At their third landing place, Ellsworth and Hollick-Kenyon huddled in their tent, waiting for the blizzard to abate. Ellsworth’s diary for November 28, 1935, simply records, “Lay all day in our sleeping bags with drift and gale reaching 40 mph.” The following day he wrote, “Our sleeping bags are cold. Grease and dirt is the order of the day in camp. Our small primus [stove] leaks, so use the fire pot.”
The strong wind continued and the pair understood they were going nowhere soon. When they peered out of their tent, they could see the Polar Star was still where they had left it, but it was beginning to be covered with snowdrift. They also understood that when the blizzard finally passed it would be a laborious task to dig it out.
Despite knowing it was unlikely they had enough fuel to reach Little America, they still felt it was worth using some of the precious liquid to run the portable motor and generator to send a signal from their 100-watt radio, which they usually only operated during flight. They strung antenna wires from bamboo poles and brought the motor and generator inside the tent, so that they could warm them sufficiently. After spending hours getting the small motor started, during which time the exhaust soot turned the interior of the tent a filthy gray-black, the appointed time for their scheduled radio contact arrived. Hollick-Kenyon flashed their estimated position, then switched on the receiver to listen. At that moment, the magneto in the generator burned out and the radio went dead. Ellsworth noted in his diary that at least Hollick-Kenyon:
. . . did succeed in getting out a message of our whereabouts to the Wyatt Earp if [radio operator] Lanz ever did receive them and to say that we had been blizzard bound for three days and were waiting for weather.11
Henceforth, any broadcasts from the larger radio could only be made while the engine of the Polar Star was running. Ellsworth and Hollick-Kenyon turned in desperation to their weaker trail radio, but when they tried to generate enough electricity by quickly turning the hand-operated generator, they stripped the teeth off one of the gears.
Confined to their tent, and with nothing to do and nothing to talk about, Hollick-Kenyon, who had studied the theory of navigation, was still puzzled over Ellsworth’s inability to take observations and draw conclusions that did not vary wildly. Something was clearly amiss. Sometime during their second day at Camp III, Hollick-Kenyon decided to inspect Ellsworth’s sextant to see if he could determine where they were, or at least why Ellsworth seemed unable to do so. Hollick-Kenyon only had the sextant in his hands for a few moments before he noticed something that Ellsworth had missed. The index mirror was out of alignment.
A sextant’s function is to accurately measure the angle between horizontal and an object in the sky. In Ellsworth’s case, the sun. Ellsworth carried a Bausch & Lomb bubble sextant. It determined horizontal, not by looking at the horizon as sailors did, but by looking at a bubble, not unlike a carpenter’s level. With the sextant held perfectly horizontal, the sun was sighted and its image reflected through an index mirror to read the angle. Once the angle of the sun was accurately measured, the navigator looked up the date and time of the sighting in an almanac, then found the corresponding angle to determine position. Sextants are delicate instruments and navigators carefully protect them from knocks and bumps. The index mirror, so critical for an accurate reading, is usually set by the manufacturer and locked in place.
How long the index mirror on Ellsworth’s sextant had been out of alignment, Hollick-Kenyon had no idea. Perhaps the mirror had been jolted by the heavy landing at Camp I. Perhaps Ellsworth had knocked or mishandled the sextant during the flight. Or maybe it had been that way from the beginning. But Ellsworth’s sextant was out of alignment and he had not realized until Hollick-Kenyon had inspected it.
It must have been a disappointing time for Ellsworth, whose one job on the flight had been to navigate. Until that time his diary entries had been brief, but on his third day at Camp III, he summarized his worries:
November 30: One trouble after another now. First the airplane transformer burns out. 2: Cooking primus leaks. 3: The trail [radio] set slips a gear thus leaving us with no communication with the Wyatt Earp. Suppose she is already starting to lay bases for us along the coast, knowing nothing of where we are. 4: The sextant is out of order. What next? The snow still drifts and the next thing to do is dig out the camp and the plane and try and reach Little America. Probably not enough gas to get there. The speed on skis isn’t what we thought for we are certainly behind schedule. We have gotten three time ticks from Buenos Aires. Kenyon and I both agreed it was best to get on to Little America instead of trying to fix up the radio here.2
Having noticed the problem with the sextant, even more remarkably, it was Hollick-Kenyon who worked out how to fix it. Sextants can be checked quickly in the field by setting the index arm to zero. One imagines the sun is sitting on the horizon, so the angle is zero, and sets the sextant accordingly. Ellsworth wrote it was Hollick-Kenyon who:
. . . happened upon the simple expedient of putting the bubble on the snow horizon, then setting the index at zero and locking it there. We both of us instantly realized that this would give us a roughly correct set [of observations].3
On their fourth day, the wind dropped and the two men emerged from the tent to see the sun for the first time since they had landed at Camp III, and to find the Polar Star half buried under drift snow. They immediately cut blocks of ice and built a wall to protect their tent, lest the wind pick up again.
Then, with the reset sextant, Ellsworth took elevations of the sun and calculated they were at 80° South and approximately 114° West. They were, in fact, on course, but still had over six hundred miles to travel before they reached Little America. Their position also meant they had to be near the western end of the polar plateau and, if they could get in the air, hopefully they would find themselves descending to the ice shelf. Whether or not they had enough fuel was another matter.
