The Stowaway Read online

  Billy, surprised he had found his sea legs after a few initial days of queasiness, was often on deck on breaks from the stokehold, even in the storms. Captain Brown was surprised how well the kid fared in rough waters. All was officially exciting again as they approached the frozen continent, and Billy kept his eyes peeled for sights such as Saint Elmo’s fire: mysterious balls of discharged electricity that supposedly clung to prominent points on ships (like their masts), and were said to be a common phenomenon in Antarctic waters.

  Navy-trained Harry Adams could be found above board in his polar parka, too. He viewed Billy less as a curiosity now and more as a chum. They all had their cliques. Adams had a special rapport with Byrd’s thirty-five-year-old secretary and now shipboard personnel officer, Charley Lofgren, an even-keeled former navy man like him who had transferred from the whaler Larsen to the Bolling back in New Zealand. Lofgren, who had recently learned his mother had died, appreciated Adams’s light banter. One brightly lit night close to the Antarctic Circle on midwatch, the men sat puffing Chesterfields, taking in the smell of the salt air, having a gam on deck. Lofgren pointed to something pink in the distance. Adams blinked, sure it was a pink whale. “No doubt about it!”

  Billy strolled by, bringing coffee from the galley. Asked for his opinion on the pink whale, which Adams declared loudly to be the king of the whales, Billy focused his gaze where Adams pointed and joked that he also saw the Woolworth Building floating on the Ross Sea.

  • • •

  Russell Owen recouped in the relative peace of lighter swells and was able to finally file a significant story about how the men saw their first tabular icebergs: “sentinels of ice 20 miles in length and 200 feet height. Drifting north and gradually melting away.” These giant ice cubes had calved from the Ross Ice Barrier, and the amazed crews dodged a route through the curious chunks of ice, some tipped up to form odd flat-topped shapes that occasionally glowed blue in the southern light. To put the size of these twenty-mile icebergs in perspective, one scientist on board reminded Billy that Manhattan was only twenty-four miles long.

  The expedition’s new second in command, geologist Laurence Gould, gave lectures at night, and no good question went unanswered. Why are the cracks in the icebergs blue? The light spectrum, he explained, bounced down into the cracks; the longest wavelengths (red) were absorbed, but shorter wavelengths were refracted back. Gould had much to say about the patterns and textures of ice. And did they know that icebergs, as overwhelming as they were on sight, could be four times larger below the water? Melville and Brown would have to navigate carefully; no one wanted to go the way of the Titanic.

  Crews worked twelve-hour shifts on the rough sea with ice blockading their path. It was unseasonably cold this year, with more sea ice than anticipated. By December 11, nearly a week after they were due to reach the barrier, they had transferred eighty-seven tons of coal from the Bolling’s hold to the City of New York; as pretty as the sails looked, the ship ran on a combination of wind and fuel. Malcolm Hanson, the chief radio engineer, told reporters over shortwave radio that the crew would no longer transmit messages except in emergencies, to focus all manpower on the task of survival. “But everybody is well and very busy,” he hastened to add.

  As each captain slowly made his way through Antarctic pack ice, with the ships occasionally hitched together, crews began to spy regional wildlife, especially whales. “Any pink whales?” Billy often joked to Adams. Animal lover that he was, every whale call had him bolting to the bridge. He learned there were eight species of whales near the pole, and yearned to see a blue, the largest animal on Earth, though there was no denying the others’ magnificence. Seeing a whale with its tail in the air set his heart racing, and there were plenty of scientists on board to point out the difference between a minke and a humpback. There was no classroom like the ocean. After days, he finally saw his blue.

  Giant grey birds were observed sweeping overhead by the most vigilant birdwatchers on board. One sailor found them rather ratlike. There were seals, too—the Weddell seals spotted on the ice floes wholly unafraid of man. About eight feet in length and weighing a ton, they were named by the early-nineteenth-century English explorer James Weddell. Perhaps if Byrd discovered new species in his flights over the interior, he would give his name to them.

