The Stowaway

by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

  The Sir James Clark Ross was named after the first great Antarctic explorer back in the early nineteenth century: the handsomest man in the British Royal Navy and a daring man at sea from the age of twelve. (Ross also gave his name to Byrd’s destination, the Ross Sea.) The fastest and largest ship in Byrd’s flotilla—Norwegian built, too; it was impossible to find a good polar expedition ship built in America—the Ross would transport the cold-weather expedition dogs (and forty tons of dog biscuits) so that the valuable canines would arrive in good health, getting to New Zealand before almost all the men. The ninety-seven dogs had been handpicked in Canada’s remote Newfoundland and Labrador Province by the veterinarian who tended to President Hoover’s Belgian shepherd, King Tut.

  The cargo steamer the Chelsea had been purchased at the last minute; Byrd needed more space for supplies. His expedition office paid only $34,000, a bargain, as the ship had been seized as a rumrunner, bringing illicit alcohol from the Caribbean to American shores. These were the days of Prohibition.

  The three ships departing from the East Coast would pass through Cristóbal, the port city on the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal. They would reach the Pacific Ocean via the canal in a few days’ time and then, sometime in October, would pass a smattering of islands off the coast of South America. (This would include the Galápagos, where in the 1830s Charles Darwin studied the peculiar isolated animals that led to his theory of evolution.) Then it was on to Tahiti: Billy could only imagine what that would be like. He had ogled those sensual Gauguin reproductions of exotic women, exposed. After the interlude of broiling South Pacific sun, the fleet (now accompanied by the Larsen) would travel another three thousand miles to New Zealand to refuel and then navigate in dropping temperatures to what reporters on the Byrd beat called the Eighth Wonder of the World: the Ross Ice Barrier (now called the Ross Ice Shelf), and according to the New York Times, “a great table-land of solid ice, two-hundred or more feet high” and nearly the size of France. An explorer might as well try to sail through the White Cliffs of Dover.

  Roald Amundsen, believing (erroneously) that the barrier was not free-floating ice but safely over land, set up camp there in 1911. His success, the aging explorer had argued to Byrd shortly before his death, proved that it was solid, and a suitable spot for the American’s proposed wintering-over camp. Its snow-covered surface was perfect for modern planes equipped with skis. Besides, at 80 degrees south, the inlet was a mere six hundred miles from the South Pole—the nearest a ship could approach and the easiest point of takeoff for a pilot aiming to fly over the pole.

  Byrd planned to establish bases at hundred-mile intervals all the way to the pole, manned by the bravest men in layers of long underwear, wool sweaters, bearskin trousers, reindeer-skin coats, and sealskin gloves. Only the best of his men—those that had proved their mettle—would winter over, spending six months in total darkness before Byrd and his new chief pilot, Bernt Balchen, could make their South Pole flight when the sun returned. One of Byrd’s strengths was his vigilance for safety, but, even so, there were real and exciting dangers ahead. Beat reporters said the coldest temperature recorded in Antarctica was minus 74.4 degrees, with the strongest winds on Earth. The newsies knew their audience: What young man didn’t dream of battling windstorms and rolling waves?

  Alas, expeditions gobbled money before they even entered water, and despite Byrd’s best efforts, funds were still short—though in nine months, he’d raised $900,000 (in the dollars of the day). His two principal backers were John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Edsel Ford, the thirty-five-year-old son of Henry Ford, who had succeeded his father as president of the Ford Motor Company in 1919. But while checks from private donors constituted the bulk of his cash, media rights also sold for a pretty penny: the New York Times paid $150,000 to be the official newspaper of the expedition, a deal that included assigning Russell Owen on board the flagship to dispatch stories by wireless. Byrd also secured $50,000 from his friend George Putnam for an autobiographical account of his journey, financing from the National Geographic Society for magazine rights, and a handsome sum from Paramount Pictures for the honor of sending a two-man crew with the ships to shoot a documentary at sea and on the ice—even if Paramount had to pay salaries for a two-year job.

