On the same day that the Polar Star flopped to a stop just north of Roosevelt Island, Sir Douglas Mawson in Australia was explaining that he was not eager to search for the missing fliers. Mary Louise’s request for assistance from Byrd had been forwarded to Mawson, who put the responsibility back on Wilkins. Mawson, who never had a high regard for Wilkins, informed Australia’s federal treasurer, Richard Casey:
Wilkins’s position on the expedition has, I believe, been an unimportant one but there was a provision that, should the present emergency arise, Wilkins should be in full charge and empowered to make a search. Wilkins has looked forward to this moment. There is obviously now a chance for him to do something and reap the reward for his three years devoted to the expedition in a very junior capacity.
Provided Wilkins is in the field to complete Ellsworth’s wishes regarding search etc. I would not feel disposed to enter the arena myself unless, of course, there was something I could do that Wilkins could not.1
Casey was interested in Australia’s Antarctic territorial claims and knew Mawson and Wilkins personally.1 After listening to Mawson’s argument against searching, Casey sought a second opinion from John King Davis, the experienced ship’s captain who had been to Antarctica with both Mawson and Shackleton. Davis showed more enthusiasm and pointed out that if Ellsworth and Hollick-Kenyon had gone down in the first half of their flight, then it was unlikely they would have survived. He explained his reasoning to Casey:
When one realizes that an attempt to reach Charcot Island would mean traversing an unknown range of mountains of considerable height to reach the seaboard, where they could not rely with any certainty on obtaining provisions, or of being rescued, I think this must be rejected in favor of a probable attempt to travel the greater distance to the Bay of Whales, where they know food supplies are available and where rescue would only be a matter of time.2
The fliers, Davis believed, would be either dead or at Little America. Casey agreed with him and, at a time when the Australian Government was keen to impress America, the experienced politician suggested that it would be a friendly gesture toward America if Australia were to make some attempt to rescue the fliers.
But what, exactly, could Australia do? Mawson and Davis had spent a decade trying to convince the government to set up bases in Antarctica, both to reinforce its territorial claim and as permanent weather stations, but the country still did not have a ship suitable for Antarctic waters.
Fortunately however, the British ship Discovery II, which a year earlier had been stalking the waters around South Georgia to scare off the Argentineans, was now conducting oceanographic research in the Indian Ocean. Perhaps Australia could borrow that. Casey sent a cable, via the Australian High Commissioner in London, to the Discovery Committee, asking if it might temporarily suspend its scientific research to place the ship at the disposal of the Australian Government. Always happy to demonstrate its rightful dominance in Antarctica, the Discovery Committee promptly gave its consent.
When Davis informed Wilkins of the decision, he replied indignantly that the offer of assistance was unnecessary, at least in the immediate future: “Unless delays experienced Ellsworth’s Expedition’s own plans meet all requirements until mid January, after which would be time [to] despatch Discovery to Bay of Whales.”3 But Wilkins’s attempt to refuse help was ignored. Excitement for an Australian expedition to Antarctica was already gathering momentum in public and political circles. A Yank and a Brit were lost in Antarctica and Australia was going to rescue them.
The fully provisioned Discovery II was south of Fremantle, Western Australia, when Commander Leonard Hill (who had recently replaced Captain Andrew Nelson) received orders to proceed to Melbourne and collect two planes, pilots, and additional crew members. F. D. (Francis) Ommanney, a British naturalist traveling on board, recalled:
But we still knew nothing of the reason for our summons to Melbourne except that it had to do with Lincoln Ellsworth, the American aviator, who, we believed, was to make this summer his third attempt to fly across the Antarctic Continent. One evening I was reading in my cabin, supporting myself against the rolling of the ship. Deacon and Marr came in. “We’re to take on two airplanes in Melbourne,” they said, “and two pilots. We are to take in stores for four months and go down to the Bay of Whales. That’s all we know.”4
Here at last, the excited Ommanney realized, was the chance to visit Antarctica.
