After the stunt at Advance Base, which nearly killed him, Richard Byrd returned to Antarctica three times. The first was in 1940. Alarmed that various countries, including Germany, were making claims on Antarctica, the Americans formed the United States Antarctic Service (USAS), and sent an expedition south with the aim of establishing bases on the Ross Ice Shelf (West Base) and the Antarctic Peninsula (East Base), then flying across the continent to map it. Byrd was appointed commanding officer of the USAS, but his age and declining health made the appointment largely a public relations exercise. He returned briefly to Little America, but did not winter there. The work of the USAS was cut short when the U.S. entered the war in December 1941. At the end of the war, the USAS mounted Operation Highjump, with the aim of mapping as much of Antarctica as possible. Again Byrd was appointed commanding officer, although everyone understood it was an honorary title. On February 16, 1947, he flew over the South Pole a second time. Byrd went to Antarctica the final time during Operation Deep Freeze and spent February 1956 at Little America IV. He died at his home in Virginia on March 11, 1957.
A few months after Byrd’s death, Bernt Balchen published his autobiography Come North With Me. In it, Balchen made no mention of his two trips to Antarctica with Wilkins and Ellsworth. He did, however, cast doubts on Byrd’s claim to have flown to the North Pole in 1926. According to Balchen, the Fokker Trimotor, Josephine Ford, in which Byrd had made the flight, was not fast enough to have flown from Kings Bay, Spitsbergen, to the North Pole and back in fifteen and a half hours. Balchen started a controversy that continues to this day as historians debate whether Byrd actually reached the North Pole, mistakenly believed he had, or purposely faked his records. Balchen died on October 18, 1973. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Washington, DC.
Herbert Hollick-Kenyon rarely spoke about, and never wrote about, his time with Lincoln Ellsworth. He joined Canadian Pacific Airlines and retired from flying in 1962. He died in Vancouver on July 30, 1975.
Shortly after he returned to America in 1939, Lincoln Ellsworth announced that he would spend the southern winter of 1941 alone at the South Pole. He wrote to Wilkins, asking him if he knew of any ships similar to the Wyatt Earp that were for sale. A few weeks later Ellsworth changed his mind and announced instead that he intended to fly from Enderby Land to the Ross Sea. Nothing came of that either.
In July 1941, the sixty-one-year-old Ellsworth was talked into joining an eleven-man expedition to Peru in search of Inca treasure. He went along, but the whole thing was little more than a hoax that Ellsworth was gullible enough to pay for.
In May 1943, he wrote to Wilkins asking for some excuse to get back to the polar regions. Wilkins, as always, placated him by sending him suggestions. Ellsworth continued to correspond with Wilkins, proposing this scheme or that. It was all fantasy. Harold Clark, Ellsworth’s business manager and the man who had originally persuaded him to sponsor Wilkins’s submarine expedition, regularly exchanged letters with Wilkins, as the two devised fictitious schemes to bolster Ellsworth’s flagging spirits and indulge his dreams. Wilkins would write long letters, comparing the suitability of new airplanes for polar work, or suggesting areas that needed to be explored. Running out of ideas, Wilkins wrote to Clark, “I wish to goodness we could find something that Lincoln could do and which would interest him. The Antarctic potentialities will wear thin before too long.”1
Ellsworth suffered a stroke in 1948. Since childhood, his one source of self-confidence had been his physical strength and fitness. Even in his fifties he had prided himself that he could do the work of younger men. Now, his body frail, he became increasingly despondent and difficult to be around. Mary Louise lived separately, unable to deal with his black moods, and Ellsworth’s care was given over to professional nurses. He died on May 26, 1951 and is buried in Hudson, Ohio.
When Wilkins wrote his autobiography, he devoted only one paragraph to the six years he spent managing the Wyatt Earp expeditions. Philosophically, he came to see it as a period of transition:
It was a fine partnership we had, Lincoln Ellsworth and I, and together, using our own ship and the Northrop plane . . . we did fine work on a bigger scale than was possible for me before. The star of the individual explorer operating with minimal equipment had set, and the day was dawning of the big expeditions, financed by huge sums of money, with a supply line and trained men stretching from the frontier of the unknown, all the way back to the sources of supply at home. In this period of transition, Ellsworth and I formed a kind of link between the old school type of expedition and the new.2
While he was magnanimous publicly, privately Wilkins was critical of Ellsworth’s lack of generosity toward those who had served him so faithfully. He complained to John King Davis:
Your enquiry about Ellsworth’s legacies reminds me that he did not leave anything to any geographical society, any institute or fund. He did not even make provision for the occasional small sums, about $200 at a time, I used to worm out of him for one of our sailors [Lauritz Liavaag, who had his leg crushed on the fourth expedition] who, in an accident while on duty in the Antarctic, lost the use of one leg and who had been existing on the very meagre Norwegian sailors’ disablement pay.