  Many expenses were avoided through in-kind donations of close to $600,000 in goods, an unimaginable sum possible only because Byrd traded favors shamelessly—as much a wheeler-dealer as he was a voyager. (He was, to be fair, only following the Antarctic business model: that fine British gentleman Robert Falcon Scott had financed his famous 1911 journey by chasing sponsorship, including one ton of donated Colman’s mustard.) Cargo would soon include Kolster-Brandes radios “drawn from the crucible of science”; Hamilton stopwatches for officers (“The one place you would think time would be unimportant would be at the South Pole”); Leica and Graflex cameras for the pilots and media types; and Waterman pens engraved with the words New York. There would be Underwood typewriters, Longines chronometers, Kitchen Kook stoves, Veedol motor oil, National Ammonia brand ammonia, Flit brand insect repellent, and axes and hammers from Fayette R. Plumb. Sponsors donated refrigerators, binoculars, microscopes, United Fruit bananas, and caseloads of Chesterfield cigarettes. Beech-Nut committed to peanut butter, jams, and jellies; Swift was good for calf’s liver, oxtail, pork loins, pigs’ feet, “frankfurts,” turkeys, and fowl. Brookfield Dairy supplied the “official” butter. Armour took out smoked-meat ads in which it noted that Byrd had already taken the company’s ham and bacon to the North Pole. And in addition to shelled Diamond brand walnuts, the Byrd South Pole expedition would take along a hundred-pound gunny sack of Diamond’s unshelled nuts, 3,180 calories per pound.

  Sweets were of special interest to the boys and girls following along, and Necco anticipated great press for the rolls of candy wafers it was sending south. Byrd received a last-minute letter from William Wrigley Jr. of Chicago, who had instructed his factory in Dunedin, New Zealand, to send five hundred pounds of chewing gum to Antarctica to avoid having it pass through the tropics. The members of the expedition would be familiar with peppermint, Wrigley wrote, but they would also discover an exotic flavor called spearmint already on market in New Zealand—an offering Wrigley hoped the expedition would publicize, as the product was launching shortly in American stores.

  With all these favors to beg and sponsors to thank, Byrd was exhausted before even leaving New York; he had to prioritize his speaking engagements, or he would never get to bed. No more formal dinners like that with the National Association of the Fur Industry, broadcast live on radio, at which he was presented with sixty muskrat fur caps, sixty Siberian dog fur gloves, and thirty pieces of wolverine so their winter parkas could be fitted with wolverine strips to cover the chin and mouth, as it was the only known fur on which the moisture of human breath would not freeze.

  For the most part, journalists remained respectful of the hero-turned-promoter. The only ones daring enough to poke occasional fun at the never-ending plugs were those roundtable wits at the New Yorker, a magazine then only three years old but already wielding considerable literary influence. Said one Talk of the Town piece, with studied ennui:

  “There is one item in the published expense account which tends to shed light on what the explorers are going to be doing way down there at the pole; that is the item Kardex and office supplies, $2,500. Apparently they’ll be busy every minute with bookkeeping and general office management. Every night someone is in for a big job of filing—we can see that.” (Although the piece was anonymous, an in-person check at the New Yorker offices revealed it was written by underappreciated wit E. B. White.)

  By late summer, his bank accounts now fattened enough to at last set sail, Byrd toned down his rhetoric and focused on selling the expedition’s respectable scientific goals. Officially his main purpose was to aerially map vast geography the world had never known and to highlight how aviation could benefit exploration.

  “The expedition will be in many re
spects one of the most novel expeditions which ever moved its way into the regions of ice,” Byrd said in late August, standing a little taller, more hero-like, in the Biltmore conference room; he was now giving an official update once a week. He envisioned great new advances in geography via aerial photography. They would search for new animals and even dinosaur fossils. His engineers would try out the latest developments in shortwave radio, allowing the world to listen in on his exploits as they happened in Morse code (voice transmission from Antarctica then being impractical if not impossible). Still, a few naysayers whispered that the main business of the two-year expedition was immortalizing Byrd himself.

  Yes, for good measure, as everyone knew, he was going to be the first to fly over the South Pole. Norway had gotten there first on foot, but flight was the prize left for America. It was something everyone could get behind, from the youngest citizen to the oldest. (Privately, Byrd felt it would broaden his name recognition in other countries, too. His PR men had wisely cautioned him that without the Inuit men and women populating the colony—Nukaping had been uninvited long before, as the idea of a breeding colony of Inuits was in reality a logistical nightmare—he needed a new gimmick.)