When the Discovery II arrived at the small port of Williamstown, a suburb of Melbourne, the British crew realized they had sailed into a national fervor. In the two weeks it took to remove the samson post on the afterdeck and build a platform to hold a plane, people flocked to Williamstown to see the ship that was going to rescue Ellsworth. Ommanney wrote:
In spite of the fact that we were called the “Good Will ship” and “Australia’s Gesture,” we found that people quite genuinely meant it when they said to us in clubs, in pubs, or in the street, “Good on yer, Discovery! Hope you find him!” And when young men and girls, lean, bronzed, superb, sailed across the harbor in their skiffs to “see the Discovery” . . . they had caught the sense of the gesture their stripling race was making.5
The Ross Ice Shelf, December 5, 1935:
Ellsworth and Hollick-Kenyon sat silently in the Polar Star. The flight they had expected to make in fourteen hours had taken twelve days. But despite getting lost, the failure of the radios, and being trapped on the ground by blizzards, Lincoln Ellsworth and Herbert Hollick-Kenyon had crossed Antarctica. They had seen, and stood in, the heart of the last unexplored continent in the world. Now all they had to do was locate Little America so they could survive to tell their tale. They climbed out of the Polar Star, dug trenches for the skis, and hauled the plane forward so its wings sat flat on the snow. Then they spent the next forty-eight hours resting. After they had rested, Hollick-Kenyon scavenged fuel sloshing in the corners of the plane’s tanks and attempted to repair the portable generator. Ellsworth recorded their daily routine in his diary:
Continued S.E. wind and snow squalls. Still in our [sleeping] bags. We eat twice daily. Morning oatmeal with bacon boiled in it and evening a mug of pemmican. I like Coman’s pemmican flavored with spice best. It was more tasty than the Danish. The temp here hangs on the freezing mark. Quite different from the -5 degrees Fah[renheit] on the 6,000 feet plateau. Every evening at 2200 GMT we try to get contact with the Wyatt Earp using our 100 watt portable generator. Whether or not they hear we do not know. But hope they are not laying bases [near Charcot Island]. Ye Gods. A 300 mile walk to the sea.6
By December 8 the weather had cleared. Ellsworth and Hollick-Kenyon stood on the plane and scanned the horizon for the radio masts they knew protruded from Little America. (They had not brought binoculars.) To the northwest they saw irregular ice hummocks which they suspected were snow-covered buildings. Hollick-Kenyon also thought he could make out an ice-covered tower. They were uncertain whether it was Little America, but seeing nothing else, they strapped on snow shoes and, without taking additional supplies, set off in that direction. After walking for two hours the “buildings” appeared no closer, so they returned to the plane and rested.
The following day they assembled their sled, packed it with ten days’ worth of rations, and set off again. Expecting to soon reach Little America, they left their tent erected beside the Polar Star. The going was slow. The soft wet snow made hauling the sled difficult but, after a draining nine miles, they reached the hummocks only to discover the “tower” was merely an ice pinnacle and the “buildings” were snowdrifts.
Their disappointment was aggravated by the realization they had left the sextant in the plane and were unable to check their position, or attempt to determine in which direction Little America might lie. With no shelter, they left the sled where it was and hurried back to the Polar Star, where they rested, grabbed the sextant, packed the tent, and then made another nine-mile slog back to the loaded sled. It was, Ellsworth wrote in his diary, “awful going. Our feet sinking into the snow and soaking wet.”
They returned to the sled at 0300 on December 10. In twenty-four hours they had hiked an exhausting twenty-seven miles. Hollick-Kenyon was “pretty well done in.” They set up the tent, ate a small meal of mixed nuts, and rested for seven hours, after which Ellsworth took sightings and estimated they were twelve miles south of Little America.
On December 11 they set out again. After the previous heavy hauling in the soft snow they agreed they would only travel at night, when the snow hardened. Plodding on, with Hollick-Kenyon exhausted and Ellsworth stumping along on a left foot he could not feel, Ellsworth suddenly shouted that he could see water. Hollick-Kenyon looked and agreed. It had to be the Bay of Whales. They must have been traveling too far to the west.
The tired men felt they could reach their salvation after a rest, so they pitched their tent again, then varied their diet by treating themselves to bacon and boiled powdered milk. Ellsworth, believing he would be safely in a dry hut within hours, took off his left moccasin to examine his foot for the first time since leaving Camp III at 6,000 feet. The foot was covered with large blisters.