Naturally he did not leave me anything at all—I did not expect or want him to, but about eight months after Lincoln died his wife did offer me something—an overcoat, which I had helped Lincoln to buy four years ago and which, of course, would not have fitted me in any case.3
Wilkins was, perhaps, unfair in being critical of Ellsworth. There was nothing that Ellsworth had promised that he had not delivered. By the completion of the third voyage of the Wyatt Earp, Wilkins had assisted Ellsworth to cross Antarctica, and had thereby repaid whatever moral or financial debt he might have had. What their arrangement was for the fourth voyage is unknown, but at the end of that voyage the Wyatt Earp was sold to the Australian Government, which was clearly the plan before departure, and Wilkins had the opportunity to present himself as the potential head of any Antarctic program that Australia might instigate. That Mawson outmaneuvered him is hardly Ellsworth’s fault.
Ultimately, Ellsworth and Wilkins should have shared any credit or accolades that might have been awarded for the first crossing of Antarctica. Neither man could have done it without the other. Ellsworth provided the money. But he contributed more than that. Ellsworth was driven partly by curiosity and partly by something haunting him from his past. That restless nature, which few people understood, drove Ellsworth again and again to seek out what was beyond the horizon—to go to a place where no one else had been, or perhaps where no one else was.
Wilkins, for his part, had the knowledge of Antarctica as a result of his previous trips. He had the skills and the experience to plan, organize, and implement the expeditions. He was also an experienced navigator, whereas Ellsworth was not. And Wilkins was on hand to see to the running of the expeditions, while Ellsworth avoided coming aboard the Wyatt Earp until the last minute and always left at the first opportunity.
Wilkins was driven by his past too. His glory days were the 1920s. In that decade, he had led three expeditions to the Arctic, two to the Antarctic, and had been involved in two others. But he had overreached himself with his submarine expedition and, by 1931, was financially ruined. Had he not gone to the Antarctic with Lincoln Ellsworth, it is difficult to imagine what else he might have done in the 1930s—a time when sponsorship for private exploration had dried up. Although Wilkins spent the decade talking about attempting another submarine voyage to the North Pole, he probably knew he could not raise the money for such an expedition. As he observed in the tent on Snow Hill Island, when he was camping with Magnus Olsen, “You will never gain anything without personal wealth, or government backing.” In the 1930s, Wilkins had neither.
At the outbreak of World War II, Wilkins contacted the Australian embassy in New York and offered his services, but the Australian Government had little use for an aging polar explorer. Wilkins did, however, have friends in many countries, including Germany and Italy. He went to Europe on behalf of the American government (not yet in the war) and was involved in a series of diplomatic missions. He traveled extensively, sometimes performing tasks for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1942, he was employed as a climatologist and geographer with the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps. He designed clothing, tents, and related equipment so that American soldiers in the field—be it desert or ice—would be more comfortable and more efficient. When, after the war, the Quartermasters Corps opened the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center at Natick, Massachusetts, moving its central operation from Washington, DC, Wilkins followed. The center later took for its motto, cum scientia defendimus (through science we defend). Wilkins rented a room at the Grand Central Hotel in the nearby suburb of Framingham. He repeatedly went to the Arctic with the army, helping to design clothing and equipment.
Wilkins and his wife, Suzanne, never lived together, nor did the marriage produce children. Wilkins died in the hotel room he rented at Framingham. His body was found on the morning of December 1, 1958. The U.S. Navy, out of respect for Wilkins’s pioneering effort to take a submarine under the Arctic ice, took his ashes to the North Pole aboard the nuclear submarine, USS Skate. The Skate broke through the ice and surfaced at the Pole on March 17, 1959. After a short ceremony, Wilkins’s ashes were scattered over the ice.
With the outbreak of World War II any plans Sir Douglas Mawson had to return to Antarctica were put on hold. The Wyatt Earp was renamed HMAS Wongala and pressed into service by the Australian Government. In the latter half of 1939 it carried ammunition from Sydney to Darwin. From 1940 to 1945 it served variously as a “guard ship” at Port Pirie and Whyalla in South Australia, and as a “mother ship” to the Naval Auxiliary Patrol. At the end of the war the Wongala/Wyatt Earp languished in the Torrens River, Adelaide. With no other purpose, it was made available to the Boy Scouts Association for Sea Scout training.
By 1947, Australian interest in an Antarctic program had reawakened. Although he understood he was now too old to go himself, Sir Douglas Mawson was still pushing for Australian Antarctic bases to be established on Macquarie and Heard Islands, and along the coast of the Australian Quadrant. Mawson’s influence saw the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE) get the official nod. Finding a ship for an expedition, however, proved a problem. Nothing suitable was available and nothing available seemed suitable. Then Mawson remembered the Wongala/Wyatt Earp, tied up in Adelaide and being used by boys to learn sea craft.
