The Stowaway Read online

  The Eleanor Bolling, with Billy on it, arrived at last at the Bay of Whales on January 27, the sea ice having thawed sufficiently. The ecstatic crew tied the ship to the City of New York’s side. The men were glad to see one another, alliances be damned. Roth, that lucky duck who’d gotten the first glorious aerial views of the continent, showed nothing but kindness for Billy, his fellow rascal from the Lower East Side.

  Billy couldn’t get over the size of the Ross Ice Barrier, which was more dramatic in person than any journalist could have ever described. Nothing reminds you of the minuteness of your existence like standing at the foot of a mysterious unknown land. The bright sky above him filled in blue, the light mesmerizing. Antarctica was otherworldly, a dream version of a Jack London adventure book—even like being on another planet. Awestruck, Billy struggled to listen as those in command explained the work to be done. He would soon be part of building Little America: the bunkhouses, the mess hall, a machine shop, and an administrative building.

  The supply ship was secured as close as possible to the top of the barrier (a portion where it was lowest), and tall ladders were stretched across diagonally for men to climb up to the ice. Unloading the four hundred tons of new cargo was a risky business, all knew, as the barrier ice could calve off at any time. Laurence Gould went over again how to recognize danger: thick ice goes white, so avoid walking where the ice was clear. Even taking a pee in tide cracks (the small cracks caused by tides separating the sea ice and the edges of the barrier) could be hazardous. The two doctors cautioned the men to be careful of all things, even sunstroke in mid-January. This was the warmest part of the Antarctic summer, and with the sun out twenty-four hours, after a full day of manual labor, they might even overheat on ice.

  There were twenty-five men dotted across the barrier on one of these first unloading days, handling parts of the Ford plane that Byrd would fly over the pole after the Antarctic winter. Boosh! Just as Gould had feared, a square mile of shelf ice broke off, with new cracks forming where men stood. Three floes now floated lazily in different directions, with men on each. The chunks of barrier ice were large enough for the men to keep standing with their cargo, though the aluminum wing of the Ford plane had tumbled partway down a gap in the ice. Fear gripped all near. Lives were at risk, and if they lost the Ford wing, there would be no South Pole flight—the signature event of the two-year endeavor. Of the three planes on the expedition, the powerful Fokker trimotor was the only one suited for such an arduous flight.

  Billy, who had been working on the scene, lay down, and while others held his legs, he slipped into the big crack and, dangling, “got hold of the pedestal, and the airplane sections, and pulled them out,” reported the New York Times. He was ordered out as the rift expanded. Byrd, taking over operations with a megaphone, called for his men to put on life belts.

  Billy’s young body fat helped prevent hypothermia. Harry Adams pushed him a ladder, and Billy ran to the Bolling’s fiery stokehold he knew so well. Shivering but unruffled, he switched into dry clothes and was back in an hour to clean a propeller clogged with ice, gaining new respect from the amazed expedition crew. He hoped that Byrd noticed, too.

  The commander did. Bedridden briefly from the cold, Byrd called Billy to him, telling him how proud he was of his heroic effort.

  After the crew recovered from the scare, hard labor resumed. Byrd called the men together to explain that they must all get to work, including him, to move Little America another five miles inland, where the ice was less fragile. The village would be built approximately eight hundred miles from the South Pole, Byrd said, from prefabricated four-inch walls painted orange to be seen easier from the sky. From horizon to horizon, there would be nothing but ice.

  The crew worked quickly and dutifully, unloading the remaining cargo in five and a half days. Tottering on the level, snow-dimpled surface of the barrier was much easier then ascending it, and, once on top, they had fairly level traveling to what would soon be the new Little America. Byrd named the route Kit Carson Trail, after the man he had traveled with in the Philippines, who had given him a chance to prove his worth at a young age.

  Sledge-loads of stores were connected to the dog teams, and everyone hastened to transport supplies: coal, food, more gasoline, and two extravagant pianos, one of them a player piano. (How much “medical” liquor remained was never mentioned.) Billy helped relocate the two thousand books that would be part of the underground library, complete with fine leatherback chairs. Back in Bayside, he had pasted into his scrapbook a Scientific American story that itemized the books that a New York City lawyer named David T. Layman had purchased for the expedition. There were plenty of Sherlock Holmes stories, six Zane Grey Western adventure novels, Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and fifty humor books. Layman had also thrown in some goodies for the most erudite, such as Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, George Santayana’s Essays, and Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy.

