When the prime ministers posed for photographs after the imperial conference in November 1926, they were confident that the Antarctic continent would soon be part of their British world. But Colonial Secretary Leopold Amery’s secret plan to secure all of the Antarctic for the British Empire was already under threat.
Firstly, the French were adamant that Britain could not have Adélie Land. That still left the bulk of the continent available, of which the British Empire had already laid claim to two sizeable wedges: the Falkland Islands Dependencies and the Ross Dependency, which amounted to about one-third of the continent’s area. However, two other threats loomed on the horizon. The most immediate was the post-war whaling boom, which had brought fleets of whaling vessels to hunt in Antarctic waters. It was this that had made the Antarctic a desirable territory for Britain to control, but it had also caused other whaling nations to want the Antarctic for themselves. The other threat to Amery’s plan came from aircraft, which would bring a renewed rush of exploration every bit as frantic as the pre-war race between Scott and Amundsen. Americans would be in the forefront of this airborne phalanx, which would prompt the United States to make its own grab for Antarctic territory.
It must have been frustrating for Amery. It was seven years since the ardent imperialist had proposed to his colleagues that Antarctica be annexed and made a part of the British Empire. Creating the Ross Dependency and placing it under New Zealand administration, was just a first step, which brought under British control a sea rich in whales. Even that proved contentious when the Norwegian government, in the wake of the 1926 imperial conference, questioned Britain’s right to include the Ross Ice Barrier within its annexed territory. After all, this great body of ice was now known to rest on water rather than on land, and was therefore mostly more than three miles from the actual coastline, which lay somewhere far beneath the snow and ice. At the time, three miles from land was the internationally accepted sea boundary of a nation’s territory.
If Britain accepted the Norwegian argument, practically all of the Ross Sea, including the Bay of Whales, would lie beyond the three-mile limit in international waters. Moreover, the Norwegians contested Britain’s right to claim Edward VII Land, pointing out that Scott had merely seen it from the deck of his ship in 1902 – he had not stepped ashore or made a formal claim to the land on behalf of Britain. Norway’s claim was much stronger, they claimed, because in December 1911 a three-man group from Amundsen’s expedition had actually traversed the land, occupied it and ‘formally took possession of it in the name of the King of Norway’, at the same time that Amundsen was doing likewise on the polar plateau.1
Britain could not allow this argument to go unanswered. Its officials pointed out that the Norwegian party’s exploration of King Edward VII Land was limited to about forty kilometres, and that the ‘occupation’ had been ‘no more than a fortnight’s camping in tents’. Moreover, the Norwegians had referred to Scott as their ‘respected precurser’, and in fact had named the only exposed land they saw during their short traverse as ‘Scott’s Nunataks’. There was no indication in the English edition of the expedition’s account to show that they had claimed possession of King Edward VII Land or had been given authority by Amundsen to do so. Because of these factors, argued the Foreign Office, the Norwegian activity could not override the British claim, which was based upon Scott’s ‘prior discovery’.
As for whether Britain exercised sovereignty over the Ross Sea, that would partly depend upon the position of the coastline, which was not easy to define in the Antarctic. In papers prepared for the 1926 imperial conference, officials had argued that a seemingly permanent ice barrier should be regarded as the coastline, even though it was resting on water rather than land. London put this argument to Oslo in August 1927, noting that where a barrier – such as the Ross Ice Barrier, now known as the Ross Ice Shelf – was ‘to all intents and purposes, a permanent extension of the land proper, there is good reason for treating the Barrier as though it were terra firma’. Since this was not an accepted legal opinion, the British also suggested that in at least some places the floating barrier was resting on land.2 One way or another, the Norwegians had to be dissuaded from challenging British sovereignty over the Ross Dependency. By keeping the coastline vague, the exact position of the three-mile limit in the Ross Sea was also kept imprecise, which was meant to make it difficult for Norwegian whalers to operate in the Ross Sea without first having obtained a licence from New Zealand.
Things might have been difficult if New Zealand was actually ‘administering’ the Ross Dependency by having bases ashore or even just by having a ship patrol the waters during the summer months, when whalers were active. Instead, its administration of the territory had consisted only of sending an officer of its marine department on board one of the licensed Norwegian factory ships, the Sir James Clark Ross. No New Zealand official had ever stepped ashore on the Ross Dependency. Moreover, at the end of the 1926 season, the marine department officer reported that the Sir James Clark Ross had operated almost wholly in international waters and had only once resorted to Discovery Inlet on the Ross Ice Barrier, which was only within New Zealand’s territorial waters if the ice barrier was regarded as coastline. This meant that the whaling company was paying for a license that it did not really need, and which carried conditions that restricted the type of whales that could be caught and forced its men to process whole carcasses rather than just strip the blubber and discard the rest.
While two Norwegian companies had paid for licenses, the captains of their ships were dismayed during the 1926–27 summer to see an unlicensed Norwegian factory ship, the Nielson-Alonso, steam with its whale-catchers into the Ross Sea, where it proceeded to kill whales, strip the blubber and leave the carcasses. That gave the interlopers a real advantage over their licensed rivals. Unlicensed whalers could kill and process more whales, as they did not have to spend time processing the less valuable parts.3 And there was nothing that the New Zealand official could do about it.
New Zealand had been collecting £2500 from each factory ship operating in the Ross Sea as a license fee, as well as a royalty based on the amount of oil that it processed. All that revenue was now at risk, both because whalers had little need to obtain a license if they restricted their activity to international waters and because the unrestricted entry of unlicensed whalers could soon see whales hunted ‘to the point of extermination’. Such an eventuality seemed more likely when the Nielson-Alonso arrived at Hobart in March 1927, after completing its summer hunt in the Ross Sea. Captain R. N. Gjertsen proudly told reporters of having killed 456 whales, the blubber of which had been processed to produce 36,700 barrels of oil. Moreover, he had been able to keep working in bad weather and to haul whales weighing as much as 100 tons aboard the ship’s rear slipway. There had been no need to pay for a license, Gjertsen said, because he had been operating only in international waters.
