To the Ends of the Earth

by John V. H. Dippel

  There so sequestered, he could be true to his own self, be his own master, allow his mind to roam freely and widely by reading and listening to phonograph records, subject to “no man's laws but my own”—even if physically he was completely captive, with no relief party expected for at least half a year. If something went wrong down there, there would be no possibility of rescue. Byrd was totally self-reliant—a modern-day Crusoe. His world was what he would create. He professed to have no worries about that. He could cope. His only regret was not having a cookbook. Like others who had been drawn to this frigid frontier, he saw his retreat as returning him to a nobler age, when more elemental virtues had prevailed. Its mantra echoed Polonius's advice about being true to one's self. But Byrd's so secluding himself was also an act of colossal egoism: by following his own dictates he was thumbing his nose at those who cared for him most—notably, his wife of nearly twenty years and their four children. In his life he cast a shadow so long that none of them could ever escape it. (His only son, also Richard E., was so burdened by his father's fame that he ended his days as an alcoholic derelict, dying alone in an abandoned Baltimore warehouse at the age of sixty-eight.) The admiral made up his mind to stay there alone without telling any of his friends either, knowing they would try to stop him.

  Still, for a man who had spent most of his life in the air and in the glare of publicity, it was a peculiar choice. Temperamentally, he was certainly not another “Lone Eagle”—quite the opposite, in fact. Whereas Lindbergh had sought seclusion (again) after he had become world famous in 1927, Byrd had never shied away from the limelight. He had sought out rich men to bankroll his explorations and courted the media to ensure they would be well publicized. He had cultivated a public persona as America's “lone adventurer and last explorer” as assiduously as Lindbergh guarded his privacy.4 During his previous trip to Antarctica he had brought more men with him than any other explorer of his day. He seemed to enjoy such a large entourage. So why did he choose to go alone this time? Was it some kind of self-imposed punishment? Was he simply tired of his fame and wanted a break from the adulation? Or, conversely, was this act of “foolish, glory-seeking indulgence”—as one biographer has surmised—merely a “stunt,” an aging explorer's last shot at stealing the spotlight?5 Byrd publicly justified staying through the winter so he could carry out meteorological observations impossible to make during other seasons—and thus learn more about Antarctic weather. But in his memoir, he was blunt about his reasons: “I really wanted to go for the experience's sake.”6 Here was another compulsively driven man who cloaked his naked ambitions in scientific garb. By midwinter Byrd had dropped this research pretense, wondering if the weather-related figures were even worth the rolls of paper he had used to record them.

  Isolation unhinged him. For long hours he lay in his cot, crying, facing the blank wall.7 Only a month into his stay, Byrd wrote that he now fully understood the “brain-crackling loneliness of solitary confinement.”8 (According to one source, the explorer had brought a dozen straitjackets and two coffins on the plane to Advance Base.9) The uninterrupted silence around him was like that of the grave: there was no way out of it. Two times each day he would slip out through a trapdoor to take weather readings—and maintain a semblance of purpose by keeping up this routine. His existence was devoid of any human contact, except the intermittent radio calls, and during those sessions he hid his growing depression, out of vanity, perhaps: why should he let them know? Like many polar explorers before him, Byrd had to accept that he had orchestrated his own predicament, but failed to anticipate all of its aspects. He could not tear down this prison; he was not God. His shack resembled a dilapidated railroad refrigerator car. Out of fear of being buried alive in it, Byrd left the trap door open all the time, and so temperatures inside ranged from ten to forty degrees below zero. Once in deep snow he nearly lost his way back to the hut, and for months he inadvertently poisoned himself with carbon monoxide fumes that were seeping out of his stove. This and other mishaps strained his mental state, and when the generator conked out in early July, preventing him from sending messages to the outside world, he came to the “brink of death and madness.”10 Finally, Byrd broke down and conceded defeat: on the phone he practically begged for someone to come as soon as possible. The snow tractors that lumbered over the drifts in August of 1934 to reach his hut found inside, amid the frozen vomit, the discarded tin cans, and the odiferous squalor, a broken, sick, old man—not the same person who had brusquely waved them off five months before. And he would never really be that person again.

  Isolation in the Arctic and Antarctic crushed the spirit as well as the body. There, hell was the absence of other people. Sensing this, few men dared to enter these cold, indifferent domains without companionship. Otherwise it was a death sentence. The words “all alone” sent a chill down their spines—caused more anxiety than an approaching polar bear. Facing an unyielding Nature, human company was the only compensation. This was really why Byrd came with so many men on his other expeditions, making sure these comrades were “kept warm and enthusiastic and in absolutely united fellowship by this principle of always thinking of the other man first and with constantly increasing personal devotion to their leaders.”11 This was the wisdom Ernest Shackleton had practiced with singular adroitness, conveying consistently by his actions that he was always prepared to suffer more than his men, thereby making them always willing to die for him—and for each other. In extremis explorers cared for their fellows as lovingly as their mothers had cared for them when they were little boys. The need for companionship was that intimate, and that great, for they were helpless without it. But who would look after a man on his own? This was the question none dared to raise, and none dared to find out.