  Foundations were built deep in the snow for the two main buildings Billy helped construct: Little America’s administrative headquarters and the mess hall, which was not large enough for the men to eat in all at once. There would be shifts. It wasn’t long before the shacks were covered with snow, with only the stovepipes peeking out. Long tunnels hollowed out of ice were lined with food and instruments and kennels, and connected the two implausibly located buildings built two hundred yards apart. Once completed, it would be unnecessary to go outside. The men chosen to winter over would live like moles under the snow in houses built from highly insulating ceiba tree pods that had traveled from America.

  But the heartless cold wearied all. Parked at the Ross Sea, their ships were the southernmost ships on Earth, and now they were constructing the southernmost village in the world. Billy’s childhood dreams of getting a real taste of polar misery were a little too realized in the bitter weather of the barrier, as wind whipped up his neck. Pink faced and teeth chattering, he slogged through his daily January assignments in pain, though he dared not tell anyone. Everyone was essential, he told himself, even if he was a mere cog. Byrd would lavish praise on all who deserved it.

  • • •

  Radio operator Carl Petersen had huge news: he had communicated with operators in Spitsbergen, Norway, in the Arctic Circle archipelago up with the polar bears and walruses—modern technology connecting the ends of the Earth. The tired men broke out in applause.

  A Radiogram that Petersen sent from Billy provoked similar excitement in the Gawronski household. Rudy and Francesca now had proof that their “ill-disciplined” son had made it to the famous barrier: “Mother. Father. Warm Greetings from a cold country. We are living on the barrier at the Bay of Whales in the most southerly of American villages in the world Little America, Antarctica.”

  This wasn’t quite true. Billy was bunked not in Little America but on the City of New York, where he had first stowed away, although he made many trips to the emerging village as ordered. During one excursion up the barrier, he fell in the water, “a sea thick with slush ice and killer whales, and the weather [12 degrees] below zero.” He was able to clamber out and warm up again in the flickering light of the stokehold. But he was young; another man might not have fared so well.

  Work never ceased, except when blizzards hit, and then even the hardworking dogs curled up in the snow. On the rare break, Billy rested on the ice or his bed, moored alongside the barrier. He ached—but he would not let himself cry. The constant sunlight of Antarctic summer should make it impossible to sleep, but at night the crew was so tired, it didn’t matter.

  As soon as the weather let up, the man-hauling resumed. Billy’s latest assignment was to hunt seals and skin them so that the forty dogs would have meat over the long winter. On off-hours, when he had the energy, he played with the baby Weddell seals and the penguins. He listened to the radio on the City of New York, read, played cards and checkers, ate candy, and smoked those free cigarettes donated by Chesterfield, the offic
ial cigarette of Little America. It wasn’t all that different from the passage through the Pacific, really. If it wasn’t so exhausting, it would almost be dull.

  Then the drama that Billy had wished for occurred. On January 31 the Bolling was getting ready to leave for New Zealand when the ice broke again, stranding several men on floes that began floating away. The ship listed far to starboard and almost capsized. Thirty-six-year-old former US Army Air Corps mechanic Bennie Roth fell into the Ross Sea. Bennie yelled out that he could not swim. How had he never admitted this in his interview? Byrd was distraught, but within seconds, Billy dove into the 28-degree water, perhaps not realizing that in such frigid temperatures, even swimmers could go into shock and die. But in his mind, what was there to fear? He’d gone with the Polish Falcons on so many midwinter river swims.

  Now was the time for Russell Owen to bash away at his typewriter. Danger was a great sell, and he wisely (if unjustly) made Byrd the hero of the day: “One’s heart stood still for a moment. There was a cry, The Barrier Has Broken! On deck men were calling Commander! Commander!—I’m coming, Bennie, he shouted! Two of his men grabbed Commander Byrd and refused to let him go. ‘I can get him, let go, let go,’ pleaded Commander Byrd.”

