotas; barren and desolate when silhouetted against the snow and glaciers of the larger James Ross Island. Before they could get a view of Snow Hill Island, a fog set in and they sailed past it, unable to see from one side of the Wyatt Earp to the other. They groped their way through the thick white mist to bump into the Weddell Sea ice shelf. Instead of finding flat ice, suitable for getting the Polar Star up to takeoff speed, they found “a mild season had pitted its surface with loose refrozen crystals on which a heavy plane could not ski.”9
They decided to wait and inspect Snow Hill Island when the fog lifted. Wilkins knew that Nordenskjöld’s hut was on the west side, facing James Ross Island, which lay across a narrow strait. He proposed that they sail into the strait to look for a runway on the protected side. But the Wyatt Earp found too many shoals and was unable to navigate the water, so Captain Holth was forced to take the ship to the exposed east side of Snow Hill Island, drop anchor, and wait for the weather to clear. After an exhausting trip from Deception Island, the tired crew sagged into their bunks. The next morning, when everyone awoke, the fog had lifted and the gale had subsided. Ellsworth came on deck to be greeted by a glorious panorama:
The twenty-five-mile length of Snow Hill Island lay clear before our eyes—the most theatrical island of the archipelago. The northern tongue of it—a low coastal plain perhaps twenty miles square in area—was brown, stony, and barren. Behind that the island had a turtle-back formation, rising on gentle slopes to a height of 900 feet; and this whole flattened dome was clothed in a glacier which, being white, had given the morsel of land its name.10
Wilkins, Ellsworth, Balchen, and Second Mate Lauritz Liavaag walked to the plateau. There, about a mile inland, they found the ideal runway for which Wilkins had searched unsuccessfully on his two trips with the Lockheed Vegas. Ellsworth, who had been close to abandoning the whole enterprise, noted “my spirits, which had been lower than the barometer, now rose to a keen pitch of anticipation.”11
The glacier from the plateau was only ten feet high where it met the water, providing a natural wharf for the Wyatt Earp to tie up. The Polar Star, which had been lashed on the deck with its wings still attached, was unloaded and easily taxied up the glacier to the plateau. Then the crew set about the more laborious work of hauling drums of fuel and crates of supplies up to the plateau as well. Ellsworth left the hired hands to do the heavy lifting and hiked across the island on snow shoes to visit Nordenskjöld’s hut. He found it just as it had been when it was vacated thirty years earlier:
The evidences of the hurried departure were as plain as though the thing had happened yesterday. The skeletons of three white sled dogs lay in front, just where they had fallen when shot. Near them was a pair of rusty ice-skates and a pair of shoe-trees, dropped in flight. Piled against the cabin were several cases of canned sardines, pepper and mustard, and cakes of chocolate. The chocolate tasted as good as new . . . Inside were the same evidences of flight.12
Ellsworth collected some clothing, boots, equipment, a gramophone, and some cylindrical wax records, which he later donated to the American Museum of Natural History.
When he returned to the Wyatt Earp, he found everyone optimistic about the chances of a successful flight. The Polar Star was ready and Wilkins and Balchen had even taken it up for a test flight.
But on Ellsworth’s return to the ship, Balchen again raised objections to flying, saying he wanted a third man in the plane. He continued to argue Ellsworth could not be relied upon to navigate accurately. Wilkins, Balchen, and Ellsworth tried to resolve the issue, but as they negotiated back and forth, a gale blew in and resolved it for them. Extra person or not, there would be no flying until the weather cleared. Then, to add to Ellsworth’s frustration, the glacier began to calve, so the Wyatt Earp was moved, while Captain Holth waited for the massive slab of ice to float away.
On the opposite side of the continent, Byrd summarized the problems they faced:
[Meteorologist] Bill Haines was talking about it today. This late in the season, Bill says, the chances against the right conditions for the flight are about 100 to 1. Weather, of course; the same sort of thing we’re up against, but on a much larger scale. Where we need a clear stretch of only 400 miles or so, they need clear weather between two hemispheres. The weather experts and pilots here seem to think that Ellsworth’s only hope this season is to ignore weather at his end and seize the first stable weather at Little America, gambling on the chance of breaking through and finding good weather for landing here.13
The primary concern with taking off in poor weather and chancing their luck, Byrd pointed out in his public diary, was that Balchen and Ellsworth would cut off their chance to retreat if they did not break through into clear weather, and that flying in poor weather limited observation and made the flight, ostensibly for exploration, pointless.