For Gjertsen, the ownership of the Antarctic meant nothing, as he would always be operating beyond its territorial waters. So he could quite unconcernedly suggest that Australia claim some of the continent, for its possible mineral resources, while there was still some land left to claim. The New Zealand government was so concerned by these developments that it urged Britain to seek an international agreement to regulate Antarctic whaling, so that it did not go the way of Arctic whaling. However, neither Britain nor Norway, which together controlled most of the whaling in the Antarctic, wanted to call an international conference that would only see other nations demand a piece of the very lucrative industry.4
Although Gjertsen was unconcerned about claiming any part of the continent, one of his Norwegian colleagues certainly had that in mind. After it became more difficult to find whales around South Georgia and the South Shetlands, Lars Christensen began to send his ships further afield. If he could find new whaling grounds and establish bases outside of the British-controlled Falkland Islands and Ross Dependencies, he could avoid paying license fees and royalties to the British. In January 1927, he sent the whale-catcher Odd I from Deception Island to the Bellingshausen Sea to look for whales. Encountering Peter I Island, a lonely speck of land on the edge of the pack ice that was discovered by Bellingshausen, the Norwegians were disappointed to find that there were no whales in the vicinity and no suitable harbour in which a factory ship could anchor. Indeed, wrote one Norwegian, ‘this island looks quite dead’.
Unable to get ashore, they nevertheless sprinkled Norwegian names on its prominent features, calling its mist-covered mountain ‘Lars Christensen Peak’, a cape after his wife, and a bay after the whaling port of Sandefjord. Undaunted by this unpromising reconnoitre, Christensen sent a wooden sealing vessel, the Norvegia, from Sandefjord in September 1927 to explore the possibilities of Bouvet Island, which had first been seen by the French in 1739 and which had later been looked for in vain by Captain James Cook. A British sealer, George Norris, had landed on the island in 1825. Not realising it was Bouvet Island, he had claimed it for Britain and named it ‘Liverpool Island’. He named an adjacent island – which was probably an overturned iceberg – ‘Thompson Island’. Norris’s claim was never followed up by the British government, nor were the islands ever marked on maps as British possessions. The Norwegian whalers hoped that the forty-nine square kilometre Bouvet Island, which was situated south-west of South Africa and on a similar latitude to South Georgia, might provide a valuable base for Norwegian whalers, as the much bigger British-controlled South Georgia had.5
Goaded into action by the 1926 imperial conference, which had revealed the scope of Britain’s territorial ambitions and its push to control Antarctic whaling, Christensen was determined to stake a territorial claim on behalf of Norway and retain Norwegian control of whaling. For Christensen, it was not just to protect his profits. He regarded whaling as part of Norway’s ‘ancient inheritance’, believing that it provided ‘spiritual capital’ for the ‘Norwegian race’. He also believed that the polar regions were the Norwegians’ natural home, that over the centuries they had become inured to the ice and cold of the Arctic reaches that had come within their dominion. So too with the even colder Antarctic, where ‘nobody else has ever worked so long’. Christensen’s own father, Christen Christensen, had been a modern pioneer with his dispatch of the Jason to the Antarctic in 1892.6 Lars aimed to secure his father’s legacy by working in tandem with the Norwegian foreign office to secure part of the Antarctic continent for Norway. Having recently lost its tentative hold on East Greenland to Denmark, the Norwegians wanted to ensure that Britain would not similarly exclude them from the Antarctic.
Armed with advice from the retired Norwegian shipping broker and whaling historian Bjarne Aagaard and the venerable Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen, Christensen was well aware of what had to be done to ensure recognition for a territorial claim. The first thing was to have authority from his government to make such a claim, which was duly given on 31 August 1927. It empowered the captain of the Norvegia ‘to occupy on behalf of Norway all land which had not previously come under the dominion of other Powers’. This was why Christensen was focusing on Peter I and Bouvet Islands, as both lay outside of the Falkland Islands Dependencies. But his ambitions were much wider.
As he explained in his 1935 account, Such Is the Antarctic, Christensen had already decided ‘to bring under the sovereignty of Norway all the land between 60°E and 20°W’. This represented a huge wedge of the Antarctic continent, stretching from the eastern shore of the Weddell Sea to the eastern edge of Enderby Land. It was nearly a quarter of the continent. If the claim was successful, it would end Amery’s plan to claim the whole land mass for the British Empire. The region was chosen because even the latest English map of the Antarctic had no names anywhere between 20° W and 50° E. It was therefore open to the Norwegians to attach their own names to it. At the same time, Christensen instructed the Norvegia’s captain, Harald Horntvedt, to abstain scrupulously from naming any geographic features within the Falkland Islands Dependencies, which might appear to threaten Britain’s hold on that region.7 He was clearly hoping that, in return, Britain would allow Norway free reign in those parts of the Antarctic not yet claimed by any other nation. So that it was not seen as a selfish land grab by a whaling company, Christensen sent two scientists who would invest the voyage with the semblance of being a science-driven expedition.8
The presence of the scientists did not allay the concerns of the British Admiralty when news of the expedition’s departure reached London in November 1927. The navy’s hydrographer, Admiral Henry Douglas, dismissed the ‘professedly scientific’ purpose of the expedition and warned that its real aim was to claim part of the Antarctic coastline, in order to free Norway’s whalers from having to obtain license fees from Britain or New Zealand. He pointed to the expedition’s plan to examine ‘approximately half the known, and unknown, coastline of the Antarctic Continent’, noting that any new land that was found was likely to be claimed on behalf of Norway. This would cause problems for Britain, wrote Douglas, since most of the coastline Christensen was planning to examine was ‘British by discovery’, even if that discovery was sometimes of the most uncertain kind, by sealers more than a century before. He urged that the Foreign Office take immediate measures ‘to safeguard this country’s territorial rights’.9