  Fortunately for the two-man film crew, they had been on the scene and caught some of the all-too-real action. A small rescue boat was lowered and began filling dangerously with seawater. Twenty-four-year-old aerologist Henry Harrison, hanging on fifty feet down the barrier, was saved before he could die of hypothermia, encased in ice.

  That night, as all recouped, the pregnant husky Josephine gave birth to six puppies. How could dog lover Billy, dried off and warmed up, not come over for a look?

  Two days later, Captain Brown headed back to Dunedin in treacherous weather with a crew of twenty, including Kess, Billy’s friend from the Black Gang. Although Billy adored the captain, his heart leapt, for he was not assigned. Perhaps, just perhaps, he was going to overwinter after all.

  • • •

  The Matson freighter Golden State arrived in the pretty city of Auckland on New Zealand’s North Island on February 11, 1929, with a very familiar mess boy: Bob Lanier. Bob had been relentlessly goaded during the journey; to get his goat, someone even posted on the message board that another “colored boy” had flown over the South Pole. He knew the most racist members of the crew resented his ambition, and that men among them spent the voyage drinking did little to help. But Lanier had made it to New Zealand. True, his plan was vague: to get in front of Byrd and plead for another go. But why should his luck run out now?

  Then he was in the news again, but not for reasons he ever wished for: Bob was accused of stabbing a boatswain named John Murphy earlier the same day. Murphy would live, but the court record was grim: “The evidence indicated a wound by a butcher’s knife, about three inches from the heart.” Bob pleaded innocent: self-defense. Bob’s counsel stressed that his client had “lived in terror of his life, and had acted under provocation and constant melees.”

  Back in the United States, black papers such as the Indianapolis Recorder covered the alarming news, but at first they were alone in believing Lanier’s innocence. New Zealanders hardly knew what to make of it all. Why would he stab one of his shipmates the day they reached shore? Where was the motive? “Trouble on the ship,” a friend of Murphy’s would tell the press.

  Lanier was allowed to stay out of prison, and earned money for food by making and selling wax paper flowers—a man at the docks had taken pity on him and showed him how. Interest in the young man swelled; this quiet country was used to petty crime, not murder. The New Zealand Truth ran a half-page photo of “The Smiling South Pole Boy.” Lanier was surprised that public opinion had started to go his way.

  • • •

  On February 18, with twenty-four hours of sunlight, and the aid of his four-member pilot team, Commander Byrd explored forty thousand square miles from the air in one day. He named a low-lying snow-covered mountain range after sponsor John D. Rockefeller Jr.—Laurence Gould, second in command, cracked later that his boss named it after the signature on a $100,000 check. He dedicated a peak to a carpenter on both of his trips, Charles “Chips” Gould (every ship’s carpenter was nicknamed “Chips”), and yet another to Billy’s original champion, toothless cook George Tennant, which must have tickled Tennant to no end. Later in the year, he would name another range he helped discover after sponsor Edsel Ford. The entire region he labeled Marie Byrd Land, after his ever-loyal wife. Still, Byrd kept to his plan to hold off his more dangerous flight over the South Pole (harsher weather, hours away from help) until after the Antarctic winter, when, with aid of able meteorologists, he could pinpoint the optimum moment for likely success.

  Byrd assembled his crew two days later, after going down his list of men as coldly as a chess grand master considering his best move. He was ready to announce which forty-one of the remaining fifty-six had been selected to join him for the winter—or as his men saw it, those he was getting rid of. Some of the discards would kick around New Zealand before being summoned back to ice at winter’s end to collect those luckier than them. Others would return to New York.

  Almost immediately, Billy learned he was a goner.

  He stood to hear the rest of the names in stunned silence. The news was real. The remaining men tried not to gloat, though Paul Siple’s wide smile gave away that he’d been tapped for a spot. Byrd allegedly never planned to let Siple winter over because of the potential for PR disaster if the “little Boy Scout,” as Siple bitterly referred to himself, lost so much as a hair on his head while under Byrd’s care. But Siple’s coddling up to Laurence Gould had proved very effective. His selection as the new taxidermist, even more than his initial triumph as the lucky Boy Scout, would lead to his storied career in polar science lasting four more decades.