After resting for most of the night, Ellsworth got his blistered foot covered and the pair set off in the direction of the water they had seen. But after walking for six hours, a devastated Ellsworth’s wrote in his diary:
A snare and a delusion. The Bay of Whales. Where? We traveled twelve miles today at two miles per hour, but where was the water we saw yesterday. No more. The second no wind [day] on our trip and the weather misty with no visibility except toward the west of our route of travel. So tomorrow we head in that direction. One little bird dropping in the snow. No other sign of life. Down to our last quart of fuel now.7
Later the same day he recorded they had walked another ten miles toward a water sky, and that it was:
Like walking on a fog bank. Can’t see any irregularities under foot. Sometimes ahead it looks as though we were going into a depression. At other times, as though we were going up. But always the flat monotonous barrier surface. No desert was ever more monotonous. Objects that appear near are miles ahead. We approached a ridge and thought to get an extended view.8
As they struggled to the top of a ridge, hoping to get a better view, the two men heard the lapping of waves. They stumbled quickly forward and stared down, almost in disbelief. Below them, salt water splashed against the ice. It was the open water of the Ross Sea they had seen from the Polar Star. But where was Little America?
Again they pitched their tent, ate and rested. On December 13, Ellsworth recorded:
The 13th is both my lucky and unlucky day. It was this day two years ago that the plane went through the ice. It is astonishing to think that Kenyon and I are the only two humans on this continent of 5,000,000 square miles.9
Perhaps Ellsworth was becoming disoriented. The Polar Star had been damaged, almost two years earlier, in January. He was making his diary entry in December.
By December 14 their search had become aimless. They had reached the edge of the barrier and stared down into the sea, but in whichever direction they looked, they could not see Little America.
On December 15, ten days after the Polar Star had run out of fuel, Ellsworth was out of ideas. The two men decided they had no choice but to walk in whatever direction they chose until they could walk no longer. They had enough fuel to prepare one, or at the most two, hot meals. With the same fatalistic determination, focused by a lack of options, with which they had climbed aboard the Polar Star at Camp III, they now packed the sled and stumbled on their way.
Fifteen miles later they found two abandoned tractors. They had reached the small inlet that Byrd had named Ver-Sur-Mer and had used to unload his ships. This was one end of the Misery Trail that led to Little America. With new energy, they followed the edge of the inlet east until Ellsworth recorded, “Topping a rise we looked down on the most desolate remains of past habitation I have ever witnessed. I have seen deserted mining camps in the west but nothing to equal this. Only a lot of masts and the stove pipes of buildings sticking out of the snow.”10
They scrambled toward their beacons of salvation and found two glass skylights that were relatively free of snow. They smashed one and lowered themselves down to the room below. It was Byrd’s radio shack. Next, they lowered the supplies from their sled and set about making the room habitable. The radio shack at Little America consisted of two rooms. The first, where Ellsworth and Hollick-Kenyon had entered through the skylight, had once housed radio equipment. In this room Byrd’s failing voice had crackled through from Advance Base as the poison slowly unhinged his mind. The second room was lined with bunks and was where the staff had slept. Ellsworth and Hollick-Kenyon were delighted to find a small stove and a sack of coal.
On his three expeditions, Ellsworth had carried a bottle of brandy, given to him by Mary Louise before the first. He opened it, and he and Hollick-Kenyon took a celebratory drink. Then, finding themselves in darkness for the first time in three weeks, they slept for twenty-four hours.
After they woke, Ellsworth wrote in his diary:
We dug a tunnel and made steps down to the door of our shack. Found three sacks of coal for our stove in the snow including a sack of hard tack, also a drum of gasoline for our primus. In the shack was a tin of strawberry jam and some marmalade. A can of G.W. coffee and numerous bottles of malted milk tablets. We can get all our snow for water without putting our head out. Cleaned everything up including our dishes. Shaved and took our first wash in three weeks and settled down to await the arrival of the Wyatt Earp. When she will arrive we don’t know for it is a 3,000-mile voyage from Dundee Island to the Bay of Whales. Anyway, we have made the crossing and that’s something so we can afford to be patient, dreary as it is here.11