Oblivious to the alarm bells ringing in London, the Norvegia arrived at Bouvet Island on 1 December 1927, and Horntvedt promptly claimed it for Norway by raising his country’s flag and making the required declaration in the name of the king. Christensen had planned to establish a meteorological station on the volcanic island, which would have been useful for the Norwegian whaling fleets and would have allowed Norway to put its claim beyond doubt by actually occupying the ice-covered place. When that proved impossible, they built a hut that they stocked with food and medical supplies; it would serve as a shelter for shipwrecked sailors. The erection of a hut was a traditional Norwegian means of asserting ownership of new lands. Most lately it had been used during Norway’s unsuccessful attempt to wrest ownership of East Greenland from Denmark. Apart from the symbolism of the hut, the Norwegians also spent a month surveying the island, collecting specimens of its life forms and rocks and killing any fur seals they could find on its rocky shores. Horntvedt had planned to go ashore on Enderby Land but was forced to retreat to South Georgia for repairs after striking a rock. He radioed Oslo with news of his claim, although the government decided to await his written report before announcing the news.10
Ironically, it was another Norwegian whaling company that nearly scuppered Christensen’s careful plans by asking Britain for a license to hunt for seals and whales in the waters of Bouvet and Thompson Islands. Because Norris had landed on an island roughly in that position, naming it ‘Liverpool Island’ and claiming it for Britain, the government duly gave permission on 17 January 1928 and pocketed the license fee. When this news became public, the Norwegians immediately announced that they had already claimed Bouvet Island for themselves and had begun hunting there for whales and seals. It rejected Britain’s claim to the island, which was based on a fleeting visit by a British seafarer more than a century ago. They also pointed out that the supposed ‘Thompson Island’ did not exist.11
The British press couldn’t decide how to react. Some papers erupted with barely suppressed amusement at their own government’s apparent stupidity, while others expressed righteous outrage at the Norwegian intrusion. It was certainly ‘a shrewd stroke of business’, as the Daily News archly observed, for the Colonial Office to lease ‘one island that does not exist and another that belongs to somebody else’.12 Although Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain tried to defend his government’s decision to lease the island, Norway’s pre-eminent Antarctic historian, Bjarne Aagaard, wondered in a letter to the London Times how Britain could claim ownership of Bouvet Island when Norris had not even landed on it. Even if Liverpool Island and Bouvet Island were one and the same, the Norwegians argued that any claim the British might have made to Liverpool/Bouvet island had long since lapsed because their sovereignty had ‘not been effectively maintained’ over the subsequent century.13
Norway was now on notice about Britain’s determination to defend its supposed ownership of even the most miserable speck of land in the South Atlantic if there was the prospect of a profit to be made from it. Christensen was just as determined to establish Norway’s hold on the Antarctic, for reasons of profit and patriotism. He duly announced in March 1928 that he would send the Norvegia back to Bouvet Island later that year to establish a meteorological and radio station.14
This put Britain in a fix. While it might concede Bouvet Island to Norway, Christensen had made clear that his main territorial ambitions lay on the Antarctic continent itself. This raised the possibility that Norway, with its many whaling vessels in Antarctic waters, might take the two-thirds of the continent that Britain had not yet claimed. London was particularly concerned about the Australian quadrant, which was next in line to be formally claimed. This could have been done back in 1911–12, when Mawson’s expedition had explored and claimed large parts of it, without having Britain’s authority to do so. His calls over succeeding years for Britain or Australia to formalise his private claims by having the king issue an order in council annexing that part of the Antarctic had gone unanswered. When the issue had finally surfaced at the 1926 imperial conference, British legal advisers had warned that another expedition needed to be sent to survey the coastline and raise the flag at as many places as possible before Britain could annex the Australian quadrant. That would take time to organise.
In the meantime, the Norwegians had to be prevented from intruding into the Australian quadrant or the unclaimed region between the Ross Dependency and the Falkland Islands Dependencies. It would be even better if Norway would agree to recognise those places as British, but that was considered unlikely. London dallied with the idea of doing a deal with Oslo. Perhaps it could swap the unclaimed and largely unexplored region between Enderby Land and Coats Land in return for Norway recognising British sovereignty to the remainder of the Antarctic, other than Adélie Land. This would give Norway about thirty per cent of the continent, but that would exclude the areas traversed by Amundsen’s expedition and claimed by him on behalf of Norway. All those areas would be included in the seventy per cent or so of the continent that Britain wanted for itself. It was less than the entire continent that Amery had originally wanted, but it encompassed the best whaling waters, the easiest points of access by sea, and the areas most likely to have mineral deposits. The British officials hoped that if Norway explored and claimed the remaining thirty per cent, that might ‘soften the blow for public opinion in Norway’, which was still smarting after having so recently lost East Greenland to Denmark.
But there were problems with this approach. The Norwegians had opposed the idea of sectors in the Arctic, which had enabled Canada to claim any lands north of its coastline all the way to the North Pole. Norway could hardly now agree to this method in the Antarctic. At the same time, Britain’s attachment to the sector principle meant that it could not recognise just the coastline and immediate hinterland that Norway might want to claim. Being limited in its ability to do a deal with Oslo, the British government decided that it should not push for Norwegian recognition of British claims but should simply try to forestall ‘active Norwegian opposition’ to those claims.15
The strategy met with some early success. In November 1928, the British government agreed to recognise Norway’s claim to Bouvet Island, while at the same time reminding Norway of all the areas listed by the 1926 imperial conference that were British by right of discovery. To the relief of the British, the Norwegians agreed not to occupy any of those areas.16 Helping make sure that Norway’s territorial claims were contained within that thirty per cent, a young Australian official in London, Richard Casey, encouraged a British whaling company to claim as much of the coastline as possible between Enderby Land and Queen Mary Land – roughly between 60° E and 90° E. The British company’s licence already required it to ‘hoist and maintain the British flag over any and every establishment that they may erect or maintain in the lands or territorial waters of the said area’, with Casey asking that the company go further and assert British sovereignty ‘at as many points as possible between Enderby Land and Queen Mary land’.17 Britain might thereby create a solid eastern boundary at 60° E against possible Norwegian encroachments, which would keep the Australian quadrant free for annexation by the British Empire.