  By December 17, another week was gone, and the party was still at sea in ice and winds that slowed progression. But on that day, crew members spotted the first emperor penguins. These four-foot-tall barrels of fat—if you live in Antarctica, it’s good to be big-bellied, especially if you want to survive the winter—were first encountered on Captain James Cook’s second voyage in the late eighteenth century. For a while after Darwin’s evolutionary theories finally caught hold, emperors were thought to be a possible evolutionary “missing link” between birds and reptiles. Scientists believed they could prove this by carefully observing the emperor embryo as it matured. On Robert Falcon Scott’s second and last Antarctica expedition, a small side party, including twenty-four-year-old Apsley Cherry-Garrard, set out on a winter sledging journey to scour the ice and collect emperor eggs for this purpose, even though the breed lays only one egg per year. This ill-fated trek in the name of science gave rise to what in Billy’s day was considered the greatest of all Antarctic adventure books: Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World: With Scott in Antarctica, 1910–1913.

  The crew spotted the adorable and social Adélie penguins next, discovered in 1840 by scientists on a French expedition led by explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville, who named the penguins and an expanse of Antarctic land after his wife, Adéle. Adélies are ubiquitous along the Antarctic shore. Very short, they have the classic penguin big-belly look, and white rings around their eyes. Many Adélies lay dead on the rocks in stomach-churning decomposition, and dive-bombing seabirds known as skuas came for the feast, gnawing at their open flesh. Billy had never encountered such violence in his library books.

  Scientists today identify seventeen distinct species of penguins, but in 1928 there were thought to be only three: emperors, the largest; Adélies, the most common in Antarctica; and kings. The latter are found in more temperate subantarctic regions (outside the Antarctic Circle) such as South Georgia, an island about 1,500 miles east of the tip of South America, and so the men did not get to see them. Each species kept to a strict biological schedule. Emperors were done breeding in November, but Adélies were very busy in December when Byrd’s men came across them, building nests, mating, and engaging in humorous courtship rituals such as presenting their prospective lover with a rock. The paired lovers then would stand belly to belly, singing loudly—quite a different sound from the sharp gakking heard when disputing territory or being pestered by skuas. Almost all Adélies loved walking in lines; there were no leaders, but most seemed more than willing to follow.

  A pervasive tang of pink penguin guano was everywhere: big-barnyard nauseating, like a paddock of cow dung laced with digested and decomposed fish. That stink!

  As they wended through the ice, Captain Brown called Billy to the bridge with good news: Byrd wanted him to catch some penguins. He’d promised to take live birds back to zoos; how many yet to be determined. The commander felt that Billy and Siple were perfect for the job, and it would give the boys something to do with their youthful energy.

  Harry Adams was charmed watching Billy plodding along on the ice, writing: “He was good at chasing and catching penguins—and here too he went to extremes—because he selected the largest penguin in sight and the farthest away on the ice . . . [A]fter much labor, he brought the penguin on board, only to have it dive overboard and disappear forever.”

  Billy became an amateur naturalist, recording various penguin spats and dramas in his journal. He loved imitating the loud calls that pairs made meeting up, and watched as they tobogganed on their bellies on fresh snow and dove for krill, small shrimplike crustaceans. “They were tame towards humans,” he wrote in a letter home, “and a little too easy to ca
tch.” He felt sorry for his quarry, though Billy was so good at catching them that he soon almost exclusively had the job of penguin tender. Siple distanced himself from the task, seeing where else he could be of assistance, and got in with the dog teams.

  After setting out from Dunedin, the Bolling doubled back to New Zealand to replenish supplies. (Otherwise the ship might reach the barrier with no coal left for its return.) The New York kept on toward the prize. Of course, Billy wanted to be at the Ross Sea with the first to arrive, but what choice did he have? The Bolling would get to the barrier eventually, in early 1929. At least he could celebrate Christmas properly in New Zealand and look up some of those lovely girls he’d met at the Dunedin docks.