  Lump in his throat, Billy tried to hold on, but reporter Russell Owen was not the only one to spot his tears. More seasoned men were able to hold back cries—there is innate behavior, and there is learned behavior.

  The commander took a walk with his youngest crew member, to rally his spirits. His adventures were far from over, Byrd said. Hadn’t he told him his heroic work would be rewarded? Billy would be allowed to come back on the rescue party after winter, and not everyone returning now with him was being asked back. Why, Byrd and Hilton Railey even had another job for him: the public loved the Polish stowaway, and the public relations whiz would set up some interviews in New York. Billy’s new assignment was to bring news of his expedition to the waiting public—a stowaway report. How would he like to be on the radio, representing the expedition? Selection, he told Billy, boiled down to who was most useful where. Billy was good copy best used elsewhere. Wasn’t he a sworn member of Byrd’s Loyalty Club? He was looking for loyalty now, not tears.

  News of who had been designated winter-worthy cloaked the brand-new village of Little America with an odd mood, with men trying not to gloat, men trying not to cry.

  There were fifteen slated for the City of New York’s return from the Bay of Whales—from Adams to Wallis—and they boarded for Dunedin on February 22, given just two days to say their farewells. Billy was now sailing aboard the flagship he had swum to so many months ago, and he would have plunged into the frigid Ross Sea and paddled back toward the barrier if it would have allowed him to stay on ice. He was not just sad; he was scared. He knew from those who had traveled on the New York how cruel Captain Melville was said to be; a man who ignored Byrd’s egalitarian directives and favored officers, forcing the common crew to keep four hours on, four hours off watch, denying them a good night’s sleep.

  As Billy battled his disappointment, in a second act of benevolence, Byrd (still spelling Billy’s name wrong) sent a follow-up Radiogram from his new Little America radio station, WFBT:

  Gavronski: Heartiest congratulations for the part you played in winning the battle through the ice and storms—stop—I was with you in thought throughout the fight—stop—I
know what you went through—stop—I am proud of you—stop—Best of Good Wishes, Byrd.

  To Byrd’s credit, this would be William Gawronski’s most treasured possession throughout his life.

  • • •

  The men in Little America settled down to life in what was fast approaching twenty-four-hour darkness. But even in hibernation, there was plenty of work to be done. The executive building held desks, drawing boards, a radio lab, and scientific equipment for the physicists, geologists, and meteorologists tasked with staying put. Nearby were the three radio towers—each seventy-six feet tall—a weather station, and a magnetic observatory. Occasionally, men on the expedition were allowed to communicate with wives and children, but only in an emergency. In their leisure time, bored men made good use of the under-ice gymnasium, which doubled as the only motion picture theater in the world built and operated under the snow. They perused the extensive library of books Billy had helped lug, or listened to the radio or the Victrola, which played records by current musical artists such as Louis Armstrong and Al Jolson. The most popular game was bridge. Byrd, as leader, had his own accommodations (and his own books) in a partitioned section of the library, where his fox terrier named Igloo, a veteran of both ends of the Earth, would sleep at his side. (Igloo wandered the ice in his own snowsuit and boots.) For the rest, there were two bunkhouses, one doubling as a mess hall. To bathe, men had to melt snow and stand in a pail in their bunks, something so uncomfortable to pull off that it was not often done. (Melted snow also provided water for the photo lab.) To snag a snack or a cigarette, they had to venture down a dark tunnel of ice in the newly built “city.”

  The overwinterers used snow-covered tunnels to roam between buildings, trenches that Billy had helped excavate. Each structure had to be separated by at least a hundred yards, the size of a football gridiron, to reduce fire hazards. Similar trenches were built to house the weary dogs that had hauled the fuselage of the Ford trimotor aircraft—the Floyd Bennett—to an ingeniously constructed igloo hangar before the last glimpse of sun. The working dogs lived in what was dubbed “Dog Town,” but puppies born on ice were kept outside until winter came for good, including Ski and Ski, the adorable pack dog who became a favorite of Holland Tunnel engineer John O’Brien; he would bring the dog back to New York City and adopt it after the expedition’s end. The chained dogs had little room to move, were fed chopped frozen seal carcasses, and drank from melting snow.