The Norvegia was already on its second voyage to Bouvet Island when news of the British recognition was received. This time, it was supported by one of Christensen’s factory ships, Thorshammer, which carried equipment and men for a meteorological and radio station, only to be again unsuccessful for want of a suitable site. As for the hut that had been erected the previous year, they found it had been blown away in a gale. The newly claimed territory was not proving to be much of an asset to Norway, and an attempt to find the non-existent ‘Thompson Island’ ended fruitlessly after an eight-day search by the Norvegia. At least the Norwegians knew that Peter I Island existed. The vessel headed there in February 1929, to ‘occupy’ it for Norway by raising the flag and erecting a small hut.18 Norway could now claim ownership of the two widely separated islands, but a Norwegian claim to part of the continent itself would have to wait for future expeditions. Meanwhile, Britain was facing an even more serious challenge to its remaining Antarctic ambitions.
It had been nearly ninety years since the United States had sent the 1840 Wilkes expedition on its extended voyage to the Pacific, during which it made brief and controversial forays to the Antarctic. American interest in the South Pole had been almost non-existent since that time. From the early 1900s, a small band of geographers, scientists and descendants of early American sealers and explorers had been arguing the case for America’s pre-eminent historical position in the Antarctic and agitating for another American expedition. But they had not managed to excite either public or official enthusiasm.
That all changed in the late 1920s, with the advent of more reliable aircraft and the possibilities they created for polar exploration. Although the American government remained unwilling to sponsor an expedition, private benefactors now had compelling reasons to do so. Aircraft manufacturers wanted to prove the safety and reliability of their machines in the harshest conditions imaginable, and newspaper proprietors wanted to use tales of American adventurers to boost sales. And they had a ready-made American hero to do so.
Richard Byrd was a man on the make. He was the second of three sons born to a well-connected Virginian family that had fallen on relatively hard times, partly through one of his ancestors having an addiction to gambling and alcohol and having backed the British in the War of Independence. From a young age, Byrd was determined to make a name for himself and help restore the fortunes of his family. Short in stature and frail as a child, he had built up his physique with a determined routine of exercise and sought his father’s approval by engaging in risk-taking adventures with his brothers. His alcoholic and politically minded father served as a lawyer and public official, while his formidable mother was a Virginian ‘blue-blood’ with ‘a mind as sharp as a steel trap’. It seems that it was his mother – whose photograph he later would keep on his dresser, surrounded by fresh roses – who sent him as a fourteen-year-old on a voyage to the Philippines and back via Europe, opening his eyes to a wide world of adventure and danger. Byrd later exaggerated the story by saying that he was only eleven or twelve years old and that he’d been unaccompanied. It was perhaps this trip that ensured Byrd would eschew the careers in Virginian politics and business chosen by his brothers and seek his fortune elsewhere. At the age of nineteen he went to the naval academy at Annapolis to train as a naval officer. Although he suffered a permanent injury to his leg while doing gymnastics, he was soon serving aboard a battleship in the Caribbean, where he had his first flight in an aeroplane. Byrd was hooked.19
In the air, Byrd was not so hampered by his physical infirmity, and aerial feats promised promotion and possible fame and fortune. When the United States went to war in 1916, Byrd applied successfully to be trained as a naval pilot. Although he did not serve in Europe, he received plenty of flying experience, along with plenty of political experience in Washington. His brother Harry was a rising power in the Democratic Party and Richard was used by the US Navy to lobby for its appropriations. One of his close friends in Washington was the young Franklin D. Roosevelt, with whom he went moose-hunting in Canada.
It was in aerial exploration that Byrd had decided to make his name. In 1924 he was to join a naval airship that planned to fly across the Arctic, with a possible landing at the North Pole. But the venture was abandoned before it began when the airship was damaged. The following year, Byrd convinced the navy to lend him three planes for another expedition that would explore the Arctic between Alaska and the North Pole, during which he would claim any land that he found for the United States. It was a time of frenetic activity in the Arctic. Denmark and Norway were still contesting the ownership of East Greenland and Canada had claimed any undiscovered islands to the north of its coastline. Canada established police posts in its frozen north and moved Inuit people there to buttress its legal claim with an effective claim based upon occupation. Russia was doing likewise north of Siberia, after the Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson had established a party of Inuit and Europeans on Wrangel Island in the hope that a ‘quiet occupation’ would allow Canadian ownership to be established before any protest was raised by Russia. Stefansson promoted the island as a landing place for a future polar air route. The survivors of Stefansson’s ill-fated group were soon evicted by the Russians, who made clear that all Arctic islands off their coastline were Soviet-owned.20
There was also a race to reach the North Pole by air. It was a contest that attracted an immense amount of public interest, with an Italian airship being pitched against a Norwegian expedition that planned to use two large Dornier Wal seaplanes. The latter expedition was led by Amundsen and financed by the wealthy American adventurer Lincoln Ellsworth. Both expeditions planned to leave for the North Pole from Spitsbergen, off the northern coast of Norway, with fame and fortune being assured for the winner.
Byrd had a chance to join the race, flying north from Greenland or Ellesmere Island, but he was forced by the US Navy to attach his three small seaplanes to the expedition being organised by Donald MacMillan under the auspices of the commercially driven National Geographic Society. Whereas Byrd wanted to make a trans-polar flight, MacMillan intended to discover the large piece of land that was believed to exist in the Arctic north of Baffin Island. Both men were destined to be disappointed, but the expedition did bring Byrd to the notice of the American public. As for the expedition of Amundsen and Ellsworth, it nearly ended in disaster when one of their aircraft was damaged landing on the ice; the remaining plane barely managed to get aloft with all the men and returned safely to Spitsbergen in June 1925.21
The summer of 1926 saw a renewed flurry of activity in the Arctic. Amundsen and Ellsworth returned with an Italian airship, which was named Norge by Amundsen and piloted by the Italian Umberto Nobile. Amundsen and Ellsworth hoped that the airship might be able to achieve what their two aircraft had not. Rather than simply making for the North Pole and then returning to Spitsbergen, the airship would fly on across the Arctic to Alaska, passing over the previously unseen region where undiscovered land might lie. Amundsen wanted any such land for Norway.