  Paul Siple was by this time well aware of the public’s fascination with the stowaway—he’d seen the fawning girls in New Zealand—and he was deeply worried whether his wintering-over spot was secure. While never disparaging Billy, in interviews he chose to pretend the other boy was simply not there. Even the penguin-catching passages in his 1931 memoir, A Boy Scout with Byrd, make no mention of his supposed friend tasked with the same job.

  The good Boy Scout crafted a rather ingenious plan that would permit him to overwinter: the expedition had promised various zoos barrelfuls of seal and penguin skins in addition to live specimens. Skinning penguins was Laurence Gould’s responsibility. Desperate to make himself more than a glorified gofer—a novelty assigned to run after birds—Siple broached the overtaxed Gould with a proposal: Was the second in command aware of his Boy Scouts badge in taxidermy? He’d be eager to assist with the dirty work. Thrilled by the suggestion, and overwhelmed by his new responsibilities following Dick Brophy’s demotion, Gould told Siple he would talk to Byrd.

  • • •

  In bold headlines, the Hearst newspaper empire crowed that Wilkins, not Byrd, made the first Antarctica flight, on December 20, 1928. Byrd took comfort in knowing that Wilkins had not actually flown over what he saw as the prize: the South Pole. And while Wilkins took handheld photographs on the flight, one of Byrd’s celebrated men, Captain Ashley McKinley, would be the first to use an aerial mapping camera: a Fairchild K-3, the finest of its kind. Like the Boy Scout shrewdly ignoring the stowaway, the New York Times, Byrd’s official sponsor, made little mention of Wilkins’s not-insignificant achievement. This strategy worked, and for the most part, few Americans cared, having bought that flying over the South Pole was the real story.

  (Ironically, to find many of the records and medals bestowed upon Wilkins, one must travel to the Byrd archives at Ohio State University. Next to the cavernous rooms that hold the Byrd files is a lonely glass case devoted to his once-formidable rival.)

  • • •

  On Christmas Eve, back in Dunedin, Billy received a Radiogram from his parents. There had been a long letter waiting for him, too, when the Bolling pulled into dock, written on his father’s new company stationery. Rudy thought it would do his son good to know the family would have no Christmas tree this year without him home to trim it. They had decided to have Christmas dinner at the Polish National Home in Manhattan with their many friends and relatives. “Babcia is not going to be with us,” he wrote. “She prefers the quiet at home.”

  It was a very fatherly message, reminding the boy that his letters home were lifelines for his tearful mother and grandmother, and stressing that no matter if the labor was great or small, the key was to do it well. His performance was his future. Everything in the world would be his if he followed that golden rule.

  Billy was surprised to hear he was still a staple in the news, especially in the New York papers. Were his parents really besieged with reporters wanting to hear about the stowaway boy? His father begged him to add humor to his stories so he could share them with the papers and keep his name in Americans’ minds. Did his son know that Polish Americans were excited to hear about the Polish flag that Rudy had sent with Billy to take to the ice? He reminded him to have it autographed by all the men.

  Rudy was sure to include a report on Billy’s beloved bees. He had packed the poor creatures into a box, worried how they would live through the winter, but the little things seemed happy and were making lots of honey: eight to ten pounds this season. He would send some to the Ross Sea! Although the women of the house prayed that Billy would be home soon, Rudy urged his son to do his all to make the wintering-over party, writing, “The farther you go will be a credit to you on return. Don’t forget, because there will be lots to learn!” His mother wanted to know if his nails were clean.

  Finally, Rudy enclosed a long story about Billy from one of his favorite journals, Poland magazine, and mentioned that Babcia was sitting knitting stockings by his side. The father couldn’t hide his immigrant’s pride about his son turning into an American celebrity.

  Moved by the heartfelt updates, Billy had the good sense to write his mother that reading the letter brought him to tears.

  • • •

  The fifty-four-man crew of the New York finally arrived at the Ross Sea on Christmas Day. (Having crossed the international date line, the crew marked Christmas twice.) Casting off the Bolling’s towline ended the supply ship’s responsibilities after having transported the New York; the latter was left to fend for itself in the pack ice, crunching through the nearly continuous frozen mass off Victoria Land.

