TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/20s/20byrd

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                                                                                Richard E. Bryd


(MAY 17, 1926)

  In Spitzbergen, the young Virginian, Lieut.-Commander Richard
E. Byrd U.S.N., backed by Vincent Astor, Edsel Ford, John D.
Rockefeller Jr. and others, rested after an historic 1,600-mile
round-trip flight to the Pole, and laid out his next course--to
wing westward from an advance base on north Greenland and search
for unknown land where Explorers Peary and MacMillan each
thought they descried it on different occasions years ago. Most
formidable and promising of all, the dirigible Norge lurked
in her Spitzbergen shed ready to nose forth and explore earth's
last big "blind spot" from Spitzbergen clear over to Alaska. The
Norwegian Roald Amundsen, the Italian Colonel Umberto Nobile and
the American Lincoln Ellsworth, biding their hour for this trip,
denied that there was any competitive spirit between themselves
and the two parties of heavier-than-air flyers. Theirs seemed
the best chance of completing the map of the world, judging by
the past performance of their craft, though Byrd's Fokker
Josephine Ford had flown with astonishing success where
Amundsen's planes failed last year.

  The commanders of the Norge were fast asleep when Byrd and
Bennett went to the Josephine one midnight, whirled the huge
propellers and soared gracefully aloft, heading north. Kings Bay
slept on. Morning came and the news spread that Byrd had gone
forth to "try it." The long day began to wane; excitement waxed.
At 4:20 in the afternoon, a whizzing speck came down the twelfth
Eastern meridian, landed superbly, and Byrd and Bennett
stepped out to receive a ringing ovation that was echoed all
over the world. They had reached the Pole, circled it three
times, dropped a box of "certification" papers, unfurled a U.S.
flag and returned some 1,600 miles in 15 1/2 hours. Their sealed
instruments would, they hoped, bear out their testimony that
they had circled within a very few miles of Earth's upper hub.


(JULY 5, 1926)

  Wine ran in Norway. Bells pealed in Rome. Headlines screamed
across the broad U.S. Bright bunting shone forth in grim Alaska,
where searchlights had pierced the skies during the three-hour
nights. Seventeen fur-bundled men and a fox terrier had passed
in an airship completely up and over the earth's icy pate,
parting that wilderness as a comb might part the unexplored
thatch of a wild man from Borneo. From Spitzbergen in Barent's
Sea via the North Pole and the Pole of Inaccessibility, to Point
Barrow, Alaska, they had peered out of their gondola for new
lands, and in a strip of white waste 2,000 miles long by 10 to
100 wide, had spied none. they had seen seals, roaming polar
bears, their own flags (Italian, Norwegian, U.S.) sticking up
at the top of the world on iron-pointed staves dropped into the
ice--but not so much as a rocky islet had arisen out of the vast
Polar Sea. Disappointed yet jubilant they had flown past Point
Barrow, on down the Alaskan coast for 700 miles, and alighted.

  In 17 1/2 hours their instruments told them they were at the
Pole. They bared their heads, dropped their flags, and after
circling for 2 1/2 hours, set their rudder to follow the 160th
meridian of West Longitude down the opposite curve of the world.

  After 8 1/2 hours more, they "shook hands warmly and all wore
bright smiles." They were over the hardest place to reach on
earth, some 400 miles south of the North Pole, the center of the
Arctic ice cap.

  The evening of the second day they sighted land through the
cloud rack, Point Barrow. The last 850 miles had been through
fog banks and snow. The helmsman, ordered to steer ashore, at
last brought the Norge into the fishing and reindeer settlement
of Teller, about 60 miles northwest of expectant Nome. The
pilgrims clambered to earth 2,700 miles from their starting
point, after 71 hours in the air.


(DECEMBER 9, 1929)

  A cold green horizon cheered the Byrd Antarctic Expedition
Thanksgiving Day. It meant clear flying weather toward the
South Pole. Into their grey Ford transport climbed Commander
Richard Evelyn Byrd, Pilot Bernt Balchen, Radioman Harold June,
Photographer Ashley McKinley. The fuselage door slammed
shut...hand salutes...smooth take-off, with the three Wright
motors howling. Commander Byrd's mind "shot back to an exactly
similar scene in the Arctic spring, May 9, 1926, when Floyd
Bennett and I arose from the snow at Spitzbergen and headed
North-Pole-ward....Wrapped in a U.S. flag which the explorer
planned to drop over the South Pole was a stone from Floyd
Bennett's grave. The plane was named Floyd Bennett.

  For 450 miles they flew due south, uneventfully, over the
great ice plain called Ross Shelf. The diffuse sunlight cast no
shadow of their speeding ship to ripple over the sastrugi
(hardened waves of windblown snow) below. Then they were at the
Queen Maud Range.

  Whoever has seen the sheer eastern face of the Rocky Mountains
and can imagine them bleached white, can visualize the
perpendicularities before these flyers. For three steep miles
the Antarctic wall rises, like the side of a giant ice-cream
freezer. The loaded plane could not mount so high....

  Commander Byrd, navigating, sought a nick in the icy wall, of
which the late lost Roald Amundsen had written. It appeared,
filled by a cascaded glacier whose lip was more than two miles
above sea level. The plane climbed, air gusts heaved it, eddies
filluped it, it slowly lost speed. Balchen at the controls
yelled to Byrd standing behind him that he could not get over
the rim with his load. Byrd dumped three month's supply of food,
which skittered down the glacier. The plane hitched itself
upward--and over.

  Hours later a radiogram left the plane, "We have reached the
vicinity of the South Pole....We can see an almost limitless
polar plateau."  --Byrd.

  For a few minutes they romped around the polar point, then
scurried--for gasoline was getting low--300 miles by Byrd's
brilliantly precise navigating to the plateau's rim, down a
second billowing glacial gorge. A landing as the cliff foot for
fuel stored days before...a scoot for Little
America...rest...exuberant radio reports to the New York Times
and the world.

  Chief potential results for science: evidence, from
photography, as to whether or not Antarctica is one of two
continents, as to whether or not its mountains are extensions
of the Andes.

  Chief fame for Byrd: it made him the first man in history to
fly over both poles.