  As the general excitement built in the days leading up to the City of New York’s launch, even Billy’s mother clipped the daily newspaper updates, though Francesca shared her husband’s view that applying to join was a pipe dream: with the sensational news from Cooper Union, he should just enjoy the unfolding Byrd story in the papers.

  Improbably, it was Billy’s no-nonsense father—not his grandmother with the crystal ball—who one day in mid-August let slip a fateful fact: Rudy had read that Malcolm Hanson, the chief radio operator on the upcoming Antarctica journey, had been a stowaway on Byrd’s 1926 Arctic expedition. A stowaway! Could such a thing be possible?

  And thus Billy Gawronski hatched an outlandish plan to stow away on the first great American voyage of the twentieth century.

  THREE

  THE CITY OF NEW YORK

  As he took his first strokes through the murky, reeking Hudson River, Billy feared the whipping winds. He kept count—one, two, three, four, five; six, seven, eight, nine, ten—feeling a growing ease in the choppy water, even if he wasn’t going as fast as he thought. “Keep going,” he told himself; it was less than a mile to the ship. So long ago, on outdoor swims with the Polish Falcons, he had mastered the right way to breathe. Later, a streetwise immigrant’s kid, he’d jumped off the East River pier at a roped-off swimming area called Central Lanes, where even as a nine-year-old, he faced a harsher current than here. Billy was a veteran of hundreds of river swims.

  As he told it later, the only thing on his mind was his one shot to get before Commander Byrd and appeal to his mercy. Byrd liked stowaways. All the seventeen-year-old could do was aim for the flagship and hope for the best.

  As he approached the City of New York, there was enough light to spot a hawser (a thick tow rope) hanging down to the brackish water. Despite numb fatigue, Billy found the strength to pull himself up and then keep his footing on the slippery deck that smelled of salt and masculine adventure. Covered in river scum, hair hanging down his forehead like oily kelp, he found his way to the hold, clambering on hands and knees, inching crabwise over rough-hewn wooden boards, and picking his way past intriguing crates of explorer supplies to find the out-of-view spot he’d settled on during his reconnaissance mission nine days before.

  Billy removed his squelchy wet graduation suit, rolled the jacket and pants out of view, and stripped to his underwear. (One contradictory account claimed that he hid nude.) Secreted in the pitch-black of the smaller of the two forecastles he’d selected when the ship was open to visitors, Billy retold himself there had to be a job on the ship for a determined kid like him with water-clogged ears. Did he think of his mother, so fiercely protective of her only child; a woman who would never have thought him capable of betraying her this way? How long could he hold out without food or water? When should he emerge? There was no official rulebook for stowaways.

  He had read about the hoopla planned for the send-off in the morning: the brass bands and relatives and bigwigs invited on deck to say good-bye before the New York loosened her moorings and the city’s official welcoming tugboat brought well-wishers back to shore. Rumor had it that Amelia Earhart, the new Queen of the Air, would loop-de-loop over the Hudson, the grand finale to send the ship on its way. Earhart was a great friend of Commander Byrd, and, unbeknownst to the public, the new mistress of his very married publisher. She had promoted the expedition as a personal favor, endorsing Lucky Strike cigarettes (“Lucky Strikes were the cigarettes she carried on the Friendship when she crossed the Atlantic. For a slender figure, Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet”) and publicly handing over her $1,500 earnings to fund the Antarctic trip.

  Finally, snatches of sleep until—something creaked. A rat? Scary shadows flickered across the walls. What happened next felt like a hallucination: just a few feet away from him on the dark second forecastle deck, Billy could just see a kid around his age, equally shocked to have company. The puny boy whispered his name: Jack.

  Jack was a happy-go-lucky sixteen-year-old Jewish kid who had dropped out of school. Before this caper, Manhattan was the farthest he’d ever traveled from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where he’d been born. Jack told his unexpected competitor that he’d arrived at the City of New York at seven o’clock in the morning, an hour before.