  Christmas was a welcome antidote to homesickness. Canadian physicist Frank Davies, known already for his infectious laugh, appeared on deck as Santa Claus in a full red suit that he had packed for the occasion. On ice he would have the less jolly task of taking measurement of the Earth’s magnetic field.

  The City of New York’s triumph made news internationally, Russell Owen’s poignant reports tugging at heartstrings around the globe: for Christmas, Byrd had told Melville to abandon fuel rationing, and they sprinted toward the goal.

  KDKA Pittsburgh, the first full-time radio station in the United States, transmitted Yuletide wishes from American-based family to expedition staff. The radio announcer had a surprise for “the nervy stowaway” now back in Dunedin: emotional greetings from his father and mother. “We miss him so much,” Rudy told a reporter a few days after the broadcast. “This has been the first holiday season he has been away. But we know he is well cared for and receiving a good education. He will be a man when he returns.”

  Captain Melville stopped his ship first at Discovery Inlet but spied a more satisfactory landing field with flat, solid ice in a section of the barrier near the Bay of Whales. The New York inched closer, sometimes smashing into the sea ice to quicken the advance. When the ship at last pulled up alongside the barrier, crew members anchored her to the astounding cliff that rose from forty to a hundred feet above the water; a sheer wall in parts. The huskies were released from their cramped quarters and went wild with joy.

  If only Billy could see what the New York crew saw now. Whales smashed tails in the water: blues, a hundred feet long and a hundred tons, bigger than dinosaurs. The foremost consumers of the Ross Sea rose out of the ocean: orcas, better known as killer whales. Russell Owen, there as witness, was beside himself. It was whale soup out there! Finally, he could do true picaresque reporting on the whales’ loud sighs and quick gasps of air that fascinated even the most jaded.

  The men unloaded the cargo onto the sea ice and used the dog teams to haul it through crevasses and gullies and up a natural ramp they’d discovered onto the barrier. From there they sledged a few miles to the site Byrd had selected for the base camp: Little America. By the first week of 1929, a permanent base had been established. While Roald Amundsen had built his two miles from the shelf, Byrd moved his crew eight miles inland on the great Ross Ice Barrier.

  Teeth clacked in one of the windiest, coldest places on Earth. The furious whips of katabatic winds—caused by frigid air hitting the ice cap and spreading across the continent—were one thing to read about and quite another to experience. What a naïve idea the first-timers had of working in inclement weather: even in the relative warm
th of the Antarctic summer, when on a lucky day it would reach 30 degrees, if the famous high winds of the region hit, it could feel well below zero. The men waited until the extremely changeable weather improved to finish unloading the New York. (The motorized vehicle pottering along the ice soon broke down; so much for the modern idea to test heavy machinery on ice.)

  Still, in a few days, their first iteration of a base camp was beginning to feel homey. Pilot Bernt Balchen shot a seal for dinner, and the cook served everyone dark, chewy seal steak. Malcolm Hanson’s radio worked perfectly, picking up programs in several languages, including English from New Zealand and Spanish from South America.

  Byrd was ready for his first Antarctica test flight on January 15, exploring 1,200 square miles in a Fairchild aircraft with a single 425-horsepower engine. Marine captain Alton Parker was selected as pilot. Bennie Roth—the hero of Billy’s childhood friends; the orphaned Jew born on Avenue A—won a cut of cards and became Antarctica’s first sightseeing passenger. Still ignoring Wilkins’s achievements, the Times wrote that Byrd’s test run of his airplane Stars and Stripes was the first appearance of a plane over the Antarctic ice. Adolph Ochs, the paper’s powerful publisher, felt that minimum mention of Wilkins was the best way to keep his considerable financial investment in Byrd’s success worthwhile.

  • • •

  The Bolling left Dunedin on January 14 to join those already at the barrier, but Captain Gustav Brown was quickly instructed to turn around: the sea ice was freezing, even more than before. Impatient, he radioed, “We’d go through hell for you, Commander.”

  Byrd’s reply: “It is warm in hell but thirty-two below zero here, so stay where you are.”