  Up until Byrd's sojourn at Advance Base, being alone near the poles was not a realistic option. For one thing, prior to the advent of airplanes, it was impossible to get to a location in the Arctic or Antarctic where there were no other humans close by: one simply couldn't travel that far into the interior without help. To set out on one's own would be as suicidal as Lawrence (“No Surrender”) Oates's stepping outside his tent in the dark when he wanted the others to go ahead without him. In the history of polar exploration up to the twentieth century almost no one ever willingly entered this frozen wilderness by himself or chose to remain there alone. Aside from Byrd, only the English explorer Augustine Courtauld voluntarily agreed in 1930 to submit to solitary duty, also to carry out weather-related readings. The twenty-six-year-old stockbroker and yachtsman had lived in an igloo deep in Greenland, 112 miles from his base, for five months. His food was almost exhausted when he was rescued. Near the midpoint in his stay Courtauld confided in his diary, “If I ever get back to the Base nothing will induce me to go on the Ice Cap again.”12 (In our day the British army officer Henry Worsley astonished the world by nearly completing a one-man trek across the Antarctic continent, only stopped by fatigue—not apparently by loneliness—from completing the last thirty miles of his journey. But like Byrd, he had a phone link to the outside world.)

  Prior to Byrd's stay at Advance Base, one of the few explorers who had experienced such devastating solitude was Frederick Cook, left alone on Smith Sound (between Greenland and Canada's northernmost island) when his companion, Rudolph Franke, departed to lay down a cache for their spring trek in January 1908. Writing in his diary, the man who had already spent a winter icebound in Antarctica lamented, “If a man were to select a place to frustrate evildoers artificially he could find no more appropriate place than to place an individual isolated in this land of torment with its cold wind to be feared [more] than the fire of hell and its darkness more degenerating than the influence of the devil.”13 But Cook's loneliness had lasted only four days. The closest to Byrd's in terms of length was when the explorer Knud Rasmussen, son of a Danish missionary and an Inuit-Danish mother, had crossed northern Canada in sixteen months by dog sled—a journey of some twenty thousand miles, making it the longest ever
of its kind—in the early 1920s.14 But Rasmussen had been accompanied by two Inuit hunters.

  If it ever happened that a man ended up totally alone—say, as the sole survivor of an ill-fated expedition—his fate was sealed. In more recent history, there was only one notable exception to this rule—the Anglo-Australian explorer and geologist Douglas Mawson. In November 1912, Mawson began a journey with two companions—Xavier Mertz and Belgrave Ninnis—to map King George V Land, near the eastern coast of Antarctica. During the course of this eight-week trek, Mawson avoided physical injury but had to ward off loneliness and despair after Ninnis vanished down a crevasse and Mertz died of malnutrition (and distress over having to eat his beloved dogs).15 Up until the moment when Mertz slipped into unconsciousness, the two surviving men had clung to each other as to life rafts in a turbulent sea. Still grieving over the sudden death of Ninnis, for whom he had developed a deep, motherly affection, Mertz had recorded in his diary, “Mawson and I have a long way to go, and we must stick together and be good comrades to reach winter quarters.”16 But that was not to be. After having nursed Mertz—undressing him after he had fouled his trousers and trying vainly to feed him some broth and hot chocolate—Mawson could only watch helplessly as his companion died in the early morning hours and then, the next evening, drag his frozen body outside, covering it with blocks of snow and a cross made of sledge runners. With his base camp some one hundred miles away, his hopes for getting there were fading fast: “I am afraid it [staying put while Mertz was dying] has cooked my chances altogether,” he intimated, with a hint of recrimination, in his diary.17 Their ship, the Aurora, was due to leave Cape Denison for Australia in a month, and, sitting alone in the wind-ripped tent, Mawson could not conceive of making it back by then. He had selflessly stayed with his friend to the bitter end, but now that decision was going to cost him his own life.

  By a series of miracles, Mawson did make it back. He survived falling into an abyss and dangling by a rope over a fourteen-foot deep crevasse. He traveled one hundred miles overland, his body literally falling apart at each step—the soles of his feet peeling off like strips of bacon—and his food running out. It was an amazing story of solo survival. Oddly, his account of this extraordinary trip back is dry and matter-of-fact—possibly because Mawson could not bring himself to recall his emotions at that time, or because he simply did not want to reveal them in print, or because he hadn't experienced the feelings that most people would have under such circumstances. Ever more strangely, he makes no mention of his dead companions or of his own state of mind. Apparently it was not in Mawson's nature to bare his soul. Mertz and others had commented on his aloofness, and this quality seems to have stuck to him even in the most trying of situations. It may have done him some good. In any event, Mawson's story of that long, lonely trip back leaves much to the imagination, inviting some to speculate that he was covering something up, or had something to be ashamed of. But we will never know. His survival has to speak for itself. And yet it doesn't tell us what we really want to know. So we are left to scour Richard Byrd's Alone for some inkling of what the exquisite torture of polar isolation felt like. Alas, it, too, leaves much out.