Just days before the airship was due to leave on its historic flight in May 1926, an American ship arrived in Spitsbergen carrying Byrd and a fifty-man expedition with two aircraft. Byrd was determined to beat the unwieldy ‘Amundsen–Ellsworth–Nobile Transpolar Flight’ to the pole, and thereby prove the superiority of aircraft over airships and the ‘consequent awakening of the public to the vast possibilities of the airplane’. At one time, his plans included establishing a base on the northern tip of Greenland, to where he would fly from Spitsbergen before embarking on the 650-kilometre flight to the North Pole. Such an approach would allow him to fly over a huge unexplored area, where land might be located. If he discovered any, Byrd told the readers of the New York Times, which devoted the entire front page of its Sunday edition to his announcement, he would ‘descend on it, if possible, and hoist the American flag’.
However, coming from the other direction was the Australian explorer Hubert Wilkins, who was planning to fly from Alaska to the North Pole, hoping that he might be the first to the North Pole and the first to ‘claim for the United States any lands that may be found’. Wilkins was sponsored by the Detroit Aviation Society, a group of public-spirited businessmen in the home of the burgeoning American car industry; they also wanted to dominate aircraft manufacturing. Henry Ford’s son Edsel was a leading aviation enthusiast and a supporter of both Wilkins and Byrd, hoping that they would join forces. But Byrd wanted any glory to be his alone.22
The whirring newsreel cameras of the press representatives captured the preparations of the rival camps as they readied their respective craft in the late spring of 1926. With the shadow of the Norge looming over him, and the distant threat from Wilkins in Alaska, Byrd cut back his ambitious plans to cross the Arctic via the North Pole. He decided simply to make a dash for the pole from Spitsbergen and return. Being the first to reach the North Pole by air was glory enough. And there was not a moment to lose, if he was to beat the secretive Amundsen.
On 8 May, the day after the Norge nudged its nose towards the recently erected mooring mast at Spitsbergen and Wilkins radioed his own readiness to leave Alaska for the pole, Byrd and his pilot, Floyd Bennett, clambered into their heavily laden tri-motor plane, the Josephine Ford, before lifting it ponderously aloft to the cheers of the American party and the anxious looks of the Norwegians. Less than sixteen hours later, they were back, and Byrd claimed triumphantly to have reached the North Pole. He was met by the lanky Amundsen, who quietly embraced his American rival while being determined to go one better.
On 11 May, Amundsen climbed into the gondola of the Norge as it prepared to depart on its epic journey to Alaska. It passed over the North Pole just after midnight on 12 May. To mark the occasion, Amundsen dropped a Norwegian flag onto the frozen ocean, while Ellsworth dropped an American flag and Nobile an Italian one, before the airship headed on to Alaska.23 As for Wilkins, he had still not left Alaska due to fog. He abandoned his plans once he learnt of his rivals’ success.
Just as the Cook and Peary expeditions to the North Pole had caused controversy, with each disputing the other’s claim to have reached their goal, so too doubts were immediately raised by querulous European newspapers as to whether Byrd had really reached the pole before turning back. Some even suggested that he had simply flown out of sight and then circled for the required amount of time before returning. Others questioned whether the flight had been long enough to cover the distance to the pole, and whether Byrd’s navigational skills were sufficient to allow him to know when and if he had actually reached it.
Byrd’s backers were adamant that he was right. Just as it had supported Peary in his claim to have reached the North Pole by sledge, the National Geographic Society proved to be a stalwart supporter of Byrd’s claim to have reached the pole by air. The American Geographical Society was similarly protective of Byrd’s reputation and carefully kept the records of his flight away from any of his likely critics.24 However, the doubts would never be completely resolved and would dog Byrd’s reputation throughout his life and long after his death. For the moment, however, Byrd revelled in the glory that came on his return to New York on 22 June 1926, being feted with a tickertape parade down Broadway before going to Washington, where he received the Congressional Medal of Honor from President Calvin Coolidge.25
The following year, Byrd flew across the Atlantic with three companions in another tri-motor Fokker, dubbed the America, eventually landing off a Normandy beach after being unable to find the landing field in cloud-covered Paris. As Byrd and his companions waded ashore, the aircraft was left to be ignominiously swamped by the incoming tide.26 Several months beforehand, Byrd had confided to the geographer Isaiah Bowman, head of the American Geographical Society in New York, that he hoped a successful flight would ‘do something for international relations. I am thinking particularly of England and France.’27 He also hoped it would keep him in the public spotlight, now that he was in what he called ‘the hero business’.
It certainly did that. The four aviators were greeted by crowds in the streets of Paris and ‘made citizens of three French cities’. Unlike the North Pole flight, there were no records to be won. Charles Lindbergh had preceded Byrd to Europe by more than a month. Having flown single-handed all the way to Paris, Lindbergh had received the laurels and prize that Byrd had hoped to win. Although Byrd and his companions received another tickertape parade on their return to New York, and a luncheon at the White House, he needed to do something more to elevate his heroic status.28 The Antarctic now beckoned him with the glittering promise of glory and riches, particularly if he could claim to be the first aviator to fly over both the North and South Poles.
Byrd had been mulling over the idea of an Antarctic flight well before he had flown across the Atlantic. In February 1926, he had negotiated an exclusive newspaper contract for an Antarctic expedition that was still two years away.29 Although he also dallied with ideas of crossing the Pacific between California and Hawaii, or crossing the Arabian desert, his focus kept returning to the Antarctic. That would be a dramatic way to increase public confidence in modern aircraft, and to establish himself as a great scientific explorer rather than just a cowboy flyer eager to outrace his rivals. ‘Aviation cannot claim mastery of the globe,’ Byrd wrote in 1928, ‘until the South Pole and its vast surrounding mystery be opened up by airplane.’30
Byrd’s serious side was encouraged by Isaiah Bowman, who repeatedly pointed Byrd towards the Antarctic. The American Geographical Society was publishing an edited collection by leading polar explorers, giving accounts of their experiences and explaining what remained to be done in both the Arctic and Antarctic. It was designed to give the American public ‘the means … to evaluate between expeditions that may be not unrightfully termed “sporting events” and those which add to the sum total of human knowledge’. It was the latter that would stand for all time, Bowman told Byrd, urging him to write a chapter on polar aviation and thereby have his name ‘associated with a group of serious scholars who are interested in the actual scientific problems which … are the things that keep polar expeditions alive in the long run’.
