The bothersome details of the world: Richard Byrd, Little America, and the problem of retreat

Abstract

In 1934, Admiral Richard E. Byrd retreated from his crew at the remote Little America encampment in Antarctica to an even more isolated setting: a small underground shack on ‘the dark immensity of the Ross Ice Barrier, on a line between Little America and the South Pole’. Byrd remained there in solitude for a little over four months and later wrote about his ordeal in Alone. This essay considers Byrd’s account alongside his earlier Antarctic writings in order to ask what they reveal about the difficulties of retreating and maintaining critical distance from ‘civilisation’.

Keywords:

• Richard E. Byrd
• Little America
• retreat
• technology
• modernity
• Antarctica

Acknowledgements

For their help, comments and advice, I am grateful to Clare Birchall, Susan Castillo, Ann Heilmann, Tomek Mossakowski, Richard Vine, and Damian Walford Davies.

Notes

1. I will enlist the term ‘civilisation’ often in this essay to describe the condition from which Richard Byrd and others sought to withdraw. My use of the term – their term – should not be taken as an endorsement of its connotations.

2. Byrd’s claim to have beaten Amundsen in the race to fly over the North Pole in May 1926 has been contested on many occasions, and I have no interest in taking sides here. For an overview of the controversy, see Rose, 2008, pp. 123–43.

3. For more on Byrd as a coloniser of the ice, see Griffiths, 2007, p. 123 and Bryson, 1996, p. 437. For a map of Byrd’s base, see the insert between pp. 232 and 233 of Byrd, 1930.

4. For further notable references to Little America’s difference and distance from civilisation, see Byrd, 1930, pp. 20, 101, 148, 192, and 221. See also the whole of Chapter 10 of the book: ‘Civilization Does Not Matter’.

5. For a detailed summary of the differences between what the men called old Little America and new Little America, see Byrd, 1935, p. 182ff. For an account of the size of the second Little America, see p. 113 of the same text.

6. See, for example, Byrd, 1935, pp. 21, 97, 126, 163 and 249.

7. Like ‘Little America’, the name ‘Advance Base’ evokes the colonialism of the American frontier. Indeed, a caption beneath one of the photographs in Byrd’s account of his second voyage to Antarctica refers to (the new) Little America as a ‘frontier settlement’. See the top image on the unpaginated photographic plate immediately before p. 121 of Byrd, 1935.

8. All of the information about the location and construction of Advance Base in this paragraph is taken from Byrd, 1935, p. 167. For a photograph of all that remained above ground, see the unpaginated plate immediately before p. 153 of the same text.

9. Murphy was well placed to pick up the narrative: he had already published the first book-length celebration of Byrd (Murphy, 1928) and, according to Lisle Rose (2008, p. 290), ‘helped Byrd crank out Little America in four months’ in 1930.

10. While this plan to retreat from modernity into the remote wilderness might not, in seeking such separation and dissociation, appear immediately to be a form of critical distance (in that critique involves enlisted judgement, not a refusal to engage), I read in the references to ‘people beset by the complexities of modern life’ and being ‘caught up in the winds that blow every which way’ an implicit understanding of Advance Base as a critical distancing.

11. I am thinking in particular here of the terrifying incident (Byrd, 2003, pp. 116–118) in which Byrd ‘decide[s] to take a longer walk than usual’ (p. 116) outside on the ice, becomes lost, and fears that he will never find his way back to Advance Base.

12. Edward Abbey’s later account of a far warmer retreat, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, also contains an account of checking the weather station during a period of withdrawal from modern life (Abbey, 1990, p. 38).

13. Once again, Edward Abbey describes a very similar experience in Desert Solitaire (Abbey, 1990, p. 11). The phenomenon is not confined to non-fiction, either: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, for example, provides a memorable counterpart in the realm of fiction when it describes Hans Castorp’s adjustment to life, to a new sense of time, in the remote sanatorium (Mann, 1999).

14. The importance of the alarm clock at Advance Base is also described in Discovery, where the reproduction of a diary entry from the day on which Byrd watched his colleagues leave (28 March) offers a possible explanation for the absence of the object from the retreat: ‘Boxes, loose clothing, books, and odds and ends past counting are strewn about. I haven’t the faintest idea where anything is. I’ve searched conscientiously for the alarm clock and the cook book, and the suspicion is growing that I left them at Little America. It would be an ironic joke if, in the pretentious planning for every contingency, we forgot these most commonplace and vital necessities’ (Byrd, 1935, p. 166).

15. This corrective signal was, I presume, also used to set the wrist watch that Byrd mentions keeping with him in the shack (2003, pp. 58, 108, 156, 168, 173, 234, 252).

16. The Greenwich Time Signal had been transmitted for the first time just a decade earlier (McIlroy, 1993).

17. For more on the CBS broadcasts, including a fascinating reconstruction of their lost content, see Perry, 2014. In his archival account of Byrd’s first two Antarctic trips and the earlier flight to the North Pole, Matuozzi (2002) has argued persuasively that the mass media actually shaped Byrd’s adventures, rather than merely reporting them. Matuozzi also discusses the involvement of Paramount film crews at Little America during the first and second expeditions – a phenomenon which I will not discuss here because my concern is radio broadcasting.

18. CBS and General Foods were not the only commercial enterprises to support the second Byrd expedition to Antarctica. For details of other donors, see Chapter 1 of Byrd, 1935

19. Tom Griffiths (2007, pp. 123–124) points out that the 1929 expedition also involved broadcasts in both directions and that news of Byrd’s historic flight to the South Pole was relayed immediately to crowds in New York’s Times Square (p. 127).

20. While Little America was able to broadcast speech to Byrd, he was able to send only Morse code in response. He claims in Alone that his knowledge of Morse code was slight (2003, p. 65).

21. Might Emerson have been thinking, when he described Thoreau as a hermit, of an article published in the Liberator on 4 November 1859, in which Thoreau was described as ‘the hermit of Concord’ (quoted in Salt, 1968, p. 140)? This common perception of Thoreau’s life at Walden has been corrected by, among others, Salt (1968, pp. 75, 77), and Howarth (1983, p. 36).

22. Walden, in fact, as Eric G. Wilson has pointed out, is fascinated with ice (Wilson, 2003, pp. 50–68), but Thoreau makes no reference to the frozen provenance of the lake. Damian Walford Davies’s engaging ‘hydrographic’ reading of Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (Walford Davies, 2012, pp. 20–42) has persuaded me that what I will tentatively call a ‘glaciographic’ analysis of Byrd’s Alone remains to be sculpted. I do not have the space here to let this possibility crystallise, so I shall leave it, for now at least, on ice.

23. Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire effectively rewrites this scene with a jeep instead of a train (Abbey, 1990, pp. 42–43).

24. I do not have space here to discuss Proenneke, Ruess or Abbey in any kind of detail, but I plan to consider them at length, and Thoreau much more extensively, in the book of which this essay is a fragment.