The Polar Star was packed with snow, so Ellsworth spent the day crawling inside to scrape it out. The broad-shouldered Hollick-Kenyon found he could not wriggle very far into the narrow fuselage, so the laborious chore was left to Ellsworth, who used his tin drinking mug as a scoop and described his experience as “One of the worst days I have ever spent.” Referring to flattening an airfield for the Dornier Wal flying boat, when he, Amundsen, and the others were stranded on the ice in the Arctic, Ellsworth noted tersely in his diary, “Even a worse job than [19]25.”4
Ellsworth’s unwise choice of moccasins for his feet was also taking its toll. He had completely lost sensation in his left foot.
Hollick-Kenyon appears more philosophical about their trials, because Ellsworth also noted in his diary, “Kenyon says, ‘maybe it’s all to try us.’”5
After an exhausting twelve hours scraping away at the snow inside the Polar Star, Ellsworth collapsed in his sleeping bag, warmed by a nip of the grain alcohol that Wilkins had included in their food box.
The following day (December 2) Hollick-Kenyon climbed into the cockpit of the plane and spent the day clearing fine snow from his instruments. That evening, he and Ellsworth agreed that whatever happened, they would get airborne in the morning and fly west. On the morning of December 3, they emerged from the tent to see that it had snowed overnight and they needed to dig out around the plane again. They attacked the job with a desperate enthusiasm, and by midday had cleared the area. Now they needed to get the skis out of the trenches, which they had dug to allow the wings to sit flat. They unloaded everything from the Polar Star to lighten it and, after covering the engine with a canvas hood, lighting a stove under it, then heating the engine for forty-five minutes, they tried to start it. That involved cranking the engine over a couple of times, then using the battery-powered starter motor. After five attempts the Polar Star burst into life.
Hollick-Kenyon taxied the plane forward, lifting the skis out of the trenches, and they began the hasty job of loading everything on board. But before they could strike the tent, a storm front swept in from the southeast, bringing high winds and snow. They had no choice but to secure the plane and pitch their tent again.
In his diary Ellsworth revealed his growing pessimism, writing the snow-brick wall they had built to protect them from the wind, “would be our mausoleum,” then added:
Looks as though we [are] 650 [miles] from Bay of Whales with no hope of getting there. God forbid this airplane stuff anyway. One is so helpless when something goes wrong.6
On the morning of December 4, the wind had dropped again and they repeated the process of digging the snowdrift away from the Polar Star. Then they heated the engine and got it started before quickly loading everything on board. With “the sky not too promising,”7 they were airborne at 1920 and bid farewell to Camp III, which had been their home for a week.
Hollick-Kenyon steered a magnetic compass course of 190°, until Ellsworth measured the drift and put it at five degrees. Hollick-Kenyon altered his bearing to 195°. An hour after they had taken off, he noted they were flying at 4,700 feet. The Indicated Air Speed was 125 mph, thanks to the easterly wind at their backs, which would carry them farther before they inevitably ran out of fuel. At 2235, more than three hours after leaving Camp III, Hollick-Kenyon brought the plane lower to estimate the elevation of the surface. He recorded it in his log as one thousand feet. His compass course was 185°. Ellsworth wrote in his diary at 2303, “Came down to get a sight. A beautiful calm night. The boundless snowfield sparkling like diamonds.”8
They were flying over the Ross Ice Shelf.
But where on the shelf? Their only signpost to the Bay of Whales now was Roosevelt Island, a snow-covered hump, eighty miles long and forty miles wide. It was almost impossible to distinguish from a distance. Hollick-Kenyon and Ellsworth understood they could not waste fuel flying around in circles trying to locate the island.
At 2310 Hollick-Kenyon brought the plane down for a fourth successful landing and, with new confidence in their sextant, they reckoned their position to be 79°29' South, 153°27' West.
They had crossed Antarctica with extraordinary accuracy.
After ten hours on the ground, they took off again at 0900 on December 5 and flew in the direction they hoped would lead them to Roosevelt Island and Little America. They were only in the air fifty minutes when the saw the white hump. As they flew over it, they looked forward to see a water sky, then beyond the island the slate gray water of the Ross Sea.
They had barely seen the water when the Pratt & Whitney engine, after twenty hours and fifteen minutes of faithful performance since Dundee Island, began to falter. In an instant, the last fuel tank was dry. The propeller jerked to a standstill in front of their eyes and Hollick-Kenyon again demonstrated his skill by landing the powerless plane.
In his log, the pragmatic Hollick-Kenyon recorded:
1005 Landed. All tanks consumed. Camp Roosevelt. Approx position two miles NW Roosevelt Island. Fine Calm. Snow soft and lightly drifted. Antennas erected but could not start motor generator for 1200 SKED [scheduled 1200 broadcast]. Unable to rig flying antenna in time to transmit on flight. Open sea visible before landing. Estimated position about four miles east of camp at Little America.
Estimated ground speed of entire flight 101 mph. Average consumption 22.81 gallons per hour. Total flying time 20 hours 15 minutes.9
In his diary, Ellsworth wrote: “Came to Roosevelt Island. Beyond stretched the ice free waters of the Ross Sea. The goal of four years of dreaming.”10