Anxious to have the support of the American Geographical Society, with its academic credentials and well-heeled members, Byrd assured Bowman that he was ‘interested in the scientific end of the Arctic far more than anything else and if I am ever fortunate enough to get to the Antarctic continent I believe that we can gather a great deal of scientific data [and] hope to take with us a number of scientists’.31
In early June 1927, as Byrd was waiting to leave on his Atlantic flight, Bowman reminded him to ‘keep in mind the suggestion of doing that Antarctic flight and then flying to London to tell about it. The English would be crazy about a man who would continue the traditions of Shackleton and Scott.’ Byrd did not take much convincing. He was already set on going to the South Pole, so that he could claim to be the first person to have flown over both poles. But that would not be the expedition’s only objective. Byrd planned to take a team of scientists so that the venture could not be portrayed by his critics just as a publicly funded sporting contest.
In his 1928 book about his flying experiences, Skyward, Byrd set out his plans for the Antarctic. In doing so, he was careful to emphasise that ‘the primary object of the expedition is scientific’ and that there would be ‘plenty of work for the dozen specialists we will take with us’. At the same time, he conceded that ‘although the primary object of the expedition is scientific, it will be most gratifying if we succeed in planting the American flag at the South Pole – at the bottom of the world’.32 He knew that would embellish his fame and set him apart from his fellow prize-seekers. Soon after Byrd had landed in France, Bowman cabled to congratulate him on his Atlantic flight and his ‘fine Antarctic plan’.33
Other aviators also had the South Pole in their sights. One was the Argentinian engineer Antonio Pauly. His plan for a flight to the South Pole was part of a larger scheme to reinforce Argentina’s territorial claims in the Antarctic, which overlapped with that of Chile and with Britain’s Falkland Islands Dependencies. With such a nationalist agenda, he received ready support from the Argentine Geographical Institute and the Argentine government. The expedition was sponsored by the Buenos Aires newspaper La Prensa, with Pauly’s reports and spectacular photographs expected to boost its sales and excite greater public interest in Argentina’s distant territorial claim.
Pauly knew that claim would be much stronger if the news of his expedition could also be splashed across the pages of newspapers elsewhere. Doing so would also boost his expedition’s budget. He tried to sell publication rights to American newspapers and to gain the support of the American Geographical Society, confiding to Bowman in September 1926 that he wanted ‘to land at the pole itself to hoist up the Argentine flag and to look for the documents left there by the ill-fated Capt. Scott’.34 Although Pauly was unable to get his expedition ready for the summer of 1926–27, Bowman and Byrd were on notice that at least one other aviator would probably be heading for the South Pole at the same time as Byrd. As early as April 1927, American newspaper articles about future flights noted that both Pauly and Byrd were planning flights in the Antarctic.35
When Byrd returned from Europe in July 1927 he immediately began planning his Antarctic expedition, doing the rounds of his benefactors for more money and asking Bowman for advice on which scientists he should take and ‘the exact area of the unexplored part of the Antarctic continent’. Bowman put the staff and resources of the American Geographical Society, which had some of America’s best mapmaking experts, at Byrd’s disposal and offered him an office in which to do his research work.36 Despite the assistance, the scale of the expedition, which Byrd estimated would cost more than $250,000, quickly convinced him to postpone it until the summer of 1928 so as to ensure ‘very thorough preparation’. That was all to the good, wrote Bowman as he enclosed yet another map of the Antarctic, noting that Hubert Wilkins was ‘always too hurried with his preparations’. There was little time for planning in 1927, with Byrd spending months writing an account of his Atlantic and North Pole flights, published as Skyward, and shuffling across the United States by train on a lucrative lecture tour. During that hectic schedule of ‘one-night stands’, he was forced to use mail, cable and telephone to make all his arrangements.37
Although the National Geographic Society also threw its support and money behind Byrd, it was to its rival American Geographical Society, with its commitment to ‘scientific rather than popular objects’, that he continued to look for advice. Bowman remained anxious to help, drawing up an Antarctic map marked with wind directions and speeds, details of crucial importance to an aviator. He assured Byrd that he had ‘the best chance of anyone in the world today of putting through a big Antarctic expedition’, and that he himself was ‘more interested in this than in any other part of the world from the standpoint of airplane exploration’. In return for the society’s help, Bowman hoped that Byrd would allow him to publish the resulting maps of the expedition along with an article by Byrd in the society’s journal. When Ellsworth called by on 10 April 1928 and paid Bowman $1000 to produce up-to-date maps of both polar regions, Bowman assured Byrd that they would work on them slowly so that Byrd’s forthcoming activities in the Antarctic would appear on the map. ‘In other words,’ wrote Bowman, ‘we shall leave a hole in the map and expect you to bring back material to fill it!’38
Byrd was certainly keen to make his mark on the map. In Skyward he wrote eagerly of having ‘a chance to take off the maps for the ages to come, a part of that great blank white space at the bottom of the world’.39 But he could not be sure that he would be first in the field and that the names he bestowed on the landscape, rather than those of a competitor, would be the ones to endure. The support of the two important US mapmaking bodies, the National Geographic Society and the American Geographical Society, would certainly help in that regard. Byrd could also take comfort from the news that Pauly had dropped out of the race after his aircraft was damaged during a flight to Rio de Janeiro. But a new rival had arrived on the scene: Hubert Wilkins had now switched his attention from the Arctic to the Antarctic.
Wilkins’ attempt to fly from Alaska across the Arctic to Norway had been thwarted in 1926 by fog along the Arctic coast, and in 1927 by mechanical problems. But he returned in the summer of 1928, and this time successfully made it across in a single-engine monoplane from Barrow to Spitsbergen. He was on the lookout for land, much to the consternation of British and Canadian officials, who feared that the American-financed explorer would claim any new-found land for the United States. However, there was no land left to be found, with Wilkins merely able to confirm the earlier observations of Amundsen and Ellsworth.