Two weeks went by before finally, on December 18, the wind dropped and Balchen declared the weather suitable for flying. The Polar Star, having been left on the island, was now covered in snow, so that only the top of its engine was visible. The crew trudged up to the plateau and, with shovels, dug out the plane before starting and warming the engine.
After a late supper, Balchen agreed to take Ellsworth up for a test flight. They took off successfully, flew south along the coast, and returned two hours later. The repaired engine worked perfectly and they had been in radio contact with the Wyatt Earp the entire time. Yet again, it seemed everything was set. Even Balchen, perhaps sensing the mounting annoyance of both Wilkins and Ellsworth with his reluctance to pilot the plane, had agreed to make the flight relying on his own and Ellsworth’s navigation.4 In fact, Wilkins was so confident (or so eager to get them away) that he sent a radio message to the New York Times announcing the flight was about to take place.
Still the weather had other ideas. It changed again and they were forced to wait. Everyone watched nervously as the sea ice slowly closed around the Wyatt Earp, threatening to cut off their escape. Only the fact that the wind was blowing from the west meant that the ice was not forcing the ship against the coast. If the wind turned, the Wyatt Earp would be trapped. They knew they could not stay long.
As they waited, Ellsworth remained in his cabin, depression settling on him like a fog. When he did emerge, it was usually to complain the men were not working quickly enough, or to question why everything was taking so long. He began to speak of canceling the expedition. To alleviate his darkening mood, Balchen and Wilkins proposed an alternate plan. Perhaps a short flight over some nearby unexplored area would satisfy his ambition. But Ellsworth was adamant. He had come south to fly across Antarctica. It was the long flight or nothing. As each day passed it seemed more likely it would be nothing. “At last I was facing the bitter thought that the flight might be impossible this year,”14 Ellsworth wrote.
During this prolonged stagnation, Wilkins, Magnus Olsen, and some Norwegian members of the crew took the opportunity to escape Ellsworth’s despair and the confines of the Wyatt Earp, and camp on Snow Hill Island. They set up a tent, and Olsen recalled:
Sir Hubert Wilkins was an extremely taciturn man, and therefore on the rare occasions when he did talk, it was always worth listening to. As we lay resting in the tent that night for the first time, he mentioned the submarine Nautilus, which he had bought for a dollar from the United States Navy, and of his attempt to pierce the ice cap in the Arctic. Although he had to abandon the venture, he regarded the attempt he had made as having been worthwhile, and told us that sometime, someone else, with financial backing, would succeed in carrying out the project. His philosophy was that every person had ideas which appeared crazy to others, and while they might be laughed at and brushed aside at the time, someone else was sure to bring it forth as his own idea, and be given a chance to carry it out.
Before he bade us good night and dropped off to sleep, he gave me a piece of advice that should be followed by all aspiring explorers. “Remember, Magnus, you will never gain anything without personal wealth, or government backing.”15
Wilkins had devoted years of his life to repay his debt and now, for the second time, the expedition appeared to be over. Ellsworth declared it was time to load the Polar Star back on board and leave, so Wilkins investigated whether he could make the flight. Balchen could fly the plane and Wilkins could certainly navigate. On December 29, Wilkins sent a secret message to Isaiah Bowman of the American Geographical Society, asking for money to take over the expedition and make the flight himself:
Confidential: Ellsworth tired waiting, is packing to return tomorrow. Have not yet proposed anything to him and not sure he would agree to any proposal, also apart from what I might personally subscribe would need about $20,000 to carry on another year or $10,000 for rest of this season.16
But before Bowman had a chance to respond, the weather cleared. Jorgen Holmboe issued his meteorological report suggesting that they would have clear weather. Byrd radioed that the weather was clear on the Ross Sea side. Ellsworth emerged from his cabin, excited the flight was back on. The crew dug the Polar Star out of the snowdrift again and began preparing it, but the task of shoveling the snow took a full day and Ellsworth grumbled that they were not working fast enough. “With a little more speed in preparing the Polar Star we might have taken off that day,”17 he wrote.
By the time the plane was ready (January 1, 1935) fog had shrouded Snow Hill Island and visibility was reduced to a few meters. The flight was off again. Everyone felt they had chanced their luck with the Weddell Sea pack ice long enough. It was time to go home. A disheartened Ellsworth admitted that the expedition, his second to Antarctica, was over.