Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
150
the James Clark Ross and the C. A. Larsen, also carried some of the personnel, dogs, and
equipment to the Antarctic. The pride of the expedition was three airplanes, including a
Fokker Universal, a Fairchild with folding wings, and a Ford trimotor named the Floyd
Bennett , in honor of the North Polar pilot who had died of pneumonia before the end of
that expedition.
The New York and the Bolling left Dunedin on December 2, 1928, reaching the pack
on December 10. There in rough seas ninety tons of coal were transferred in sacks to New
York before Bolling turned back. Next the whaler Larsen rendezvoused with the New York
and towed her through the rough pack. On December 23 the ships broke into open water,
Larsen dropped her line, and City of New York sailed south. The expedition put in at the
Bay of Whales on December 28. The site for the base, which was named Little America,
was chosen about eight miles onto the ice shelf from where New York moored and about
four miles north of the Framheim site, though no evidence of the Norwegians' presence
was found. A reloaded Eleanor Bolling arrived at the Bay of Whales on January 27, was
unloaded in five and a half days, and promptly returned to Dunedin.
When New York departed for New Zealand on February 28, forty-two men remained
behind, as had others before them, to face the winter night. The aerial campaign was
two-pronged. One was to the north and east, exploring the unknown coastal area be-
tween King Edward VII Land and the Antarctic Peninsula. The other was to the South
Pole, basically retracing Amundsen's route across the ice shelf, through the mountains,
and onto the polar plateau. A ground party would use dog teams to reach the mountains,
where they would radio weather reports for the polar flight, and once it had been com-
pleted, would travel east along the mountain front surveying, mapping geologically, and
exploring Carmen Land.
In choosing dogs for the overland traverses, Byrd had taken a lesson from the Nor-
wegians. The primary dog handlers for the expedition were three classmates from Har-
vard: Eddie Goodale, Freddie Crockett, and the ringleader, Norman Vaughan. Vaughan
had learned to work with dogs during a nine-month period assisting Sir Wilfred Gren-
fell, a British physician who had left England in 1892 to serve the medical needs of the
Eskimo of Newfoundland and Labrador. The “Three Musketeers,” as the Harvard boys
were called, trained the year before the expedition in New Hampshire under the guid-
ance of Arthur Walden, an innkeeper and breeder of sled dogs, whom Byrd had enlisted
to provide the canine component of the logistics. Although the airplane proved during
this expedition that it could reach great distances and record new terrain through aerial
photography, the most reliable ground travel remained by dogs. A Ford snowmobile was
used to haul depot supplies onto the ice shelf, but it broke down and was abandoned on
its maiden run seventy-five miles south of Little America.
Throughout the base-building phase, the dog teams ran a four-mile shuttle from the
edge of fast bay ice, where New York and Bolling had oZoaded, to Little America, where
the base was taking shape. During this period a number of the men tried a hand at mush-
ing the dogs. One depot-laying party ventured south in early March, as much to give the
men and dogs the experience of traversing as to lay out supplies. During a weeklong pe-
riod they weathered a pounding blizzard, dropped depots at twenty-, forty-, and forty-