Nevertheless, his flight of more than twenty hours was the first by an aircraft across the Arctic from America to Europe, and Wilkins earned the plaudits of both continents. There was a knighthood from the British king and an official dinner in London in June 1928 hosted by Colonial Secretary Leo Amery, the politician who had been pushing for Britain to claim all of the Antarctic. He now likened Wilkins’ flights in the Arctic to Vasco Balboa’s sighting of the Pacific in 1513. For his part, Wilkins told the dinner guests that his task in the Arctic was done. He wanted now to go to the Antarctic to find suitable sites for a ring of meteorological stations that might allow long-range weather forecasting, which would benefit the farmers of the southern continents.40
The Australian aviator had been planning this scheme for the past four years and wanted to begin by flying from King Edward VII Land to Graham Land. In London in 1926, Richard Casey had introduced him to Admiralty officials, in the hope that they would help, but they had thought his plan was ‘madness’. Nevertheless, Casey had become a friend and supporter of Wilkins, regarding him as ‘a serious adventurer, a bit of a mystic, and a very stout-hearted fellow’.
Now that Wilkins had completed his Arctic flights, Casey again introduced him to British officials and wealthy benefactors, hoping that the Australian would not have to rely on American money for his Antarctic expedition. If he could get British or Australian funding, wrote Casey, it would ‘add something to our claims for extended Antarctic suzerainty’. But there was little British money for Wilkins, especially since Mawson was also in London seeking funds for his own expedition and denigrating Wilkins for his lack of scientific focus.41 And the same day that Wilkins was being feted by Amery in London, a British polar explorer, Commander Douglas Jeffery, who had been on Shackleton’s last expedition, announced from New York that he was organising his own expedition and also planned to fly from Graham Land to King Edward VII Land. Fortunately for Wilkins and Byrd, Jeffery’s expedition never eventuated after he fell out with his prospective pilot and was arrested for issuing a fraudulent cheque.42 The contest would be between Byrd and Wilkins.
The United States gave Wilkins a warm welcome when he travelled on to New York, with a tickertape parade down Broadway and a reception hosted by the mayor. And there was money aplenty when newspaper and radio magnate William Randolph Hearst sensed the possibility of a race to the South Pole and stumped up the funds to make it happen, with the promise of a large bonus if Wilkins got there first.
Although Bowman tried his best to dispel ‘the foolish rumours that there will be any race between them to the South Pole’, that was inevitably how it was portrayed by editors who had newspapers to sell. The ‘Wilkins–Hearst Antarctic Expedition’ had the advantage over Byrd and his New York Times backers of having a small and nimble organisation of just five men and two single-engine aircraft, the same planes that Wilkins had used so successfully during his Arctic flight. Byrd was using two ships that had to be restored at great expense. They would take to Antarctica his fifty-strong party, along with three aircraft, ninety-five dogs, building materials and supplies for up to a two-year stay, and all the paraphernalia of a scientific expedition. Wilkins simply wanted to make his flight from Graham Land to the Ross Sea, and possibly the pole; he would then go home with photographs and charts of the previously unseen land. His ostensible purpose was still to discover suitable sites for his meteorological stations. He also hoped to determine whether Graham Land was attached to the rest of Antarctica or whether, as some believed, it was separated by one or more frozen straits.43
The British now faced the prospect of two American-financed expeditions exploring the region between King Edward VII Land and Graham Land, which comprised all the unclaimed area between the Ross Dependency and the Falkland Islands Dependencies. This was territory that Britain wanted for itself. And there were reports in the American press that the State Department was about to claim both Wilkes Land, which Australia regarded as its rightful possession, and what America called ‘the Palmer Peninsula’, but which was otherwise known as Graham Land and part of Britain’s Falkland Islands Dependencies. New Zealand was also concerned that the Byrd expedition, which was going to the Ross Sea by way of New Zealand, might infringe the sovereignty of the Ross Dependency, which it administered on behalf of the British Empire.
However, Britain feared that any move on its part to prevent Byrd from establishing his base on what it claimed as its territory might provoke the United States into annexing the parts of the Antarctic that Wilkes or the early American sealers had discovered. Moreover, if it tried to pre-empt the Byrd expedition by issuing letters patent to annex the Australian quadrant or other parts of the continent, that might be taken as a challenge by the United States and ‘provoke action on the part of that expedition which otherwise they would be unlikely to take’. So Britain did nothing, hoping that its silence about sovereignty and delay in annexing further parts of the continent would cause the United States to refrain from asserting any sovereignty of its own.44
Although Wilkins was an Australian, the British could not be sure that he would not be raising the Stars and Stripes wherever he landed, or even dropping American flags onto the ice, as Ellsworth had done at the North Pole. He might even declare the land claimed for the United States by the simple expedient of flying across it. This prospect raised interesting legal questions. While the legal ramifications of exploration by aircraft would have to await the determination of a suitable international tribunal, the panicked British officials moved to limit the damage that Wilkins might cause by trying to enlist him to their cause.
Richard Casey, who had become friendly with Wilkins, casually asked him in August 1928 whether he planned ‘to drop British or Australian flags along the coastline from Edward VII Land to Graham Land’. Casey described such a move as being ‘a nice gesture’ that might prove valuable in the future, particularly if Wilkins ‘made a record of the exact position of the flags and if possible photographed them from the air’. He did not think Byrd intended to do so, since his expedition was apparently scientific; it didn’t appear that ‘the Americans have any Antarctic aspirations’. At the same time, Casey could not exclude that possibility and worried that it would ‘add very considerable complications to the Antarctic complex if Byrd were to scatter American flags about’.45
By the time Wilkins reached the Falkland Islands, courtesy of a Norwegian factory ship on 29 October 1928, Casey’s casual suggestion for him to drop Union Jacks onto the ice had become an appeal to Wilkins’ patriotism. When Wilkins stepped ashore at Port Stanley, the acting governor of the Falklands handed him a cable from Casey formally asking him to claim any new land on behalf of the empire.