Mawson suggested the ship to the ANARE Planning Committee. John King Davis, who was on the committee, was against the idea, just as he had been against purchasing it eight years earlier. The ship was old, wooden, rotten, underpowered, and a throwback to the days when polar exploration was undertaken with dogs and sleds. But Mawson was all for it. The Wyatt Earp had proven itself in four Antarctic voyages and could do so again. Mawson, as he often did, won the day.
The ship was placed in dry dock at Adelaide and rebuilt at an enormous cost of £195,000. An eight-cylinder diesel engine was fitted, rotten timbers were replaced, the bridge was raised for better visibility—even a small radar set was installed. Davis continued to argue that the money would be better spent on a more modern vessel, but he was ignored.
On July 16, 1947, the Wongala was officially renamed HMAS Wyatt Earp to continue its proud record as an Antarctic exploration vessel. The ship left Adelaide on December 13 and, after a miserable trip marked with continual breakdowns, reached Melbourne, where an airplane was taken on board. From Melbourne, it headed to Tasmania. Phillip Law, a scientist on board, recalled:
The first night out, the ship was a shambles. In my nineteen years of subsequent seafaring, I have seen nothing like it. It pitched violently, and rolled more than 50 degrees each side of the vertical . . .
Everything seemed to have come adrift. To the turmoil of the wind and the impact of the waves was added the sound of smashing crockery and the din of heavy objects sliding and bashing from bulkhead to bulkhead. Cupboard doors burst open and their contents were hurled horizontally to crash into the nearest vertical fixture . . . Men groaned and cursed and tried to salvage their more precious possessions . . .
And we were not even in the Antarctic! We weren’t even in the Southern Ocean. We were in Bass Strait, less than a day’s sailing from the Port of Melbourne!4
After reaching Tasmania, and brief respite, the Wyatt Earp sailed from Hobart, bound for Antarctica on December 26. It didn’t get far. Problems ranged from the trivial, such as a faulty valve in the toilet, which turned it into a fountain when the ship rolled and seawater blew the contents backward, to the major, like the hull leaking and the mountings for the new diesel engine cracking. Six days into the voyage the captain turned the HMAS Wyatt Earp around and returned to Melbourne. It went into dry dock at Williamstown, where the hull was repaired in an attempt to keep water out. After a month, the Wyatt Earp headed south again. This time, despite the discomfort, it reached Commonwealth Bay, Antarctica, briefly skirted a section of coast, and returned via the Balleny Islands and Macquarie Island. The voyage took seven weeks and the Wyatt Earp never went south again.
Within three months of its return the ship, which with refitting and repairs, had cost the Australian Government well over £200,000 since the war, was sold to the Pucker Shipping Company for £11,000. Its name reverted to Wongala and it became a trader between Victorian and Tasmanian ports. In 1956, it was bought by the Ulverstone Shipping Company and renamed again, this time, Natone, to honor a small Tasmanian town. After about eighteen months of service plying Tasmanian waters, the Wyatt Earp/Wongala/Natone was sailed to Queensland, where it continued to work as a coastal trader.
In January 1959, while en route from Cairns to Brisbane, it encountered two storms. It weathered the first, but sprang a leak during the second. The pumps were unable to cope with the intake of water. With the engine flooded the crew rigged the sails and managed to reach Rainbow Bay, on Queensland’s Gold Coast. When the moorings failed, the Wyatt Earp/Wongala/Natone ran aground near Mudlo Rocks. The crew of eighteen reached shore safely. The date was January 24. Over the next few weeks, Lincoln Ellsworth’s gallant little ship was smashed to pieces.
Wyatt Earp’s cartridge belt, which Ellsworth carried across Antarctica, is in the New York’s American Museum of Natural History. It is not on display. Visitors to the Museum can, however, climb the stairs to the first floor to discover a bust of Ellsworth along with a small display of artifacts and a map of his flight across Antarctica.
During the International Geophysical Year (1957–58) Vivian Fuchs (later Sir Vivian) led a Commonwealth party of nineteen men who crossed Antarctica from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea, via the South Pole, where America had established a permanent base. The book of the expedition, The Crossing of Antarctica, stated:
Men have long dreamed of crossing the vast frozen wastes of the Antarctic, but not since Shackleton’s last attempt to reach the Pole from the Weddell Sea in 1914 has anyone embarked on this great adventure. In turning the dream into a reality Sir Vivian Fuchs has taken his place alongside Shackleton, Amundsen, and Scott, with a feat of courage and endurance that has rightly been called one of the truly heroic and magnificent achievements of the century.5
The book made no mention of Lincoln Ellsworth.