  To avoid ending up alone, expedition leaders had to pick men who would hold up under the extreme conditions at the top and bottom of the world. They had to look for candidates with the range of traits needed to stay alive there. Not just any strapping young sailor or soldier would do. Physical stamina was only important up to a point. Above and beyond it were qualities that were hard to define. One had to go on intuition—by sizing up a man's inner fiber. For, in the end, survival depended on human chemistry. On the ice, a band of explorers had to function like a closely knit family, highly attuned to the needs of all its members and yet willing to put them aside, if need be, for the good of all. In their capacity for selfless attentiveness and interdependence, polar expeditions resembled small military units under war. To cite one example of this behavior, when one of George Back's men arrived from another Canadian outpost during the exceptionally cold winter of 1820–1821, the seamen who welcomed this near-frozen messenger “spent time rubbing warmth into him, giving him change of clothes and some warm soup…[and] nursed him with the greatest kindness, and the desire of restoring him to health seemed to absorb all regard for their own situation.”18

  If the leader made a bad choice and brought along someone who did not subscribe to this philosophy, if the bonding did not take place, the results could be as catastrophic as finding one's self all alone. In the Arctic and Antarctic, no man could be an island. All had to hang together, or die. The closeness forced upon expedition members went further than the quasi-homoerotic bonding during combat because, at the poles, there was no raging battle (only the occasional polar bear) to divert their attention. They lived like Siamese twins, aware that any moment one of them might do or say something that could grievously wound another or drive him mad. To keep from each other's throats under such sustained stress, they all had to speak softly and tread lightly.

  The lesson that abrasive personalities could destroy esprit was not overlooked by latter-day explorers like Byrd, whose original plan for wintering on the Ross Ice Barrier with two other men had been based on keen psychological insight: whereas a pair would soon tire of “hearing one voice everlastingly and seeing one face and being confronted with one set of habits and idiosyncrasies,” the presence of a third would mitigate against this inevitable antagonism.19 In Byrd's view, leadership was all about creating cohesion and compatibility. When the then-navy captain made public that he was embarking on his first expedition to Antarctica in 1928, he received some twenty thousand applications from eager young men—much as legions of able-bodied Englishmen had besieged Ernest Shackleton with letters fourteen years before, after the much admired Irishman had announced his intention to cross the same continent.20 Thanks to his experiences as a naval officer and pilot, Byrd had a good idea of the attributes he was looking for. First of all, his men had to be able to cope with fear and danger over a long period of time. In addition, he wanted young men who possessed imagination and flexibility. Preferably, they should be of medium height (since big men ate more and their bodies did not hold up as well in cold climates).

  Loyalty was also important. Team members had to have temperaments that fit in and thus diminished the friction resulting from living in close quarters. They further needed a “crusading spirit” and had to be free of personal vices, such as a fondness for drink.21 Beyond that, Byrd didn't really care much what his team members looked like or where they came from. (Early in the organizing stage, he had toyed with including several Inuit men from Greenland.) Those externals were inconsequential.22 But evaluating candidates for polar service was a tricky business, since few of them had ever been to that part of the world before. Byrd had to count on his hunches. He ended up selecting forty-two men to go with him on this trip. Unfortunately, they didn't all live up to his expectations: many were insubordinate and got drunk (as did their commander), and an insecure Byrd had to worry about a mutiny breaking out. But he may have been his own worst problem: his need to puff up his own image made him too controlling, and some of the men came to regard him as constitutionally dishonest—lying about having flown over the North Pole, for instance.23 Stuck indoors for the long winter, many lapsed into depression or sullenness, and Byrd's therapy of “medicinal” alcohol didn't do much to alleviate this. Little in the admiral's past had prepared him for the peculiar challenges of handling men in such a static, claustrophobic environment, and his leadership deficiencies soon became obvious for all to see. Many of Byrd's men ended up ruing their decisions to accompany him to Antarctica.

  The “Little America” expedition of 1928–30 was not the first, nor the last, to be riven by personality clashes—fueled by constant proximity, boredom, and physical discomfort. Keeping a party reasonably harmonious and in good spirits under these conditions was as daunting a task as steering around hidden crevasses, and only a handful of expediti
on heads had the ability to do both well. Most leaders sought to build a compatible team by picking men like themselves—men they could relate to. Career officers like John Franklin, George De Long, Adolphus Greely, and Robert Scott felt most comfortable with soldiers and sailors accustomed to discipline and standard procedures, men who would follow orders, no matter what.24 For these commanders, the “military mind” was also the sign of a dependable, predictable character. In the pressure-cooker polar environment, personal traits such as stoic perseverance, pluck, and cheerfulness could be more important than physical strength because psychological resilience was essential. Some commanders were influenced by racial bias: De Long, for one, rejected “point blank” French, Italian, and Spanish candidates for his Jeannette voyage, and tried to avoid English, Irish, and Scottish ones if at all possible. Next to Americans, he preferred Scandinavians.25 Experience in the Arctic or Antarctic also counted for a great deal, especially when it came to choosing the civilian scientists, but qualified persons with this background were scarce.