Although competing territorial claims would complicate Wilkins’ aim of creating a cooperative ring of meteorological stations around Antarctica, he put aside his internationalist inclinations to declare himself also a ‘Britisher’ who was willing to help ‘the cause of Empire by dropping or planting British flags in the manner suggested’. He was duly handed a pile of Union Jacks and given authority by the acting governor to claim any ‘new’ land over which he flew, while keeping his activities – and his authorisation – secret from the world.46
Wilkins was not well served by the weather. He had been relying on the enclosed bay of Deception Island being covered with thick ice, so it might serve as a runway for his two aircraft. But the weather was unusually warm that year and he was forced to resort to a rough runway that he and his Norwegian whaler friends managed to create on land. This meant he had to use wheels rather than skis or floats on his aircraft, making it impossible for him to land at his intended destination of the Ross Sea, or indeed anywhere but back at the improvised runway on Deception Island. His flight would also be briefer than he had planned, since the runway was too short for the aircraft to get airborne with full tanks of fuel.
Nevertheless, he was able to take off on 20 December 1928, the first aircraft flight in the Antarctic. With sufficient fuel aboard his aircraft to take him the 3200 kilometres he had hoped for, Wilkins settled for the lesser goal of investigating whether Graham Land was connected to the rest of Antarctica. It was still a very long flight of more than twenty hours, over unfamiliar territory and through uncertain weather conditions. The view from the air led Wilkins to believe – mistakenly – that there was at least one channel, and probably more, separating Graham Land from the remainder of Antarctica, making it an archipelago rather than part of the continent.
He sketched rough maps as he went, and photographed and named many of the prominent features. However, as he couldn’t land and get a proper fix on his position, his maps were almost useless. Nevertheless, one apparent channel was named after Casey, and what he wrongly took to be a strait was named for Stefansson. The name of his principal benefactor was reserved for the massive plateau that stretched into the distance at the limit of his flight, which thereafter became known as ‘Hearst Land’. As Wilkins prepared to turn around at about 71° S, 64° W, he opened a hatch in the floor and ‘dutifully dropped a Union Jack and a written claim to British sovereignty’.47
The flight had been much more limited than either Wilkins or Hearst had wanted. It was historically important as the first aircraft flight in the Antarctic, and it had proved the usefulness of aircraft for exploration. But Wilkins had not reached the end of the Antarctic Peninsula and had not ventured outside the territory already claimed by Britain as part of the Falkland Islands Dependencies. Dropping the Union Jack where he had did not add anything to Britain’s existing territory. The great expanse of territory that lay along the route that Wilkins had intended to take to the Ross Sea remained unseen and unclaimed, and he had made no attempt to be the first to fly to the South Pole. Hearst would have to be satisfied with Wilkins’ account of the flight, which was illustrated with spectacular photographs from the air, and with the naming of Hearst Land. As for the flag-dropping, Wilkins reported to British officials what he had done, while keeping it secret from the world. He left his aircraft for the winter at Deception Island, intending to return the following summer to complete his expedition by flying to the Ross Sea and claiming all the ‘new’ territory that he might pass over along the way.
With Wilkins claiming territory on behalf of Britain, it was only Byrd who continued to cause concern in London, Canberra and Wellington. He was intending to base himself on the Ross Ice Barrier, which meant his activities threatened to undermine New Zealand’s hold on the Ross Dependency, Australia’s desire to annex the Australia quadrant and Britain’s ambition to annex the territory east of the Ross Dependency. British officials tried to reassure themselves and their counterparts in the dominions that Byrd’s expedition was ‘of a purely scientific character’. But they could not be sure. Byrd certainly had the capacity to do a lot more exploring than Wilkins. It was the largest and most expensive expedition ever sent to the Antarctic, with a budget of about $700,000, although not all had been raised by the time Byrd departed for the south in October 1928.48
There was a flurry of worried cables between Wellington and London when Byrd’s two small ships, the wooden barque City of New York and the steel-hulled freighter Eleanor Bolling, arrived in New Zealand, accompanied by two much larger Norwegian factory ships, the C. L. Larsen and the Sir James Clark Ross. Byrd tried to allay the concerns of New Zealand journalists and officials by declaring that his expedition was purely scientific and that he was carrying a Union Jack, which he planned to hoist at the South Pole in honour of Scott and Shackleton. Ever suspicious of the ambitions of others, Amery asked the New Zealand government to discover, without alerting Byrd, whether he was also carrying the Stars and Stripes. If the American flag was raised at the South Pole, or on any other part of the continent claimed by Britain, it could be interpreted as an assertion of American sovereignty.
But the New Zealand officials could not shed any light on whether Byrd was carrying a cache of American flags. They could only repeat what he had told a public meeting, that the objects of his expedition were ‘purely scientific’, and he had a party of scientists to prove it.49 This was hardly sufficient reassurance for the nervous British and New Zealand governments. The Foreign Office in London tried a different tack, sending a note to the US State Department that ostensibly welcomed Byrd’s expedition while notifying the Americans that his base was going to be located on British territory. The note went on to mention the conclusions of the 1926 imperial conference, which set out all those parts of the continent that Britain believed were British by right of discovery and exploration. Britain hoped that its note would elicit an acknowledgement from Washington about British sovereignty, but there was only silence.50
The British had pinned their hopes on Wilkins being able to scatter Union Jacks across the ice-clad territories that Britain had already claimed, or that it wanted to claim in the future. But Wilkins had only made one long flight, and it had come nowhere near the unexplored lands that Britain had wanted him to claim. The news of that flight reached Byrd as he was establishing his base, which he dubbed ‘Little America’, close to Amundsen’s old base of Framheim on the Ross Ice Barrier. Byrd sent a message to Wilkins offering to put his facilities at the service of the Australian, if he should want to fly from there to the South Pole, but he was confident that the prize was beyond Wilkins’ reach.
So it turned out to be, when further news was received that Wilkins had ended his flying for that season. Until Wilkins’ return the following summer, the field was wide open for Byrd. He busily laid the groundwork for a series of flights and sledge trips that would expose a massive area of the continent to human eyes for the first time. Despite his assurances in New Zealand, Byrd most certainly intended to claim any new land for the United States.