  Well, determined Billy, then he was here first, hours ago. This was his spot.

  Jack tried to discourage Billy, insisting that it wouldn’t pay for him to make this two-year trip without any of the thought he himself had put in. Why, Jack had brought a suitcase stuffed with warm clothes for once they neared Antarctica. He’d come aboard with extra clean underwear and a $100 bill pinned inside a coat pocket. Billy was practically naked. Negative 74.4 degrees? He’d freeze!

  Billy was no dupe. “Is that so?” he shot back. If this was going to be such a rotten trip, why didn’t Jack get off the boat?

  The boys argued for nearly an hour, cramped in their almost-adjacent shelves on the lower hidden forecastle, first in whispers, and then louder and louder. But then, to their joint amazement, yet another voice piped up: “Keep quiet! They’ll find all of us!”

  Could there really be a third stowaway? Yes, the voice told them, for over two days! It was a deeper voice, manlier, belonging to one Bob Lanier, a black youth of twenty. Even knowing where to look, Billy and Jack could see only his feet.

  Well, Jack said, that still left him the “sensible” one who had thought this through. Who goes the cracked step of swimming in the Hudson? Nuts! He’d taken a ferry and entered from the Hoboken pier when the crew wasn’t looking, without getting wet or tired out.

  Bob said he had hired a rowboat to get to the ship, remaining as dry as Jack. Then he stopped talking, even when Billy and Jack called out to him. He let the younger daredevils bicker over who had the right to be with Byrd.

  As the sun broke from behind clouds above deck, thousands of wistful Byrd fans jammed the pier. Nineteen Eagle Scouts were thickly clustered where the expedition publicists had prearranged for them to congratulate the cherry-picked Paul Siple, who, in full view of the cameras, calmly said good-bye to his tearful parents and his twenty-five-year-old sister, Carolyn, and admitted to curious reporters that, no, he didn’t have a girl. One reporter later described Siple as “[t]he fully-accepted Peter Pan, standing on deck as calm as Capablanca.” (Cuban-born José Raúl Capablanca was world chess champion from 1921 to 1927.)

  Nearly six foot four and weighing more than two hundred pounds, Siple was hardly a boy in the same way that Billy or Jack was, and his Boy Scouts uniform bulged with telltale manly muscles. But the media kept up the charade, even though the nineteen-year-old had already completed his first year at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, his double majors biology and geology. (Byrd had shrewdly set an age of seventeen to twenty for
his scouting recruitment.)

  Below deck, the boys agreed, finally, on something: Siple had to be a ringer! He was a member of the Alpha Chi Rho fraternity. He was not a boy like them.

  Up above the boys’ heads, Commander Byrd had joined the flagship crew for a minitrip around the Statue of Liberty before his scheduled return to shore. Dressed in khaki trousers and shirt, and topped with a little khaki sunhat appropriate for the wilds of a jungle, Byrd was the very embodiment of what Americans thought an explorer should be.

  As commotion increased above, adrenaline spiked below in the hold. The trio was terrified of being discovered before the ship left port. If only they could hear more than muffled voices.

  Journalists fired off last questions, with Byrd pooh-poohing rumors that the two thousand gallons of booze, four hundred gallons of rum, one hundred gallons of port wine, one hundred gallons of sherry, one hundred quarts of champagne, and additional rye and burgundy on board were anything but medicinal. What an undignified question! “Just when we are starting,” he told the goading reporter who dared to raise that issue now, “I can hardly afford to discuss things that are not so. I have issued the order that there is to be no intoxicating liquor aboard except for medicinal purposes, and that this alcohol is to be kept under lock and key by the medical officer of the expedition.”

  (The explorers of what’s been called the heroic age did not have to suffer the indignity of American prudency: Ernest Shackleton wisely brought along plenty of hard liquor to cheer his men. In 2006 several unopened cases of the malt whisky his boozy crew imbibed in 1909 were found beneath the floorboards of their expedition hut in Antarctica’s Cape Royds. The whisky was smartly cloned by the original distiller, Mackinlay’s, for sale in the twenty-first century as Mackinlay’s Shackleton Rare Old Highland Malt.)